Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon

Josh Pearce

Q uinn: nervous, violet-haired, edging toward her late 50s with a queasy apprehension, hands on either side of the growing mass in her midsection. Her feet ached, her insides burned, her temples throbbed, her spine felt like it was being pulled apart. Her everything hurt.

Dr. Kay switched off his innerscope and said, “Yup, everything looks good. How you feeling?”

Quinn threw up in her mouth. He pointed her to the sink and she spat and ran the tap, rinsing out her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Perfectly expected. How far along are we now?” Flipping through the onscreen. “Ten months. Beautiful. Well, judging by the size, you’ve got another two-three months in you. Keep your calories at max, or it’ll eat you inside-out. And…” double-checking “…you chose a boy?” He opened a drawer and selected the appropriate supplement injection. “Lie back a little and lift up your shirt.”

That made Quinn feel like vomiting again, but she bit down. Kay chattered as he sterile-swabbed her belly and gave her the shot. “This your first? Always so nerve-wracking, I know. I’ve had five, you’d think it’d get easier after a while, but nope, I’m a mess each time. You doing a home-molt, or coming to one of our clinics?”

“Home.” She struggled to get upright, under all that weight.

Kay helpfully raised the motorized recliner. “Alone? Or do you have someone to be there with you?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Okay!” he said brightly. “If you find yourself in need, though, we do offer doula services, highly experienced, wonderful guides, I use them myself. I also always recommend my patients attend at least one reveal party, see it all first-hand so you know what to expect.”

“I’m going to one this weekend, actually.”

“Great!”

T he upcoming party was for a friend, Zee: eight weeks ahead of Quinn, not nervous at all but impatient to get on with it. They often hung out in one of the station’s lower rings, doctor-recommended for the developmental benefits of stronger gravity. Today they trundled through the orbital station’s hanging gardens, just people watching. There were very few elders.

“Can’t believe you’re ready to pop in just a few days,” said Quinn.

Zee was enormous, swollen with impending life and permanently riding in a torqued-up hexapod chair. “Can’t wait to get out of this thing and back on my feet.”

“You’re going for another girl?”

“Sure am. I barely got time to enjoy this body, so I want another chance to explore more of what the feminine form has to offer.” Her friend hardly looked out of her teens, but Zee was missing her right arm at the shoulder, lost in an industrial accident that had also mangled her right leg and burned half her face and head, and she now wore her hair buzzcut rather than asymmetrical. Zee had gotten injected right after the accident. Standard medical procedure for such debilitating injury and illness – easier to just start over.

A cluster of freshborn jogged past, their skin smooth; unblemished, glowing, bodies stretched by recent growth spurts. “What age are you aiming for?” Quinn asked.

“Minimum full development. My frame is too small right now to incubate anything else safely.” Unable to keep the weight up, her other limbs were withering, auto-cannibalized to feed the thing inside her. Without the mobile chair she’d have been bedridden for the best part of a year. “It’s okay, I don’t mind starting young. Gives me more time until I have to go through it again, I hope.” She touched her scalp. “Like getting a really short haircut, right? I want to see how long I can hold it off next time. One made it to their 80s before the doctors put them down, because trying any later than that would be too high-risk a pregnancy. You?”

“This is the oldest I’ve ever been.”

“I know that.” Zee rolled her eyes. “I mean what’s your target age?”

“Like you. Star cruisers want them as young as they can get. Take up the least amount of room, use the fewest resources, longest hypothetical lifespan, but also mentally developed enough to deal with the confinement and isolation.”

Zee shuddered. “Ugh, you’d never get me in one of those. Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good life.”

“Well, fortunately I’ll have a brand new one at the end of it.” Quinn smiled. “That’s the whole point, right?”

This was likely to be their last walk together in these bodies. All these years they’d been friends, but friends only. They’d met down on the surface a decade ago while Zee was a man, and the timing had never yet aligned for them physically – too young, too old, mismatched chemistry and preferences, living in different gravities. This was the closest they’d been in quite a while.

“Are you getting double vision or split mind yet?” Zee asked.

“Just the dreams so far. Some derealization in the mornings when my brain doesn’t switch out of his REM for about an hour.” Some nights, too, she would awaken inside her own body and forget where she was, smothering in darkness and intestines. Try to claw her way out through her own stomach before the housing warden could unlock her door and talk her down, face pressed to her stomach and speaking loudly and calmly through Quinn’s skin.

