The two of us, myself and this man I did not know, sat at a table in a windowless white cell with an indefinite light source.

I was afraid, as afraid as a human being can be. I remembered every step that had brought me here and I did not consider this a place of safety, only one promising a damnation not quite as painful as the one that was otherwise certain, if I did the sensible thing and left.

The man had a lean face with high cheekbones and eyebrows that gave him a permanent scowl. His features were foreign to me in some manner that was not easy to define; some race of humanity I had never encountered in my limited travels. But he seemed amiable enough, in the way that powerful people can be amiable when they are about to ruin you and know there is not much you can do about it. He had a bumpy bald head and he wore a silver disk at forehead altitude, its intelligence advising him in ways I could not even guess at.

He had told me his name but I had not registered it. I could not avoid the irony that it was the only thing today I would forget of my own accord.

On the table between us was a little organic object, moist and greasy and shaped like the seed of a certain popular fruit. The seed it resembled was edible and it was sold in bags to be munched in great numbers. This seed looked like that, but it was not that. It just looked the same, or like the turd of one of the rodent species that had followed humanity into space. I almost retched at the thought.

The man whose name I’d forgotten said, “Eat it.”

I would later remember the things that went through my head as I obliged: the awareness that this would not be good, the certainty that I had no choice, the grief that went along with knowing I had put myself in this position.

And more, behind all that, memories from my recent past, the face of a man I might have loved, remembered here as an angry scowl, hollering things I secretly agreed with; another face, that of a little girl, intense and serious and with two eyes that did not match.

I knew I would never see either of those people again, but within a second of biting the seed I had forgotten why. Were they far away? Were they dead? Had I sinned against them so grievously that they did not want me in their lives anymore?

I felt a little fizz on the tip of my tongue and then: nothing.

The man said, “Place your hands flat on the table.”

As blank as any newborn, I did that too. The table was cold and smooth and it had a strange organic feel, adhering to my palms like glue.

The man said, “The seed has already gone to work. You are not the same person you were before you put it in your mouth, and so I will now necessarily have to repeat much of your orientation. This is an inconvenience of my role here, but it is an inherent part of my responsibilities. And so I begin again.”

I said, “What?”

“You received a full briefing, ending only a few seconds ago. It presented all the data you needed, but none of that is now accessible to you, and so I will now have to brief you again, to make you comfortable as the devices do their work. Panic on your part would not be effective, but it would be unpleasant for both of us, and so it costs me nothing to start over. Do you feel any pain?”

I considered this question. Pain can be hard to quantify, of course. What is discomfort for one can be unbearable agony for another; and what is torture for that one, another would find painless. What I felt was primarily a sense of wrongness, an awareness that the current existence was without context for either myself or this room. It didn’t bother me as much as it should have, that I was nobody, that I didn’t know my name, my station in life, or the path that had brought me here. It did bother me that I didn’t know anything about this man, who struck me now as something other than fully human, either in the measured way he spoke or in the way his piercing eyes maintained that stare of his without a single blink.

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“That is normal,” he said. “You knew everything until you ate the seed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The devices are least effective in erasing the knowledge that was still accruing in the last few seconds before ingestion. That is because they were still resonating when you put the seed in your mouth, and they bled through. You must remember a certain feeling of desperation, the knowledge that all your alternatives were exhausted, the revulsion that went with resignation to the elimination of all you were, and surrender to all the things you would become. Is this accurate?”

I possessed all these fragmentary thoughts, but did I remember them, really? Or did I remember remembering them, remember what it had been like to remember? It was more like that, I feared: more like the shape of the experience than the experience itself.

I said, “I remember a man. A little girl.”

That was a thick voice. It did not sound like my own, but would anything at all sound like my own?

What, I wondered, had I done to myself?

He said, “That’s normal.”

“Is that my family? Am I her mother?”

“These are unproductive thoughts. How are you otherwise?”

“I can use a glass of water.”

He said, “That’s also normal. The answer’s no.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“You only think you are. It is the ghost of being thirsty, the habit you formed of thirst as a reaction to stress. You think of the request itself as a delaying tactic, something that will take up time while you continue to consider how you should react to this unfamiliar experience. But all experiences will be unfamiliar to you now, and you cannot have a glass of water. Glasses of water are in your past.”

My reaction to this pronouncement was far more calm than I had any right to feel, and I asked my next question with the same strange placidity.

“Am I dying?”

