Charles Stross - Remade

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Remade

Issue 3 of COSMOS, September 2005

by Charles Stross

Illustration by Justin Randall

Who said that death has to signal the end? It may just be an opportunity.

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt

strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She's

interested in me.

"You're new around here, aren't you?" she asks, pausing in front of my table.

I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she's wearing is roughly

ortho, following the traditional human body-plan. The skulls are sub-sized, strung together on a necklace

threaded with barbed wire and roses. "Yes, I'm a nube," I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger

tingle, a little reminder. "I'm required to warn you that I'm undergoing identity reindexing and

rehabilitation. People in my state may be prone to violent outbursts. Don't worry, that's just a statutory

warning: I won't hurt you. What makes you ask?"

She shrugs. It's an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. "Because I haven't seen

you here before, and I've been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn

extra rehab credit by helping out. Don't worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to

warn people myself a while ago."

I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? "Would you like a drink?" I ask,

gesturing at the chair next to me. "And what are you called, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I'm Kay." She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great mass of dark hair over her shoulder and

tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. "I'll have an iced double

mocha pickup, easy on the coca." She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. "The clinic arranges things

so that there's always a volunteer around to greet nubes. It's my turn this swing shift. Do you want to tell

me your name? Or where you're from?"

"If you like." My ring tingles and I remember to smile. "My name's Robin, and you're right, I'm fresh out

of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth." A bit over ten planetary days, a million

seconds. "I'm from" - I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her,

ending up with an approximation of the truth - "around these parts, actually. But just out of memory

excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over."

Kay smiles. She's got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she's got bilateral

symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that's a

mirror of itself - and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It's tough, not being

able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a post-surgical identity prosthesis.

"I haven't been human for long," she admits. "I just moved here from Zemlya." Pause. "For my surgery,"

she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There's something not quite right about them,

and it's bugging me intensely. "You lived with the ice ghouls?" I ask.

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Charles Stross - Remade

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