forever the wall rears up at an uncanny angle and folds itself suddenly inwards over my head there's a crunch as something collides with my left temple followed by a burst of supernatural pain which mushrooms rapidly incoherently outwards before lodging itself someplace deep beneath the parietal brain. What was I saying? I was saying something. I try to get a hold of myself, forcing my eyes to focus on a pair of combat boots planted next to my face, which I now understand is on the floor. I can't get up. There's a girl. She's peering down at me from somewhere far above
the tops of the tall black boots. Even through the face scrambler I can see that she doesn't mean well. I try to protest but she's crouched right over me now holding my head down and pressing something cold against the base of my skull. The chill relents for just a second as if she's hesitating then returns all the more fiercely accompanied by the full resources of the body's capacity for pain. The first thing I'm conscious of is Dee's voice. She's talking to someone else. A doctor? An attendant?
He's my husband, I hear her say. An air conditioning unit snarls warily in the corner. I struggle against the tightness of the sheets. My body is intact. Thank God. Puss white room. The furniture's all on wheels. It's a clinic. Dee is in a chair by the bed, watching me. Noticing the sudden, subtle activation of the muscles in my face, she places a hand on my thigh through the sheet and says, So how's it feel? something is up the room is overwhelming everything is so highly defined that there's
hardly any depth of field it's all foreground nothing out of focus each line a distilled migraine of perfect form it's excruciating despite the austerity of the medical environment like a pre-raphaelite painting where some kind of spiritual ideal is extracted from nothing but the most obedient replication of nature. A whole vertigo of white inhabits the interstice between the embossed paper mat on the table beside the bed and the plastic tray it sits beneath. If my concentration lingers a little too long on any one feature, a whole new world blossoms out of it like a sort of noetic zoom. I seize involuntarily on a grain of whiteness which unfolds into a glacial landscape of
grothic microtonalities. Then my attention is drawn by a peculiar specificity of shadow, and the zoom function kicks in again, launching me into a meta-hellscape of fractal whiteness, completely abstracting me from the world of the clinic, of D, of human relationships. It starts to occur to me that I might not be able to find my way back. They say it'll take you a while to adjust, Dee offers, sensing my disorientation. But you're looking pretty good, for a guy who's been in a vat for nine months. Why is everything so intense, I ask. Ah, you don't remember,
the unnamed attendant inquires, a little too amicably as if the question were also a test. I remember blacking out, I venture. The attendant frowns. You paid for this, Mr. Betancourt. You don't remember? The logo on his coat reads ID, with the I followed by an infinity symbol, the second loop of which is half filled in to make the D. It's a first-tier private clinic. Fuck, Dee interjects. She always took pleasure in crudeness. A personal protest against what she saw as my relentless civility and erudition, something I like to call cultivation, but which for her was merely a direct and unearned expression of my family's money.
And to tell the truth, it probably was. Most of it was from outrageously expensive neurological modifications. It was also her way of telling my family she didn't need their money and could do perfectly well on her own. "'It's like they say, though,' she continues. "'Your long-term memory's intact, right? "'I mean, you still remember me?' "'Yes. Well, you're a lot more... "'acute now.' She grins wickedly. The skin around her eyes folds into deep, unfortunate runnels. Her stubbornness has cost her a certain level of biotechnological luxury I at least had taken full advantage of.
She seems old. You look younger than me now, she says, guessing my thoughts with telepathic acuity. I do. The attendant taps something into his tablet. Shit, you really are hopeless, Dee continues. The vat thing? you got de-aged that takes a moment to sink in i struggle to extract my forearm from the network of tubes that runs over it under it and into it and lift it as high as i can until a hand comes into view the skin is uncharacteristically smooth and uniform like a teenager's and the nails are frighteningly long. But there's a mole and a familiar stippling of blonde hair across the
knuckles that assures me it's my left hand. But my left hand 40 years ago. The attendant activates the camera on his tablet and holds it screen side up to me so that I can see my image on the display. Staring back at me is an alternative timeline version of my 19-year-old self. He's not quite the same 19-year-old I remember. The wide bone structure is there, freshly discernible under regrowing tissue. There are no lines in his cheeks or his forehead. His hair has miraculously re-sprouted and the hairline decamped from the fallback position high atop the cranium to its old post, just north of the brow. but his expression is different, vacant, a bit lost, like a dementia patient.
