The camera focused on a broad, plain-but-pretty face with expertly threaded eyebrows. Her eyes were unfocused. She sighed and sent her glance darting to every corner of the room, to the camera, to the corners of the room again. You couldn’t see it in frame, but you could tell her leg was bobbing up and down. The interviewer moved across the camera for a second and settled in, and the woman loosened some of her tension.
“Miss—may I call you Josephine?”
She bit into the center of her lower lip and nodded.
“What do you remember?”
“It’s hard to say now. I had my backup put in right away, and it seemed like the memories of a movie. Like when you remember something you saw with your parents. So I can’t say what was real or not. I had a journal I kept from when I signed up to the day I went in, and that matched up with some of it.
“The salesmen said it was “one square deal,” the whole shebang. You signed up to give them your body. They backed-up your memories and your soft parts. Your tenure was built around the company suit. The details are…”
She gesticulated up and away, then made a fist to rest her chin on.
“The best explanation is the suit has three parts. The parts that go inside you—the implants, the extra hardware, the drug pumps—is just one part, but it happens first and they need blood to match it all up. Genotailoring, to prevent rejection. It took three months to gee-tee the internals before you go in. Then they cut you and take out the “suboptimalities” and put in the replacements. The whole optic nerve faculty, whole joints, reproductive organs—everything gets put on ice for you and swapped out for upgrades. The decanting—it’s like a whole life they put into you, so your body knows how to use itself after you wake up. That’s part two. Part three is the suit itself, but none of it works well without the rest of it.
“The promise was you go in for 5 years and then they refurbish you as a regular person. Best life insurance on Earth, wages with interest, and fat bonuses on top of everything. They said, “it’ll go like a dream and you’ll be set for the rest of your life.” That’s what they said.
“I don’t remember most of what I did. That was the point, of course. But the very end of it, yeah, I remember. It was like one day I just woke up thrown into the middle of the ocean. Then everything happened. You don’t need me to tell you what happened.”
Josephine sighed again. The interviewer sipped a glass of water and continued.
“How was life once you came back?”
“Hard. You don’t really get your memory back from the backup. You recognize people in an abstract way, but it’s not the same. The money didn’t help. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Is there anything else? Anything you want on the record?”
“I’m sorry he had to die. But he had to, absolutely. Otherwise none of us would be here now.”