But it’s the same question that kept me awake last night, so I speak instead. “I can’t believe that God would call a soul up to him and then allow a machine to parade around impersonating the real, living human that soul belonged to, in such a way that everyone who loved them couldn’t tell the difference. If there is a God, if there is a soul, He must transfer it. The person has to live on in the shell.”

Author's note: This chapter is a little shorter, hope y'all don't mind.
 

I am sterile. My grandfather took a large dose of radiation from the research reactor in Belgrade, and two generations later that misfortune has literally hit me in the balls. So understand when I say that I have never felt more impotent than I do watching Rebecca suffer for two weeks while her new body is prepared.

Time is not on her side. Every day they image her brain, and the pictures that come back are not reassuring. She is a brilliant girl. Her neurons are fucking awesome, and they put up one hell of fight. But still, the cancer is beginning to nibble at the edges of her brain. And frightening as the imagery is, it is still abstract. There is no evidence, in those big eyes that still burn bright in her emaciated body, of any damage to that mind. The pain, though. There is plenty of evidence of that, and seeing it in her eyes is like a constant kick in my malfunctioning gonads.

“This has to stop,” I tell Sandra- Dr. Qureshi. We’ve become friends. She touches my arm with the easy intimacy of her Southern upbringing; it is a sign of my trust in her that I tolerate it without flinching. “She is hurting.”

“It’s gonna be a little while, Romin,” she says, drawing out the vowel in ‘while’. “These shells have to be custom made, or they wouldn’t match Rebecca’s internal body mapping.”

I grunt. “She’s lived her whole life with a body that didn’t match her mapping. She’s told me this. Is there nothing you can do?”

Sandra chews her lip. “The first shells… they sucked. And that’s putting it diplomatically. We didn’t fully get how to wire up the sensory inputs to the quantum state machines emulating the patients’ brains; it wasn’t much better than the state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs of the time. Which was plenty good enough for near-normal range of motion, balance and such… but there were problems.”

“Problems?” I say.

She nods. “It felt like being on drugs. People felt disembodied. They experienced anosognosias- they became convinced they were blind, or deaf, or paralyzed, even though they could see, hear and move just fine, even describe what they were seeing or hearing. Some… some even became convinced they were dead. That they didn’t exist.”

From Rebecca’s room, a cry of pain.

“I’m not so sure she wouldn’t prefer that,” I say.

Quireshi winces. "The point is, I don't want to inflict severe psychological trauma on her to save her from physical trauma. It's not like there's even a supply of extra shells we could find the best fit from. If we transferred her now she'd have to live as pure software for almost a week, and I'm sorry Romin, but there's no way I'm putting her through that."

The next day circumstances force her hand.

I’m chatting with Rebecca, sitting at her bedside, when it happens.

“How do you feel about this?” I’m asking her. “Being a machine, a robot. Really.”

“A little scared,” she says. “A little. But, I don’t know, I feel like… like I’ll be finally real. Isn’t that crazy? But God, we’ve been saving up for the surgery, and all along I’ve been thinking, what if I still feel like a fake? What if I still see this, this fraud in the mirror? And with the transfer, it’s like I’ll be no different from any other woman wearing a shell. Sure, I won’t,” she swallows- “won’t get periods, or have kids, but neither can they. I won’t be a fraud.”

“You’re not a fraud,” I say, frowning.

“It’s sweet of you to say,” she says, “but we both know it’s true”.

I don’t feel that way, of course, but I don’t know how to convince her, and while I’m thinking of what to say her left eye starts twitching. She isn’t quite looking at me, either, but looking just past me at some blank spot on the ceiling.

“Becca?” I say.

“Romi, I wun flub wuf…” She’s not making sense, and the left side of her face is slack. I press the call button. A second later, I press it again. Her eyes roll back into her head. I run out into the corridor as monitors start beeping.

“Someone help!” I shout. “Quickly, please!”

It turns out Becca has hemorrhaged. She’s bleeding into her brain pan, and the swelling is putting pressure on her skull. The transfer needs to be done now, but they need her to wake up first; they need to know her mind is intact.

It takes three and a half hours, but she does wake. Dr. Im’s text wakes me from my fitful sleep in a chair in the corridor. My back protests, but I jump up and run to the ICU.

They have her head immobilized in a vice that looks like a medieval torture instrument, but her eyes seem alert. “Becca?” I say, gently. “How are you doing?”

“That’s up to you, Romin,” Im tells me. I look quizzically at him, but he just nudges his head towards Becca.

“A-“ she coughs- “ask me something.”

For a second I’m confused, but then it clicks. “Your dog you had as a kid, what was her name?”

“Chérie,” she whispers.

“What was the name of the professor of the class we met in?”

“Um… Rothschild. Bio.” Her voice is stronger now. “I helped you study. You still flunked out.”

“Where did we first make love?”

Her eyes grow wide; she coughs again. Then she smiles and laughs, though it’s little more than a breath. “Backpacking across Europe. The youth hostel in Hungary. We had… a bottle of cheap local beer. The sheets stank. We didn’t care.”

“And tell me: did I ever call you fraud?”

Her smile disappears. “Romi, I…”

“Not then, not ever,” I say. I turn to Im. “She’s all there. Do it. Do it now.”