Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I found myself on a headland, crunching along a graveled path. An ancient notice-board asked me to clean up after my dog. Ahead lay a row of benches, on the seaward side of the path, much closer to the cliff edge than perhaps they once had been. They all bore commemorative plaques, with lettering mostly faded or rubbed away. I came upon a legible one that read:

  * * * *

  In memory of Katriona Grady

  2021-2098

  She Loved This Coast

  * * * *

  Grass had grown up through the slats of the bench, and the wood had weathered to a mottled beige. I brushed aside the detritus of twigs and hawthorn berries, then smiled at myself for the outdated gesture. I wore no clothes to be dirtied, and my exo-skin could hardly be harmed by a few spiky twigs. In time I would abandon the foibles of a fragile human body, and stride confidently into any environment.

  I sat, and looked out to sea. The wind whipped the waves into white froth, urging them to the coast. Gulls scudded on the breeze, their cries as jagged as the rocks they nested on. A childhood memory shot through me—eating chips on the seafront, a gull swooping to snatch a morsel. Within me swelled an emotion I couldn't name.

  After a moment I became aware of someone sitting next to me. Yet the bench hadn't creaked under any additional weight. A hologram, then. When I turned to look, I saw the characteristic bright edges of a cheap hologram from the previous century.

  "Hello, I'm Katriona. Would you like to talk?” The question had a rote quality, and I guessed that all visitors were greeted the same way; a negative answer would dismiss the hologram so that people could sit in peace. But I had several days of solitude ahead of me, and I didn't mind pausing for a while. It seemed appropriate that my last conversation on a dying world would be with a dead person.

  "Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I'm Winston."

  The hologram showed a middle-aged white woman, her hair as grey as riverbed stones, her clothes a tasteful expanse of soft-toned lavender skirt and low-heeled expensive shoes. I wondered if she'd chosen this conventional self-effacing look, or if some memorial designer had imposed a template projecting the dead as aged and faded, not upstaging the living. Perhaps she'd have preferred to be depicted as young and wild and beautiful, as she'd no doubt once been—or would like to have been.

  "It's a cold day to be wandering around starkers,” she said, smiling.

  I had forgotten I wore no clothes. I gave her a brief account of my augmentations. “I'm going to the stars!” I said, the excitement of it suddenly bursting out.

  "What, all of them? Do they make copies of you, and send you all across the sky?"

  "No, it's not like that.” However, the suggestion caused me a moment of disorientation. I had walked into the hospital on my old human feet, been anesthetized, then—quite some time later—had walked out in shiny new augmented form. Did only one of me leave, or had others emerged elsewhere, discarded for defects or optimized for different missions? Don't be silly, I told myself. It's only an exo-skin. The same heart still beats underneath. That heart, along with the rest of me, had yesterday passed the final pre-departure medical checks.

  "We go to one planet first,” I said, “which will be challenge enough. But later—who knows?” No one had any idea what the lifespan of an augmented human might prove to be; since all the mechanical components could be upgraded, the limit would be reached by any biological parts that couldn't be replaced. “It does depend on discovering other planets worth visiting. There are many worlds out there, but only a few even barely habitable."

  I described our destination world, hugging a red dwarf sun, its elliptical orbit creating temperature swings, fierce weather and huge tides. “The colonists are a mixed bunch: naturals who'll mostly have to stay back at base; then the augmented, people like me who should be able to survive outside; and the gene-modders—they reckon they'll be best off in the long run, but it'll take them generations to get the gene-tweaks right.” There'd already been tension between the groups, as we squabbled over the starship's finite cargo capacity, but I refrained from mentioning it. “I'm sorry—I've gone on long enough. Tell me about yourself. Did you live around here? Was this your favorite place?"

  "Yorkshire lass born and bred, that's me,” said Katriona's hologram. “Born in Whitby, spent a few years on a farm in Dentdale, but came back—suck my flabby tits—to the coast when I married my husband. He was a fisherman, God rest his soul. Arsewipe! When he was away, I used to walk along the coast and watch the North Sea, imagining him out there on the waves."

