Gerard lay awake in his bed, uncomfortably aware of the background noise of his house as the wood fixtures creaked almost as much as his own limbs every god damn time he tried to move. He cast a look to his side table, which was piled with medications to the extent he couldn’t even see the wood anymore.
His neural link chimed in his brain and a text message popped up in the periphery of his vision.
John: Hey dad, we really need to talk about the will. Now I know you said two hundred and fifty thousand but, if you’ll remember, five years ago when I came out to your birthd-
Gerald closed the message and stuck it into the folder along with all the others. He knew he was dying, but somehow his family always managed to remind him of that fact with their constant demands for a cut of his asset once he was gone.
He missed the days when his family cared enough about each other to get together and eat dinner at his house, where they could just talk and not bitch at each other about who gets what cut of his and his late wife’s money when he finally rolled over and died.
He laid back on his elbows, slowly leaning up to a sitting position and grabbing the pillow behind him and sitting up in his bed like a chair. His joints creaked in agony, and he felt a burning sensation from the boils and bedsores on his legs and back dragged against his sheets.
He winced at the though of his own decaying body. His doctor had proposed rejuvenation treatments or perhaps a neural transfer to a clone body, but those things would have depleted his not insubstantial savings and put him well into debt. Just on the hope of extending his life for another thirty or fifty years of working like a dog to pay down medical debt, if he was lucky.
He used his neural link to switch on the TV and began skimming through various programs designed to waste his time. Cooking shows, news, entertainment pieces, all things he’d seen before and long since grown bored of due to the sheer mass of idleness he had in his life, Gerald shook his head.
“I’m hardly living like this, what’s even the point…”
Deciding on reminiscing on the old days to distract from his current condition, he skimmed the net for a short while before finding an old video streaming site to access some old movies from his own generation. And like most sites of this kind, it had un-skippable ads.
A few quick adds flashed past his screen; recovered games from the last seventy years, virtual reality porn beamed straight into your brain, investments in dodgy single-A megacorporation’s and dozens of other things.
Something caught his eye as he idly flicked through the dozens of garbage adds trying to get to the archive link of old horror movies at the bottom of the page.
Independent Biohacking Services – Build your own bio-forms! Customer gene sculpts! New-You-Fluffies and Custom-Tailored Designer Models!
He quickly beefed up the security on his neural link before opening the link. A short bit of swimming through a sea of malware and security programs later, he was taken to a nondescript store page filled with prices and pictures of the ‘products’ this independent group offered.
It was a fairly typical assortment; pages of spoiled looking designer fluffies going for thousands of dollars a pop, knock off Puffy Griffins and other patented bio-forms with slight changes to their composition.
But Gerald’s eyes were drawn down to one specific section at the bottom of the page where he saw the listing for the thing that brought him here in the first place; New-You-Fluffies.
Gerald had read about these things in the news a few years ago, Fluffy Ponies equipped with a neural interface and equipped with enough bio-ware to allow the otherwise unsuitable mind of a fluffy to hold a human consciousness, copied or ‘transferred’ much the same way a neural transfer into a human body would work.
Most people did it as a cheap alternative to doing just that, paying small fortunes to bring back dead relatives from data saved on their neural links in fluffy bodies or trap copies of their own or other personalities in fluffy bodies and using them to ‘relieve stress’.
It was still a wealthy mans hobby right now, and flat out illigal in a number of places due to the ‘questionable’ nature of Fluffy Ponies with human intellegence.
He idly manifested his ‘avatar’ in the shop and thumbed through some of their options and price listings, chuckling to himself at the absurdity of it all. How little it cost to have some dodgy scammer on the internet do a procedure that would bankrupt him if he tried to do it to save his own life at a hospital, the only difference being what his new body would be.
“You strike me as a revenge type of guy…”
Gerard turned his head to the modulated effeminate voice that was speaking to him suddenly, spotting the virtual avatar of somebody else sitting on a nearby display pedestal. The avatar was an anime character from a work he didn’t recognise, probably something recent.
“What gives you that impression?”
“I donno, you just look the type. Do you see anything you like or are you just here to browse?”
“Latter, mostly.”
“Well, feel free to have a look. Whatever you’re considering a New-You for; revenge ploy, stress ball, like minded companion… other things… just lemme know!”
A ping in the periphery of his vision alerted Gerard to the presence of a message cropping up from his son again, his expression soured as he looked over the contents of the message his eldest had sent him.
John: DAD, STOP IGNORING ME, WE NEED TO TALK! I’M COMING OVER, I’LL BE THERE IN THIRTY!
He looked back up toward the female avatar, his expression changing from amused curiosity to something more serious. He summoned up all the poise and authority a man of his advancing years and experience in his former field could draw on in the limited field of augmented reality.