“Watch out,” Zee warned. “You spend a lot of time sleepwalking near the end.” She looked down at herself. “Well, not me, though. Not this time.”

“Is that you talking to me now, Zee? Or is it your little puppeteer?”

“Wrong way to look at it, babe! There’s no difference. It’s not two minds, it’s only one, processing input from separate sources. It is, in the end, only yourself in there.”

End of the path. Quinn’s inner life opened her mouth, said good-bye. The words fell on Zee’s ears – the person she was inside heard, and smiled.

S ure, the heavier gravity was good for bone density and cardiovascular strength, but it also blew out Quinn’s knees the day of Zee’s party. She got a pair of fabricated leg braces so she could stay upright for the event. At least this far along, enough of her nervous system had been hijacked by her unborn that there wasn’t much pain anymore. Because of the wait for fabrication and fitting, and with her new stiffness, Quinn only showed up right as the reveal party was peaking.

Quinn was the oldest person in the room and she felt every minute of it. Zee had a lot of young friends in good health. She’d inflated a barnacle hab on the outside of the station to accommodate them all. The walls were transparent and flexible, you could see right through to the starscape outside. The weight of people standing or leaning distorted the starlight into multicolor halos.

The guest of honor skittered up in her chair as Quinn arrived. “Just in time. Here, sign my body.” Most of Zee’s visible skin was covered in permanent ink. Signatures and well-wishes. “Go on now, I saved you a choice cut.”

Quinn wrote Q-U-I-N-N in black letters on Zee’s bare bicep. “How will you sever the connection? Gonna cut the top off?” There had briefly been a fad for guillotines on the journaling streams. Even though that had passed, there was still a market for ritual beheadings. The only sharp objects Quinn could see were kitchen knives over in the corner where the staff hired for the party were heating up a large countertop griddle.

“Oh, no, I’m going with something more festive.” Zee briefly closed her eyes. “Feels like it’s almost time. Find a spot with a good view, this will be fun.”

She walked her chair to the middle. “Gather ‘round!” she called. “Piñata time!” The crowd formed a giddy circle with Zee in the center. The guests nearest carried double-handed laminate staves, gave a few test swings. “Remember, let’s keep it above the shoulders!”

Zee barely finished the words when a club lashed out and clipped her ear. Blood sprayed in an arc across the front row and the chair crabwalked sideways. Zee laughed along with everyone. “Okay, go for it!”

The blows started raining down for real. Zee pinballed back and forth as they landed, knocked in and out of their reach, but the chair kept her head at strike-zone height. One swung directly into her nose, crushing the maxillofacial bones. Respiratory blood bubbles. Cheers.

As Quinn watched, she pinched the loose flesh on the back of her arm, hard. The ravenous growth folded up like origami within her had already consumed her stomach and intestines and hollowed her out, leaving her outer body almost completely numb. Pinched harder, felt a faint prick of pain in whatever nerves she had left. Not entirely without feeling, then, not yet. Not until the moment of birth, when the lack of sensation would be a benefit. A blessing.

The next hit caved in Zee’s temple and an eyeball popped out of its socket. Another removed her lower jaw. And still, the laughter. The guests swinging the bats had the muscles of 17-year-olds and the flint of immortality in their eyes.

An overhead chop split Zee’s skull like a log, spilling her brains into her lap. She slumped out of the chair and flopped to the floor. Everyone crowded closer to watch as a second head emerged from Zee’s neck. A slime-covered body wriggled out of its chrysalis, shouldering aside the old brittle skeleton that encaged it, and then lay there for a minute, just breathing.

Contortionist’s disjointed limbs and loose ligaments. Like a butterfly slowly unsticking its sodden legs one at a time and then its wings, she spread herself out. Her closest friends took her hands and pulled, helping pop the bones into place like collapsible tent poles.

Zee stood up in her fresh body, standing in the puddle of her discarded flesh, her hair stringy with viscera. She was shorter than she had been, much reduced in weight, unsteadily perched on thin legs. And she was hungry. Her growth curve was only just now slowing, so she would be packing on more mass for the next few weeks.