  My face must have showed my surprise.

  "Is it happening again?” asked Katriona. “I was hacked a long time ago, I think. I don't remember very much since I died—I'm more of a recording than a simulation. I only have a little memory, enough for short-term interaction.” She spoke in a bitter tone, as though resenting her limitations. “What more does a memorial bench need? Ah, I loved this coast, but that doesn't mean I wanted to sit here forever.... Nose-picking tournament, prize for the biggest booger!"

  "Would you like me to take you away?” I asked. It would be easy enough to pry loose the chip. The encoded personality could perhaps be installed on the starship's computer with the other uploaded colonists, yet I sensed that Katriona wouldn't pass the entrance tests. She was obsolete, and the dead were awfully snobbish about the company they kept. I'd worked with them in the simulator, and I could envisage what they'd say. “Why, Winston, I know you mean well, but she's not the right sort for a mission like this. She has no relevant expertise. Her encoding is coarse, her algorithms are outdated, and she's absolutely riddled with parasitic memes."

  Just imagining this response made me all the more determined to fight it. But Katriona saved me the necessity. “That's all right, dear. I'm too old and set in my ways to go to the stars. I just want to rejoin my husband, and one day I will.” She stared out to sea again, and I had a sudden intuition of what had happened to her husband.

  "I'm sorry for your loss,” I said. “I take it he was never"—I groped for an appropriate word—"memorialized."

  "There's a marker in the fuckflaps graveyard,” she said, “but he was never recorded like me. Drowning's a quick death, but it's not something you plan for. And we never recovered the body, so it couldn't be done afterward. He's still down there somewhere...."

  It struck me that if Katriona's husband had been augmented, he need not have drowned. My limbs could tirelessly swim, and my exo-skin could filter oxygen from the water. As it would be tactless to proclaim my hardiness, I cast about for a neutral reply. “The North Sea was all land, once. Your ancestors hunted mammoths there, before the sea rose."

  "And now the sea is rising again.” She spoke with such finality that I knew our conversation was over.

  "God speed you to your rest,” I said. When I stood up, the hologram vanished.

  I walked onward, and the rain began.

  * * * *

  I relished the storm. It blew down from the northeast, with ice in its teeth. They call it the lazy wind, because it doesn't bother to go around you—it just goes straight through you.

  The afternoon darkened, with winter twilight soon expiring. The rain thickened into hail, bouncing off me with an audible rattle. Cracks of thunder rang out, an ominous rumbling as though the raging sea had washed away the pillars of the sky, pulling the heavens down. Lightning flashed somewhere behind me.

  I turned and looked along the coastal path, back to the necropolis of benches I had passed earlier. The holograms were all lit up. I wondered who would sit on the benches in this weather, until I realized that the lightning must have short-circuited the activation protocols.

  The holograms were the only bright colors in a washed-out world of slate-grey cloud and gun-dark sea. Images of men and women flickered on the benches, an audience for Nature's show. I saw Katriona standing at the top of the cliff, raising her arms as if calling down the storm. Other figures sat frozen like reproachful ghosts, tethered to their woode
n anchors, waiting for the storm to fade. Did they relish the brief moment of pseudo-life? Did they talk among themselves? Or did they resent their evanescent existence, at the mercy of any hikers and hackers wandering by?

  I felt I should not intrude. I returned to my trek, slogging on as the day eroded into night. My augmented eyes harvested stray photons from lights in distant houses and the occasional car gliding along inland roads. To my right, the sea throbbed with the pale glitter of bioluminescent pollution. The waves sounded loud in the darkness, their crashes like a secret heartbeat of the world.

  The pounding rain churned the path into mud. My mouth curved into a fierce grin. Of course, conditions were nowhere near as intense as the extremes of the simulator. But this was real. The sight of all the dead people behind me, chained to their memorials, made me feel sharply alive. Each raindrop on my face was another instant to be cherished. I wanted the night never to end. I wanted to be both here and gone, to stand on the colony world under its red, red sun.

