Thirty-Nine sat across from her captors, a coffee table strewn with papers between them. Some documents were apparently so sensitive that merely having them on the system was a liability. That was secondary to her main concern. Isabelle had made quite clear her intentions. That Thirty-Nine was to serve as her personal bodyguard and loyal spy. The body, outfitted for such a purpose, was her payment for these services rendered. Victoria would set the best engineers and scientists the world had to offer to the task. Her ‘payment’, such as it was, would be to see herself in the mirror. To inhabit her own flesh once more. Thirty-Nine seemed to mull things over whilst Isabelle read the files Victoria had sent for from her offices.

“Your name was Eve?” her benefactor snorted to herself. She seemed to remember her manners, folding the file before offering it to the bog body before her.

“To remind me that I am a wretched sinner. Utterly unworthy of god’s love.” She replied sadly, the name bringing memories of her life to the fore. Would that the tube had robbed her of all that. Would that if had taken all things but the very end. That distilled heavenly moment in which she felt fulfilment proper. Found her place, found love and purpose. “Fun guy, my dad” came the ancillary comment, acting as prelude to her point, “he acted under the same delusion you do. He thought he owned me.”

The reaction was immediate. Victoria sucked in a breath. It was as if the toaster had cursed. Isabelle’s expression however was the most curious. There was a subtle tightening around her eyes, smile fixed in place. Yet the lift seemed genuine, an air of mischief beginning to manifest. Was it genuine, or merely another trick? She seemed the type to play games with another’s mind.

“By my grace, as your father might have said, you return to life. With Eve Haversham in the grave, you are legally my property,” the board member taunted, drumming her fingers impatiently over the back of the sofa. “What’s to stop me putting you in a cage like any other disobedient pet?” Isabelle seemed to ponder, though her ‘property’ knew all too well that the business magnate had made up her mind before setting foot in this room. Petty violence wouldn’t do any good here; she’d likely already taken measures against that. This called for the unexpected.

“Claim ownership all you want,” came the counter, “but I know I’m the first one that’s worked. And I know that what you’re doing here is far from legal. So, your contracts don’t mean shit. All that matters now is what I can do and what I can’t do.” Thirty-Nine then paused, the pair looking to her expectantly for elaboration. Victoria looked on as if her patient were a bomb, primed to explode at the smallest provocation. How eloquent her tics had been. Isabelle, however, gazed at her with something that could only be described as hungry curiosity. “But I’m a reasonable woman. You dragged me here without permission, stuck me in this bargain bucket of a body and demanded my services. I’m willing to forgive all that. All you have to do is resurrect me. Properly this time. Eve Haversham. Safe, whole, in her own body once again. Legal rights and protections, all of it.” The intimidating undead woman, borne of science and atrocity against nature, stood and made her way around the coffee table to loom over Isabelle.

For a moment, she fixed her antagonist with a defiant stare and confident smile. But Thirty-Nine didn’t waver. Soon thereafter, the confidence in the air began to sour. The orchestrator of that abomination locked her jaw. The tension began to rise, both women considering what the limitations of their bodies would yield. Could the finest aesthetic and utility mods money could buy stand up to the brute strength of a creature fighting for survival? Then it happened.

The resolute stare of a confident businesswoman broke. Her eyes flicked over to Victoria, almost pleadingly. The good doctor swallowed hard, reaching out with a hand to touch their latest project.

“And if I don’t?” Isabelle asked with what she’d probably hoped was steel. As the words left her lips, her voice faltered slightly. “Will you strangle me right in front of Dr Beltane?”

“Only if you ask nicely. You’ve got two options, ‘Izzy’,” she began in reply, grabbing Victoria’s wrist as she closed in. She wasn’t sure whether there was an emergency shutdown beyond a bullet to the head but wasn’t prepared to risk it. A little additional danger might make them reconsider their options. “Either we work together as equals,” Thirty-Nine released Victoria’s hand then, eyes hopefully conveying a warning, “or you learn to sleep with one eye open.”

