Chapter Forty Three

Valerie

Valerie is sitting in the lab at her workstation with her elbows on the desk and her head resting in her hands. She’s couldn’t sleep last night, again, and she’s flat wore out. She can’t stop dwelling on what happened out on the road with Five and the investigators, and if she’d been killed. She almost was. By the angle of it, one of the bullets would’ve gone right through the back of her head if it hadn’t glanced off the steel roll cage tubing.

There wouldn’t have even been anything left of her for them to copy if it had been a half inch off. She imagines what it must’ve been like for Aaron to have woken up in an artificial body, in a frame that wasn’t even built for him, but Paul Mendle. After Aaron had changed, it felt like someone else was wearing his face, parading around in it, telling her that they loved her. He said it was him, but she didn’t believe it. This new thing that looked like him was angry, aggressive, and not the man she fell in love with. Regrettably, she wasn’t there when he needed him most, but Arma was. It makes her feel awful, and that she deserves what she got.

When her own time comes, she plans on being ready for it. With her own naked artificial body loaded onto the holograph, she is yet again reminded of her mortality and age. She’s recreated herself like she has always imagined in her mind, with the strength she’s always wished she had. She’ll no longer be in her forties. She’ll return in her prime, and be anything she ever wanted.

Evan had made it look so easy to make a beautiful face. Even after using the program to recreate her face from old pictures of herself, she still doesn’t recognize herself. It seems as if her mind has been lying to her about what she’s been seeing in the mirror this whole time. She can never seem to get her nose just right. She puts her face down in her hands again when she remembers Aaron telling her that it was what he liked about her the most.

With Aaron on her mind, she sullenly thinks of what kind of miserable life she would be leading if she ever did die and come back. She’d live forever, but not with him. She’ll have to watch him with another woman for how long? She could never have him back, not after someone else has been between them. Spitefully, she reminds herself that she only dated him for a week or two. It’s hard to even remember. She’ll have all the time in the world to find someone.

She doesn’t hear the doors out in the main room open or close when her sister comes in to find her. She’s brought her lunch again. She jolts at her desk, trying to close out of her profile, but it’s too late. Clarice has seen everything.

“Holy crap! Look at those rubber baby buggy bumpers!”

“Clarice! Come on! Don’t embarrass me like that.”

Clarice, on the verge of her water bursting, awkwardly sits down next to her and puts her hand over one of her wrists. She looks a little worried now. “You’re not… going anywhere right?”

“Nooo. I’m just… I got scared. I feel like if I don’t do this myself, no one will. I don’t want to come back in a body someone else slapped together as fast as they could. I wouldn’t want to wake up like that.”

Clarice grimaces. “Like with Aaron.”

She closes her eyes and puts her forehead in her hand. “Shit. Did he say that?”

“No, not that I know of. I thought he was pretty happy with what he got honestly. He could hardly stop prancing around in it if you ask me. He was suddenly buff as hell. Guys are pretty easy to please.” Clarice look up at the projector again. “You actually gonna go through with it? Would you want us to bring you back like the others? I thought you didn’t believe in it, you know, after Aaron and all that.”

She doesn’t look up at Clarice when she responds. After all the thinking about being alone she wonders if she’d maybe do it simply for the sake of her sister. “Would you do it if I do?” She almost starts to cry. “I don’t wanna keep on going if I have to lose you.”

Clarice thinks about it for a moment. She and Mikel had talked about it between themselves. He was firmly set on not doing it. He still feels that even the thought of it somehow cheapens living their lives. He figures that even the possibility of him being given a second chance predisposes him to not cherishing every little bit of what he has while he still lives. He believes that he might not fight as hard to keep living, if he could just give up and come back another day. Then she gave him the guilt trip about abandoning her and their soon to be daughter.

She looks behind herself, to make sure Mikel hasn’t snuck in behind them. “Yeah. I’d do it. We could at least give it a shot right?” She smiles back at her and shrugs her shoulders. “There’s no harm in that.” She wonders if Mikel might still do it if she does. If she asked him, would he love her more than his stupid beliefs and follow her to the other side?

Valerie hugs her real tight for a bit and then wipes her tears off. Her saying that she would go through with it too makes her feel a lot better, and not so alone. She can’t believe she’d forgotten how inseparable the two of them have always been. Losing Aaron in the grand scheme of things doesn’t seem so bad, as long as she’ll have her sister with her forever.

She considers what it would be like, watching her sister grow old. “You know, we’ve pretty much got you already taken care of. I mean, Five’s body was actually designed from you to begin with. I honestly have no idea what she even looked like before this.”

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Clarice looks at her with scrunched eyebrows. “Mikel said that he knew who they were. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that though. I couldn’t get him to. He said Marco told him to take it to his grave, and I think he means to.”

“Why in the hell… how in the hell would he have had anything to do with it? That makes no sense.”

Both of them look out the entrance to the lab again, to make sure no one heard. Five and Gabriel are both out in the clean room, training another one of the techs on the brain slicing machine. They’re all gowned up and look like they’ll be in there for a while.

Clarice leans in and lowers her voice this time. “He said that he and Ray were working on their disappearances. It had something to do with Paul and his friend Barry. It’s why he and Ray killed Paul.”

