By Jill Bronfman
- Not Pretty
“She’s not pretty.”
“I think you need to rephrase that. It’s going to be me. You’re going to have to say I’m not pretty. Like right to my new face.”
Snarky laugh.
I was ready for transfer, but not ready. They showed me pictures of what I would look like, but like most advertising, they showed me the most expensive models. That’s not what I would be getting in real life. I was one of the first, and being picked first for a team is a lovely honor if you actually know what sport you’re going to play. I had only the vaguest outline of the rules of this game. The game was to discard your old body, the one you were born with, and get a new one. Everyone else who had undergone the procedure was leaving behind a decrepit old body. A hundred-year-old bag of bones and deteriorated cartilage, a real disaster area of a body. I was the first young person to go over.
There had been some disparagement of my original body as well, but only recently. I was born beautiful and whole, with clear, glowing skin and strong potential. But in my early twenties, a degenerative disease slowly wasted away my skin, then my muscles, then my bones. I got used to riding around in a wheeled cart for several years. Driving it, actually, like a character in a video game. I wasn’t above hitting people in the calves when they stepped out in front of me. I wasn’t any kind of virtuous person, disability or not. I wanted my fair share of the sidewalk, a spot in the line for the burritos; life.
Rory was the one saying that my new body wasn’t pretty. I got that. My new body was mostly metal and plastic. Rory said that the newer models would have photorealistic skin and sparkly eye coverings. I missed having eyes, even with the cameras currently hooked to my brain; they weren’t the same. People didn’t know where to look when they met me, even with the flashing light hovering above my forehead. They mostly looked at the floor, or around the room, anything to avoid the lack of reciprocal eye contact. All well and good, if you could wait for the new models.
I could wait for the new models. Or maybe I couldn’t. There was a looming spectre of death, real death, taking me right off the transfer list. Things in my bio body could deteriorate quickly and without warning. The doctors said that my path was far from linear and predictable. I might last another year in this body, or maybe it would be a week.
Robotic body, it was. I went in, and I went under.
I opened my new eyes and looked at Rory. She had been waiting through the entire 12-hour window to see me. I had always known that her eyes were brown, but I had never noticed that they were different shades of brown. And she was looking right into my eyes, even though they didn’t look exactly like human eyes. I tried a smile, and I think it worked, because I got one in return.
- What Rory Meant When She Said No
I opened my eyes again and saw most of Rory. She was sitting in a chair and reading, flipping virtual pages by lifting them and turning them. The action was almost real compared to the last century’s predilection for scrolling through texts. It was viewed as an extraordinary waste of time by people who downloaded information directly into brain chips.
Rory looked up when she heard me squiggle in the bedsheets, then over to me.
Hey, she said, you’re awake.
How long has it been, I asked.
We were lifelong friends, Rory and I. Still, sometimes Rory had her own things to do.
She said, let me think, no, you’ve been out for another two weeks.
Two weeks! I tried to exude some force with my exclamation, but it came out as a squeak. How, how, had I had a second period of unconsciousness? Was that normal, I wondered.
Rory usually knows what I’m thinking. It’s a combination of intense study of my psyche and her penchant for using A.I. software. Machine learning tells her what I might say next. So she said, yeah, that’s normal. The doctors told me you might be bitter about it, too. Eager to get on with your life and forget all of this recovery stuff. Forget that you are…
More like you, I said, predicting what she might say for a change.
More like me, Rory said, smiling.
- Sweet Forgiveness
I want to believe that I can change my body and my life. Therefore, I eat the unfilled croissant and the plain tea from the hospital tray while I recover from the surgery.
Something is coming for me, some form of death.
What can I do with that information? I know that my time above the ground, in the air, and in the sea, is dwindling. Perhaps, it’s gone already, and I don’t even know it.
My eyes are shut now, but when I open them, I’ll see Rory, and she’ll tell me where I am. It’s not my fault that I had a genetic disease, but I didn’t do anything to help myself. The doctors said if I ate almost nothing, the free radicals in food, drinks, god forbid alcohol, would refrain from deteriorating me further. Most of the time, I followed some of their advice or adhered to the regulations quite loosely. And again, at the other end of the curve, I frolicked and detoured my way into an early or frankly, earlier, death. And especially early, given that the average young woman was expected to live until they were one hundred and fifty years old. The average man, probably only until one twenty or even, for the warriors, one hundred max. They weren’t of much use beyond that anyway.
