LINKDING

Summary: <blockquote>In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the back of your neck, catching at the ridges of the drive that carries his consciousness. He’s confused, lashing out to wrest temporary control of your limbs from you in quick staccato bursts before you can yank them back. “Stop that,” you snap, and then, remembering your client, soften the message with a “please.” Your right pinky twitches and you lasso it in, exerting your will over its movement. You splay your hands on your desk and watch them carefully, pay attention to your toes lest they start off on unwelcome dance routines, but in your head the dead man quiets, and you know he’s beginning to understand.</blockquote> ➤ sci-fi story about a woman with a port-drive into her brain that allowed her to be a great child actor when she was young, and gives her a career as an adult of plugging in the mental backup of a dead person to visit bereaved families who want their beloved dead back again ➤ about identity, embodiment, and not knowing how to want things ➤ also about body-sharing ➤ in second-person pov which works so well for the things this story is about and the things it's doing! the main character is someone who spends most of her time being someone else, after all ➤ it's so compellingly written! ➤ has the perfect ending, which can be so hard to pull off right ➤ 7k words in length ➤ this is the first published story by this author, and something this great is her first; I am excited to think of where she might go from here!

<blockquote>When you needed a miracle in the old days, you would walk into the woods, or the sea, or the flat and windswept plains where reality was thin. If you had luck, charm, or raw and spiteful determination, something in the shape of a person would answer you. A bargain would be made. Eventually the thing in the shape of a person would come to collect. But the miracles remained—so long as the bargain was honored. Grey & Tender, LLP offered the classic condition: your heart’s desire in escrow, to be returned if you leave the firm. And of course, you would be given the continual opportunity to make partner, at which point the single miracle would become a drop in the bucket of all the miracles you could create for yourself. It was one of the fairer bargains. It was still a trap: to be transformed would be to become a thing that no longer needed a miracle.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Isabel said, “I think I’m being possessed.” You said, “You’re not being possessed.” You also said, “Don’t be so dramatic,” which you would later look back on and regret.</blockquote> ➤ really good and interesting, and then that last line!!!

<blockquote>I thought I’d see a whole closet-shaped box be swallowed by the closet we already had. You thought the new space would be invisible. Neither of us, at the time, had the words necessary to describe what was happening in our narrow hall that afternoon; words like spatial distortion and physical impermanence weren’t in my vocabulary yet and they certainly weren’t in yours. All we knew was after the installers left, we could push a small beige button discreetly set within the closet’s doorframe and the dubbed “guest” or “nice” closet would disappear, replaced with one filled with our more well-used things</blockquote>

<blockquote>You understand her father’s mistake. You are wearing Valentine’s clothes. You are wearing her body. You are everything that makes Valentine Manning herself, except for the throbbing electric lump that should sit in her cranial cavity. Her new brain is currently stored in a little closet in the Resurrection Clinic, bathed in goo and bombarded with targeted electrons. It will take two months to rearrange the freshly printed organ into the shape that she left it in before she died, all memories restored. Bodies can’t just sit around, though. They get bedsores. They take up space. Val has an empty apartment seven blocks from the university and a signed insurance contract that authorizes experimental therapies when provided by a licensed medical provider. Therefore, you are piloting Valentine’s freshly created meat instead of letting it lie on a shelf. You are one of the fifty-seven synthetic replicative intelligences the Clinic owns for this purpose. You are floating in a bath of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid. You are attached to her brainstem. You do not have a name.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You’ve lived this all before. That’s the thought that keeps me going, through the acrid sting of mage-smoke in my nostrils and the terror of almost having lost you already. There’s fear on your face, too—you’re only now straightening, one trembling hand clutching at your sleeve, and—and—no. I find I cannot call this woman you. You look older than your years, your hair streaked with silver. This woman is barely thirty. She does not have your easy calm; she flinches at the sight of the Tierran assassin pinned neatly to the floor by my sword. She is not you, and will not be for years to come. So be it; she is Fallon Deere, First Minister to the Free State of Altorania, and you are you, the woman who sent me to her side.</blockquote>

<blockquote>To spend a season in a place is not enough to turn it into a home. Some seasons last longer than others, but do not be deceived. Remember that, daughter-mine, when you level the lintels of whatever house you build someday, when you set a boat with sails or lay soft furs in the bottom of a deep dugout. You were still a secret moon riding high in my belly when we came to Ksmal. The People of the Butterfly had lived in the valleygreen a hundred years before the war drove us out and into Ksmala arms, but a hundred years was not enough to make that place ours. Before that, our greatmothers and greatfathers sailed the broad seas for many years, when the land they once loved sank beneath the waves. Ksmal is not my home either, and it is not yours.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The day you arrive at the academy, you spend just three minutes outside the car before begging your mom to drive you back home. There are too many girls. They’re too loud. They’re laughing. Some of them are flying. Even if you weren’t a mindreader, you’d be overwhelmed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Hello, Sacrid Henn. I’m aware that you’re terrified. I’m also aware that you are paralyzed, deaf, and blind, your only sensory input being my voice. It is a voice that has been designed to be as comforting as these circumstances permit. Believe me when I say that you are in no danger and that my intentions toward you are that of a caretaker toward a vulnerable charge.</blockquote> ➤ I find the ending unsatisfying to the point that I nearly didn't bookmark this, but decided in the end the other interesting stuff the story is doing is still worth it

<blockquote>As you enter the doors of this school for the last time, the girl who your brother slept with last night brightens for just a moment before she realizes you’re not Jesse. She deflates. You and your brother should be identical—technically you are—but no one has ever mistaken you for each other.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Two women who have been friends since they were children—one a recovering alcoholic brought up by parents who believe they’re alien abductees, the other an orphan with an eating disorder—contend with a secret that might doom their friendship.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Back up here, she says again. That’s what you’re gonna go for? Some lame esprit de l’escalier moment? What about the girl that broke your heart? Have you even told me about this chick? Why not go back and fix things with her? You make a face. Oh, you say. Oh, yeah, no. That’s not a great idea. What? Why the hell not? I dunno, man, you say. We just. We weren’t meant to be. That’s what people always say to make themselves feel better when shit ends stupidly, An Li says. Well, you say. An Li says, it’s going on the list. </blockquote>

<blockquote>You leave Earth like you leave your girlfriend: tripping over your shoelaces because you hurried too much to tie them right. You need to be gone before she wakes up, before you have to fumble an awkward goodbye. So you hitch a ride on a rocket ship with your legs curled against your chest and with the stars shooting by, thinking about the things and people you’d left behind: the diner with the all-you-can-eat waffles every Sunday morning, the temple across the way with a smooth paved lot so good for rollerblading, and your mom who always baked her own bread, who always gave you the first steaming slice glazed with sugar and dusted with cinnamon, but who never liked your girlfriend, the same girl you left, remember, without even saying see you later.</blockquote> ➤ the ending is too facile, but I liked the story anyway

<blockquote>“The movies only have two endings for sexbot stories.” She curls back onto the couch across from the bed — which you cannot stop staring at — then demurely adjusts the brass cable that keeps the voluptuous, human-like sculpture of her inner-self tethered to the clockwork room of her outer-self. “The sexbot murders someone, or the sexbot gains a soul. As if any sane collection of routines would want a soul! You know all a soul is? The feeling that you should fight your pleasures. Which, in turn, arises from a flawed algorithm that erroneously calculates you’re more than the sum of your inputs. Well, you are that sum, and so am I! If happiness can be defined, a soul’s the thing keeping you from it.”</blockquote>