The room, rather than turning cold as anticipated, began to grow with a different mood. Victoria looked to her superior with a look verging on abject terror while Izzy herself eased into the sofa with an expression between intrigued and irritated. The two halves of herself were at war, it seemed, until the board member chuckled to herself and stood up with a gracious smile. Given the audible sigh of relief from the doctor, Thirty-Nine was at least hopeful her gambit wouldn’t get her brain shelved in some dusty archive. No soulless suit spent this much money on a project this wasteful without something truly tremendous to gain. The resurrected woman repeated it to herself as a prayer as Izzy reached up with her fingers, tracing them along her jaw.

“With an attitude like that, I can see why you survived the process” she observed, her eyes filled with intrigue. There was that hunger again. Untrustworthy, dangerous and unsettlingly alluring. Thirty-Nine was beginning to worry she had a type. “Dr Beltane. Please see to it Eve gets her body. Make sure it has all the conveniences. For me if nothing else.” Izzy winked over to Victoria, who stammered out her affirmation while caught in the full glare of her employer’s power and presence. Thirty-Nine made her way to the doctor’s side, assisting her in gathering the broken pieces of her decorum.

Isabelle sat herself back down, knuckles pressed against her immaculately made-up lips. Once Victoria had been guided to the lift, Thirty-Nine looked over her shoulder at the powerful woman who held her fate in her hands. Her gaze was caught, red lips parting in a genuine, flirtatious smile. The skeletal-seeming woman attempted to smile back, only to fumble and use her thumb and index finger to imitate a smile. Her soon to be boss burst out laughing, explaining that her sister had been deaf, and that gesture meant something very different to her. Weighing up whether or not to reply that it hadn’t been a mistake, Thirty-Nine thought better of it and bade her goodbye. She dared not turn her back for fear it would soon be filled with pricey artisanal knives.

Once more cocooned in the lift, the zombified cyborg leant against the wall. Though the relief was more psychological than physiological, Thirty-Nine reminded herself that she was still under observation. She righted herself, making a spurious comment about her spine feeling misaligned. Victoria supplied a frosty look, as if insulted by the very notion. Apparently, she’d stitched the temporary measure together from the various modifications that existed on the market. Finding compatible units had been a nightmare. Her patient, however, was more entranced by a realisation. This body, with its skinny waist and withered appearance, its skinned sinews and blackened muscles, was not fit for purpose. It had no space for a digestive system, heart or lungs worthy of the name. What then sustained her brain? Her spine? What of all the essential silent limbic systems nobody considered part of function? She briefly wondered where she’d attained even this cursory anatomical knowledge.

They walked down the corridor toward Victoria’s office once more, the bushy-haired physician biting her nails as she went. Thirty-Nine resisted the urge to remind her it was bad for her. She’d once told something similar to a blonde woman. Something about her was important.

“You weren’t really going to hurt her, were you?” Victoria suddenly asked, turning her eyes on her patient with a mixture of threat and concern that she’d seen many times. Many people underestimated such a look, thinking the person docile. But even the most tepid of tempers could turn tempestuous under such duress.

“You weren’t going to shut me down, were you?” Thirty-Nine inquired in kind, a mocking tilt to her voice.

The doctor stalled her pace, recoiling as the question was asked. Though from disgust or fear was unclear. She seemed to consider her options for the moment, seeming to come to a realisation before resuming their walk past her dentist-like operating theatre. It made sense that the more sensitive technology would be kept further away from the gestating brain tubes. Or whatever they were.

“I’m telling you this in good faith,” Victoria began, a furtive look over her shoulder adding to the conspiratorial air. “Due to the nature of your consciousness, you have more control over your body than I do. I can paralyze you for a minute or two but soon enough, you assert control over your body. And that’s saying nothing of the unknown effects of your ‘biology’. You could conceivably evolve pathways around such safeguards due to the intense neuroplasticity I had to programme into you” she explained at length. Her charge was impressed that she was so forthcoming. It must have been plain on even that face. “As much as I hate the bullshit you pulled in there, you’re right. Either we work together or spend the next steps looking over our shoulders.” Victoria then removed a ring of keys that possessed impressive variety, using them to open the magnetic locks on an impressive door before them. It was more bulkhead than door to Thirty-Nine’s reckoning.

