2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  Shane laughs in the glass chamber.

  “What’s so damned funny?”

  He stops right away, looking pained. “Sorry, Mr. Pope. I was just thinking that most people die when they get shot in the head. You just get pissed.” He checks again on the upload status. “Almost done here, war hero. Save complete in seven seconds.”

  I’m anxious and tired, suddenly needing to get drunk, get laid and pass out for a month.

  “Let me tell you, Shane,” I say, “May you live a long life and never

  • • •

  I’m naked in a steel tub filled with warm water and slimy gel. There’s a small console on the wall. A glossy black camera eye studies me from the ceiling.

  I don’t even remember opening my eyes.

  My half-spoken reply to Shane is still on my tongue, but he’s nowhere to be found. It’s like having a stage backdrop whisked away and a new background springing from unseen theatrical compartments. Knowledge floods into me, recognition springing from old brochures. I’m in a regeneration pod, where new bodies are grown for mental downloads.

  Which means I died at some point following my last save.

  My contract states that if I flatline on Mars, I’m to be regenerated at Bradbury station, and this was not Bradbury. Commercial clinics are bright and welcoming and filled with flowers and ferns, as if you’ve been resurrected in a Buddhist paradise. Partisan clinics are antiseptic and cold, eschewing comfort for the military necessity of getting you back on your feet as soon as possible.

  This room is neither. It looks bolted together by cheap screws and spit. A place built out of rawest necessity; four walls, a ceiling, and optional towels. The camera peers down at me like a dark crystal ball. I try not to move, letting myself float in the thick water.

  And this is not my body.

  My thoughts spin into a whirlwind of panic. When I had talked with Shane I was six-foot-one, one-hundred-eighty-five pounds, leanly muscled. My new shell is stunningly at odds with that. Shorter, skinnier, darker. Arms and pubic region covered in light-blonde hair. My new hand moves clumsily for the wall console and the screen flashes to life at the slightest, dripping touch.

  The first thing I see is the Vector Nanonics LifeTree logo emblazoned beside the keyboard. Not very helpful in betraying my location. All the best upload tech is manufactured by Vector. Scumbags have a virtual monopoly on the trade.

  The logo clears and I see an inbox with two unread messages. The first is from me, recorded on December 13, 2274, a date which puts it three weeks past my save with Shane. But the second entry is from Doctor Traci Cucinella, recorded April 6, 2315! What the hell?

  I select the first entry. A strange face appears onscreen.

  My initial impression is that this is a burnt, deformed old man who has somehow left me a message under my own login. His face is horrifically blistered, dirtied and ruined. Behind him is a dim, nondescript room.

  “Hello Harris,” he says through a choking wheeze, as if part of his throat has collapsed. I swallow the lump in my own.

  “I’m recording this with the few minutes we have left. You will remember that your last upload followed the explosion on Phobos. Without their tactical center, the Partisans were finished. The Resistance achieved total victory four days later. A few pockets of stubborn holdouts in the west, a lot of groups suicided rather than surrender.”

  It takes until that moment for me to realize who the burnt man is. There’s no use denying it.

  I stare into the blistered face and recognize my own.

  The monitor-me sighs in difficulty, glassy-eyed and dazed. “They must have had a contingency plan to poison the well in the event of defeat. An orbital stealth platform we never knew about bombarded the planetary surface with three hundred nukes.”

  My stomach drops. The fledgling colonies of Mars, with all the innocence of scattered college campuses, now laid to waste?

  “I was in my apartment when the first bombs hit. The explosion threw me out into the hallway like a doll. I remember crawling through rubble, trying to find the staircase. Some of the residents and I punched our way through the floor and got to the basement, where we were able to send a message to the outside. I have no idea if Jill survived. I reached Traci, and I’m recording this message on her bandwidth.”

  The eyes find mine—hideous funhouse mirror reflection. It makes for a queasy math in my head: one soul across 41 years, two bodies and divergent lines of consciousness in an unfolding fractal pattern like diamond gloss.

