Schild’s Ladder

By choice, Tchicaya’s mind started running long before his new body was fully customized. As his vision came into focus, he turned his gaze from the softly lit lid of the crib to the waxen, pudgy template that he now inhabited. Waves of organizers swarmed up and down his limbs and torso like mobile bruises beneath the translucent skin, killing off unwanted cells and cannibalizing them, stimulating others to migrate or divide. The process wasn’t painful — at worst it tickled, and it was even sporadically sexy — but Tchicaya felt an odd compulsion to start pummeling the things with his fists, and he had no doubt that squashing them flat would be enormously satisfying. The urge was probably an innate response to Earthly parasites, a misplaced instinct that his ancestors hadn’t got around to editing out. Or perhaps they’d retained it deliberately, in the hope that it might yet turn out to be useful elsewhere.

As he raised his head to get a better view, he caught sight of an undigested stretch of calf, still bearing traces of the last inhabitant’s body hair and musculature. "Urrggh". The noise sounded alien, and left a knot in his throat. The crib said, "Please don’t try to talk yet." The organizers swept over the offending remnant and dissolved it.

Morphogenesis from scratch, from a single cell, couldn’t be achieved in less than three months. This borrowed body wouldn’t even have the DNA he’d been born with, but it had been designed to be easy to regress and sculpt into a fair approximation of anyone who’d remained reasonably close to their human ancestors, and the process could be completed in about three hours. When traveling this way, Tchicaya usually elected to become conscious only for the final fitting: the tweaking of his mental body maps to accommodate all the minor differences that were too much of a nuisance to eliminate physically. But he’d decided that for once he’d wake early, and experience as much as he could.

He watched his arms and fingers lengthen slightly, the flesh growing too far in places, then dying back. Organizers flowed into his mouth, re-forming his gums, nudging his teeth into new locations, thickening his tongue, then sloughing off whole layers of excess tissue. He tried not to gag.

"Dith ith horrible," he complained.

"Just imagine what it would be like if your brain was flesh, too," the crib responded. "All those neural pathways being grown and hacked away — like a topiary full of tableaux from someone else’s life being shaped into a portrait of your own past. You’d be having nightmares, hallucinations, flashbacks from the last user’s memories."

The crib wasn’t sentient, but pondering its reply made a useful distraction from the squirming sensation Tchicaya was beginning to feel in his gut. It was a much more productive rejoinder than: "You’re the idiot who asked to be awake for this, so why don’t you shut up and make the best of it?"

When his tongue felt serviceably de-slimed, he said, "Some people think the same kind of thing happens digitally. Every time you reconfigure a Qusp to run someone new, the mere act of loading the program generates experiences, long before you formally start it running."

"Oh, I’m sure it does," the crib conceded cheerfully. "But the nature of the process guarantees that you never remember any of it."

When Tchicaya was able to stand, the crib opened its lid and had him pace the recovery room. He stretched his arms, swiveled his head, bent and arched his spine, while the crib advised his Qusp on the changes it would have to make in order to bring his expectations for kinesthetic feedback and response times into line with reality. In a week or two he would have accommodated to the differences anyway, but the sooner they were dealt with, the sooner he’d lose the distracting sense that his own flesh was like poorly fitted clothing.

The clothes that were waiting for him had already been informed of his measurements, and the styles, colors, and textures he preferred. They’d come up with a design in magenta and yellow that looked sunny without being garish, and he felt no need to ask for changes, or to view a range of alternatives.