Writers of the Future, Volume 29 Read Online Free Page B

seizes my head, tilting it one way and another. Shines a light in my eyes, checks the pupils. I have the discomforting thought that he’s looking for the imposter beneath the skin.
    â€œYour father is on his way.”
    Good.
    â€œGood.”
    I rinse my body in the shower stalls, and use the moment to access Traci’s subfile by pressing the subdermal chip behind my ear. A lavender flower of access tabs blossoms in my eyes, and I gorge on the info train. This body’s identity is registered to a Peter J. Bayne, son of Matthew and Jessica. I wash my hair with the facility’s shampoo, prodding data bits of Peter’s life, interests and habits constructed piecemeal by Traci’s hack team.
    I’m toweling off when I complete my overview of Peter Bayne’s e-mails. There’s a fogged mirror in the stall, and I wipe it clear. A strange blond teenager looks out at me from the frame.
    The thing is, I want to dislike this kid but I find it difficult to. He is nineteen. He subscribes to multiple samurai sensoramics, especially ones where he gets to play the lone ronin helping out impoverished villages. He likes to hike. His e-mail confessions indicate he hates his father.
    The mirrored smile on my face makes me sick.
    W hen I emerge, dressed in Peter’s ghastly choice of neo-Victorian attire, I go straight to the waiting room and meet Matthew Bayne, the new identity of Corporal Peznowski.
    â€œPeter!”
    Years back, I’d read an article in Nowire about why resurrectees make certain new body choices. An unsurprising eighty-one percent select the same shell—minor alterations notwithstanding. The remaining nineteen percent purchase entirely new bodies of calculated antithesis to what they were born into. Blondes into brunettes, women into men, short into tall, racial switching…
    Corporal Peznowski has defied the stats. He’s taller, and traded his steel-gray hair for brown curls. He’s still white, and sports black-rimmed glasses stylish among the self-identified intellectuals. But the face isn’t really so different from what he wore in his last life. He’s gone from Nordic looks to a swarthy Portuguese genotype while keeping the general mix of features in eerie reminiscence of his birth face. Clever, this attempt at ducking pattern sniffers.
    â€œPeter!” he says again, embracing me warmly. His cologne stuffs my nose. “Let me look at you. How does it feel? All checked up, no worries?”
    â€œSure.”
    He looks me over, concentrating on my eyes. The worm in my stomach flips around. There hasn’t been time to study my new identity’s speech patterns and word choices, so I’m determined to be as monosyllabic as possible. But what about the eyes? Matthew Bayne’s eyes were the same as Corporal Peznowski’s . There is no mistaking them. I had looked into those eyes too often to miss the gray, hard, glassy stare that’s part calculator and part sadist. He seemed to regard everything as if it was potential food, to be weighed, smelled and eventually cut up and devoured.
    â€œCome on,” he says gladly, “Mom wasn’t expecting you until next week. You were fifteenth on the waiting list, but I pulled a few strings. Let’s give her a surprise!”
    I force a smile. Endorphins flap in my chest, my movements strain in odd directions as if tugged by elastic bands. Peter’s muscle memory and hormones will be a problem. Add them to the damn list.
    Peznowski/Bayne signs the release at the reception desk, and we depart together, father and son, through a corridor smelling of disinfectant. We step outside.
    It’s the enclosed “outside” of a Martian colony. Everything is built economically crammed together, replicating the appearance of a Middle Eastern medina. The narrow street is beset on each side by a mall’s worth of shops, balcony markets, squat offices and a monorail station.
    Peznowski leads us