  “Harris,” yesteryear’s self tells me, “I’ve been mortally irradiated, and we can’t reach any of the labs for treatment. When you get this…” A sad smile forms on his melted face. “Good luck.” A pause. “I slept with Charlotte the night before the bombs fell. Neither one of us seemed to regret it in the morning. Traci will regen you as soon as possible.”

  The message ends.

  I hit the next message, from Traci, recorded 41 years later.

  • • •

  My finger is a hummingbird kiss on the monitor. Traci’s message stirs.

  “Harris,” she says, and I suck in a panicked breath at how she looks. My Stars! She is old and grey, enough to account for the passage of 41 years with only the most limited longevity treatments. Her myostatin blockers appear to be cranked too high, giving her a famished appearance.

  Or maybe it wasn’t blockers at all. What the hell had happened in the space of a single sentence?

  “I can just imagine how confused you’re going to be when you hear this,” she says. “We tried to bring you back right away. But the bombardment was cruelly calculated, Harris. A second wave, much weaker and more scattered, hit a few hours after the first. It destroyed our facilities. I took the save files and fled. It’s taken this long to get our equipment up and working again. We had to cannibalize several labs, and then trade with other survivors for equipment. You can’t…”

  Tears leak from her eyes.

  “Things have been difficult, Harris. I lost Charlie… he was murdered a few weeks ago in New Haven.”

  So bring him back, I think hotly. The way you brought me.

  Traci’s eyes lock onto mine with prescient intensity. “The only city on Mars which still has a working Regen facility is the one you’re just waking up to. New Haven. And it’s not the way you remember it.”

  My memory hunts down a map of Mars. New Haven is a shuttle port city seventy miles south of Cydonia. It’s where, after detonating Phobos station, I had landed in my stolen shuttle and enjoyed my first victory meal of Pad Thai noodles in the mall rotunda while my guards kept cheering crowds at bay.

  Traci wipes her eyes with a harsh, angry motion.

  “We hacked you straight into the Regen list, making the system believe you were an approved regeneration in Peznowski’s circle. You’ve probably noticed by now that you are in a different body. Even the doctors at the clinic won’t know who you really are.”

  Peznowski? My fists clench at the name.

  “He’s alive,” Traci says onscreen. “And he’s on the governing board of New Haven. Calls himself Deputy Mayor Matthew Bayne. Has a whole new body, new voice, but our AI pat-match scoured his speeches and gave a 91 percent match with Peznowksi’s cadence, word-choice, and style. Peznowski is back from the dead and practically in charge of the town you’re in.”

  I stand up, naked and dripping synth-placental slime. The message scroll-bar shows me there’s just seconds left to the content.

  “We need you to kill Peznowski again.”

  As if I’d needed her to say the words. I nod wearily, feeling as if my stomach has a bloated worm crawling inside it.

  “Harris, we included a subfile with your download. It has blueprints of New Haven, an injectable dom patch—”

  My jaw drops like a collapsed drawbridge. Why in the hell would I need a dom patch? Who should I inject?

  “—and a total workup of the body you’re occupying. We chose you because you’re a quick study. Memorize t
he info ASAP.”

  “Why?” I ask the monitor.

  Traci sighs deeply, her body shrinking. It’s as if she can hear me across time and geography.

  “The body that you’re in,” she says, “Is Peznowski’s son.”

  • • •

  The message ends. I delete it instantly, the blood pounding in my head. Then I slide open the pod hatch and walk naked to the shower stall, passing a row of pods and a nurse station. A gray-haired doctor intercepts me. His name registers to my nanonics eye-lens: DR. HORACE WELLINGTON.

  Wellington is an alarmingly hairy fellow, what a Neanderthal would look like if snatched from the Paleolithic and forcibly dressed into a starchy white lab coat. His eyes simmer beneath impossibly bushy eyebrows.

