Version Control - part 8 (Patreon)

The next morning, Sera is still in bed when I start dressing, watching me put on these unfamiliar clothes.“I can come with you,” she says, “if you like.”

“Thanks but I’ll go alone.”

I reach back for the bra clasp and feel her move behind me. She does the clasp for me, routine for her, and before I can say anything she cups her hands around my breasts over the bra. She gives them a quick squeeze, as if to say goodbye.

I see her expression in the mirror - it’s not quite a smile.

“Sera.”

“I know,” she says. “Finish getting dressed.”

She leans on the door frame and watches me put on the rest. A shirt, the cardigan. Linen trousers, canvas flats. She steps forward to adjust the cardigan’s collar, straightening it slightly.

"Call me," she says.

"I will."

I study my reflection before I go. Shorter than I was, hips wider. The cardigan falls across a chest that belongs to this body. My face above all of it: the jaw unchanged, five days of stubble now almost soft. The same eyes look back. I look at it for a moment — trying to find the thing that's going to happen, the next change, the direction of travel — and find only what's there, which is my face, same as every morning, over a body that is not. Then I go.

The clinic is on the sixth floor of a medical building downtown, a different suite from where Brin did the installation — this one with the word Integration on the frosted glass door. The waiting room has committed hard to calm: low chairs, a water feature in the corner, plants that are probably real.

There are seven people waiting. I take a chair by the window across from a man in a coat.

The man has his hands folded in his lap, his shoulders hunched inward, head hanging low as he looks down at the floor. There’s a woman in the chair next to him, close, possibly intimate. She says something low to him and he shakes his head, then sighs.

The reception desk opens to a corridor and through it I can hear the low professional murmur of staff. I'm not trying to listen.

— third one this week with the same presentation —

A door opens somewhere and the voices change register and stop.

I look at the man in the coat. He hasn't moved. His eyes are on the corridor door, the look of a person who already knows what's behind it.

The woman beside him gets up to refill her water cup and he looks up for the first time. Straight at me.

He has the look of someone who has been rehearsing something and has decided this is the moment to say it.

"Did they call you this week?" he says.

"Yesterday afternoon," I say. "You?"

"Wednesday." He shifts slightly in the chair. "They offered a car."

"Me too."

He nods. He looks at his hands. "How long has it been going on," he says.

"Since Tuesday. You?"

"Six days." He says it quietly. "It started before the physical changes. I thought it was something else." He looks up again. "I mean what you can see. What they can see." He glances at his body, briefly, and away. "That started four days ago."

I look at him more carefully. The coat, the stillness, how he holds himself. I recognize it. Except something is different. He's male. He presents entirely male. The coat is men's. The hands are large.

"Have they told you anything," I say. "When you ask."

He shakes his head. "Nothing useful. You?"

"I haven't seen anyone yet. Today's the first time."

He nods again. Something in him is deciding whether to say the next thing.

“This…isn’t my body. I don’t know this man at all. I woke up in his body on Monday morning, like this.” He presses his right hand against the back of his left.

"My name is — " He stops. "My name is Denise." He says this evenly, as though he has practiced the evenness. "They won't hear it that way. But that's what it is."

I look at him — at the coat, the size, the face that is male and looking at me with something between despair and a strange composure.

He looks at the window. A pause, not for effect but the pause of someone choosing how much to say. "I woke up in a room I didn't recognize. People I've never met. This body has a life I don't know anything about."

I think about Tuesday morning when I got up for water and the shirt had changed shape and I stood at the sink trying to get to the other side of the sentence. At least the body was mine.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"Don't be." He says this quickly, like he's heard it before and it lands wrong. "I know what I am. I just want them to understand what happened." He looks at the door. "They don't. Or they do and they're not saying."

A receptionist calls my name.

I stand up. There's a phone on the table beside him, screen-up, the screensaver two women, arms around each other, squinting into sun somewhere. One of them is the woman sitting next to him. I don't say anything — nothing to say — and walk to the desk.

The examination room: fluorescent light, examination table, antiseptic and recirculated air. A technician I haven't met — Cora, early forties, brisk in the way of someone running behind schedule — runs the intake questions.

“When did you first notice symptoms?”

“Tuesday morning.”

“What were the symptoms?”

She types while I list them. Her face does the thing where it doesn't do anything.

“Are you still experiencing them?”

“Yes.”

She looks at me — at my face, at the cardigan — and then back at the screen. Something, but I can't tell what.

She types something. "I'm going to ask Dr. Ademi to come in before we start the scans."

Dr. Ademi is somewhere in his fifties, moves unhurriedly, the pace of someone who chooses how fast to move. He reviews the intake on the tablet. He sits on the rolling stool. He looks at me for a moment before he speaks.

"You're the installation from Monday," he says.

"Yes."

"Same-model paired XSync."

"Yes."

He makes a note. He looks at the tablet and then at me, and something in how he does this — the slight settling of his posture, an attention that is not just clinical — that I can't fully read. "We'd like to run some diagnostics," he says. "Standard protocol for cases like yours."

"What kind of cases."

"Installation anomalies." He says this without elaborating.

"Have you seen something like this before."

He pauses. One beat, maybe two. "We've seen anomalous responses," he says. "What we'd like to do is map what's happening at the implant level. The sync channel, the proprioceptive data. It's going to take a few hours." He sets the tablet down. "We'd like you to stay."

"What happens after the scan."

"We'll have a better picture of what we're dealing with. We can talk about what options look like then." He starts to stand. "Cora will get you set up."

