![]() A couple of other prisoners were there ahead of her one disappeared soon after she sat. That registered as a request for the AI’s attention. She swam into his pink-walled waiting room and eased her icon into a chair. Not for eight light-years in any direction. Why not put himself smack dab in the middle where he belonged? Doe distrusted Dr. Why pretend he was anything other than central to the whole setup, she asked. Doe, Wayna’s honeywoman, disliked this placement. In the sphere of freespace, his office always hovered in the northwest quadrant, about halfway up from the horizon. Instead of dressing in her overall and reporting to the laundry, her next assignment, she retreated into her locker and linked with Dr. She stripped off her suit and hung it to dry. What was going on? She’d never felt anything like this, not that she could remember-and surely she wouldn’t have forgotten something so intense . . . ![]() She turned on the water and stood in its welcome warmth. Wayna was the first one from her hour out of the pool, and it was too soon for the next hour to wake up. At the door to the showers, it hit her again: a shock of electricity slicing from right shoulder to left hip. Tentatively, she kicked and stroked her way to the steps rising from the pool’s shallows, nodding to those she passed. White! Heat! There, then gone-the lash of a whip. She swirled her arms back and forth, creating waves, making them run into one another. One of those had told her it was typical to translocate missing freespace controls to their meat analogs. When Psyche Moth had reached its goal and verified that the world it called Amends was colonizable, her group was the second downloaded into empty clones, right after the trustees. She paddled toward the deep end, consciously relaxing her useless facial muscles. She’d been clenching it, trying to amp up her sensory inputs. Of the eighty-seven years en route, Wayna had only lived through seventeen. During that voyage the prisoners’ minds had been cycled through consciousness: one year on, four years off. ![]() Then the ship, with Wayna and 248,961 other prisoners, set off on a long voyage to another star. The process of uploading her mind had destroyed her physical body. Like all those on board, Wayna was an upload of a criminal’s mind. Overhead lights speckled the wall, the ceiling, the water, with a shifting, uneven glare. The temperature varied irregularly, warm intake jets competing with cold currents and, Wayna suspected, illicitly released urine. The voices of the pool’s other occupants boomed back and forth in an odd, uncontrolled manner, steel-born echoes muffling and exposing what was said. Too bad it wasn’t scheduled for later all the slow, meat-based activities afterwards were a literal drag. She went in first thing every “morning,” as soon as Dr. Enough like it, anyway, to help Wayna acclimate to her download. The pool was supposed to be like freespace.
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