  “Why didn’t you ring for assistance?” he demands. “If you fell while relearning coordination, your father…”

  Would cut out your eyes? I think. I saw him do it once to a prisoner whose transgression was a “disrespectful” glance in Peznowski’s direction as he and I were walking past the line of cells. The man’s name was Clint Frederick Jamison, a captured journalist who had written an anonymous editorial against the Partisans. But nothing is anonymous anymore with patmatchers and sniffer programs combing the web like merciless spiders, feeling for treacherous vibrations. I remember Jamison’s name, because Peznowski had tortured his wife to death repeatedly over the course of forty days. Every time they brought her back, she woke up screaming. She died the same way.

  It was understandable, then, that Jamison might be apt to shoot Peznowski a glare. And for it, Peznowski had the man restrained, and personally plucked his eyes out with a staple-remover. I stood by, forced to watch, while Jamison screeched and howled in pitiable agony, and I promised myself I would delete the memory that night. But I never did. I kept it, out of respect for Jamison. Maybe, too, to add more fuel to my desire to kill the corporal with my own hands.

  Or with my teeth.

  Like my teeth in the throat of that dog.

  I realize suddenly I haven’t answered Wellington. He’s peering at me suspiciously from beneath his caterpillar-like eyebrows.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and freeze at the sound of my new voice. It’s like having a stranger speak beneath my chin.

  The doctor seizes my head, tilting it one way and another. Shines a light in my eyes, checks the pupils. I have the discomforting thought that he’s looking for the imposter beneath the skin.

  “Your father is on his way.”

  Good.

  “Good.”

  I rinse my body in the shower stalls, and use the moment to access Traci’s sub-file by pressing the subdermal chip behind my ear. A lavender flower of access tabs blossoms in my eyes, and I gorge on the info train. This body’s identity is registered to a Peter J. Bayne, son of Matthew and Jessica. I wash my hair with the facility’s shampoo, prodding data bits of Peter’s life, interests and habits constructed piecemeal by Traci’s hack team.

  I’m toweling off when I complete my overview of Peter Bayne’s emails. There’s a fogged mirror in the stall, and I wipe it clear. A strange blonde teenager looks out at me from the frame.

  The thing is, I want to dislike this kid but I find it difficult to. He is nineteen. He subscribes to multiple samurai sensoramics, especially ones where he gets to play the lone ronin helping out impoverished villages. He likes to hike. His email confessions indicate he hates his father.

  The mirrored smile on my face makes me sick.

  • • •

  When I emerge, dressed in Peter’s ghastly choice of neo-Victorian attire, I go straight to the waiting room and meet Matthew Bayne, the new identity of Corporal Peznowski.

  “Peter!”

  Years back, I’d read an article in Nowire about why resurrectees make certain new body choices. An unsurprising 81 percent select the same shell—minor alterations notwithstanding. The remaining 19 percent purchase entirely new bodies of calculated antithesis to what they were born into. Blondes into brunettes, women into men, short into tall, racial switching…

  Corporal Peznowski has defied the stats. He’s taller, and traded his steel-grey hair for brown curls. He’s still white, and sports black-rimmed glasses stylish among the self-identified intellectuals. But the face isn’t really so different from what he wore in his last life. He’s gone from Nordic looks to a swarthy Portuguese genotype while keeping the general mix of features in eerie reminiscence of his birth face. Clever, this attempt at ducking pattern sniffers.

  “Peter!” he says again, embracing me warmly. His cologne stuffs my nose. “Let me look at you. How does it feel? All checked up, no worries?”

  “Sure.”

  He looks me over, concentrating on my eyes. The worm in my stomach flips around. There hasn’t been time to study my new identity’s speech patterns and word choices, so I’m determined to be as monosyllabic as possible. But what about the eyes? Matthew Bayne’s eyes were the same as Corporal Peznowski’s. There is no mistaking them. I had looked into those eyes too often to miss the grey, hard, glassy stare that’s part calculator and part sadist. He seemed to regard everything as if it was potential food, to be weighed, smelled, and eventually cut up and devoured.

  “Come on,” he says gladly, “Mom wasn’t expecting you until next week. You were fifteenth on the waiting list, but I pulled a few strings. Let’s give her a surprise!”