Valerie loads her profile back up on the projector again, but makes it more transparent this time, so it’s not so naked. “Well, maybe I have a little more respect for Mikel now.”

Clarice has suddenly become much more interested in the body on the projector. All of its intricate inner details are starting to show. She’s been working with the new Five-Series frames for a couple years now, and they still impressers her every time she looks at them in detail.

Except for the big battery pack in the middle of everything, where a person’s organs would normally be, everything looks very similar to real human anatomy. From having helped design the frames back at Advanced Machine Forms, she knows everything about them. She never really grasped how incredible they were until now though. It still blows her away every time she thinks about Aaron, a person she had known, is alive and walking around in one.

Clarice has something else on her mind though. She knows Valerie had sex with Aaron after he was brought back, but they definitely never talked about it. She would never ask, not after all the teasing she got from some of the jealous SSS guards. But it isn’t Aaron they’re looking at right now.

“So, uh, I remember overhearing Gabriel saying that Paul had these bodies designed pretty much for himself right? He wanted to still be… himself.”

Valerie looks at her a little awkwardly. “Yeah, he was human, and he still wanted to feel everything he could before.”

She closes her eyes for a second, now having to say it outright. “How is the sex Valerie?” She looks up at the screen, clearly able to see the artificial anatomy. “I’ve heard it’s still very much a thing. So do you still have an orgasm or whatever?”

Valerie blushes, thinking about it. Her mind wanders back to her and Aaron’s first time in the shower at Evan’s place, after he was brought back. It wasn’t only his arms that had been beefed up. Then she recalls the muffled noises coming from Five and Arma’s room. She brushes her hand down her face.

“You think it’s awkward talking about this with me, imagine what it’s like with Five. Ugh, that little girl is… curious, or adventuresome. I don’t even know how to explain it. I think Marco and Gabriel might have made them all little too…”

Clarice gets the point, and finishes for her. “Eager?”

She sighs. “Yeah.”

Clarice doesn’t say it, but she and probably everyone else has heard the noises down the hall. “So, what’s it really like, being in a completely fake body? What’d Aaron say about it? I don’t think I ever heard him describe it.”

“I didn’t want to make him feel self-conscious about it, so I never really asked. He did say that it took a moment of him to figure out what was going on when he woke up. He said he could still feel some pain, like all over, but like it was masked by some pretty serious drugs. He initially thought that he had woken up in the hospital.”

She remembers he was having the most difficulty in speaking, of all things. The change in his voice was likely one of the things that seeded her doubts. She thinks about his wild mood swings, and how she was so stupid to not have seen what was right in front of her.

“He said that after not too long, his new body had become the normal,and he didn’t really notice it. The problem was with his mind. He could never just… turn off, you know. It was real hard on him. Still is.”

Clarice looks up at the body on the holograph again. “I kind of imagined it would be like trying to pick up a martini glass, but tipping it over on accident.”

She changes the settings on the display to only show the nervous system. The body transitions to looking like a bottled galaxy. “It looks like a lot, but it’s nowhere near what an organic body is like. The artificial synapses are technically more efficient than organic ones, so it’s kind of like being on ecstasy. It all basically evens out.”

“Reeeally. Looks like you’ve got plenty of sensors in the crotch there!”

“Yes, you are correct again Clarice.” She sighs. “And no, I am not the one who designed the dermal harness. Marco oversaw that. So yeah… I suppose we might have at least one thing to look forward to, hmm.”

Clarice can tell she’s annoying Valerie a little, with all the sex talk, so she changes the subject. “Aw, what about food? You’ll never be able to have sausage gravy n biscuits ever again!”

“Yes, sadly, but we simply delete those hunger cues. Aaron said food simply doesn’t come to mind anymore, not like you would think at least. Oh, except for thirst. When they overheat, or run out of their consumable water stores, they do get thirsty.”

“That’s handy I guess. It’d be nice to feel satiated in some way. What about sleep, I’ve seen them all sleep before, do they get tired?”

“No, they don’t get tired or drowsy, and sleep doesn’t make them feel rested either, but it’s apparently still nice. It was the only way Aaron could ever turn off. He said his dreams were often in overdrive too though.” She looks down in worry. “He also told me there was no way he could seem to… escape his thoughts.”

When Clarice’s wrist communicator lights up, she causally looks at it, but then her eyes suddenly get huge. “Um, shit. Looks like I’ve got to head back up to my station.” She gets up in a hurry and starts marching out of the lab. “I’ll maybe come and swing by your place tonight.”

After Clarice has gone, she immediately starts feeling down on herself again, hardly able to keep her eyes open. If she doesn’t head back to her apartment, Five will be waking her up in a puddle of drool on the desk. She trudges through eating the sandwich Clarice made for her and drinks the pop, hoping it might pick her up some.

She brings up her face profile again, leans back in her chair and stares at it for a while. She wonders if it’s actually what she used to look like to other people when she was young. It makes her wonder what Aaron would think if the next time he sees her, she’s lost ten years and is in a super hot fake body too. Would he second guess who she is? Would anyone still mourn her death if she came back? What would her sister really feel?”