Caterers pushbroomed the molted scraps into pails and took them to the griddle while Zee’s friends washed her down with wet and dry towels and gave her a clean party dress, ignoring the mess on their own outfits. Quinn hovered at the edges, the smell of sweat and grilled meat filling her nose. The dancing started. Zee exulted in her new limbs, her age-mates celebrated their bodies against hers. There were pillows in one corner for later unclothing.

The caterers passed plates around. “Here’s your slice.”

On the plastic plate, a cracklin with QUINN written on it in black letters. She took a bite. It was nectar-glazed, salted with the same sweat she smelled. She ate it in small bites. The pieces drifted like fish food flakes down through the fluid that filled her inner cavities, and her inner hunger snapped them up with full-sized adult teeth. He’d spat – and she’d shat – out his baby teeth months ago like undigested kernels of corn.

She mingled. People were exceedingly friendly. Whenever anyone asked “May I?” she pulled her shirt up, reaching out her inner hand to press palm-to-palm with theirs through her belly skin so that they could compare sizes and comment on how big he was.

Quinn made her good-byes. Zee’s brightly shining eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” Zee promised, people already pulling her toward the pillows, fingers undoing the straps of her dress. “Come around soon as you get that new body!”

C arbon copies: you don’t even need a womb to grow one; just a nexus of blood vessels and ganglia, a nutrient nest for the new cells to divide in. Less a fetus and more like a tumor with teeth, or a partially absorbed twin.

As the copy grows, the nervous systems mesh until you can see the darkness inside your own body with brand new eyes, storing memory chemicals and connections in fresh neurons. How long would it take to regenerate a lost limb? Well, humans can grow entire bodies in nine months, and if they can do that, why bother replacing just an arm? Might as well make yourself a whole backup copy. A simple extraction of template cells, snip-and-edit for any recessive or dominant expressions so desired, then an injection to set the clone cooking in the autoclave of the host body.

For the first few months, your copy is only a a few inches in length, all bent up like a paperclip. Then it doubles in size, and then again. Then it really starts accelerating until the host is bursting at the seams.

T he organs in Quinn’s copy had taken over most functions of respiration, digestion, excretion, circulation, and as he grew so did his appetites. Teething, he gnawed on the withered husks of her original organs to make room for himself. Quinn felt this only as pressure or an uncomfortable tugging, and that mostly at night while her old brain dozed and her new one grew restless.

Even with the bottom falling out of the birth rate, universal immortality led inexorably to overpopulation. On these types of orbital stations, there was always a stream of people going to and from the uppermost level, the null ring where ships docked. Evacuation sloops offloaded mortally wounded soldiers copied into freshborn children, screaming at the phantom pain experienced by their previous bodies. Warfare was just a pressure release.

Exodus was another. And the reason Quinn was training to gradually move up each higher ring and acclimating to the physiological challenges of interstellar flight.

The day she would give birth to himself came up like sunrise seen from orbit: no warning, just a sudden, blinding awareness – oh. Quinn scheduled a cleaning crew to come by in an hour, then stood naked in her shower stall, holding her largest kitchen knife. Hesitated, pressing knifepoint to stomach. If this didn’t work, she was going to look pretty silly when the cleaners walked in on her trapped halfway through the birth, like watching someone struggle to get a sweater on over their head with their arms in the wrong holes.

Ah, well, that’s why she’d chosen her first time alone.

The knife sliced easily through layered curtains of skin, fat, and muscle. Only a slight burning tingle of pain. Her copy pushed his arm through the slit and took the handle of the knife, drew it back in. Inside her body, Quinn squirmed like a camper on a cold morning trying to get dressed in a sleeping bag. By this point there was only a vestigial umbilical tethering her old body to her new, and severing it would free her into her next life.

He found it, a little flesh tuber gluing right shoulder to the subcutaneous wall. Quick slice, and it was done. Another slice, and the cocoon fell away as he stood up. Quinn put the knife in the soap dish and turned on the water. He’d never had a haircut, of course, and he even had a patchwork beard! Another new thing: Quinn held his penis in hand and felt his heartbeat through it. He didn’t have a navel, but the puckered scar on his shoulder looked like one.

At his feet the old body lay as crumpled as a raincoat, faceup and drowning in the blood-pink water filling its mouth. Mindless, but because he hadn’t severed the brainstem it still had autonomic function: gasping and sputtering; staring fisheyed up at the ceiling light; also like a fish, flopping in the shallows. Quinn stepped over it to exit the shower. The cleaning crew would haul the body to the compost compactor. He wasn’t going to go through the fuss of an afterbirth ritual.

