In the deep weak peacefulness of his mind, another troubling thought took shape. He tried to write with his finger, the way that Luci wanted him to, but he had neither pointed fingernail nor scanner’s tablet. He had to use his voice. He summoned up his strength and whispered:
"Scanners?"
"Yes, darling? What is it?"
"Scanners?"
"Scanners. Oh, yes, darling, they’re all right. They had to arrest some of them for going into High speed and running away. But the Instrumentality caught them all—all those on the ground—and they’re happy now. Do you know, darling," she laughed, "some of them didn’t want to be restored to normality. But Stone and the chiefs persuaded them."
"Vomact?"
"He’s fine, too. He’s staying cranched until he can be restored. Do you know, he has arranged for scanners to take new jobs. You’re all to be deputy chiefs for Space. Isn’t that nice? But he got himself made chief for Space. You’re all going to be pilots, so that your fraternity and guild can go on. And Chang’s getting changed right now. You’ll see him soon."
Her face turned sad. She looked at him earnestly and said: "I might as well tell you now. You’ll worry otherwise. There has been one accident. Only one. When you and your friend called on Adam Stone, your friend was so happy that he forgot to scan, and he let himself die of Overload."
"Called on Stone?"
"Yes. Don’t you remember? Your friend."
He still looked surprised, so she said:
"Parizianski."
(1950)
MUSÉE DE L’ÂME SEULE
E. Lily Yu
E. Lily Yu was born in Oregon, and now lives in Seattle. In 2012 she received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. Yu also works as a narrative designer for video games, including Destiny and Destiny 2.
It was a bus skidding off a rain-slick ribbon of a road, everyone for a moment in flight, levitating from their seats, then the shear and scream of metal. This is what distinguishes you from others. For whether you were shot to bits in a war or whether a telephone pole crushed your liver against the steering wheel, the procedure is the same. You can assume what happened after that.
Unless you are wildly rich—and you are not—the puddles of your organs were scooped out and replaced with artificial tissues that perform the necessary filtration, synthesis, and excretion for a fraction of the price of a transplant. Splintered bones become slim metal shafts. Ceramic scales cover ruined skin. They wheeled you out of the operating room hooked up to a bouquet of tubes, batteries, and drains, a grid of lights screwed into your plates, blinking red, blue, green. Stable. Functioning. Okay. As the drugs wore off you began to fumble at the strange new surfaces of your body.
Your lover was in Zanzibar on a lucrative minerals contract and did not hear about your accident until after they had patched you up enough to tap out the first of many detailed emails. The damage was extensive, your reconstruction complicated. For the rest of our life you will need a constant power supply, a backup generator, and hourly system flushes. You could choose to live homebound, they say, never passing your door. They quote you the prices of the various adaptors and chargers you need, and you laugh and cannot stop laughing, lightning balls of pain throughout your unfamiliar body.
Or, the nurses say, nervously thumbing down their screens, you could move to an experimental city in Washington designed for patients like you, where you would enjoy a certain degree of freedom and company. They do not add, a place where everyone looks like you. But their eyes shine with kindness.
Your lover offers to pay for the house installation. If nothing else, you should give him credit for that.
One nurse makes sure you are loaned a set of equipment from the hospital for your transitional period. You consider absconding with the adaptors—if the prices are to be believed, they’re worth a small Caribbean island or two—but you can’t extract the tracking tags. Besides, the nurse was nice.
You ship two cardboard boxes to the address they give you and sell the rest. You give away your pair of budgerigars because you can’t take them with you. Your lover never liked them. Too noisy. Too messy. Too demanding. They chewed up the clawfooted chair from his grandfather’s estate, little chips and nocks like angry kisses in the gloss.
Unexpected difficulties with buses and trains and airlines keep your beloved in Zanzibar, so when it’s time to leave, your friends do the heavy lifting for you. They are polite. They try not to stare.
"What a dipshit," you hear one mutter, unhooking a photo of your lover, and she is right. He should be here with you, packing sweaters you can’t wear anymore in plastic, boxing up your dinner plates.
You take the medical flight that leaves twice a month, your new address printed on a plastic strip around your wrist. Your college roommate sees you off. You hand over your borrowed equipment at the gate, shrugging off the promises of care packages and visits. You flinch from the hug. You don’t look back.
The air is sweet on your exposed skin when you first see the square mile of concrete that is Revival. At the center of the city, a sheaf of faceted skyscrapers floats above a squat white mall. Rings of smaller apartments slope down and away, glass and steel congealing to stucco, brick, and concrete as they approach the city limits, where buildings meet crisp dark pines, sharp as cuts. Far beyond the pines rise whitened mountains like licked ice cream. You will dream sometimes of climbing those mountains and plunging your face into soft, shocking snow.
It is impossible, of course. Your batteries have enough charge for a couple of hours, but without fresh supplies of lymph and plasma, there’s only so much your filters can do. The city newsroom is staffed by former war reporters, bulletproof and bitter, and every couple of months there’s a story about a disconnection, either accidental or deliberate.
In determinedly cheerful emails, you recount to your absent lover everything he has missed. You have been assigned a fifteen-by-fifteen room with enormous windows in the southeast corner of Revival. You have not yet bought a mirror. Very few stores stock them, and you are not sure you want one. Pets are prohibited. Rent is moderate but food prices are inflated and utility bills are astronomical. Double-digit municipal taxes give you a slight headache. The consortium of medical providers managing the city is nominally a nonprofit, but you do the numbers on the back of an electricity bill and figure the executives must be drawing large salaries.
Since you are an accountant, you can work remotely. Your clients, who heard about the bus crash and have offered their timid condolences, assure you that it does not matter to them whether you are based in Des Moines or Los Angeles or Revival, Washington. Other residents are not so lucky. Their debts are paid for out of their retirement savings, or their estate, or alternatively by the sale of their genome and medical history and whatever organic components remain at the time of their death. The lease document makes for an interesting read. You tear the pages into tiny strips as you go.
All too soon, you memorize the silver line of cables and pumps that strings apartment block to apartment block, running through grocery store aisles and along library shelves and shooting up the five floors of the bright, sterile mall. You know where it turns at the end of the pavement, in the shadow of the pines, and loops back toward the mall. A local joke has it that the silver lines, if viewed from above, if all the intervening roofs and floors and ceilings were removed, spell out freedom.