I’m sorry, I often said to my body. I’m sorry for treating you like this. But really, isn’t morality all a numbers game, an amount of percentages? No one is one hundred percent blameless, or every ancient religion wouldn’t have some way to exonerate yourself, either on a regular basis, weekly or yearly, or all at once at the end. And post-religious society wouldn’t have a substitute for this ritual, the Purgie. I wasn’t that into the Purgie, given my lack of opportunity to do anything evil. I had physical limitations. Most of the evil I did was to my own body and my own psyche, and very few rituals existed for that sort of forgiveness.
- The Minibeat
They gave me a beating heart. It wasn’t entirely for show, but it wasn’t quite what the original meant, and did.
Balumpa-bump, bump, bump, the doctor heard when she listened in. Yup, she said, beating.
But why? I asked her.
She said: It works more like a second hand on a clock. Not many uses for an analog clock these days, although they are still collected for their beauty and, I guess, historical value. But your heart is a signal that the rest of your systems are probably working just fine. She whispered the “probably” part.
Oh, I said. Will I be able to monitor it on my own?
Sure, she said, handing me a tablet the size of my thumbnail. Check it out.
How am I supposed to carry this thing around?
No worries, she replied, smacking the tablet onto my left thumbnail. Afterwards, she caught her breath and said, Oh, wait, you are right-handed now.
What?! I almost screamed. My whole identity centered around being left-handed. I had a left-handed brain, a left-brain life. I was an artist.
All the models are right-handed. It’s simpler that way.
I lifted my new arms attached to my new hands and waved them around. They looked remarkably similar to my old arms, my old hands. Worked like magic, just thinking made them so.
Like forgetting about a previous time zone when you traveled. The sooner you stopped counting forward or backward or sideways from wherever you started, the better. But I had more than a time zone or a country of origin to forget. I had a whole body, a body that was composed of seemingly infinite working parts. So many things to learn to use in new ways, and so many things to learn to forget.
- Where o where
There isn’t a good word for what I feel right now. I was going to say what you made me feel, but I have had enough therapy to know not to speak to anyone like that outside of my head.
They made me undergo a fair amount of therapy before the transfer. It was a lot of hours of talking about my feelings and my history that had nothing to do with what the transfer would feel like. It was a lot of time to spend on the past when I’ll be spending most of my time in the future from now on. I mean, we all will.
Unless we step out of the whole therapy module and realize that we’re actually only existing in the present. I did spend some time with a guru on my own dime to talk about reincarnation. I figured it would be good to imagine another life after the short and somewhat painful one I had been dealt. If the transfer didn’t work out. If the cocoon was a coffin. And then, ideally, a womb again. What would you get, I asked him, if you were given a painful, short life, but also you didn’t do anything useful or good with your pain? Did you start over as another human, or did the powers push you back down to amoeba or grasshopper to learn a bit more this time?
The guru placed my hands inside his hands and rubbed them together until they were warm. He then placed my bony hands on my eyes, covering them. Imagine, he said, your best life. The best one you ever had or could ever have.
I fell asleep on the persimmon orange mat in his studio. When I woke up, he was gone, and the bill for his services popped up in my feed. I threw it over into my old account. Good luck finding me after the transfer. Even if it worked.
- Working for Free
Apparently, I’m a beta tester for my own body. Of course, they warned me in advance. But there, in the smallest of fonts, was the pre-ticked box for experimental use. This body was for experimental use only.
My life, my whole life going forward, was going to be an experiment. One that I had signed up for and supposedly willingly agreed to.
There wasn’t a lot to do at first. I had to just live, just survive. Eat food, do physical therapy exercises in the hospital, and then at the clinic for weeks afterward, getting used to using my old brain, as assisted by my new brain, to move my limbs. I guess movement hurt a little less than my bio body, which hurt quite a bit at the end of its existence, but then, as the physical therapy helped me make choices about movement a little less voluntarily and a little more automatically, hardly anything hurt at all.