"Dr. Ademi."

He waits.

"What options are there."

He clears his throat and shifts on the stool. “It’s essential that we get a clean baseline. We need to know what’s driven by the implant and what isn’t.”

I nod, waiting for the rest.

“Regardless of what the scan shows we’ll need to suspend the AI.”

I look at him. "Suspend it."

"The AI's activity creates interference in the scan results. We can't accurately map the proprioceptive data with it running. It would need to go offline — at least a week, maybe permanently."

I think about this. The essay. The writing sessions since Tuesday, the shed, my father's hands on the level, my mother at the window. The words arriving before I searched for them, the grasshopper gone quiet, the resistance lifted. The voice that Gil called embodied. All of that, offline. The friction would come back. The grasshopper would come back. I'd be in this body without the smoothing, sitting with whatever the body is now and the essay unfinished and the AI suspended for weeks while they ran their tests.

The thought is: I don't want to do that.

"I'd like to use the bathroom before we start," I say.

"Of course." He stands. "Cora will walk you."

Cora walks me to the corridor bathroom and waits outside.

I lock the door. I take out my phone.

I call Sera.

She picks up on the first ring. "How's it going?"

I describe the room. Dr. Ademi's answers that weren't quite answers. The man in the coat. Then: "They want to suspend the AI. Could be a week, or permanently."

A pause. "How do you feel about that?"

"I don't know." I look at the mirror. "I wrote better with it. I don't know if I was writing better because of it or with it. If I turn it off, I'll lose — " I stop. "I don't know what I'll lose."

"Declan."

"And they want me to stay for hours. They said don't leave the suite."

"What does the door look like."

"Push-bar from inside. Fire standard."

"Okay," she says. Then: "Your voice."

I stop. I hadn't been listening to my voice.

"Say something else," she says.

"Something else," I say, and hear it — the register shifted. The voice coming from my chest is lighter, different, the words landing with a different resonance than they had this morning. I look at the mirror above the sink.

My face in the mirror is not quite the face I looked at this morning.

The stubble is gone. The jawline has softened, rounded, the angularity I'm used to replaced by something closer, something I've looked at from outside for three years. The hair is longer — not slightly longer, significantly longer, falling past my chin now. I lean toward the mirror and the face that leans toward me is female. Not yet completely hers but getting there, the man's face I've had for thirty-one years giving way to something else, and above the collar of the cardigan the throat has changed too, the Adam's apple gone or nearly, the neck narrower.

"Declan," Sera says. "Talk to me."

"They want me to stay," I say, in a voice that is not quite mine. "And something is happening to my face."

She's quiet for a moment. "You only have a few minutes. Before they realize you're not coming back from the bathroom."

"The AI — "

"I know." Her voice is steady. "It's yours to decide. But you need to decide now."

I put the phone down briefly and look at my face in the mirror.

I remember the grasshopper, the months of struggle with the essay. The shed and my father’s hands on the level. What the AI going offline will mean. A nervousness I can sense in the staff in the clinic. I think about Denise. Something they’re not saying.

The direction of the stairwell suddenly comes into focus. The nudge reads more like information than instruction.

I put the phone against my ear again.

“OK,” I say. “I’m going.”

“You should take off the cardigan. Your silhouette will be different.”

I do as she says. When I look in the mirror, in these clothes, with a face that is nearly Sera’s, I look like a woman. Not the same person who came into the clinic this morning.

I feel a sense of which direction has less traffic right now, the pressure of a nudge.

I unlock the bathroom door.

Left. Past the scan rooms. A door marked STAIRS, propped open with a wedge. I take the stairs down and push through the lobby door and the cold hits me and I'm on the street and I walk. Fast without running, the way you walk when you're leaving somewhere you're not supposed to be leaving, and the city goes on around me in its ordinary way — cabs, a delivery truck, two people arguing outside a deli. A woman coming the other way meets my eyes, looks at me once, then again — a half-second of something — and walks past.

At the corner of Aldrich and Fifth there's a dry cleaner with an awning and I stop under it and wait.

My reflection is in the dry cleaner's window.

I look at it for a moment.

The face looking back is Sera's face. Not almost — completely. The hair, the jaw, the eyes, the throat. Sera's face on the body that has been going her direction since Tuesday. The last piece arrived in a clinic bathroom, the transformation finished or finished enough that standing here in the window's glass I see her looking back at me.

I stand there and look at her and she looks back.

And then I try to find myself in it. That's the thing — I stand there and I look for Declan in the face and I can't locate the line. Where I end and where she begins, in the jaw, in the set of the eyes. I've been inside this face for thirty-one years and I know it from the inside and what I'm looking at in this window is something I've looked at from the outside for three years and I cannot find the boundary between them.

But there is something wrong in the reflection. Small, precise, wrong in a way I can't name: the posture. The way I'm standing under this awning, weight slightly back, head tilted at an angle I don't recognize as mine or hers — it belongs to neither of us. It is a posture I have never seen her hold. It is not one I've learned. It is as though something else is wearing us both, wearing the body we've arrived at together.

Sera comes around the corner. She sees me. Stops. Something moves across her face — not recognition, something underneath it — and then she's walking toward me and she takes my hand. Neither of us says anything. We walk. My reflection slides away in the dry cleaner's glass behind us, and I watch it go as long as I can.

The Premium Patreon version includes images of Declan with Sera in the morning, Denise at the clinic and Declan and Sera after the full transformation.