“What’s going on?” asked Landen as he lumbered out of the elevator, panting.

“I remember now that she’s in the stockroom,” I said, pushing the door from its hinges. We found a pale figure of a woman in her underwear hidden behind a pallet of Colwyn Baye’s latest book. She looked terrible. One leg was thinner than the other and badly scarred, and her skin was a pasty shade the color of hospital inpatients. She was unconscious. I’d forgotten how tired and old I looked. Landen checked the unconscious me for vital signs.

“Alive?” asked Stig.

“Very much so—just unconscious.”

Landen slapped me around the face. First softly, then harder. This didn’t seem to have much effect, so he pinched me—twice. Nothing.

“Any ideas?” he asked.

“The upload takes less than half an hour,” I said, not knowing how I knew. “It’s a neural-bandwidth issue. And it’s almost complete.”

I was now getting the deep subconscious stuff. The memories of childhood, the time our hamster ate its young—I was only eight. Never forgot that. Then other stuff started to come in, too, stuff I thought I’d forgotten. Arguments with Anton, long before he died in the Crimea, and my mother crying for her husband, the first time he died. But through it all there was one thing that was strong in the front of my mind: This wasn’t me. It was subtly different in ways impossible to explain. It was wonderful, but disturbing, too.

“I know what we have to do,” I said quietly. “But first I have to prove to you that this was really me.”

I took out a pen and scribbled a note on the back of my old Skyrail ticket. I took a step forward and slipped it into Landen’s trouser pocket. I hugged him, placed my cheek to his and whispered in his ear.

“I love you. Now, do it.”

14. Tuesday: I’m Back

14.

Tuesday: I’m Back

Chimeras took many forms. Many of them hideous and all dangerous. The hobby geneticists of twenty years ago had moved from the making of odd-looking pets in a garden shed to the work of a younger elite who called themselves “Gene Hackmen.” They’d make anything for kicks and giggles, and generally did. Famously, FunBoy-6 built a centaur from spare parts. It was a good effort and galloped elegantly, although due to having the cerebral cortex of a pig, it was prone to oinking. Stig had dispatched the creature without mercy. The Hackmen hated Stig, and he hated them. And that from a neanderthal, who thought that hate, like greed or envy, was the emotion of a species doomed to failure.

James Crick, Hobby Geneticists: The New Dr. Frankensteins