Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,10
dry and no sweat broke out on my body. Nonetheless, a cold, numbing sense of surprise flooded my mind, and for a moment all I could do was try to mutter, “Sixty-three days?”
The words were unintelligible, barely sounds at all, since I still had little control over my new vocal cords or lips. But they were, apparently, loud enough to catch someone’s attention.
“Awake, then, are we?” The words were cheerful, almost chipper, and full of a brisk professionalism that just screamed medtech. They had a crisp, vaguely British edge to them. “Well, you’ve no doubt already queried your agent and learned that your re-coiling was just a bit, how should I put this… unusual? We’ll give you all the details once you’re a bit more, well… you. In the meantime, I need you to open your eyes. Do you think you could do that for me?”
I’d been through this a half-dozen times before—salvage was a dangerous business, after all, and it wasn’t the most dangerous business I’d ever been involved in. The question should have been perfunctory, but there was a note of actual concern behind those words. What had happened to me?
I drew a deep breath—at which point, I suddenly became aggressively aware of the fact that I was breathing. That resulted in a brief, panicked moment where my conscious mind struggled with the autonomic responses of its new coil. It was a lot like I imagined suitless exposure to vacuum would be—wanting to breathe, struggling to take in precious, life-giving oxygen, but at the same time, being somehow unable to make your lungs work, despite seeing and feeling nothing that should prevent it. It passed quickly, leaving me momentarily panting.
I concentrated on my eyes, on opening the lids. They felt heavy, not from lack of sleep, but physically challenging, requiring an effort of muscle and will to manipulate. Slowly, ever so slowly, they parted, revealing a blurry and bleary world about me.
“Well, that’s good, then,” the British voice said. A slightly darker oval appeared in the generally bleary light that was my current field of view. A brighter light swept past my eyes, once, twice, a third time. “This may sting just a bit.”
Something warm and wet poured into my eyes, and I blinked rapidly in response to the mild irritation that came with the fluid. It had the desired effect—with each blink, the blurriness eased, and my new eyes finally came into focus. The man leaning over me was fine-boned, dark-skinned, and, as was the case with almost every coil, physically attractive. He held a plastic squeeze bottle in one long-fingered hand and was dabbing at my face with a cloth held in the other.
“Are you back with us, then? Can you talk?”
Again, there was that edge of worry in his words.
“Where?” I forced the single word out in a strangled croak. It was deeper than it should have been, or at least, deeper than my old coil would have produced. It was definitely a bio-male voice though. Re-coiling facilities tried to put people back in the gender with which they identified, unless they specifically requested otherwise, but coils were in short supply. It wasn’t unheard of to be re-coiled into whatever was available. If you did end up in the wrong body, your options were somewhat limited. You couldn’t simply ask for a new one—the demand for coils always outstripped the supply and only the very, very wealthy could get a new coil at whim. The rest of us were stuck with whatever meat our cores got pushed into. If you ended up with the wrong plumbing, you could still try for reassignment surgery, but most people had to put all their spare cash into paying their re-coiling insurance premiums, with not enough left to buy the kind of medical policy that would cover reassignment surgery.
After three hundred plus years and several coils due to the perils of my profession, I fell into what had come to be called the gender-pragmatic portion of the spectrum. All things being equal, I felt most at home as a bio-male but the one time I’d been re-coiled into a bio-female shell, I hadn’t felt any particular distress. Sure, I missed some of the muscle mass, but the smaller frame had been helpful for some of my salvage ops. And I’d still been me—thought the same way, liked the same things, been attracted to the same types of people. That wasn’t how it went for everyone, of course. Some people