I tried not to be a child about it, but I did have the urge to stick my finger in the flame of a candle just to see. Fire could still burn me, hurt me, I thought. Just the heat of a flame is supposed to be a warning to our human bodies. Too hot, too cold, bad. Move away from the flame so as not to damage yourself, you dimwit.
A little dimwitted, I touched the flame. I got a good ouch out of it. Pleased with myself and my new body, I started filling out the required evaluation forms by week eight. Five stars. So far.
- Or Not Working
If you can’t say anything nice, the saying goes. I can’t say anything nice, so I’m suspending reporting on my new body. I’m keeping up the brain reports, I’m sorry to say, because I don’t have a choice. The upside-downside goes right from my central processing unit, which is part of my new brain, right to the doctors. If it shuts down, they assume I’ve gone rogue, trying to operate my new body with my old brain. This would not go well, they tell me.
So the new brain is continuing to report. I have turned off the tablet that shows me the reports, which, in theory, I’m supposed to have access to in the interest of transparency. I don’t usually read them, because they are boring. Yup, they usually say, all is well in here.
My leg is kind of hurting. There’s a small pain outside of my right knee, and a couple of weeks ago, it kept me up all night. What I want to do is turn down the pain centers in my new brain, which can poke my old brain to tone it down a little, if not turn it off entirely. But I’m worried. Like the hot-cold warning that I tested out when the new body was newborn, I feel like pain is telling me something. At least that’s what our evolutionary legacy gave us. I want to know why it’s hurting, and to get to that, a crucial part of the data is how much it’s hurting and whether the pain is constant or it comes and goes.
It comes and goes.
I give up doing my own research and send the report on my knee pain.
The response comes right away: turn down pain settings.
No, I say. Fix it.
The response comes the next day: Fine, come in.
- Posh
There’s a word for what I’m not, and it’s posh. Nevertheless, it’s what I’m called in a number of circumstances. First, when I call for dinner reservations. I have a whole list of things that I cannot eat, and so I ask the restaurant if I can just message them in advance. They usually say yes to the message, but often say no to the requirements. I know it’s a lot. Mostly things with acidic ingredients that would wear away if not incinerate my internal mechanisms. It sounds ever so reasonable until you think about how pretty much everything has tomatoes or vinegar or something mildly acidic in it. Almost everything you might want to eat or put on a menu if you were them or you were anyone bio.
So I have learned to cook. It’s hilarious actually, the concoctions I’ve come up with, the endless sandwiches and simple pasta recipes, the slow-cooked oatmeal with de acidic fruit that the hospital sends me. I make it work, but it is work.
It’s nice being alive, though. I write a bit in my gratitude journal every day about my longer and more expansive walks through the countryside. I go during the weekdays when most people work because my work is now existing, and of course, reporting to the various medical and engineering companies about how I’m existing. Which bits of me work. And I’m posh because of that, too.
People do comment on my looks and say posh as well. I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about that part of my transformation. Being not a woman, or at least not looking like a woman. It’s a lot. It’s maybe more than the whole artificialness of my new body. But like nearly every drug or medical apparatus ever developed, they did the men first.
- Quiet for a Moment
I would have said that it was too quiet, except for the fact that the noise had been so unbearable. The racket that the contractors were making next door rose high into the sky and ricocheted off the moon to land in my backyard.
Rory was grilling tote burgers on a small red device that looked like a vid screen but somehow got hot enough to cook food. She seemed to think it was normal to watch some cat puppies dance around a bit on a screen and then turn their faces into burners. It was a little dark for my taste. Also, the tote burgers were a little dark for my taste. Rory assured me that they were made from black beans and not lab-grown meat, and so their near blackness was quite natural. Not burnt.
She was my best friend. Also, I had been in love with her since we were seven. Rory was straight and laughed about my crush, as she called it, when I told her at sixteen with as much sincerity as I could muster while wearing false eyelashes. We had been getting ready for a double date, and I couldn’t take it anymore, pretending to like a guy so I could really just be with her. She was supposed to be a companion for me when I was a child, but I wasn’t a child anymore. And Rory, designed to be as human as possible, grew up as well. She knew I was gay and was just indulging her by the date by then, but didn’t get that I was into her. Like that.
