Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,51

the others in ways that we simply cannot reliably predict.” I was almost entirely lost now. “It gets worse,” she warned.

I remained silent, figuring that that was the best way to stop myself from looking like a complete idiot. “That’s the software side,” Chan said. “The cores themselves are techno-organic—they’re essentially computers that are grown along with the coil rather than ‘built’ in the traditional sense. They use several inorganic components, but those components are part of whatever primordial soup is used in the process, introduced when the body is grown. But, because the software operates on entanglement, the partition that houses the operating system is write-only. You can add to it, but you can never take anything away. Which means that everyone knew—right up until the point that I deciphered what we found on Copeland—that while you could muck around with peoples’ memories—with the database side of things—you absolutely could not delete their personality—the operating system. But it looks like somehow, something went very wrong—or maybe very right—with Genetechnic. They either figured out how to manipulate the quantum entanglement structure to effectively use the accessible portion of the core to overwrite the inaccessible… or somehow something went horribly wrong in just the right way.”

It took a long moment for all of that to sink in. “Shit,” I muttered at last. Despite all the advances technology had given us, coils—bodies—were incredibly difficult and time-consuming to produce. Add to the fact that only a single entity held the monopoly on the creation of coils—as a measure to ensure the best quality possible—and bodies were always in short supply. The very wealthy could guarantee quick and ready access to a coil custom-made to their specifications in the event of death—the wealthiest and most powerful could be re-coiled within hours of any unfortunate accident. But for the rest of us, the process took quite a bit longer, and, like Chan being stuffed into a bio-male body, it was often a jarring and less than optimal solution. It beat the alternative, of course, but carried with it a lot of psychological baggage.

In theory, new coils were a human right. You paid your insurance premiums, and you were guaranteed re-coiling within a “reasonable” time frame. Even if you couldn’t pay the premiums, as long as you had a viable backup, you would, eventually, return to flesh and bone. Without the most basic of insurance, it would be years before you ever felt the sun, and you would be stuffed into what amounted to a “factory defect” of a coil, but you would reemerge from the purgatory of the archives, pick up your life where you left off, and likely have a much deeper respect for the idea of paying your premiums on time. Even with the slower birthrates among human society, this meant an ever-expanding demand, coupled with a supply that was still bounded by the limits of the growth time for coils. The manufacturer was prohibited by a mountain of laws from selling directly to anyone and was forced to work with the select few megacorps that backed the insurance policies.

Boundless demand, tight supply, and endless government regulation did what it had done among humanity for eons: it created a thriving black market where coils could be bought and sold for exorbitant fees. But even that market was squeezed so tight it squealed. Coils could be “lost” and rerouted. They could “fall off of trucks” and find their way to destinations for which they had never been intended. They could be stolen, hijacked, diverted, or anything else imaginable, right up until the point that a person was stuffed back into them. The core of every coil wasn’t simply inserted when the vessel reached maturity—as Chan had just pointed out, the core was grown with the coil, making it an inseparable part of the body. There was no way to extract a core without terminating the biological functions of the coil to which it belonged. Which meant that once you were re-coiled, nothing and no one could take that body from you. No matter how it came to you, it was yours until accident or age or some other form of untimely death took it from you and put you back in the queue. But when that happened, the coil itself was done. Useless. Spent.

Unless Chan had the right of it.

“If they can do that, then…” I trailed off.

“Then we’re no longer safe in our own bodies. If they can—or already have—isolated that effect, then