Constance (Constance #1)(9)

“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.

It pained her that she could remember Zhi’s first words to her but not his last. He had become both one of her ghosts and one of her demons, and she felt suffocated by his memory. God, how she missed him.

She felt her skin prickle as the refresh began, and her vision hollowed. The last thing she remembered was Laleh telling her that she would check in on her in a few hours.

Then came darkness.





CHAPTER FOUR


As Con clawed her way up the gray tunnel toward awareness, she knew something was very wrong. The hangover effect after refreshing her upload was rarely pleasant, but it had never been this bad before. Not even close. Her head felt waterlogged, and a steady pressure was building against her temples. Drip, drip, drip. Her brain felt as if it had been crammed into a soggy matchbox. No, not her brain. Her mind. And it wanted out, bad.

She yawned uncontrollably. That much was normal. Even though a refresh bore a superficial resemblance to slow-wave sleep, it wasn’t restful. They’d explained it during orientation—how suppressing the prefrontal cortex simulated sleep while the rest of the brain lit up like a slot machine hitting a million-dollar jackpot. Which was why it felt less like waking up and more a guided tour of the world’s largest tequila distillery.

When she opened her eyes, her eyelashes were crusted shut as though she’d been crying. It happened. Palingenesis called it autonomic emotional response, a side effect of the intense stimulation of the hippocampus. Con just called it draining. Though the lights were dimmed, their glare cut into her retinas like rescue flares. She raised her hand to shield her eyes, but her arm didn’t respond. She couldn’t even feel it. As if nothing at all existed below her shoulder. She tried to lift her head to confirm that she still had arms, but her neck wouldn’t obey either. A terrible thought occurred to her. There’d been a malfunction. They’d fried her somehow. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remain calm.

Palingenesis billed uploads as routine outpatient procedures. Sure, there had been mistakes in the early days that had left smoking vegetables in the chair—cut and paste instead of copy and paste. But Palingenesis claimed it had resolved those issues and that the latest generation had upload errors of less than 0.0000004536 percent. Con had memorized the number because there was comfort in its infinitesimal smallness. There was a better chance of a shark attack on a mountaintop than of a neural lobotomy during a refresh. Or so Palingenesis assured its clients.

The sound of voices encouraged her to reopen her eyes. A man and a woman came gradually into focus. Con didn’t recognize either of them, but more ominously, neither was Laleh Askari. Worse still, both wore white lab coats over hospital scrubs. No one dressed like a doctor at Palingenesis. Ever. It was part of their shtick to distract clients from thinking about where they were. That alone frightened Con more than how bad she felt. She opened her mouth to ask what had gone wrong, but all that came out was a low, grinding moan. Wonderful. The lab techs glanced briefly at her, then returned to their LFDs. Con decided to give establishing first contact one more shot.