Oh, no, she said over and over again, worrying about hurting my feelings. We always talked about my feelings, never hers. Hers were boring, she’d tell me, over and over again throughout our upbringings. No need to rehash.
And then it was the day before my surgery. We both knew what kind of body I would get. Mechanical, and different, and awkward.
It was a break in the quiet. Rory spoke. She was drowned out when the contractors restarted, apparently having taken in a liquid shot lunch instead of a leisurely grill like us.
She waved me off when I asked her to repeat herself.
We ate, mostly quietly. The burgers were delicious, maybe with a little hot sauce, maybe with a little more.
The next time she spoke, she’d be talking to me, at least I hoped it would still be me.
- This Thing
I mean, I knew in advance, but not a lot in advance. It was a hard lesson in assumptions. When the doctors said new body, I just imagined a body much like I had, or at least like I should have had, if I was a healthy young adult female.
Not male.
I had read that prescription drugs were always tested on 150-pound males to see if they worked. That’s the average they came up with, and they wanted a simple measure, everyone the same. And so, the same with the test dummies, as I came to call them, all the bodies that they tested to see if they would work before the big moment when they actually risked a human life. In my case, not much of a life, so I went first. Among the first batch of beta testers. Walk down this hallway, open the door, and enter your new life. How’s that for you? Please report back to us, or forward to us, if you make it. If.
I asked a lot of questions, but maybe not enough questions. A lot of why. Why can’t you just make my new body look like the one I have, but functional? Isn’t it all about cosmetic overlays? What video game creators called skins, which in this case was literally skin. Couldn’t they replicate what I looked like on the outside, they could.
Well, yes, they said, but it takes a lot longer for custom bodies. Years, even, for artists and biologists to work together and get you a custom body. And we think, we estimate, that you have a few weeks left before this body gives out. The gap between when this body shuts down— they started to talk about bodies, not me, at this point— and when you have to be in a new one, it’s just minutes if not seconds. We have not done well with longer time gaps.
They mean death, like permanent death. We don’t have a word yet in any language for the time in between bio bodies and artificial ones.
And so, here I am, with this thing. This body that is now mine, but is so very strange. I had seen a naked man, but not this close. This is close. Close enough to touch.
- Sex
We used to say sex for so many concepts. The act or acts, the verb, the thing we now call gender. So you’ve probably been wondering. What is sex for me, now that my gender is different?
The weird thing is that most of it is exactly the same. I’m still attracted to women, mostly, and they are attracted to me. The women are different, of course, but the concept is the same. Their eyes meet mine and hold. And all of it means something, but not much, at least to me, because for me, there is, was, and will be only Rory.
So that’s what is different. It’s the way that Rory looks at me. At first, mostly with pity. And then with something more, because I am, as I must admit, handsome. Conventionally handsome, of course, this basic male model body they have given me as a beta test. I look like a wax Superman from hundreds of years ago. Not the muscled type enhanced by drugs or computer graphics, but the original. Possessing only the muscles that would develop if you lifted things. Not cars or buildings, probably, but just people in danger. It was difficult for me to appreciate at first because I was so angry about so many things right after the transition.
I was angry about sex. It wouldn’t ever be the same again. I mean, it could be the same or at least similar again if I ever got a custom body, and they did promise me one if I completed all of my beta testing surveys, but that could be years from now.
And then there was the way that Rory started looking at me once I got the hang of moving around in my new body. I thought I might want to stay in this body, with all of its flaws, for a while longer.
- Just one kiss, she said
Rory kissed me on the nose. I think that’s what she meant to do. Whatever her intent, I am grateful. It’s not the first time she’s kissed me, but it’s the first time in this body, with this set of sensory organs.
It’s her body, it’s always been her body. She’s nearly entirely bio, a weirdo really. Just a pancreas assistance device for her type I diabetes. She had a genetic edit shortly after she was born, as her parents knew that she was likely to inherit the gene for type I. Current theories on the genesis of the disease have focused on a combination of genetics and possibly a triggering incident, as small as a cold or infection. Most people decline to take their chances for any child inheriting or exhibiting a serious disease, and get the gene editing done before the baby leaves the hospital. But still, Rory started to show some indicators of the disease early on, not strongly, but enough that her parents decided also to go with the back-up plan, a small device inserted in her pancreas at age seven that bumped up cell production. So she wouldn’t run out.