She allowed the words to settle in her thoughts as they entered the lift contained within the room beyond. This one was less opulent, being a utilitarian loading bay. A replacement tube had been brought up, another identical body to her own floating within it. The overworked porter who pushed the pallet it was on nodded to Victoria, casting a suspicious eye toward Thirty-Nine. It was only natural. He probably wasn’t used to them moving under their own power. She soothed herself with the knowledge that she soon wouldn’t have to endure such stares. At least in Novaroma people were used to the strangeness.

As the lift came to rest on their desired floor, the resurrected of the pair widened her eyes. Before her sat row upon row of tanks similar to those above them, clustered in optimal hexagonal holding cells. Occasionally, one would lift itself from the confines of its honeycomb internment to release a tank into the waiting crane of a porter. Victoria, who seemed impatient, took Thirty-Nine by the hand and guided her forward even as her eyes wandered. Each lid had been stamped in a quadrant with a serial number. Containment for the other subjects’ future bodies, most likely. She was almost miffed that she hadn’t seen the brain jar room yet. It was probably deeper in the facility, housing their most precious resource. A part of her reflected on the horror. There would be time for terror later. Survival was priority.

Victoria took the pair to an alcove that served as a miniature lab compared to the one above, flicking switches as she went. The machines whirred to life as a metallic cradle set into the ground opened its jaws wide to receive a tank. The doctor tapped her phone, most likely texting instructions. She then took a chair in hand, sliding it across their sleek white and sterile workspace with a grim expression. She bade the other sit, crossing her arms as she leant against a bank of tubing and medical technology.

“Before I do this, I want to know what you’re going to do once you get what you want.” Victoria demanded with a stern voice. One that had such steel in it Thirty-Nine couldn’t help but suspect ulterior motive. She would have smiled, recalling her pet-name for her boss.

“Alright then. As a show of good faith,” Thirty-Nine replied, not content to think of herself as herself just yet. “I don’t remember much of who I was before the dark and I don’t intend to,” she began, staring into the middle distance above them both. “I’ve probably been gone longer than I think, being asleep and all. All the people I loved, all the attachments I formed would have mourned me and rotted. So, for the sake of my own sanity, I think I’d like to stay away for now.” She continued, rubbing the back of her own neck as her gaze was cast between her feet. “I just want to see the sun” she concluded.

Victoria’s expression was reserved at first, guarded against potential deception. Then her eyes widened, corners of her mouth falling. They briefly flicked to the hubcaps of the towers ensconced beneath their feet. An expression of shame creased her features momentarily before it solidified into resolve.

“You won’t just see it. You’ll feel it too” she reassured in a firm voice, taking Thirty-Nine’s hands in her own briefly before tapping at her phone once again. The expression she sent the text with gave her patient pause, as if seeing something for the first time.

What arrived in the fullness of time were two porters, each hauling different objects. One, an older man with a sullen disposition, pushed a pallet that held a tank constructed of solid steel, hinged and bolted such that not even air could escape. The other, a younger man with dyed red hair, hauled what seemed to be a milk urn or propane gas cannister. The copious warning stickers and advisories made her somewhat nervous. As the pair busied themselves locking the tank into the cradle by its anchor points, Victoria moved the urn to the tubing. With a practiced deftness, she hooked it up and sent an eerie light blue substance coiling throughout the machine. Once they’d achieved ‘saturation’, whatever that was, the doctor thanked the men and began working at the computer.

With her task complete, she walked to the bank of machinery and hauled a cable thicker than her forearm toward the tank, affixing it with a grunt. Thirty-Nine watched her lock it into place, reassuring herself once more once Victoria got to her feet.

“Alright, with the right juice hooked up your nerves should activate sooner.” The doctor informed her with a wipe of her brow, pushing the chair toward the machinery as she went. Thirty-Nine stirred in her seat, only to be firmly placed back within it. “The process is a little like falling asleep in one body and waking in another. Transferral we always had a hand on. It was synthesis that was a pain” Victoria babbled as she drew a cable close to her charge’s head. She shied away, gripping the doctor’s hand.

