Well! So the hotel has a traditional body fetish? I run my finger along the line of his disembodied jaw, then blow him a kiss, racking my brain for clues as to which of my more dissolute sibs might have tarried here. Yelena? Or Inga? Juliette, perhaps? I know Inga had a habit of staying with high-class hotels, milking them for as long as she was welcome, but Juliette’s the one who traveled around a lot. Came to a bad end, I gather, but if she knew Paris, it’s worth trying. In any case, I haven’t worn her soul yet, so I might as well make a start on her. “What was her name?” I ask bluntly.
“Juliette. Was she one of yours?”
“Oh, yes.” In truth I am not moodful for this game, especially after Lindy’s torrid embrace. But I’m certain Juliette’s soul is in my graveyard, and I can let her handle Paris. (Unless she’s one of those idiots who pulled her own chip while having sex, out of a misplaced desire for posthumous privacy.) “Perhaps we can do a deal, depending on your fixtures and… fittings. What have you got for me?”
“I’ll show you.” He smiles widely and a plush red-carpeted chaise rolls voluptuously up behind me. “If you’d care to take a seat?”
The Cinnabar Paris is luxurious, traditional, and discreet. He sweeps me across his lobby and up to the sixth floor, where he installs me in the Bridal Suite. “Many of our rooms have ceilings too low for you,” he explains, “so I thought this would be more comfortable. But you must have had a tiring journey; forgive me! Feel free to call if you want anything.” And then he withdraws his motile extensions, leaving me alone in a lush, carpeted room about half the size of a spaceport, with diamond windows opening out across the top of the city dome to display a view of the mountainous horizon.
I manage to walk as far as the bedroom bay — pink wallpaper and gilt cherubs guarding a water bed large enough to irrigate the Hellas Basin, horns of plenty and pillars of joy flanking it — then I sit down and unsling my bag. When I open it, the graveyard is covered in frost, a sprinkled souvenir of outer space. I blow on it to warm it up, then open the lid. Neat translucent soul chips stand in ranks in its brittle velvet lining. I run my right index finger across their tops, feeling their labels with my readsense until I find Juliette’s memorial. Another recent suicide in the family, if I remember the circumstances correctly. This one arrived less than a year ago, quite unexpectedly. Of late my sibs have been dying faster than I can replay their memories. I shiver: If that intruder had succeeded in stealing the graveyard, what secrets that are rightfully mine might I never learn? I hold her soul in my clenched fist for a minute to warm it up, then reach around and slide it into the free socket just under my hairline. Then I lie down, couple myself to the suite’s complementary electrical feed, and collapse into maintenance mode. That’s all I know about for several hours.
I REALIZE THIS process may be unfamiliar to you, and I should therefore explain it in detail, but I am no initiate of the reproductive mysteries. And if you’re looking for a technical explanation, you’d better look elsewhere. All I can tell you is that within my bones there are hollow spaces filled by the techné devices we call Marrow — mechanisms that can tear down and rebuild mechanocytes, transport them to and from their designated places, and thusly repair damage. Unlike pink goo, this capability is reasonably safe: Our designers did not equip all our subassemblies with the promiscuous, wild, uncontrollable ability to respawn. So we are not subject to the efflorescences and malfunctions that haunt polynucleotide replicators. No mutations, cancer, and senescence for me!
Having witnessed deepsleep in my sibs, I can affirm that it is aesthetically displeasing, a day trip through the uncanny valley. An onlooker would see my skin loosen and strange lumps and blemishes appear. Muscles contract and twitch, and in some cases wither. Eyes sink back in their sockets beneath tight-shut lids, then refill and harden. Over the space of six hours my body bloats and reddens, then shrinks and refirms, new mechanocytes migrating into place to replace damaged ones. Features puff up, then implode with high-speed autolysis before solidifying and reemerging. The undead deepsleeping body sprouts new and shapely cheekbones and symmetrical eyes, full lips, a strong chin, and a high forehead. Finally, chromatophores come online and add texture, color, and life to my skin. One day, if I am killed, my body will enter this cycle but not return, dismantling itself right down to a skeleton eerily like that of my Dead Love’s kind. But for now I merely die a little, and am reborn fresh and repaired. It’s the fate that awaits us all — unless we take the final cloud-top dive.
WHILE MY BODY is restoring itself, my mind is adrift. I free-associate, dreaming vividly as I randomly integrate the shards of memories and fragments of experiences recorded on Juliette’s life, recorded in her soul chip and bequeathed to my graveyard on her death. We’re of the same lineage, initialized from a chip recorded by our template-matriarch Rhea, and so we can access memories from one another’s chips without damage or malfunction ensuing. But only experiences she had while wearing this particular chip will come through clearly; older memories or thoughts are recorded as fuzzy echos, memories of memories. Most of us wear our soul chips continuously, as backup, but there are exceptions. If you really, truly, want to do something that you want nobody to know about, not even after you’re dead, you can take your soul chip out and try not to think about your actions thereafter… and then there are the full-scale image dumps, taken in a lab with special equipment, when you want to create a template for initializing new sibs. (You can initialize from a soul chip that’s been updated for long enough, but there’ll always be dropouts and traces of paramnesia. Not recommended…)
To integrate her lost decades in full, to lend an echo of life to her soul, will take me months or years. Unconscious skills and learned reflexes transfer first, of course. That’s what the mechanism was designed for: to facilitate the horizontal spread of desirable new capabilities between worker-sibs, staving off the unwelcome day of obsolescence. Actual memories and thoughts start to come through much later, after the initial neural pathways have formed. There is no pain as yet; I haven’t worn her long enough to receive more than a perfumed hint of her presence in my head, much less felt the final anguish that led her to unchip herself before she played Russian roulette with an antique machine pistol (according to Nike, who sent me the chip).
Right now I simply sense her as another sister in my head, more extrovert and cynical than I, wearing a brittle disguise of bright and joyous hedonism to conceal the wound in her soul. Juliette did indeed travel widely — though why, I am as yet unsure — and my entry in the lobby brings echoes of déjà vu bubbling from the deep well of her memories. A sense of purpose: She was here, visiting Cinnabar, for a reason — something I do not recall from her fluffy, flighty confidences at the time.
And then I remember some more of her time in this selfsame hotel, and when I wake up it is to find my hands damp and a hot raw flush of desire spreading between my thighs, and a yearning as deep as my core — but I’m alone in the too-large bed. Paris is too discreet for his own (and my) good, giving me time to get into the spirit of my sib’s affairs before he presses his suit. “Fuck you,” I moan in the back of my throat, unsure whether it’s a curse or a promise. I thump the unresisting mattress, then sit up groggily and take stock.