“You are,” he said. “The you that existed is in its last few heartbeats of life. And the you to come is being born. You are having both experiences simultaneously. The creature you have agreed to be will not require hydration to function. And yet, you will still be drawn to the sensory pleasure of a cold liquid flowing against the back of your throat, and of your tissues being refreshed as the substance is distributed throughout your body. These sensations are now antiquated, and you need to accept that the impulses urging you to seek them out are now vestigial. They will never go away, but you can trust me when I tell you that you will adapt to disregarding them.”

I found myself licking my lips. They felt dry. I imagined them growing cracked and pitted as water was denied me for long periods. I felt the stirring of panic. And yet, did I feel the ghost of the awareness that I didn’t want water so much as want to want water. I felt that I should be thirsty, and therefore I was thirsty. I knew, with cold certainty, that this dichotomy would always be with me, and again I thought: what have I done to myself?

He said, “Do you remember being afraid?”

I did not remember anything directly, but I remembered the echoing aftermath of those sensations. I remembered the corridors racing by as I ran, the footsteps close behind me, threatening shouts, a certain door in the distance that promised delivery of a kind, but that I regarded with a separate species of dread.

I gathered that the entrance I remembered, vast and welcoming and silvery beneath a sign identifying it as something-something Embassy, had been the threshold which brought me here, to this cell, to this man, to the agreements I had made, to that seed, and to what I had just been told was a lifelong elimination of thirst.

And these, too, were not memories, but the memory of memories, the things that remained in my mind as I bit down.

I said, “I was terrified.”

“Well, there you go. At the moment you ate the seed, you knew that bad men had been pursuing you. You knew that if you left this facility without making some arrangement with us, those men would make sure horrible things happened to you. Eating the seed and accepting what it would bring must have seemed almost as terrible, but presented your only means of survival. So you pursued the only option that did not promise extinction.”

I tried to lift my hands off the table. I could not. The surface held my palms flat. My shirtsleeves exposed a small strip of skin at each wrist and so they were held tight as well, so tight that I might as well have been part of the surface, growing out of it like a plant.

Panic was not far away, but I could not access it.

I said, “What would have happened if I let them catch me?”

“The precise reasons for your predicament were complicated. But those men were hunting you down at the behest of a powerful criminal whose intentions toward you were not kind. There were three men at the end because it is by killing the fourth you achieved enough volition to flee those that remained. They are brutes, but not just brutes; they had considerable affection for the one you killed, and a genuine reverence for their master, a man named Magrison. They would not have been shy about doing you grievous harm themselves, of making you pray for death even before bringing you back to the employer whose intentions of causing you unimaginable pain puts their own cruelty in a realm of much lesser consequence. In his hands, death would not have come quickly enough to qualify as a blessing. You were well aware of this when you came to us. Our establishment, a diplomatic installation that you knew to have offered others sanctuary before, was like the cliff you jumped off in order to avoid capture.”

It was unnerving, the way he suggested the worst atrocities without any alteration in his tone of voice. It was, I realized, like a math equation to him, a less-than or greater-than calculation that pit whatever terrible fate I’d escaped, against whatever terrible fate I had accepted.

I said, “They won’t come after me here?”

“They might want to. They will face retribution because of their failure to apprehend you. But they are not mad. They know better than to get between us and someone who crosses our threshold in search of sanctuary. And they know you are lost to them. Which is, more or less, the same thing. Keep your hands on the table.”

I tried to remember more. Clarity only went back as far as the instant I ate the seed; a moment when I now remembered thinking that what I was about to do amounted to suicide. It was a thought that had come with considerable relief I would not be experiencing something in specific, a thing that was so unthinkable that the dread, if not the details, remained with me, still. I got the impression now that my understanding of the horrible fate I had fled was quite vivid, built at least in part on having seen it being inflicted on others.

Maybe I’d participated. Maybe I’d been a stalker like them, tracking down others who’d crossed our leader. Maybe I’d caught one or two who were just as desperate as I’d been, racing toward the threshold of this very establishment; maybe I’d caught up with them at the last moments of their desperate flights, and been one of those who dragged them kicking and screaming back to this Magrison and to the fate they were owed. This felt possible.

On the other hand, maybe I’d been an innocent, only linked to his crimes by circumstance, a figure who had wound up being bound to him, and found the noose around my neck growing tighter as his manipulation left me owing debts that I could never repay.

I had no sense of my prior self that would have placed me in either category. But of the thing he did to those who incurred his rage, I could summon only the vaguest impressions. I remembered wide eyes, fraying sanity, disbelief on the part of the suffering that in a universe they understood as a construct with themselves at the center, punishments so final could be applied to themselves. But that was all I could remember beyond the feeling I’d gotten, upon looking at the seed this other man had given me, that everything I defined as myself was about to end, and that in these current circumstances only a fool would not take this devil’s bargain.