It gives him another worldly quality. It's almost angelic. I'd always assumed you'd die before me since, you know, statistically women live longer than men and you were already way older than me, D says. But I never foresaw this. My overclocked sensorium detects a note of ridicule in this last clause I wouldn't normally have picked up on. Mr. Bettencourt, the attendant commands, interrupting any possible inquiry into the source of D's derision. You've suffered severe memory loss, hence the need for the mind, Jack. It's a memory upgrade that will ensure your sense of succession is maintained in the face of the lapses that tend to occur as a result of your life extension treatment. A large percentage
of recipients experience this side effect. Unfortunately, it's just part of using experimental technology, and as you are no doubt aware, if you had left it any longer, you wouldn't have been eligible for the extension. The good thing is that the Jack retains so thorough a ledger of your day-to-day experience and at such high resolution that, should you wish, you can instantly and perfectly reconstruct any moment of your past experience in order to relive it or re-inspect its contents. It also records unconscious psychic detail and will grant you perfect recall of your dreams. The depth of information it is capable of accumulating does have certain ethical and legal consequences. Groups in third and fourth are trying to have them classified as low-level
consciousnesses as we speak, but this is mainly an excuse to prevent us from installing them. Besides, he adds with professional inscrutability, should this be true? Well, you could consider yourself backed up for life, but we will discuss these details further when you've healed. he lowers the lighting in the room using the tablet all visitors are required to leave before midnight mrs bedencore he says to d then just before the exit he turns and declares quite unexpectedly you'll be reassured to know that security here is of the highest order before vanishing through the door is there a threat i ask but it's too late for a reply
don't sweat it d says nothing like what's been happening down in fourth tier can possibly happen here what happened in fourth the usual anti-immortality sentiment protests kids with contraband jacks or exoskeletons lifted from the factories where they were but there's a manifesto that's going around the upper tiers now elite stuff attributed to a group that calls itself the white cell, nature's immune system. Get it? That is reactive nonsense, I sputter, a little stunned at my own vitriol. Is it though? Dee asks. You're the one who's trying to freeze
things into place. They're fighting in the name of time, of change. That's active, not reactive. She pokes one of the nutrient bags suspended above my head that has the clinic logo on it. that infinity symbol kind of looks like an hourglass if you turn it on its end but they have no idea what they could be depriving us i mean humanity of this is going to change everything politics economics religion it will be the greatest transformation in human history i can feel myself warming up now the implications of what i've elected to put myself through are starting to become clear to me, and I will be part of it. A warlike expression flashes across Dee's face.
You get a few families of wealthy gerontocrats monopolising continuity enhancement, or whatever the fuck the latest PR euphemism is, and everything changes a great deal once, then never again. She stares out the window at a view I can't see from my position in the bed. A security drone skims past high up in the frame. This is not about trying to control time. It's about being rational. It's about optimizing the human capacity for... You're afraid of death, she interrupts. It's got nothing to do with the transformation of humankind. You're afraid of things going on without you. You're afraid that the universe doesn't make sense
in some way that includes you. I can feel the residue of an old mental defence system struggling to assemble itself in the ashes of my burned-out id, but nothing coherent comes from it. Then she adds, almost to herself, this is why it all went wrong for us. What? I demand. What went wrong? But Dee withholds her response. I try to bring my most recent memory of her to mind. Something concrete from before the upgrade. But it's all too vague. I just keep getting her in the chair next to the bed from half an hour ago. The pressure of her hand on my thigh.
Her innate eroticism. Even now, in the inclination of her neck as she peers out the window at something I can't see. Even despite her ageing face. she still looks as handsome as ever if not a little marshal I take advantage of her distracted gaze to drink it all in from her maybe too severe military haircut to the point just below her knees where the edge of the bed interrupts my view my hope is that this might trigger a lost recollection of past lovemaking and that this will be added to the library of memories I can replay but there's nothing she's not there it's just a blank biological memory feels like such a sham next to the crystal clear recall of the mind jack
i return to the vision of her hand on my thigh instead holding it in place and examining its details one by one i notice that she isn't wearing her wedding ring that's when the buzz sets in it's in my bone structure but not my ears the sense image of d's hand freezes and then starts to jitter about i can't clear it from my perception it overlays everything in the room an enormous pale hand pressing down on me i can feel my adrenaline rising instinct tells me to get out of the bed D, I murmur, hiding my urgency, trying to get her into the clear spot in my vision. D, the Jack, it's wrong.
But as she turns back slowly from the window, her face is no longer her own. D, I manage to get one foot out of the sheets and onto the ground. It's not about controlling time. the wall rears up at an uncanny angle and folds itself suddenly inwards over my head there's a crunch as something collides with my left temple followed by a burst of supernatural pain which mushrooms rapidly incoherently outwards before lodging itself someplace deep beneath the parietal bone what was i saying i was saying something I try to get a hold of myself, forcing my eyes to focus on a pair of combat boots planted next to my face, which I now understand is on the floor.
I can't get up. There's a girl. She's peering down at me from somewhere far above the tops of the tall black boots. Even through the face scrambler, I can see that she doesn't mean well. I try to protest, but she's crouched right over me now, holding my head down and pressing something cold against the base of my skull. The chill relents for just a second, as if she's hesitating, and then returns all the more fiercely, accompanied by the full resources of the body's capacity for pain. Shit. A woman with grey hair and a stolen armjack yanks a pair of goggles off her face
and extracts a thin, prism-shaped drive from the machine the goggles are plugged into. She holds it out to her companion, who's clinging to a ladder high above, encircled by a dim halo of red light. You know this guy, De Nira? The woman on the ladder says nothing. De Nira! Dee! Do you know this guy? Yeah. Dee shouts down after a long pause. He was an ex. We'd been divorced for eight years before I looped him. The woman with the arm jack peers tentatively at the drive. Are you sure you're okay with it? Dee stares darkly down into the bunker.
At least with a bio memory she won't be condemned to remember this shit forever. Yeah, fuck him, she replies. Fuck all the geros. Imagine thinking you deserve to live forever. Make sure the power stays on. Sure, says the other white cell operative, and slams the drive into a vacant slot in a rig that spiders out across the curved walls of the bunker. a vortex of thick cables connecting thousands of processors to a generator in the centre of the room. Dee climbs several metres up the ladder she's holding onto, and exits through a hatch in the ceiling. The remaining white cell-operative scrolls Betancourt, allegedly on a label by the slot,
then hoists herself up the ladder with her jacked left arm, three rungs at a time. she unplugs the red neon tube dangling from a cord beneath the hatch curls her legs up into the crawlspace above then disappears the sound of a magnetic lock echoes briefly in the distance then silence nothing to relieve the pressure of the void but the flutter of green black drive lights each corresponding to a loop of perfect derontocrat memory playing over and over again forever in the darkness