Some things you just don’t think about ahead of time. None of Quinn’s shirts or trousers fit his new body and he’d forgotten to get anything fabricated. Well, he couldn’t go out in just a towel, so he found the loosest pair of underwear and a dress that would at least reach past his knees. Moccasins that stretched over his feet.

Then he went to find Zee.

U ncertain of the mechanics from this end, his first ever emission was like another orbital sunrise, without warning, suddenly blinding. Took both of them by surprise, leaving Zee wiping herself down and Quinn looking like a man caught with the smoking gun still in his hand. On the comedown they talked about names and pronouns – Quinn keeping one, changing the other – and the second attempt was better timed, though still a shock to the senses.

Zee helped Quinn shave, then shoved him into the shower with her for a third go. Finally, before he could get his hands on her for a fourth, she pushed him out the door, saying, “Go on, I have work in an hour.” Just before it slid shut: “But come back in the morning!”

Quinn kept turning down invitations to group sex – he wanted only Zee, and who had time? The exodus flights were generation ships, only each generation was just the same people over and over again. Knowing how to keep the power on was the only guarantee of survival, so training involved a lot of rote learning to ingrain system maintenance on an instinctual level.

Zee said, “Couple of copies down the line and you’ll forget all about me. I won’t be around to remind you who I am.”

“Come on, sure I’ll remember you. I’ll take a recording, listen to your voice every day.”

“What’s the point in that? Two hundreds years from now we’ll be 100 trillion kilometers apart. Who has ever come back from that? How would we even recognize each other?”

“So come with me,” Quinn said, knowing she would say no.

“Hell no. You know the risks out there – the mental strain of spending several lifetimes in basically a prison? And copying yourself in zero-g, in deep space radiation? If you survive the trip, it’s almost definite you end up with twisted carbon. I like my life here. I’m not leaving it.” Casually: “You could stay, and not leave everything behind.”

Quinn sighed and pulled away. “Can’t stay here forever. Every human star system gets eaten by war, eventually. Might take a thousand years, might take a hundred thousand, but the population pressure makes it inevitable. The only way to avoid it is to run for the next star and stay ahead of the violence. You’re going to kill someone someday, Zee.”

Zee patted his arm. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

T he very star cruiser that would take Quinn and a crew of over four hundred to the raw stars was visible through the viewports of the null ring. Everything was tightly scheduled, and on these journeys there were no passengers. The timetable extended to deaths and rebirths – all had to be freshborn within six months prior to boarding so that they would be the same generation at launch, with a schedule of staggered pregnancies while underway.

Bad news, then, when Dr. Kay told him, “Yup, you’re pregnant again. You been taking any unauthorized injections?”

The words failed to sink past Quinn’s skull. “What?” He’d come in for a checkup because weird dreams were interfering with his sleep and, therefore, flight training. He’d thought it was just stress.

“Judging by the rate of cell division, you’re about twenty-eight weeks in.” Kay frowned. “Didn’t you copy over—”

“Yeah. Same amount of time.” Quinn felt his skin crawl. “Did someone incept a growth in me? Without consent?”

Kay was looking at the charts. “Unlikely. I see some twisted carbon in your genetic lattice. A mutation that causes spontaneous regeneration. It’s rare, but it happens – you were reborn pregnant.”

The horror of possible bodily violation receded, to be replaced with a new one. “I can’t be pregnant now! My ship is sailing in less than three months. They won’t let me crew in this condition. Can’t you abort it?”

“Now, this isn’t a fetus, understand. That would be much simpler. Your systems wouldn’t be so tightly intertwined. This is more like cutting out a tumor the size of an aubergine, connected to several major arteries and sharing half your brain. It’d be like giving you a lobotomy. And it’s already absorbing bits of your organs to make room for itself. That’s why you don’t start showing until very nearly the end stages and probably why no one else caught it before now. We could irradiate and pesticide it to shrink it down, but—”

“Okay, well how about accelerating it so I can finish my copy before the launch date?”

Kay said, “I suppose if we gave you growth hormones you might come out the other side developed enough to ship out, but—”

“Great, let’s do that!”

