Free Diamonds in the Sky by Ed. Mike Brotherton

and said conspiratorially, “You saw my
Earth
presence. After squishing a few too many times for my tastes, I came up with an idea.” He sat back and rocked his chair. “You’ve heard of full-body repairers?”

    “Replicators?” The best Meyer could hope for one day were medbots, tiny repairers injected directly into your bloodstream that navigated your body to repair things at a cellular level. “I thought they were just rumor.”

    “They exist. But you have to plan ahead. You can’t just grow a biobod overnight, you know — it takes
years
, even with rapigrow medbots. Did you know they’re grown from common DNA elements until puberty, when they introduce the DNA variants? That’s when you can make a custom biobod for yourself, rather than walking around in a generic one like yours.”

    “I think I follow you. You squish into a biobod that’s right there, physically, instead of beaming your brain to another planet?”

    Reege jabbed a finger toward Meyer. “Exactly. Five years planning, and you can have a much younger replica of yourself, through the magic of the squisher. Plus, the direct-access squisher isn’t as expensive, since you don’t need to go off-planet to use a gravitational waveguide.”

    “You could essentially use a high-volume optical cable, right? Combined with the brain mapping completed half a century ago, it’s a simple process of deconstructing, transmitting and reconstructing — like Bell’s telephone?”

    Reege laughed. “Not so simple, but close enough for the layman. The biggest problem is the brain mapping — the process itself damages the brain beyond repair, rendering the body useless. Remapping doesn’t do this. The data stream is decrypted at the other end real-time and rehosted to the new biobod, which can be grown to be perfect.”

    “I have to say, I’m not feeling very perfect.”

    “You’ll get used to it,” Reege said drily. “Back to the point: What if I could squish to
two
places at the same time?”

    Meyer stared blankly.

    “You don’t need to know the details; all that really matters is that I put a team on it, and they managed to find a way of manipulating the waveguide to split the beam.”

    Stunned, Meyer opened his mouth and shut it, like a dying fish.

    “And then I thought, what if I could squish to
ten
places at the same time?” Reege paused. “Turns out I could. So I squished to all nine of my colonies at once, and replicated locally as well. We all keep in touch, and collectively we get ten times the work done in the same amount of time.”

    “Impressive,” Meyer said after the revelation had sunk in. “But you still haven’t told me why I’m here.”

    “Ah. Yes.” Reege pressed a button on his desk and stood up. “I’d like to show you our facilities.”

    Puzzled, Meyer stood up. Something sharp poked his thick neck, and everything went black.

    * * *

    Meyer’s brain
squished
again. He felt dizzy, as if he were swaying.

    After a few minutes, Meyer’s eyes focused. He was alone with a petite female Reege medtech — trim and redheaded, she looked northern European. “Earth?”

    The woman shook her head. “Venus Sky City 4, 50 clicks above the surface,” she said in a raspy alto. “Up here, it’s similar to Earth’s temperature and pressure.”

    The room shifted unexpectedly as Meyer tried to stand, throwing him to the floor. “I don’t feel well.”

    “Welcome to living in the air. It’s usually pretty stable, but every four or five days, the traveling winds come around at the cloud layer and remind us we’re not on solid ground.” The medtech shrugged. “Then again, the ground’s no picnic, either. That’s why we’re floating up here. Feels like Earth, doesn’t it?”

    “Except for the swaying.”

    “That could be solved if we could grow Venusian bodies that don’t crush halfway to the surface — it’s 92 times Earth’s pressure. We can lick the temperature problem. It’s over