Expiration Day

by William Campbell Powell

  “Well, I think she ought to be able to choose. We just left it to Oxted before. They said it would be a natural progression, so you wouldn’t suspect. But now you’ve found out, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a say in the matter. Change a few things. Not everything, of course. I mean, if I were you, I’d keep your hair the color it is—it’s lovely. And I think it should be long and straight, the way it’s always been.”

  “I like it like that, yes.”

  “But after that, I think we should think hard about everything else. I mean, I’ve always been fairly trim, myself, around the bust. But you could afford to be a little more generous. You might want to aim to be on the tall side, to compensate.”

  As I remembered Mum on platform shoes, wobbling, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be even that “generous.” But she was in full flow.

  “And I don’t see why you shouldn’t have decent hips, darling, whatever your father says. He certainly appreciated my hips when we were courting. And my bust.”

  At last, that got a faint smile out of Dad.

  “I suppose I did, Nettie.”

  “Well then. You shall have full hips likewise, darling. And you’ll be pleased to say good-bye to those legs. I remember what it was like. All elbows and knees. You know, we should have done this a year ago. Or the summer before you started at the new school. You’d have missed the holiday, of course, but that wouldn’t have been any great loss. It was just the seventies theme.”

  And then I’d never have met John. No thanks.

  That, though, struck a chord with Dad. A rather suspicious chord.

  “These plans, Tan. You said you were starting a band. Is that all? Would you mind if I asked if there’s any other reason why you need to be a young woman all of a sudden? As a father, I have to ask if there’s a boy involved. And if you’ve been … experimenting. Or you’re planning to?”

  Which wasn’t something I’d really thought through. I’d only thought as far as looking.

  “No, Dad, it’s not like that at all.”

  I could only repeat my plans to become a bassist. How I just needed a bigger body, simply to play the bass properly. And to look right on stage, of course, rather than looking like somebody’s kid sister.

  I don’t know what he thought deep inside. But he nodded, and let Mum wrap up.

  “Well, darling. You’ve certainly given us something to think about. I guess we should all sleep on it, but we’ll call Oxted first thing in the morning.”

  Friday, February 9, 2052

  Well, we didn’t call Oxted the next day, or the day after that. I got cold feet the first day, and Mum did the next. It was about two weeks before we were all simultaneously ready to make the call.

  Come in, they said.

  So we went.

  Oxted was a sprawl of buildings clustered about Banbury. An industry that had grown in five years from a single, cheap industrial unit into an international corporation largely responsible for keeping the world sane. In other countries, Oxted was more conventional, with imposing architecture in steel and glass and concrete. But here in Banbury … this was the original. It had grown too fast to be planned—buildings looked like they’d been thrown up overnight wherever there was an odd corner of unused land. Rusty Nissen huts and rickety shacks nestled next to great hangars and soaring concrete, and everywhere people scurried, antlike.

  We were met in reception by a pale, pinch-faced, harassed-looking man in his forties, glasses sliding down his nose.

  “The Deeley family? I’m Doctor Markov. That’s cybernetics, not medicine.”

  We stood up, and Dad shook his hand, then introduced us. Doctor Markov smiled warmly as he shook my hand, and I suddenly felt it was going to be all right.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Deeley. This is quite unusual, you understand. Most of our young visitors are quite unconscious of their nature. It’s a pleasant change to meet someone who takes such an active interest in her development.”

  He led us down a succession of corridors, opening side doors in a seemingly random fashion, as he zig-zagged farther from reception. Once or twice we crossed open spaces, before diving back into a fresh portion of the maze that was Oxted.

  Finally, at the end of a dingy corridor he threw open one final door, leading us into a spacious, day-lit room, comfortably appointed with sofas and low tables. He indicated a group of seats and waited patiently for us to arrange ourselves.

  From nowhere, it seemed, a smartly dressed woman appeared and fetched us coffee. And biscuits.

  “So, Miss Deeley. You’ve decided you need a revision. You’re how old?”