“But we don’t know if your new body will just have the same problem. Did any of your parents have similar issues?” He looked up their records. “Well, that’s of note! Your main mother made the crossing way back in the last millennium. One of the first gens, wow! That could do it – ships back then were a little more rickety in their radiation shielding. Love to get a scan of her, to see if that was the cause. Don’t suppose you know where they are now?”

“No. Haven’t seen them since creche.”

“You have kids, Quinn?”

He nodded. “One. I outsourced the actual pregnancy and birthing to an ostrich egg, though. They’ve copied at least once, last I heard.”

“Did your child experience any problems copying to their next body?”

“No problems.”

“Means you haven’t passed on whatever this is, at least.”

I t didn’t work. Or, at least, it didn’t work fast enough. Zee and Quinn floated in the station’s uppermost observation bubble. He was inflated to twice his starting size, watching the drive flare of the cruiser dwindle swiftly in the dark, moving tiny flakes of carbon from one star to another.

“They left without me.” Well, of course they did – not going to hold back an interstellar mission for one person. Zee took his hand.

Once it was clear he was going to miss the launch, Quinn had stopped taking the growth hormones, had even briefly considered the chemical treatment to delay things just to keep Zee around a few months longer. But now that the cruiser refit was complete, Zee’s work season was over and she was leaving the station for her next project. He couldn’t blame her, and it wasn’t fair to keep clinging. For the past year she’d been a supportive bed companion, though more platonic as Quinn’s pregnancy grew between them. She’d promised to stay until after Quinn’s birthday.

It was just the two of them in a rented bath house, the day of. Zee brought her power saw, was delicate enough with it to scrimshaw old bones. In their private tub she cut open the back of Quinn’s head with one down slice and severed his brain stem. Then, precise as a fishmonger, slit his stretched belly and pulled new life steaming into the water.

Quinn had a woman’s body again. Zee sponged it off, helped stuff her leftovers into garbage bags, then took her out for metabolic energy – cake, ice cream, and shots. Dancing and tipsily planning the future.

Quinn: “If it happens again, Doc says I could end up in a man or woman’s body.”

Zee: “I’m going on a reeducation tour when I land. I’ve sopped up so much engineering knowledge these past few lives, I can trade it in for expertise in some other field. Give lectures during the day, take lessons at night. I won’t be able to visit until the tour is over. So. Tonight’s the last night we see each other, for the rest of this life, at least.”

The sex in this new configuration was awkwardly unfamiliar, but it was still sex and it helped Quinn feel human again. In the morning Zee was gone, down the elevator to her next life, and Quinn went to her newborn checkup with Dr. Kay.

Her test came back positive.

"H ere’s your choice, Quinn.

“Option one: be forever pregnant. Ride the wheel of death and rebirth, living in each body for only a year before starting over. Brain connections will grow old and stale, a form of repetitive memory loss, a vanishing of your past until you know only the now.

“Option two: take the poison. We have a cocktail of medicines and radiations that will render your body inhospitable to growths. Yes, it’ll eventually kill you, but slower than the clones constantly eating you up from the inside and draining your brain. Probably. Results not guaranteed – this type of runaway cellular growth is tenacious, like a weed in the garden of your organs.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

A stark choice: one life for a number of years, or a number of lives each for one year, and neither path would leave her fit for an interstellar trip. But she wanted to leave the future open, so Quinn decided to bear out the successive pregnancies.

Because of the spontaneous generation, Quinn no longer controlled the sex of her next body. It was a coin toss of incarnating a male or female body, and sometimes the coin came down on its edge. She kept using female pronouns anyway.

Uncomfortable though it was, her outer shell wasn’t the focus of her problems. As her replacement clones grew and consumed her nerves like strands of candy floss, Quinn was left with only a few months at a time of feeling before the numbness started to set in. Often surprised while showering to find bruises she didn’t remember receiving. Touching hot surfaces without realizing it, mishandling sharp objects.

She started monthly treatments at the station’s clinic. The med techs gave her chemotherapy to shrink and slow the next growth, delaying her rebirth by almost six months. It gave her an extra half year each iteration of a functional nervous system and self-preservation instinct. So she could feel something, but the chemicals just made her feel awful, and they increased the risk of birth defects.