And it had been a devil’s bargain. I was sure of that.

So: fine. What devil’s bargain had it been?

My palms were still stuck to the table. My arms were slight and wrapped in scuffed gray sleeves, with various smudges of dirt and at least one drop of a clotted brown substance that must have been blood: the blood of the stalker I’d killed, or someone else, I didn’t know.

I didn’t know. They appeared to be a woman’s arms. A slight woman’s arms, the skin a grayish-brown, with light blue veins visible in the harsh light of this white room. The tip of some fluid, recombinant tattoo poked out of the wrist cuffs.

I said, “What’s happening?”

The man smiled at me. He had very small white teeth and receding gums, not pink or red but a plasticized white. Organic structures deeper in his mouth suggested that he wasn’t human, just something that was meant to pass as human, or to evoke humanity for the comfort of those who entered his presence knowing precisely what he was. There was no kindness or warmth in his smile, but no malice either. He gave me the impression that he didn’t want any of this to be any more difficult for me than it absolutely had to be.

“The seed contained a fleet of about five million self-replicating nanite devices, designed to customize you for your new life. They entered your bloodstream at the instant you broke the containment vessel. A percentage of them went to your brain where they immediately went about erasing your long-term memory while preserving your intelligence and problem-solving ability. That first effect takes considerably less than a second and is for all intents and purposes instantaneous. It has been several minutes, now. Will you accept that your old life is by now erased and that you cannot return to it?”

“I suppose I have no choice.”

“You do not. These are necessary changes that you agreed to before you signed the contract. You no longer have a name, a circle of other human beings you consider friends and family, or the tally of life experiences that have formed your personality and moral center. The comforting aspect is of course that you are better off without any of them. You were in your predicament because the person you were demolished her friendships, ruined her finances, betrayed her benefactors, and made enemies of the worst parties possible. She is gone and you would find it most helpful to consider the creature you are an infant, still growing accustomed to the life that follows.”

I felt a fresh sensation fluttering in my chest. “I . . . feel that I should still be more frightened by that than I am.”

“Normally, your human instincts would demand it. The nanofleet has taken steps to ensure that you remain calm. Otherwise, yes, your transformation over the next few minutes would be quite traumatic. Do not worry.”

I noticed something happening at my wrists: a strobing effect as my flesh tried on separate colors. There was a pale white; there, a tint so dark that it seemed to swallow all ambient light. There were multiple shades in between them. The very bones of the list appeared to flow like liquid, as my body decided what it was going to be. It was fascinating, and I became aware of something else, a harsh itch that was the distant cousin of agony.

I said, “What’s this?”

“This is what completes the process of guaranteeing your safety from those who pursued you. They should accept that there’s no point in punishing someone who cannot remember the trespass, especially when she is now in the hands of someone whose reach is longer than their master’s. But it is still possible for vindictiveness to overcome common sense, and so we are currently rendering you unrecognizable to them. The nanofleet is altering the bone structure of your face, introducing changes to your chin, your nose, the placement of your eyes, your complexion, and even your height. It might also adjust your secondary sexual characteristics. By the time all this is over, the changes will be reflected by reverse-engineered alterations in your DNA, sufficient to explain what you will by then appear to be. There are among the many varieties of the human species some races so isolated that they number in only the low thousands. You might end up being one of those, an exotic sight to amuse those who encounter you in places like this world or New London. Or you might be among the most common. In any event, they will not recognize you.”

“Will anyone?”

“As the person you were? Never. From day to day? Is it possible somebody you encounter twice might say, Oh, that’s the same person I saw yesterday? No. But that is irrelevant in any case. In your new life, you will have priorities other than interaction with other human beings.”

The fluttering continued. It hurt quite a bit now, though it was the kind of pain I did not have the resources to resent, let alone protest. It was the sense of things being moved around inside me; my ribs changing curvature, my spine altering length, my organs shifting in shape and position to alter my own, as well as to assume other functions I could not even begin to guess.

I said, “You’re saying I won’t have family? Or friends? At all?”

“You did not do well by the family and friends you had. Some of them are dead because of you. Others are far from here, cursing your name. Part of the deal you made with us is that we would protect the ones who still remain alive but in danger. But no, given your nature, we are not ourselves foolish enough to trust you with such connections. The need for them will go the way of your sense of thirst.”