It was there at the hospital that I met Rory, even though we were in the same grade level at school. I had been playing soccer with two boys on the front lawn of our home, and tripped on a water sprinkler and had a cut under my chin. I was only there for an afternoon, but I saw Rory in the children’s recovery room, reading on a tablet and pushing her curly red hair out of her eyes. I picked up a container of apple juice off the child-sized table. Want one, I asked her. She was still in a wheelchair. I handed her the box, and we started talking. We kept talking for years and years. That’s all we did was talk some days. She got healthy enough that I forgot that she had any weaknesses at all.
In my own recovery room, I felt uncomfortable and tight when she kissed me on the nose. And then I realized why. The male parts of me responded to her touc,h and I was as horrified as if she had pushed me naked into the public street.
- So that happened
I pitched it as an experiment. Sort of a need to find out thing, or, I am especially embarrassed to admit, rehabilitation. I persuaded her just like a man would not, not saying anything about love or a relationship. And certainly not by telling her how good I was at any of it. I had no idea whether I would be good at anything.
So we did it.
It was miraculous, and way too fast to really ascertain anything about it other than remarking that it did in fact occur. I was more than a little embarrassed, because despite my total lack of experience with the thing, I was pretty sure it was supposed to last more than about thirty seconds.
She said it was ok.
Ok, I said, like the fact that I didn’t last longer than a few seconds was okay, being that I’m new to this, or ok, like it was only fair. Are you grading me? That’s how pillow talk goes after the fact, I guess.
She laughed. Um, no, I try not to assign scores to the act. I’m just trying to reassure you, you know, like a friend. It wasn’t bad for a first try.
Wasn’t bad? I blurted out, did I say that out loud? Oh no. Wasn’t bad was worse than ok, I was almost positive. And furthermore, I wondered, not saying this part aloud, thank goodness, a first try, did that mean that there would be more therapy, more rehab, more pity fucking. I thought I might be ready again soon, to try again.
She got up and pulled on her beige panties. They had lace around the edges. The lace was the same beige. The lace looked itchy. She rubbed her belly, but not near where the lace was. She wasn’t scratching.
I hope you got what you came for, she said.
And then we just started laughing. Because that’s what long-time friends do when they are presented with a preposterous situation. Oh, yes, the best result I could imagine. We were still friends.
And maybe we would do it again, at some point, as friends. Or.
- Whereas and Therefore
I am sheepish with her after the act, and she is on to me. I can’t act naturally when I’m an artificial being. How could I be? I could watch some old movies to figure out how a man acts after sex, but that is full of stereotypes and pathos. Smoke a cigarette, set my fragile self on fire.
Or ask a bio man. But if I learned anything about men in my brief experience with the species, father, brother, co-worker, the many patients I saw in my life going in and out of hospitals with me, it’s that they are as varied as women. Maybe more so. They’ve been told so many different things about how to be that they are afraid to answer questions about what it is to be a man.
So I am in a category containing exactly one. Formerly female bio and a disaster at that, and now male, sort of, at least on the outside, and trying not be a disaster at that. I’m working with what I have, as they used to say about anyone with a disability. I used to have so many disabilities, so many difficulties. Moving, eating, just living. And now all of those things are easy, or at least easier. But my feelings are fraught. Ugly, even. I’m more than a little bitter about how things have turned out, when everyone is patting me on the back and telling me to be grateful. No one is saying look, you got upgraded, you’re a man now, but I bet at least some people are thinking that. Maybe even some of the people who knew that I was a woman who loved women, and noticed that the stats on that were difficult, were happy for me, silently, thinking look at the many dating opportunities that I would have now. And many more were thinking, gosh, he’s beautiful now, look at him, or if they were being generous, them. They are beautiful now. Not like she was. I was not beautiful. Even before the disease ravaged my face, my limbs, my hair, I was no beauty. Just plain. Just me. As long as it lasts.
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