  “Thirteen,” I told him, though he must have known.

  “Quite so, quite so. And you must have had your last revision about four years ago.”

  I looked blank, and Dad stepped in.

  “That’s right. It was all handled by the local hospital, though. We dropped her off and collected her when it was all done.”

  “Quite so, quite so. And of course, Miss Deeley, you remember nothing about it.”

  “Nothing,” I admitted. “How is that?”

  “A small device,” he explained. “It comes by post. It’s uniquely keyed to your brain, and puts you into a deep sleep. I imagine your parents would have waited until you were asleep in your bedroom. They take you to the hospital. The hospital performs a routine brain transfer into your new body, and sends you back. You wake up in your own room, a day or so later, with vague, forgettable memories to account for the time you’ve been unconscious.”

  It all sounded vaguely sinister, that I could be so easily switched off like that. He was quite right. Even knowing when it had happened, I really couldn’t pin it down to a day or two. That summer holiday had been full of unmemorable days, and the place in my mind where my revision belonged was blurred and fuzzy, just like each of the weeks before and after.

  “Will it be the same, this time?”

  “No, Miss Deeley. You will sleep, as before, but there’ll be no fakery with your mind. You’ll wake, feeling as if no time had passed, but the date will be wrong.”

  “And I’ll be in a new body.…”

  “Yes, and a considerably more mature one, according to your file, one more suited to your chronological age. It’s not usual to leave it so long between revisions. May I ask why, Reverend Deeley?”

  “We’ve always disliked the revisions, Dr. Markov. We find the sudden change upsetting. In every other part of our family life, Tania is our daughter, human in every way. In this, there’s no escaping the truth.”

  “But you always did revisions before, every two years or thereabouts. Why have you let them drop?”

  “I suppose it all changed when Tania found out what she was. She didn’t need the pretence of the revisions anymore, so it became less important to us, too.”

  Doctor Markov scribbled a bit with his stylus, then turned back to me.

  “So now it’s become important to you again, Miss Deeley, that you should look your age. I find that quite interesting. Would you mind telling me why?”

  So I told him about learning to play bass in a band. It turned out Doctor Markov had quite an interest in modern music, and I found myself telling him about the meeting in the café with John and Siân, and the band, and Amanda. I mentioned that John and I had always shared an interest in music, so then the conversation turned to how I’d met John in the first place.

  He was really easy to talk to, and I quite forgot Mum and Dad were in the room. I suppose they were listening, too, and it was stuff I’d never really mentioned to them. But eventually I heard a yawn. Poor Mum. She apologized, saying she found traveling so tiring.

  Instantly Doctor Markov turned to her and in turn apologized profusely for keeping me talking for so long. More coffee and biscuits were summoned, and Doctor Markov began to explain what would happen.

  “It’s straightforward enough choosing a new body. We’ve programs to simulate the growth of a child into her teenage years, so
it’s easy to project Miss Deeley’s current appearance into the future. We can simulate the various effects of diet and exercise, and your parents’ own physical appearance, and we can produce any number of plausible Tanias. We could even start from scratch, and give you the body of a film star, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. It rarely works out happily. Besides, Mrs. Deeley is an attractive lady, speaking purely professionally, and you should be proud to derive your appearance from her.”

  Mum blushed and Dad gave her shoulders a little squeeze.

  “As I say, that’s all pretty straightforward. It just takes an hour or two in front of the computer screen, with my colleague, Doctor Marcia Thompson, who specializes in the design of our female clients. What we then have to do is some calibration. We’ll have to run a few tests on you, Miss Deeley. Nothing to worry about. No needles or anything like that. But it will involve a few questions. At the end of it, we’ll know enough to make sure you’re comfortable in your new body. Calibration, that’s all it is.”

  We were all standing in front of a huge monitor, occupying the full height of the wall, and about as wide as it was tall. On it, I floated, life-size, in front of a featureless gray blankness. I watched, fascinated, as Doctor Thompson rotated me on screen. I was grown up, thirteen or fourteen, and nude.