“That’s just crap,” I said, feeling a strange pride that I was able to summon even this mild expression of resentment to fling in this cold man’s face. “Everybody needs people to care about. People to love.”

“Your actions over the past few years document contempt for the responsibilities that go with the privilege.”

“But I can’t just be alone forever. I’ll go insane.”

“You can be alone forever,” the man said, “but you will not go insane.”

Something popped inside me. It felt like a release of internal pressure that alleviated the pain and came with a relief deep enough to qualify as pleasure. For one queasy moment I mistook it as a sensation everybody has experienced at least once or twice, and I waited for the spreading warmth that would confirm I’d soiled myself. But that never arrived. It was just the dissolution of what had been an unpleasant, lifelong presence, and its replacement with a sense of completion, of something messy and often uncooperative being replaced by something that would never give me any trouble.

The pop had been audible, and the man said, “That was your stomach.”

He offered no further explanation.

I felt some other shifting, deep inside, and I said, “Can I still change my mind?”

“That would be unfortunate for the loved ones whose safety you bargained for.”

“I don’t care about them now. You said it yourself. They’re in my past. I have no idea who they are or how they’re related to me. They can take their chances.”

“See?” he said. “That kind of thinking is a relic of the kind of person you were.”

“And that makes no difference. The only thing that makes a difference to me now is the person I’m becoming, and you’re saying that she—”

“Not necessarily she,” he said.

“That whoever,” I pushed on, “has no ties to the person I was. Not name, not face, not memories, not identity. This person, this new person, owes them nothing. I can move on, and make my own way without guilt.”

An infuriating half-smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You agreed to this procedure.”

“Yes, and that’s the damn point. I didn’t sign a contract. The person I was signed a contract. She is now dead. I am reborn. If I am really a completely different person, I can’t be held liable for her mistakes. You’re holding me under false pretenses. You have no direct claim on me.”

His smile was affectionate. He liked my cleverness, my attempt to use legal arguments against someone representing parties who held me under their absolute power. He may have been pleased that this showed a resourcefulness I might soon need. It was not an appalled smile, and from this I knew that my inadequate little protest would do no good.

He said, “Are you surprised to learn that you were a lawyer?”

I was not surprised. But this information did nothing for me. My knowledge of the law was all but gone, its effects only shown by this attempt to argue for my freedom. I had to recognize it was something that shared the same properties as my thirst: a reflex that would never leave me, that would always pull at me but would never be relevant to whatever was now expected of me. And again I wondered: what have I done? What do they want of me? Why would they do something as petty and cruel as taking away my ability to enjoy a nice tall cup of ice water?

He rubbed the corner of his mouth with his index finger, a human gesture and a terrifying one in that its mere appearance underlined it was the only human thing he’d done in the long minutes since this newborn version of myself first met him.

He said, “There are three problems with that reasoning.

“The first, of course, is that it assumes the people I represent give even the slightest damn about human laws. We do not. They have diplomatic relations with human beings and are cordial when possible, but cannot be held liable to your contract law. The second is of course that threatening unthinkable legal consequences bears weight when you are capable of communicating with a court, and, you, of course, are not. We hold the reins of power here.

“But there is another issue. And that is: while you may already be a new person in fact, you will not be one in any legal sense until you are provided with your new documentation, and that will not happen until your new documentation is written, a process we will not even begin until your transformation is completed. I can assure you that human authorities know of the various arrangements my organization makes with people, are resigned to them given our substantial power, and would not judge in your favor any legal appeals you might currently imagine yourself making. These gestures of defiance are silly. May I continue?”

I wanted to thrash, then. I wanted to punch this bastard in that extra-long nose of his. I wanted to run screaming from this facility, even if that meant surrendering myself to the stalkers who were hunting me; even if that meant facing the reportedly bigger monster behind them. But I couldn’t even raise my hands from the tabletop. It wasn’t just that they were stuck. It wasn’t that they were held by whatever biological magnetism the table possessed. It was that I couldn’t direct functional nerve impulses to those arms, to those hands. Right this moment couldn’t even summon what such an impulse should have felt like. And this threatened even more terror, but it lasted only a second before something like a cooling wind flushed through my system, and I found even the anger too difficult to maintain. I said, “Go ahead.”

