Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,58
eyes not meeting mine. “I know you see how uncomfortable I am in this cumbersome body. It’s not just the… the maleness of it, though I hate that.” She raised her eyes, offered a hint of a smile. “No offense. It’s just not who I feel I am deep down.” Her gaze dropped again before she could see my nod of understanding, but she was still talking. “There’s more to it. I have enough funds to pay for gender reassignment surgery, but even then I still won’t be me, Carter. I would never give up the gift of near immortality, but the farther I get from the coil that I was born in, the strong self-image that it imprinted on me, the more uncomfortable I get. I can’t explain it. Not well. But it’s like being in an ill-fitting vacc suit. Everything feels too tight and intrusive and just plain wrong.” I could hear the tears in her voice, though I couldn’t see them on her still-lowered face. I reached out a hand and placed it lightly on her shoulder. She didn’t move away. “It feels wrong, Carter. Wrong enough that I go to great lengths to not feel this way. Wrong enough that I spent years in a veritable prison to get back to something that more closely fits my image of myself. And these people took that from me.”
Her trembling shoulder stilled beneath my touch. She lifted her eyes to mine and a shadow flashed across them. “Yes, Carter, I’m willing to do whatever we must.”
I tried to hide my wince at the thought—not of making someone talk, since at this point, I felt like the judicious application of pain was more than deserved, but of spending years locked into a Class Four coil. Class Ones were top of the line—what Chan and I wore now, despite not being exactly what we would have chosen, were still Class One. No medical issues, full nanobot support packages, top-of-the-line agents, everything you could ask for to assume your rightful place in society. Class Twos were… factory seconds. Small problems, nothing that would impede living, but enough that everyone knew you were in a castoff and you had to deal with… well, glitches for lack of a better word. Class Threes had problems—real problems. Anatomical abnormalities or neurological incompatibilities with modern hardware. The kinds of things that made living a real pain in the ass. If you got re-coiled into a Class Three, you were immediately on the list for the first available Class Two or higher in your area. Class Fours, though… Class Fours were the coils that murderers and rapists got shoved back into if they were foolish enough to lose their own coil before their sentence was up. They weren’t factory seconds, so much as… manufacturing mistakes. Full-on errors that, if the coil crunch wasn’t so dire, would be recycled into biological goo and fed back into whatever arcane machines spat out the Class Ones. They were bad enough that even their use to re-coil criminals was hotly debated, whether it was more cruel to leave prisoners archived, with no coil at all—and with no elapsed time on any sentencing they may have received, since punitive sentences had to be lived—or to shove them into a Class Four.
Of course, you could sign a waiver, and volunteer to be put into that hell. And doing so gave you a privilege normally reserved for the very wealthy—access to a coil of preference, provided you were willing to wait for it and not suicide somewhere along the line to get out of the Class Four. It also ensured that whatever career you pursued almost had to be relegated to what could be done in virtual reality. That part, at least, probably hadn’t been a problem for Chan, but the rest of the problems made it a practice that was almost never pursued. The only people who did it were those with a rare type of dysmorphic disorder that made them feel a constant sense of mental, sometimes even physical, distress the farther they got from their original coils. I understood then that, for Chan, there wasn’t much difference between being in her current coil and being back in one of those Class Fours. The fact that she was holding up as well as she was, was nothing short of incredible.
“Damn, Shay, I had no idea. I know getting bio-sex-crossed on re-coil can be an adjustment, but I didn’t realize how much