  I hurried, as if I could stride across the stars and get there sooner. I trod on an old tree branch that proved to be soggy and rotten. My foot slid off the path. I lurched violently, skidding a few yards sideways and down, until I arrested my fall by grabbing onto a nearby rock. The muscles in my left arm sent pangs of protest at the sharp wrench. Carefully I swung myself round, my feet groping for toeholds. Soon I steadied myself. Hanging fifty feet above the sea, I must have only imagined that I felt spray whipping up from the waves. It must have been the rain, caught by the wind and sheeting from all angles.

  The slip exhilarated me. I know that makes little sense, but I can only tell you how I felt.

  But I couldn't cling there all night. I scrambled my way across the exposed crags, at first shuffling sideways by inches, then gaining confidence and swinging along, trusting my augmented muscles to keep me aloft.

  My muscles gripped. My exo-skin held. The rock did not.

  In mid-swing, I heard a crack. My anchoring left hand felt the rock shudder. Instinctively I scrabbled for another hold with my right hand. I grasped one, but nevertheless found myself falling. For a moment I didn't understand what was happening. Then, as the cliff-face crumbled with a noise like the tearing of a sky-sized newspaper, I realized that when the bottom gives way, the top must follow.

  As I fell, still clinging to the falling rock, I was drenched by the splashback from the lower boulders hitting the sea below me. Time passed slowly, frame by frame, the scene changing gradually like an exhibition of cels from an animated movie. The hefty rock that I grasped was rotating as it fell. Soon I'd be underneath it. If I still clung on, I would be crushed when it landed.

  I leapt free, aiming out to sea. If the cliff had been higher, I'd have had enough time to get clear. But very soon I hit the water, and so did the boulder behind me, and so too—it seemed—did half of the Yorkshire coast.

  It sounded like a duel between a volcano and an earthquake. I flailed frantically, trying to swim away, not understanding why I made no progress. Only when I stopped thrashing around did I realize the problem.

  My right foot was trapped underwater, somewhere within the pile of rocks that came down from the cliff. At the time, I'd felt nothing. Now, belatedly, a dull pounding pain crept up my leg. I breathed deeply, gulping air between the waves crashing around my head. Then I began attempting to wriggle free, with no success.

  I tried to lift up the heavy boulders, but it was impossible. My imprisoned foot kept me in place, constricting my position and preventing me from finding any leverage. After many useless heaves, and much splashing and cursing, I had to give up.

  All this time, panic had been building within me. As soon as I stopped struggling, terror flooded my brain with the fear of drowning, the fear of freezing in the cold sea, the fear of more rocks falling on top of me. My thoughts were overwhelmed by the prospect of imminent death.

  It took long minutes to regain any coherence. Gradually I asserted some self-command, telling myself that the panic was a relic of my old body, which wouldn't have survived long floating in the North Sea in winter. My new form was far more robust. I wouldn't drown, or freeze to death. If I could compose myself, I'd get through this.

  I concentrated on my exo-skin. Normally its texture approximated natural skin's slight roughness and imperfections. Now my leg became utterly smooth, in the hope that a friction-free surface might allow me to slip free. I felt a tiny amount of give, which sent a surge of hope through me, but then I could pull my foot no further. The bulge of my ankle prevented any further progress. Even friction-free, you can't tug a knot through a needle's eye.

  Impatient and frustrated, I let the exo-skin revert to default. I needed to get free, and I couldn't simply wait for the next storm to rattle the rocks around. My starship would soon leave Earth. If I missed it, I would have no other chance.

  At this point I began to wonder whether I'd subconsciously wanted to miss the boat. Had I courted disaster, just to prevent myself from going?

  I couldn't deny that I'd in some sense brought this on myself. I'd been deliberately reckless, pushing myself until the inevitable accident occurred. Why?

  Thinking about it, as the cold waves frothed around me, I realized that I'd wanted to push beyond the bounds of my old body, in order to prove to myself that I was worthy of going. We'd heard so much of the harsh rigors of the destination world, and so much had been said about the naturals’ inability to survive there unaided, that I'd felt compelled to test the augments to their limit.