“Shouldn’t we be in an operating theatre if you’re going to be handling my bio-bits?” Thirty-Nine asked with a growl, hand coming away once she was fairly sure she was in no danger of foreign objects entering her skull.

A curious reaction overcame the physician then, her entire body freezing. Her fingers tightened on the hand steadying her head by the sound they made. Her face was not visible but Thirty-Nine sensed she’d touched a nerve. There was an audible swallowing sound before the doctor appeared at her side, compassion stinging her features.

“I know I should have explained this sooner” Victoria sighed with her eyes closed in self-effacing concern. “There are no biological parts of you left. You exist as a consciousness that merely occupies the body in question” she revealed, sending a hammer blow into Thirty-Nine’s chest. She didn’t know how it functioned, let alone that she was this impossible being. “I don’t have to move the physical matter because the artificial neurons you use to make yourself can replicate themselves then transfer their conditions inside another body. It takes a few hours, longer if I have to build a body from scratch” she continued, heedless to the stunned condition her patient found herself in. It sounded less like an explanation and more like a confession. “I didn’t think you’d get it. This isn’t replication. It's transferral. It’s theoretically possible to put your mind in cloud storage.” Victoria theorized with an incredulous laugh, as if amazed by her own work. Perhaps, like computation where machines were taught to think for themselves, Thirty-Nine had merely been the blueprint upon which these neurons could build themselves.

“So, I’m not Eve after all? I’m just her ghost?” Thirty-Nine asked in an almost broken voice, communicable even through the modulation of her borrowed body.

“No that’s the incredible thing! You are Eve. The same consciousness that occupied a human body with a human family, human friends and human loves. You had a human life and continued living through your death!” The doctor expounded with a breathless enthusiasm, sending shockwaves through Thirty-Nine’s thoughts. The memories, if Victoria was to be believed, were not fabrications or replications or trickery. She wasn’t a machine dreaming of life. She was life, living within a machine.

With a firm hand, she took the cable from Victoria’s and pressed its connectors to the port that existed just beside her spine at the base of her skull. It was a curious circumstance, one that she remembered when synching her mods to her brain activity. Though this was perhaps far more mechanical than before.

“When I wake up, I’m going to need time to process that” Thirty-Nine grunted with a rueful laugh, closing her eyes. She attempted to fall asleep, imagining the lazy days on Cornwall’s beaches. She was unsure why there, but the blonde woman appeared. She resisted the temptation to remember, hoping that the process was not so perfect that everything was transferred. Shredded regrets, clinging to dying neurons while the mainstay of her mind walked away in new flesh. “See you later. I need a nap.”

Whether she’d been deceived and deemed dangerous, destroyed out of precaution, she cared not. No matter what the truth was, her undeath or afterlife had been interesting. She hoped she would see more of it.

~*~

It was not a brackish swamp of blackened waters that met her consciousness this time. Perhaps, not even consciousness. Waters did indeed surround her though they were turquoise, tropical and endearingly warm. She smiled to herself, floating toward the sunny blue sky above her. As her head broke the surface, she wiped the saltwater from her eyes and looked toward a beach of white sand and pebbles. Gulls screeched their discontent to the throng of faceless people milling about on the sands. Swimming toward them, Thirty-Nine noticed her body for the first time.

Rather than the blackened bare muscles of her holdover form, this form seemed to be built of model arms. The subtle seams of synthetic skin meeting its genuine neighbour unsettled her at first before she felt her fingers brush the sands of the shallows. She revelled in the sensation, curling her fingers through the soft silt. A shell met her touch, causing her to withdraw her hand.

Sat within her palm was a beautiful shell of rainbow hues set against pearlescent blue. Within its almost ethereal beauty, a tiny hermit crab sat with its claws held toward her imploringly. She smiled to herself, appreciating its beauty before placing it back in the water. It wouldn’t do to imprison such a creature, especially on land.