  I force a smile. Endorphins flap in my chest, my movements strain in odd directions as if tugged by elastic bands. Peter’s muscle memory and hormones will be a problem. Add them to the damn list.

  Peznowski/Bayne signs the release at the reception desk, and we depart together, father and son, through a corridor smelling of disinfectant. We step outside.

  It’s the enclosed “outside” of a Martian colony. Everything is built economically crammed together, replicating the appearance of a Middle Eastern medina. The narrow street is beset on each side by a mall’s worth of shops, balcony markets, squat offices and a monorail station.

  Peznowski leads us to the monorail station. We settle into the train seats. He squeezes my arm.

  “With your birthday coming up, I was going to take us spelunking at Agatha Crossing. You still want to go? Your accident hasn’t changed your mind, has it?”

  I squint at him in the low fluorescent lighting. “My birthday? We’ve still got eight months before it’s my birthday, Dad.”

  The Matthew Bayne shell grins. “Right. Well you know me, always thinking ahead.”

  There’s no air-conditioner during the ride home, but I can’t stop shivering.

  • • •

  “Sweetie!”

  Mom greets me in the kitchen, wearing a checkered apron and a wide, ruby-lipped smile. “Let me look at you! All checked up, no worries?”

  Her eyes are grey, hard, glassy, and with the flicker of cruelty. They were eyes I knew well. They were features I knew well.

  My God!

  My blood turns to cold slush, and though I tell myself to smile or say something, my body just won’t obey. The nightmarish awareness that Peznowski’s features are peering out from an attractive female face is enough to sicken me, but that’s just the ragged fringe of a deeper, almost cosmic blasphemy. According to Traci’s records, Peter Bayne was the natural offspring of my parents. Which meant that Peznowski, existing in two separate bodies, had naturally produced me. Grunting and ejaculating, the unholy union growing into a new child from the fruit of two loins of the same puppetmaster?

  I almost attack her right there. My young hands can feel the ghostly resistance of her eyes giving way beneath steely pronged fingers.

  Please… control. Please.

  “Dear?” Mom’s eyes widen in suspicion and concern.

  Please!

  My smile cracks like a fissure in ice. “Sorry, Mom. I still feel like I’m in the save center.”

  Good!

  She hugs me. I notice that Peznowski has given himself very large breasts. “Tacos tonight?”


  My mind races fluidly across reams of data, a laser flashing on Peter’s record. Is this another test? I nod noncommittally, and then notice a reddish-brown dog padding toward me from the back rooms. Doberman, muscles sliding beneath short lustrous fur. A hundred pounds, easily. It puts its head into my hands. Wet tongue and cool nose.

  “Oh! Look who missed you!”

  It’s movie-fueled nonsense that pets can detect a stranger in their owner’s shell. Pure urban legend bullshit. The Doberman’s tail wags, tongue laps my fingers. She smells the natural cologne of pheromones, body salts and skin oils. She can’t telepathically sniff out an imposter any more than she can play chess.

  Is she Peznowski also?

  The freakish thought blasts through me. I stare into the liquid black eyes for signs of my old enemy. Dog breath, eyes like black pearls. Teeth up-thrust from cushions of slick pink gums, like black spear-point ears. Like a caveman feeling out the raw Paleolithic world, I think: Dog. This is dog. Not man.

  The Doberman’s name bobs up from my illicit subfile.

  “Hey, Suzie! How are ya, girl?”

  Dinner passes like an ocean current, sweeping me along with my monstrous progenitors like a ship caught in an ocean eddy. Mom and Dad joke and tease each other, interspersing their joviality with somber reflections of my spelunking accident. Mom kisses my cheek. Dad cleans up the table, catches Mom from behind and gives a playful tickle, to which she spins around and wrestles in his grasp. They move like dancers, their motions as delicately attuned as a well-oiled machination.

  I want to throw up.

  And worse is the feeling that I’m being scrutinized. Whenever I peek up from my food, Mom or Dad or both are glinting at me. It’s Planet Peznowski, a visceral mousetrap run by the most sadistic creature I’ve ever met.