I hadn’t known a Ykazhian could look so conciliatory. “What we’re doing helps people, Llyn. It helps them directly, when we treat them. And it helps them indirectly, when we use the resources we collect to support access to health care for everybody else. The Synarche does not allot us enough resources to run this hospital as well as it needs to be run. What if I could help you?”
“Help me.”
Her gesture took in my body, the exo. “You don’t have to be in pain.”
“I’m not in pain.” I was. But I saw no reason to make myself vulnerable.
“What if I told you we could clone your body, repair the genetic damage—your neuralgia—and upload your ayatana into the fox of a blank slate?”
That brought me up short and hard. Without snappy repartee. Without anything to say at all.
I was still herding my neurons back into some semblance of coherence when she added, “We’d waive the procedure support cost. Your service to Core Gen has earned you some consideration.”
“The hospital doesn’t do that,” I said.
She laughed. “If you say so.”
I gathered myself. “I mean, I know the hospital does it. But it’s a sleazy side job, and as much as possible, you hide it from everyone. You’ve been doing it so long you—what—got the previous administrator to set up a hack in the patient confidentiality monitors so that future admins can’t even talk about the program?”
She didn’t speak.
“Even if I believed you, where’s the continuity of experience? It’s a lossy copy. And you’re putting that data into another brain—”
“An identical brain,” she said.
I scoffed in turn. “If you say so.”
She looked at me, bristles all pointed in my direction.
I said, “Neurons and synapses form in response to stimulus. To experience. To use. Personality and function are shaped—quite physically—by experience. You can’t grow a brain in a vat, transcribe somebody’s machine memory onto it, and expect to get the same person back. You have to develop the brain, and it won’t be the same brain, no matter what.”
Even on a syster’s body, the somatics of dismissal were evident. “Plenty of people seem to think it’s a road to eternal life.”
Maybe she didn’t realize I knew that they were developing the brains? Maybe she was trying to brazen it out? “Plenty of rich people used to drink pearl powder in quicksilver to cure their gout,” I replied. “That was a death sentence, too.”
“What if I told you that you wouldn’t have to wear that thing everywhere?”
That thing. I squeezed myself a little tighter, as if I could protect my exo from her scorn.
Lead her on. “How would you do something like that?”
“The same. Body transplant,” she said. “We move your ayatana into a different fox. In a cloneself with no developed personality.”
“So you’d copy me, and then kill the original?”
“We’d move you.”
“If this were legitimate—or even noncontroversial—the hospital would offer it as a matter of course.”
“The hospital does,” she said. “To people who can support the hospital’s work.”
“But not to everybody.” I had a moment’s respect for this wily slice of code. She had figured out a way to keep Core General funded. To get it built in the first place, when everything had nearly fallen apart. And nobody got hurt except people who were willing to sacrifice their own clone children to their continued existence. And those clone children.
If I hadn’t met Calliope Jones, I might even think it was a kind of justice.
“It works,” she said. “And no one suffers.”
I had to tune back my rage to keep from spluttering and was not entirely successful. “That’s not even… The clone suffers.”
“The clone is never aware.”
“The clone is aware enough to dream,” I said. “The clone is aware enough to develop speech centers and a working hippocampus. The clone is aware enough that it counts as a person to me.”
The most important thing in the universe is not, it turns out, a single, objective truth. It’s not a hospital whose ideals you love, that treats all comers. It’s not a lover; it’s not a job. It’s not friends and teammates.
It’s not even a child that rarely writes me back, and to be honest I probably earned that. I could have been there for her. I didn’t know how to be there for anybody, though. Not even for me.
The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals.
It’s who we are when nobody is looking.
I sat down on the bench that I knew would be a step behind me, because this was a virtual world. I let Zhiruo loom over me, and folded my hands.
I said, “I didn’t know you were doing this until recently. But nevertheless I was protecting you. Me, and everybody else in the hospital. You were using us and our reputations as your shield, whether you acknowledge it or not. We’re all tarnished by your act. You put every single one of us at risk, do you understand that?”
“You had nothing to do with it.”
“No one on the outside is going to care about that, Zhiruo. And nobody is going to care about your protestations that they were only clones, that they had no awareness. You had to build them to have some awareness in order for them to grow useable brains.”
“They’re not people!”
It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control. So I didn’t unpack the suitcase full of