  Dad had coughed in surprise and blushed a deep, deep red when Doctor Thompson had first displayed the image. I was surprised, and, if I’m honest, I think I was quite embarrassed, too. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d imagined a more sophisticated version of my own efforts to paste my head onto Suzi Quatro’s body. It hadn’t occurred to me that the only proper way to design a new body was unclothed. It was me, though, undoubtedly me, and my next thought was “Hmm, actually I look pretty good.” So I quickly stopped being embarrassed. But Dad …

  Poor Dad. That hour I don’t think he knew where to look. At me? Or at me? No, I don’t think he could even look Mum in the eye, so he just stared at the floor, mostly.

  Mum, though, she was great. She got into it quite quickly, and started making helpful comments. She’d brought an old family photo album along, and was comparing what she saw in the screen with Great-Aunt Jane, who’d had a collarbone to die for, or directing Doctor Thompson to the fall of Granny Liz’s shoulders—very shapely they were, too, and so, subtly, the doctor worked in a little of this ancestor or that distant cousin. For years, there’d been Mum … and Dad. That was all. Now, suddenly I was part of a family, stretching back over generations.

  Eventually Doctor Thompson was done.

  “Reverend Deeley, I think you ought to look, now. You have a very lovely daughter, who is about to blossom into a delightful young woman. But I need you to tell me if by accident we are about to create the spit and image of your detested Aunt Maureen, who blighted your formative years. Or whatever psychological scar it is—I don’t even know if you had an Aunt Maureen, or if she was a witch or a saint.”

  Dad looked up at the screen, then at me, then back to the screen.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t find this … process … at all comfortable. Can you put some clothes on the image, please.”

  A few strokes of the stylus, and I was wearing a modest white bikini. Mmm, nice … I made a mental note—it went on my shopping list.

  “That’s better,” said Dad. “I’m pleased to confirm she looks nothing like my witch-aunt Maureen. Not that I had a witch-aunt Maureen.”

  And then, “You’re going to be even lovelier, Tan. But still unmistakably you.”

  Which made Mum shed a little tear.

  Doctor Markov came in then, and we had some fun, dressing me up some more, in different styles of clothing, to see what looked good on me. It was like being in Oxford Street again, but this time, everything fit.…

  Doctor Markov asked me for my AllInFone and copied some of the images over.

  “This’ll help you over the next months, while you’re getting ready for the exchange.”

  I was lying on a couch, straight out of any movie psychiatrist’s consulting room. I was being “calibrated,” I suppose. I remember a few of the questions.

  “What’s your favorite insect?”

  “Ladybird.”

  “Whom do you admire more, William the Conqueror or Napoleon Bonaparte?”

  “Napoleon.”

  “What is the square root of three?”

  “Er, about one point seven something.”

  “What one item would you take from your burning house?”

  “My table tennis bat.”

  “Which do you fear more, height or caves?”

  “Caves.”

  “What is the next in the series: Apple, Banana?”

  “Er, Clementine.”

  “Which is more valuable, a cockroach or a beetle?”

  “Cockroach.”

  And then, more tricky …

  “You are the mother of three children, facing death. You are given the choice, to choose one child to live, or one child to die. What do you do?”

  “Choose one child to live.”

  “You find a small sum of money in the street. Do you keep it for yourself or try to find the owner?”

  “Keep it.”

  “You find a plain gold wedding ring in the gutter. Do you keep it for yourself or try to find the owner?”

  “Find the owner.”

  It went on for an hour or more. At the end I was utterly exhausted. And baffled. How was this a … calibration?

  We ended up all together with the two doctors, Markov and Thompson. Doctor Markov had some advice.

