“Sooo ready,” Con said in a singsong voice.
She stood, swaying unsteadily on her feet, and all but fell into the waiting wheelchair. Laleh rolled her down a corridor that seemed to get longer the farther they went. The drugs again, flattening and lengthening her vision as if Con were standing between two mirrors. Laleh steered her gently into the refresh suite that would be her home for the next six hours until she was medically cleared to leave.
Laleh removed Con’s LFD and helped her out of the bathrobe. Con fell happily into the ergonomic seat that looked like a dentist’s chair no matter how hard Palingenesis worked to disguise it. Laleh began configuring the refresh, her fingers dancing in the air like she was practicing scales on a piano. Sensors snaked up from the headrest, attaching themselves to Con’s neck and scalp like a giant millipede spooning her spine. It should have been creepy as hell, but the safe haze of drugs made it feel like dozens of fingers massaging her back. A smooth, featureless pillar descended from the ceiling and stopped twelve inches from her forehead. Con heard a gentle hum, and her vitals populated a screen set into the wall, which was only there to make the client feel secure.
Dr. Qiao appeared at her elbow and asked how she felt. Laleh was Con’s steward, but Qiao ran this branch and oversaw every refresh personally. He linked to Laleh’s LFD, double-checking her settings. His reassuring fatherly presence and practiced bedside manner always helped put Con at ease. She needed all the help she could get. They were about to upload a perfect image of her consciousness, her memories, everything that made her her, and store it in a quantum mainframe on the off chance that she died between now and her next appointment.
If she were to die, a biometric chip implanted in her neck would register her death and notify Palingenesis, which would immediately download her stored consciousness into her clone so that life could go on as seamlessly as possible. Con giggled at the thought. The drugs again. It wasn’t funny, but it was. Life would go on. It was all so morbidly funny.
“Quiet now, Constance,” Dr. Qiao said. “Remember your breathing.”
“Sorry, Doctor,” she said.
“Do you consent to the refresh?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Good. We’ll see you in a few hours.”
David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” began to play. Music had been found to be an effective lubricant during a refresh, and clients were encouraged to create a personalized playlist. Con couldn’t think of a more appropriate soundtrack for making a copy of her brain than David Bowie. He had died the same day she’d been born. As a kid, that had seemed deeply significant, and like generations of outcasts before her, his music had reassured her that there was strength to be had in being different. She’d won her first talent contest performing a cover of “Heroes.” It had scandalized her mother, but by then, Con was past caring. Or perhaps it was more honest to say that she was beyond admitting that she cared. If there was an art to hardening yourself entirely against a parent’s disappointment, she hadn’t learned it.
Zhi had loved David Bowie just as much as she did. Their shared love of the Thin White Duke had been what drew them together initially. They’d met the first week of her freshman year at UT Austin. Her new friend Stephie Martz introduced them on a Thursday, and by Sunday, they were inseparable. Zhi had been the first person who could keep up with her encyclopedic, esoteric musical tastes. They’d talked for twelve straight hours that first night, passing a guitar back and forth to play the other a song. It had been the best night of her life. The night that her horizons truly opened beyond the borders of her dusty, three-street hometown. On Sunday night, Zhi had confessed that he was putting together a band with his roommate, Hugh Balzan. Their guitarist hadn’t worked out, and their first show was set for the following weekend. That’s why Stephie had introduced them.
“So this was just an audition?” she asked, both exhilarated and disappointed.
“At first,” he said, and then they’d kissed, warm in the glow of the possible. She was eighteen and her life had finally begun.
Trying to be cool, trying to play off that she’d felt the kiss dance down her spine like chain lightning, Con asked if the band had a name. Zhi shook his head and said that everything they’d come up with so far was terrible. Con suggested a quote from an old Bowie interview—how music awakened the ghosts inside him: “Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.” Zhi had loved it. Awaken the Ghosts had played its first show the next Saturday at a small club on Sixth Street in Austin. It didn’t go great, but they all felt the potential. When Tommy Diop joined on keyboards the following month, they established the sound that would set the band on its way.