As she rose from the water, she wrung her hair free of the water with a laugh. A garbled, indistinct joke had been told to her out of sight. Something concerning sharks and their new warm water habitats. She saw the blonde woman sitting on a towel, waving her down as she pointed to a troupe intending to join them. Thirty-Nine remembered them. Their faces too were indistinct, blurred by memory and time. The comfort she drew from their presence however was all too real.

The blonde woman spoke, attracting another laugh. She reached out with her now-human hand and brought her closer, kissing her forehead. As if in a fairytale, her face grew sharper and more defined, settling into the form of a beautiful, freckled woman with sharp features and strong, athletic form. She was a surfer, Thirty-Nine remembered. Ex-army too. As she recalled this fact, her beauty was altered by the presence of a scar forming over her left eye. An old wound, caused by shrapnel when an IED exploded.

A distant peal of thunder sounded in the distance, an ominous bank of clouds forming. As she looked back to the blonde, she wore a horrified expression. Following the direction of her gaze, Thirty-Nine saw the sand undulate before them as if a great octopus were swatting its tentacles beneath them. Grabbing her blonde companion’s hand, she ushered her friend group toward the town where they could make good their escape.

As they ran, the undulations grew in size until a great serpent broke the surface, its horned eyes supporting its crown. Its mouth opened, tongue lashing the air hungrily as coil after coil rose with sprays of sand from the beach. It whipped with such power that the other beachgoers vaporized into motes of mist, swept away by the gales of the oncoming storm that even now thundered its arrival.

“Wake up, Eve. You can’t dream forever” the serpent intoned in the voice of Victoria. Its eyes were trained on her. She froze in place, desperately looking about for her friends and lover. They were nowhere to be seen. Her world became consumed by the freakishly blue eyes of the crowned serpent. With a scream of fright, she thrashed against its coils as they began to inexorably tighten around her.

~*~

Eve felt her hand collide with something hard, almost unyielding. It clanged like a struck bell, sending a similar reverberation of pain through her hand. She swore and began to mutter a stream of family friendly curses before shock stayed her tongue. Pain. She felt the pain. Then, a whole bevy of other sensations presented themselves to her. A heartbeat. Breath. She experimentally drew a few breaths, feeling them enter her body. She didn’t know whether she had lungs to process the air but inhaled greedily from the sheer elation of it. Feeling around in the dark, she recalled her situation. She was probably inside the tank. A tank drained of its fluids, given the slippery texture of the walls.

She shivered first with a chill, realising her body was bare before she shivered in delight. She could feel the cold! She revelled in it for a moment before the novelty wore off. While experimentally feeling the skin of her fingertips, she laughed with giddy delight.

Above her, approximately where her face had been while reclining, a hatch opened. Shimmying under the plexiglass, Eve waved with an almost childish glee. What met her gaze was the concerned face of Victoria, who vanished shortly after before several ominous thumping sounds were heard along the tank’s length.

As the lid was removed, Victoria grabbed her patient about her torso, hauling the other woman from within with urgency. Propping her up against the tank, Eve looked to the inert skeletal form of her previous body. She ran her fingers over her cheeks, feeling the probably synthetic flesh distort under the pressure. Artificial or not, it blissfully relayed the sensations.

“Six fucking hours of work making your body. Now your brain’s broken” Victoria grumbled, shining a light into each eye. Eve lazily looked over to see what her face actually looked like before deciding what form of retort the doctor would be getting.

Her reflection, though distorted, showed a woman’s features that were dimpled with a smile. Full lips with predictably immaculate teeth adorned a rounded but defined jaw. Her eyebrows were slim, shaped expertly by AmTech’s team. Her head sported a short crop of messy, almost spiky brown hair. Her eyes, though, were distinctly not usual. Unlike the yellow of her previous body, these eyes were a deep blue with lighter blue solid irises. She was so enamoured with this idealised form of herself, noting the lack of scarring along her jaw and nose, that she didn’t notice her doctor speaking.

“Now be careful. Take it slow. Your body should mostly be working but-.”

Eve stood herself up, surprising Victoria for a moment before the sudden elevation rushed to her head. Her strange eyes rolled into the back of her head which clanged loudly on the steel tank before she landed with a surprisingly solid thud.