“Let’s talk about my options.”
-=-
“Alright Gerard, with your signature there, all the changes to your will be finalized… you sure you want to do this?”
Donald , Gerard’s lawyer and collage fraternity buddy said, looking at his old friend in his sunken forlorn face as he wiggled his bushy white moustache, an unconscious tick from their old card playing days that signaled to Gerard that his old friend had concerns about something.
“I am Don, as dead certain as I ever was.”
“I’m not questioning your reasoning, its just… your method of going about it.”
“Oh, come on Don, this definitely isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever done, way I figure it, it’s like choosing to spend my twilight years exploring a new way of life and enjoying time away from the bullshit of my families drama.” Gerard laughed, before his face grew cold and serious.
“Besides, if I wait too long, I won’t have the opportunity to change my mind…”
They exchanged a tense and awkward moment between the two old men, Donald noting that while Gerard’s body may have begun to fail him, he still maintained the same ferocity in his eyes that he had from all the way back when they had first met.
“What do I tell your kids?” Donald inquired with a sigh, leaning back in his chair as he did so.
Gerard’s reached over and sighed he last few of the documents, his emaciated hands shaking as he did so.
Once the papers where signed, the silent command of his neural link pushed his electric wheelchair out from the desk and he slowly made his way to the automatic door to the office, turning only briefly to answer his friend’s query.
“The balance on their cheques… I doubt they would give a damn about much else.”
-=-
The next two months seemed at once to sail by and drag on forever for Gerard. Preparations were made, virtual training sessions were attended, money changed hands in fits and starts, modifications to genomes were made. And all the time, Gerard’s health slowly worsened.
It was near the end of his second month when the choice was finally made to go forward with his plan.
He met the biohackers in person for the first time in an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the older, abandoned part of the city, where the three youths had set up a makeshift laboratory to perform the final procedures.
When he was wheeled in by one of the hired guns, he had brought as additional security a younger lady looking barely out of her teens hopped down from a nearby concrete barricade and walked over to him.
“You must be Gerard. I’m Liz, nice to meet you in person.”
Gerard extended a near skeletal hand to the lady and shook her hand, a wiry smile crossing his face as he did so.
“Likewise… Its good to finally meet the brutal taskmaster who taught me how to walk on four legs!”
Liz smirked at the old man; dry humor was a common side effect of being as old as her client was.
“Right, well, since your liable to crumble to dust any minute now we may as wall get started ey?”
She gestured to an uncomfortable looking table to which a large amount of medical equipment and computer terminals were attached. Sitting directly across from that table was another, smaller setup of a similar kind connected by thick wires.
As she gestured to the table, one of the other youths walked up to the table holding a medium sized pet carrier in one hand. The kid placed the carrier on the table, opened the door and pulled a large sized grey pegasus with a white mane and placed its limp body on the second table.
Gerard wheeled himself over to the second table and brushed a hand over the catatonic fluffies mane, looking up only when the another one of the masked bio-hackers walked over to him and held out a data-pad to him.
“It’s all there if you want to have a look. Needed to regrow the wings, had a problem during initial cultivation, but otherwise its all in there.”
Gerard briefly skimmed the list of enhancements and customizations, before handing the pad back to the masked individual and nodding. He wheeled his chair over beside the much larger table and had one of the assistants and his hired muscle move him over to the table.
As the two assistants hooked up electrodes, scanners and other equipment to his skull, his neural link flared with a hundred different warning indicators and permission pages that he quickly filtered through at the speed of thought, as he’d done a dozen times over the past few months.
Liz appeared in over him, flicking away at the air at holographic displays that only she could see.
“Last chance to change your mind, Gerard.” Liz said looking down on him, her expression changing from playful to serious.
“I’ve seen your vitals. You body is likely to die once the procedure is concluded. Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that this is what you want to do?”
Gerard shrugged looking up at the young lady, feeling one of his legs beginning to tense as his muscles slowly started to cramp, he smiled up at her as her assistants finished wiring him up.
“I’m eager to begin my vacation miss Liz, please don’t keep me waiting.”
Liz patted him on the shoulder, before turning to her assistants in order for them to begin the more medical part of the procedure, while she keyed in the last few codes to being a consciousness transfer.
“Alright, now the transfer will begin shortly. Just repeat the words we used before during training so I can monitor the process of the transfer, alright, old timer?”
“I despise that nickname…”
Liz grinned from ear to ear as she held up her index finger and clicked on a flashlight into Gerard’s eyes, slowly moving the light from pupil to pupil as she repeated the phrase that she used to slowly transition him during practice.
“One, two, three…”
“Eyes on me…”
“One, two, three…”
“…Eyes on me…”
“One, two, three…”
“…Eyes on meh.”
