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04 – Softer, Kinder
It wasn’t weird to look at your own body. It was really weird to look at your own body from a distance. Stef reached forward and grabbed the hand of the simulacrum, feeling its weird room temperature texture. ‘I know I disassociate pretty well,’ she said mildly, ‘but this is another level altogether.’ Andrea snorted, then went back to what she was doing. The simulacrum, the first step of agentification, stood in the centre of the room like a short, bored shop mannequin. It was her, to down every detail, every pale freckle, every hair on her arm and, under the light hospital gown, every inch of horrible scarring. ‘I…
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43 – Cake
In a way, the rest of the day was familiar. After the accident, she hadn’t been in a coma – which was apparently Ryan and the others were referring to “being dead for nearly a month”. No coma, but a long stretch without many memories. A long sleep, like a princess in a castle. After she finally had a longer period of wakefulness, the days had been filled with tests. Blood draws and tentative appointments with specialists to address what hadn’t been sorted in the major surgeries. A lot of her doctors had been hesitant to give her details – assuming that either she wouldn’t understand what was going on…
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26 – The Greater Good
She wasn’t sure she’d ever expected to be a mother. Andrea slowly sipped her coffee, pecked at a couple of keys, starting the next round of scans, then dutifully began to sort through the latest crop of crayon drawings. Agents who became parents tended to be a lot older than she was, for a start – early 30s was a perfectly normal age for a human to have a family. However, for agents, it was still very much on the “Newborn” side of life. There were exceptions, of course – some agents came to their emotional maturity – or at least their emotional selves – fairly early in life, flipping…
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18 – Far From Basic
Ryan adjusted the blinds on the board room windows – the tinted glass kept out the majority of the glare. Still, it was something to fill the time, something to pass the seconds before everyone else arrived. A meeting macro had aligned the table, set out jugs and glasses – everything was in place, except for the participants. At his place at the head of the table sat several folders. Copies of both the basic outcomes of the night before. Under normal circumstances, these would be the meat of the discussion, as well as a preliminary folder with facts about Stef’s condition. Jones walked in, nothing more than a tablet…