  Unconsciously, I'd wanted to put myself in a situation that a natural body couldn't survive. Then if I did survive, that would prove I'd been truly transformed, and I'd be confident of thriving on the colony world, among the tides and hurricanes.

  Well, I'd accomplished the first stage of this plan. I'd got myself into trouble. Now I just had to get out of it.

  But how?

  I had an emergency radio-beacon in my skull. I could activate it and no doubt someone would come along to scoop me out of the water. Yet that would be embarrassing. It would show that I couldn't handle my new body, even in the benign conditions of Earth. If I asked for rescue, then some excuse would be found to remove me from the starship roster. Colonists needed to be self-reliant and solve their own problems. There were plenty of reserves on the waiting list—plenty of people who hadn't fallen off a cliff and got themselves stuck under a pile of rocks.

  The same applied if I waited until dawn and shouted up to the next person to walk along the coastal path. No, I couldn't ask for rescue. I had to save myself.

  Yet asserting the need for a solution did not reveal its nature. At least, not at first. As the wind died down, and the rain softened into drizzle, I found myself thinking coldly and logically, squashing trepidation with the hard facts of the situation.

  I needed to extract my leg from the rock. I couldn't move the rock. Therefore I had to move my leg.

  I needed to move my leg, but the foot was stuck. Therefore I had to leave my foot behind.

  Once I realized this, a calmness descended upon me. It was very simple. That was the price I must pay, if I wanted to free myself. I thought back to the option of calling for help. I could keep my foot, and stay on Earth. Or I could lose my foot, and go to the stars.

  Did I long to go so badly?

  I'd already decided to leave my family behind and leave my girlfriend. If I jibbed at leaving a mere foot, a minor bodily extremity, then what did that say about my values? Surely there wasn't even a choice to make; I merely had to accept the consequences of the decision I'd already made.

  And yet I delayed and delayed, hoping that some other option would present itself, hoping that I could evade the results of my choices.

  I'm almost ashamed to admit what finally prompted me to action. It wasn't logic or strong-willed decisiveness. It was the pain from my squashed foot, a throbbing that had steadily intensified while I mulled the possibilities. And it was no fun floating in the cold sea, either. The sooner
I acted, the sooner I could get away.

  I concentrated upon my exo-skin, that marvel of programmable integument, and commanded it to flow up from my foot. Then I pinched it into my leg, just above my right ankle.

  Ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch, owwww!

  Trying to ignore the pain, I steered the exo-skin further in. I wished I could perform the whole operation in an instant, slicing off my foot as if chopping a cucumber. But the exo-skin had limits, and it wasn't designed to do this. I was stretching the spec already.

  Soon—sooner than I would have hoped—I had to halt. I needed to access my pain overrides. It had been constantly drilled into us that this was a last resort, that pain existed for a reason and we shouldn't casually shut it off. But if amputating one's own foot wasn't an emergency, I didn't ever want to encounter a true last resort. I turned off the pain signals.

  The numbness intoxicated me. What a blessing, to be free from the hurts of the flesh! In the absence of pain, the remaining tasks seemed to elapse much more swiftly. Soon the exo-skin had completely cut through the bone, severing my lower leg and sealing off the wound. Freed from the rockfall, I swam away and dragged myself ashore. There I collapsed into sleep.

  When I woke, the tide had receded, leaving behind a beach clogged with fallen clumps of grass, soggy dead bracken, and the ever-present plastic trash that was humanity's legacy to the world. The pain signals had returned—they could only be temporarily suspended, not permanently switched off. For about a minute I tried to live with my lower calf's agonized protestations; then I succumbed to temptation and suppressed them again. As I tried to stand up, I discovered that I was now lopsided. At the bottom of my right leg I had some spare exo-skin, since it no longer covered a foot. I instructed the surplus material to extend a few inches into a peg-leg, so that I could balance. I shaped the peg to avoid pressing on my stump, with the force of my steps being borne by the exo-skin higher up my leg.