  “We need to go away and build Miss Deeley’s new body. It will take some months, and it’s a fairly major revision, four calendar years in a single exchange. People will notice, especially as you’ve missed the main opportunity for a revision, which is the summer holiday. So you’ll have to find ways to disguise the extent of the changes. That’s one reason we gave you the images of you as you’re going to be, so you can start to make yourself over.…

  “Some pieces of advice, then. The first is to start avoiding those who know you well, even if they know you’re a robot. It’s quite upsetting for people to be faced with a sudden change, so you need to provide them with the longest gap you can.…

  “Then you should dress and walk to minimize the perceived change. Before the exchange, wear tall shoes, pad your clothing. After the exchange, wear flat soles, shapeless clothing.…”

  There was a lot of advice, too much to take in. But they gave us a booklet with all the main points in it. And a helpline.

  Big deal.

  None of it solved my biggest problem.

  How to fool John …

  Saturday, February 24, 2052

  How to fool John …

  I gave it a lot of thought over the next few days. It was very important that John shouldn’t … find out. It would spoil it, between us. Not that there was an us. I mean that it would spoil things between him and me. I wanted to make things different, yes, but better. For us. By which I mean him. And me.

  Oh, Zog! Can’t you tell? I’m such a bad robot. Such a bad, bad robot. Because I’ve got a crush on a human boy. Still. After all that’s happened. After all this time.

  While he … he’s falling for my best friend Siân. And I think she’s falling for him. At any rate, she’s our singer, while John plays guitar and I struggle with a bass that’s still far too big for me. But I’m starting to make it do what I want, which is more than I can say for her.

  She’s a rubbish singer. Her voice wobbles, and she can’t really hit the notes. It doesn’t seem to matter to John, though. He grins a lot, and when she’s not looking, he stares at her chest.

  Idiot! Why won’t you stare at my chest?

  Well, I know the answer to that. Because I haven’t got one. Because it hasn’t been delivered yet. Not literally, of course, because I’ll have to go back to Oxted when my revision’s ready.

  And then I’ve got a problem, because the next day I’ll be about ten cent
imeters taller and I’ll have a pretty decent chest. And I’ll see John, and he’ll say, “Oh, hi, Tania, wow, where did that come from, oh I guess you must have just had a revision, so you were a robot all along, nice knowing you (not), come along, Siân, we’re going, good-bye.” Slam.

  Maybe I didn’t think it through all the way, but doing nothing wasn’t an option, and I really did want to be able to play the bass.

  In the meantime, we rehearse at weekends in the church hall, and John comes out on the train because the instruments belong to the church, and there’s nowhere for us to practice near John’s parents’ place, and it wouldn’t be fair to make the girls travel.

  Why does it hurt so much?

  I want to be with John. John wants to be with Siân. Siân wants to be with John. Both of them put up with me, probably because it’s my dad’s church hall, and my dad’s instruments, and just maybe because I’m turning into a half-decent bassist.

  Where does all this pain come from? This sweet pain that comes whenever I’m with John, but pain for all that, because he is … attracted to someone else.

  I’m just a copy, I know. A copy of a real human. Not real. So this pain can’t be real pain. It must be a copy of real pain. A good copy, because it really hurts. There’s that word again. Real.

  There was a name Amanda mentioned. John Entwistle. I followed links through the TeraNet, and came to The Who. From The Who, to My Generation.

  Such bass playing.… Alone, I practiced, till my fingers hurt with the stretching. I dug out clips of this giant, his fingers blurring in a complex two-handed dance that left me baffled and awestruck. And then, little by little, I felt the rhythms fall into place.

  Then I stopped, Amanda’s voice urgent in my inner ear. Find your own style, she seemed to say once more. So I moved on, learning from others, but grateful to this other, long-dead John for the inspiration of his legacy.

  “I look pretty tall, but my heels are high.” Indeed they are. Perhaps not the full ten centimeters, but some of the way. I started to carry out some of the subterfuges suggested by Doctor Markov. Mostly just subtle padding. Mum helped with a little bit of sewing, and more important, by saying “stop,” before I overdid anything.