Author's note: This one won't be too long, but I figured that by posting it in parts I would motivate myself to finish it. The second part is mostly done so there shouldn't be too long a wait for it. After that, I make no guarantees.
“I am sorry, Rebecca, but the cancer has metastasized to your brain.”
“Oh, God,” Becca’s mom sobs, leaning into her husband’s arms. I’m standing there, numb, feeling out of place in my trenchcoat and boots in the antiseptic hospital room.
“We had hoped the nanoparticles had scoured the cancerous cells from the abdominal cavity,” Dr. Im goes on, “but it appears we did not get everything.”
Mr. Hennessy, stroking his wife’s hair, looks up. “What are the options?”
“At this point, the only option we see is a transfer.”
“No,” Mr. Hennessy barks. His wife gasps, twists her head to look at him. “No,” he says again. “Out of the question.”
“Papa,” Becca interjects. “It’s not your decision.”
“I’ve lost my son,” her father says. “I’m not gonna lose… all I have left. Not gonna see you become… Fuck.” He shook his head.
“God, David,” Mrs. Hennessy protests. “Not here, not now.”
“Yes, we’re gonna do this now! It was people like you-” he says, waving a finger at Dr. Im, “Doctor, that told my son he could do this to himself, turn himself into this-”
“Hey,” I speak up. “You don’t talk about her that way.” Hennessy turns, and the contempt in his eyes… I see red for a moment, and when my vision clears I have him up against the wall, spitting every swear I know in English or Serbian right in his fat face. Dr. Im is shouting, probably calling security or something, but I can’t hear a thing.
Until Becca screams. “Stop it! Stop it now!” That cuts through. I let go of her father’s shoulders. “All of you get,” she starts to say, then breaks up into coughing. “Out,” she manages to finish. Im injects something into her IV. Her father wrenches the glass door aside and stomps out, Mrs. Hennessy following behind. “You too, Romi,” Becca says weakly, as soon as she can breathe normally again.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I say. “I didn’t mean…”
“I know. But I can’t deal with this right now. Please just go.”
I’m walking past the receptionist’s desk when Becca’s mom finds me. “Romin,” she calls out. “Wait!” I stop and turn around. “He’s sorry,” she says. “He won’t say it to your face, but he is.”
I grimace. “Yeah. I’m sorry also. Becca is the one person I want to have a good opinion of me, and her I disappoint.”
“My husband is scared,” Mrs. Hennessy says. “What he said was rude, but true. We’ve already lost our son-” she holds up a hand- “or we feel that way at least, and now we’re going to lose our daughter. To the cancer, or to some machine.”
“You won’t lose her,” I say, “if you just let her make the transfer.”
“That’s what they say, but… do you believe in the soul, Romin?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I do,” she says with conviction. “What happens to the soul when they transfer a person?”
“I don’t know,” I say again.
“Nor do I.” She sighs. “It’s not our decision anyway. It’s Rebecca’s. Look, I’m going to talk to her, and to my husband. Whatever bad blood is between them right now, and between you and him, he is her father and you,” her voice caught, “you are the man she loves. It’s her decision in the end, but all of us should be there for her.” She wipes a tear from her eye and hurries away.
The question lingers with me in the car, driving home. By some chance the shuffle selects a late-period Iron Maiden song. Maybe in my current state I’m reaching for significance where none exists, but the lyrics call to me:
I will hope, my soul will fly, so I will live forever
Heart will die, my soul will fly, I will live forever
I want very badly to be drunk. Open container laws are still on the books in Georgia but nobody enforces them anymore, so I pull a warm beer from under the seat. Yet by the time the satnav parks the car neatly behind my apartment I’ve barely consumed half the bottle, and already I’m feeling weepy. It’s raining hard. Appropriate. A septic tank has overflowed; I dash through the muck and up the stairs. Once inside, the act of wiping the crap from my boots is distraction enough that a minute passes before I’m confronted by the emptiness. This was our place, Becca’s and mine; without her it’s just another box.
There are photos of her, of course. My eye is drawn to one as I hang my trenchcoat. Her huge brown eyes are the first thing you see, expressive and undeniably feminine, even in the few photos she’s kept from when she was a boy. Looking into those eyes, I can’t doubt the existence of a soul behind them. Could anyone sculpt those eyes into the body they would put her in?
I take a hot shower. The heat almost makes up for the stingy quantity of water; Atlanta has been on drought alert for three weeks now. I’m toweling off when I feel my phone buzz.
“Hello… is this Romin Bosnić? This is Dr. Im from Emory. I wanted to talk with you before you came in tomorrow.”