Waiting outside the clinic, a stranger. He propositioned. She, starving for contact, took him to bed. He spooned behind her, put it in. These men, always overestimating their ability to reach through her numbness and get deep enough to touch one of her pleasure centers.

Her internal hands grabbed the stranger’s penis and pulled him closer in for Matryoshka sex, to penetrate even her copy’s orifices. To feel something. To feel anything.

T he cycle of death-birth-death continued. Zee eventually came back to the station, went looking for her friend. Found her on the garden deck and could immediately tell something was wrong. Quinn was a shell of her former self, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, with an alarmingly distended belly.

“Oh shit, what happened?” Zee pulled her into a tight hug. “Are you okay?”

Quinn’s muffled answer came from deep down inside her. Most days she was hardly aware of the world around her anymore. Scrunched up in a tight ball, alone in the dark inside herself, but hearing Zee’s voice made her squirm happily within.

They went to the doctor together for the next birth.

The clone was lifted free. It appeared to be six years old. “Diminishing returns,” said Dr. Kay. “Once a body falls into mass debt, it’s almost impossible to climb out of that hole. Successive clones are smaller, weaker, unable to carry copies to full size. She’s only been pregnant for six months this time.”

She looked like a child, but no telling what age her mind was. Kay said, “Hello. Do you know who you are?”

She looked around and said, “I’m Quinn. You’re Kay.” Pointed to the ruin of her former self. “That’s me.” She waved. “Hi, Zee!”

Zee kept Quinn company during the next rounds of tests. Kay appreciated the help. Quinn was breathing, upright, alert. Heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure normal. No obvious brain damage, which was a small blessing. To all appearances, a perfectly formed child.

But, of course, a new clone was already germinating.

Z ee and Quinn had only a short time to walk in the parks and tell each other of their recent lives. “It was just my birthday,” the child said.

“Many happy returns. Should we get an ice cream to celebrate?” They sat at a cafe and Zee tried to share a story about building ocean-floor habitats, but Quinn was distracted dribbling ice cream on the table and swinging her feet in the tall chair. She still had some of her adult memories, but a six-year-old’s brain was too unformed to put them together into a lived experience.

“Why are you crying?” Quinn asked, when she finally noticed.

Zee shook her head.

Only three weeks later, Quinn’s next internal copy reached its terminal size and they moved her to Dr. Kay’s clinic. Quinn’s comatose body didn’t mass enough to fully grow a clone. The effect was visible: her mouth sunken in because the calcium of all her baby teeth had been reabsorbed to knit tiny new bones; skin bunching up around her knees like an elephant’s; hair fallen out; arms like winter-stripped branches. Her body cavity could barely contain anything larger than a grapefruit.

End of the path. Robotic arms moved swiftly, disconnecting all the lines and tubes.

Dr. Kay lifted the freshborn out, small enough to hold in two cupped palms, and handed the wailing baby to Zee. Zee said, “Hello, Quinn. I’m sorry. It’ll be okay.” Something in the back of Quinn’s brain found her familiar and the baby went quiet, staring widely into Zee’s eyes.

“I’m afraid this is the end,” the doctor said. “A runaway effect has already begun. The quickset chemicals need time to saturate the cells, but her next clone will reach its tipping point in under an hour.”

“We have to do something,” Zee said. “Implant her next copy in my body, or freeze her until we can cure it. She has still a lifetime’s worth of things to discover, won’t remember seeing any of it before. I can’t wait to show her so many things for the first time. Please.”

Dr. Kay didn’t answer. How could he?

Zee cradled her friend while the clones divided internally, cancers with cancers, clusters of mouths turning her organs menger-spongiform, too impatient for birth. Each new growth hatched rapidly into the next like fizz on a carbonated drink, until the dwindling cluster of cells slipped through Zee’s fingers and vanished like seafoam, into the place where few went voluntarily and none ever came back.

When she rinsed her hands, Quinn was gone forever.

H ow careless we are with our bodies, she thought, when every mistake can be instantly rectified. Or almost every mistake. A man once said the meaning of life is that it ends. What then are these listless unending existences?

What would it be like, to die again? Not consumed, like poor Quinn, but over meaningful time?

Zee looked at the swing arm. One quickset injection and she would be back up on the tightrope of survival without a net. Every moment, every movement, deliberate; fully aware of her body, balancing on tiptoe between fear and thrill.

Zee took a breath and said, “Doctor?”

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