Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,35
algorithm…”
The bloated wreckage of a human face morphed before my eyes, the swollen flesh melting back into normalcy, the bulging eyes receding and reshaping, the fleshy protuberance of a tongue vanishing beneath thinning lips. When the image was once again still, it revealed a rather plain-looking man with sandy brown hair and hazel eyes.
“Meet Malcolm Copeland,” Chan said smugly. “A registered member of the Pallah habitat and an employee of the Genetechnic Corporation.”
Mars hung beneath us, a sullen red eye winking at the infinite darkness. Traffic around Earth’s closest cousin and the third place humanity had reached for permanent colonization—after Luna—was thick, though the term was relative to the scale of the planet. Chan had secured us tickets on a small, but luxurious passenger liner, and I hadn’t bothered asking too many questions about exactly how—or even if—she’d found the funds to do so. I was beginning to realize that what I had known about her as a crewmember of the Persephone was only the tip of a very large iceberg.
We’d spent the week of travel in relative comfort, discussing what to do when we reached Pallah, and continuing to adjust to our new coils. The passenger liner had a gym aboard, so I was able to test some of the limits of the shell I wore. I put the coil through the paces I could, but I did long for the ability to work EVA or zero-G. No chance of either of those on the liner. Raw strength was a nice asset, but a lot of EVA work had more to do with agility and flexibility, and I needed to put this coil through those paces if I was going to get back to operating at my previous level. Chan, for the most part, sequestered herself in her cabin, taking advantage of the ship’s databases to try and track down more information on our situation. When I suggested she come with me to the gym to help acclimate to her new body, the look she gave me was a mix of incredulity and pain, and I quickly retreated. She was clearly having difficulty adjusting to the idea of being bio-male, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot that I could do to help her. Maybe she could scrape together the credits for surgery one day, but at best that was a solution for when our lives—our existence—weren’t under threat. And suggesting that to her at the moment seemed… well, counterproductive wasn’t a strong enough word. I’d just about gotten used to seeing Chan as her new self, though there were moments when I experienced an odd sort of double vision between her old and new coils. Now, as we made our final approach and the plasteel dome grew before us on the viewscreen, I stared in wonder at the sheer size of the city stretching within it.
I had spent most of my life either within the confines of a ship under way, or aboard the close corridors of deep space habitats. The economic realities of spacer life didn’t leave much time for idle vacations to begin with and work for someone like me, who had never worn the yoke of the corporations, became scarcer as you approached Sol. Independent jobs cropped up—like the salvage that the Persephone had been after—but you either had to jump on them before the corps knew they were there or find yourself competing with better-equipped and better-funded expeditions. It wasn’t just salvage: it held true in every sector of space. Mining, transport, passenger services, security… if it could earn creds, you could be sure that the corporations had a presence. Since most of them had started on Earth and were still headquartered there, Sol to Mars was the corporations’ backyard. I knew of the cities of Mars and Luna, and, to a lesser degree, Earth. I had seen images, even experienced them to some extent in various VR simulations. But that paled in comparison to the reality of the metropolis growing before us.
The dome alone was a feat of engineering to make intrasystem ships and deep-space habitats seem like toys. Not that the domes of Mars had anything like the complexity of ship or hab, but the Pallah dome stretched for kilometers. The technical expertise required to build on such a massive scale was staggering, particularly in a gravity well, and the constant reflecting lights sparking off the dome’s surface seemed to me to be the winking of some giant, human eye, as