I sit on the couch wearing nothing but the towel, feeling ridiculous even in the privacy of my home; without my jeans and trench and baggy shirts, without my spikes and rings and studs, I’m skinny like a little kid. My ribs stick out. “Go ahead,” I say.
“I was concerned about your behavior today. Ms. Hennessy’s mother tells me that both you and her father will be present tomorrow. How can you guarantee that there will not be a repeat of this incident?”
I sigh. “I have problems of anger management. I see a therapist every week to help with controlling this. Usually I can talk myself down before committing violence. Today was an exception. I don’t anticipate it happening again.”
“The Hennessy’s say much the same, even the father, though I detect a hint of reluctance there. Nevertheless, if there is a repeat performance you will not be visiting Ms. Hennessy again in my hospital.”
“I understand,” I say.
“Good night, Mr. Bosnić,” Im says, and hangs up.
“Papa, you’re not going to say anything until the doctors have explained everything. Romi, you too.”
Mr. Hennessy, jaw clenched, nods his assent; I reach over and squeeze Becca’s hand, and smile.
“Good. Now, tell them exactly why you can’t cure my cancer. Tell them what you told me.”
Dr. Im clears his throat. “When the cancer was confined to her peritoneum- the lining of her abdominal cavity- we were able to direct targeted gold nanoparticles to kill off the neoplastic cells. Once migrated to the brain, that technique becomes impossible. The only course available would be to fall back on older chemotherapy regimens-”
“No. Hold on,” Becca interrupts. “You’re not talking to a patient with a terminal case. You are not trying to give false hope here. Tell ‘em the odds on the chemo.”
“The odds are low-”
“The odds are none.”
“The odds are low.”
“I get it,” Becca’s dad says. “Chemo won’t work.”
“The odds are against it,” says the other doctor in the room. She smiles, a smile that reaches up and crinkles round her eyes; where Dr. Im’s voice was clinical, her Savannah accent is rich and full of warmth. “That’s why we’re advocating another option.”
“Mama, Papa, Romi, this is Dr. Qureshi. She works with shells.”
“Call me Sandra. I know you’ll have a lot of reservations about transference, so I’m hoping we can get those right out of the way?”
Mr. Hennessy shakes his head. “I just don’t see the point. At least with the chemo there’s some chance- yes, I know it’s small. But dead is dead. I’m not interested in seeing a copy of him-”
“David!” Mrs. Hennessy rolls her eyes.
“Her. Whatever. Running around acting like it’s my- child. A shell’s not the original. I’m not even sure a shell qualifies as a human being.”
“Papa, some of the people you work with are shells. You’ve invited them home for dinner.”
“Fine, so maybe they’re people. But a copy’s a copy. If I get the dog I had when I was a kid cloned, it’s not the same dog.”
Qureshi smiles again. “That’s actually a great place to start off. Mr. Hennessy, if your dog had had a hip replaced, or an eye, would it still be the same dog?”
“There weren’t eye replacements back then. But yeah, sure.”
“What about a heart or lung?”
“Of course.”
“People, then. If you started showing symptons of Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s, and you got a cognitive implant to replace the malfunctioning brain cells, would you be the same person?”
“Yes…”
“How many brain cells would I have to replace before you ceased to be the same person?”
“I don’t know. Half, maybe.”
“So when half of your brain cells were replaced you would suddenly become someone else?”
“Yes… no… huh. I guess it depends.”
“If the cells were replaced gradually, a few at a time, with cells that were identical?”
I can see him working on it; his cheeks tense up. “Uh…”
Qureshi beams. “That’s how the transfer process works. The functions of just a few neurons at a time are switched over to nanomachines, then the original neurons are cut out of the loop. Eventually you are left with a dead brain and a live mind in a computer, but there is never any point where the old brain died and the digital mind was born. The one is simply migrated to the other.”
Hennessy chews his lip. “I think I get it. But I’ll have to think about this.”
“Don’t forget, it’s not your decision,” Becca says. “Get comfortable with the idea, but don’t think that just because you don’t like it you get a say. You gave up that right years ago.”
Her father looks away. To my surprise, shame shows on his face.
“Well, alright,” Qureshi injects herself back into the conversation. “Does anyone have any more questions for today?" She looks around expectantly.
Quietly, Becca’s mom asks: “But what about the soul?”
I can see Qureshi searching for an answer. 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.”
Mr. Hennessy looks sharply at me, but his wife smiles and shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says, and tears come into her eyes. She looks away.
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.”