Free Counting Heads by David Marusek Page A

lost my sense of smell, and I’ve become a little hard of hearing. There is a constant taste of brass in my mouth and a dull throbbing in my skull. I go to bed nauseated and wake up nauseated. The doctor says my condition will improve in time as my body adjusts, but that my health is up to me now. No longer do I have resident molecular homeostats to constantly screen, flush, and scrub my cells, nor muscle toners or fat inhibitors. No longer can I go periodically to a juve clinic to correct the cellular errors of aging. Now I can and certainly will grow stouter, slower, weaker, balder—and older. Now the date of my death is decades, not millennia, away. This should come as no great shock, for this was the human condition when I was born. Yet, since my birth, the whole human race, it seems, has boarded a giant ocean liner and set course for the shores of immortality. I, however, have been unceremoniously tossed overboard.
    So I spend my days sitting in the dim dampness of my basement corner, growing pasty white and fat (twenty pounds already), and plucking my eyebrows to watch them sizzle like fuses.
    I am not pouting, and I am certainly not indulging in self-pity, as Eleanor accuses me. In fact, I am brooding. It’s what artists do, we brood. To other, more active people, we appear selfish, obsessive, even narcissistic, which is why we prefer to brood in private.
    But I’m not brooding about art or package design. I have quit that for good. I will never design again. That much I know. I’m not sure what I will do, but at least I know I’ve finished that part of my life. It was good; I enjoyed it. I climbed to the top of my field. But it’s over.
    I’m brooding about my victimhood. My intuition tells me that if I understand it, I will know what to do with myself. So I pluck another eyebrow. The tiny bulb of flesh at the root ignites like an old-fashioned match, a tiny point of light in my dark cave, and as though making a wish, I whisper, “Henry.” The hair sizzles along its length until it burns my fingers, and I have to drop it. My fingertips are already charred from this game.
    I miss Henry terribly. It’s as though a whole chunk of my mind were missing. I never knew how deeply integrated I had woven him into my psyche, or where my thoughts stopped and his began. When I ask myself a question these days, no one answers.
    I wonder why he did it, what made him think he could resist the Homeland Command. Can machine intelligence become cocky? Or did he knowingly sacrifice himself for me? Did he think he could help me escape? Or did he protect our privacy in the only way open to him, by destroying himself? The living archive of my life is gone, but at least it’s not in the loving hands of the HomCom.
    My little death has caused other headaches. My marriage ended. My estate went into receivership. My memberships, accounts, and privileges in hundreds of services and organizations were closed. News of my death spread around the globe at the speed of fiber, causing tens of thousands of data banks to toggle my status to “deceased,” a position not designed to toggle back. Autobituaries, complete with footage of my mulching at the Foursquare Café, appeared on all the nets the same day. Databases list both my dates of birth and death. (Interestingly, none of my obits or bios mention the fact that I was seared.) Whenever I use my voice or retinal prints, I set off alarms. El’s attorney general has managed to reinstate most of my major accounts, but my demise is too firmly entrenched in the world’s web to ever be fully corrected. The attorney general has, in fact, offered me a routine for my new valet system to pursue these corrections on a continuous basis. She, as well as the rest of El’s Cabinet, has volunteered to educate my belt for me as soon as I install a personality bud in it. It will need a bud if I ever intend to leave the security of my crypt. But I’m not ready for a new belt buddy.
     
     
    I PLUCK