“Very well. The creature you are about to become has been designed to survive with minimal expenditure of attention to coarse biological needs. For instance: no unenhanced human being can long survive without sleep. Without sleep, we die much faster than we do when deprived of food. This is an evolutionary design flaw, albeit one that human beings are conditioned to regard with satisfaction and pleasure. I would not give it up, myself. Still, it wastes one-third of your life, and so we have taken steps to eliminate it. From this moment on, your body will not know physical fatigue. You will not require long periods of useless inactivity to preserve your physical energies. Nor will you be able to summon a sleeping state out of preference. You will be awake and at peak alertness, now and forever.”

“What about dreams?”

“What about them?”

“I know some things. I know that people go crazy without dream sleep.”

“There are several reasons you won’t, but chief among them will be your capacity to summon refreshing dream states at moments of relative inactivity, such as while riding on public transports. Thirty seconds out of every twenty-four hours will be more than sufficient to avoid creeping psychosis; any more than that is inherently wasteful of you as a resource.”

“What about when I’m home?”

“Home is a place to store your body, or care for it, when it’s not in use. Your body will always be in use. It will always be upright and mobile. The nanite devices will take care of all necessary maintenance. They will, among other things, scrub your flesh and your clothing for all the substances that render an unwashed human body unpleasant to others in your vicinity. You will not need to shower or to brush your teeth or to see to other cosmetic shortfalls, any more than you will need to sleep; and you will not need space to store changes of clothing or other possessions, as you will not have any. This is useful as they just take up expensive and wasteful space. Home, in other words, now joins Thirst and Family and Sleep as among the things you no longer need. Instead, you will always be in public, and always be in motion, wandering around in the world.”

“W-what about food?”

“The nanites will be taking care of your nutritional needs, as they will be taking care of your hydration needs. They will forever be flying free of your body, and into your surrounding environment, obtaining mass that they will deliver back to you converted to any elements you may require. You will never know the messy inconvenience, or distraction, of meals, and as an inevitable side effect, of elimination.”

“B-but what if I want to eat?”

“You may occasionally have cravings for your favorite delicacies, or nostalgia for the pleasures they gave you, but as your digestive system is no longer required, it is currently being reconfigured into new internal structures that will be more useful for your new role in life. That is why I called your attention to the reclamation of your stomach tissue, a couple of minutes ago. Within twenty-four hours you will also no longer have kidneys or a liver; within forty-eight you will no longer have an esophagus or colon. By the end of a week your anus will seal up and even the premise of a meal will be, at best, theoretical. That would remove any last purpose you could possibly have for a home.”

The scale of the changes that this man described were now beginning to overwhelm me. I started to stammer and then felt that cool, calming wave again.

I looked down at my hands. They were a stranger’s hands. And the recombinant tattoo constantly churning at the end of my sleeves was fading, becoming a gray stain and then one that I could barely discern against the strobing skin color. I had the vague idea that the animated ink had once been important to my sense of self, that it had stood for something I’d once believed in, but what that principle had been remained elusive, and was even now fading still further, doing whatever a memory or concept does whenever a mind could no longer grasp it.

The man remained infuriatingly calm. “We do this because home is a point of vulnerability. There will be times when your activities in the world may be opposed by forces as potentially murderous as your recent pursuers. Home is tactically not just the charming human premise of those living an ordinary life; the place where your loved ones will always have to let you in, it is in practice the place where your enemies may find you. It represents another deadly inefficiency that we have eliminated. The creature you are becoming will have no need of it.”

“Then what am I supposed to do all day long?”

“And all night, of course.”

“Yes, all day and all night! How do I have a life?”

He said, “You will have a life, in that you will inhale and exhale and you will speak when required and you will interact in many small ways with any world where we place you. You will, among other things, explore. In any settled environment where we decide you will live, from planetary surface to orbital habitat, you will wander your community, using public transportation services when necessary, having brief and inconsequential conversations with others when you must, occasionally stopping at retail establishments to browse their wares and pretend polite interest, just for verisimilitude. You will never actually buy anything. Why would you, really? Whatever you could conceivably obtain, you have no place to store. Whatever you think you want, you have no purpose for. You will never need to stop because you will never tire or suffer any other physical needs. You will, of course, have enough credit on file to pay for anything you might theoretically need to obtain; it will follow you wherever you go, proof of citizenship wherever we send you.”

“But no food. No drink. No friends. No home.”

He looked amused. “You forget no sex.”

“Just endless wandering, without point!”

“Of course there’s a point,” he said.

And this was where he did something with his hands and a projected image appeared over the table.

It was a panoramic view of a city atrium, one I didn’t know. It was of course possible that familiarity with the locations of the world I’d known, whatever it was called, had vanished along with my memory of its name. But I thought not. I had the vague idea that the world where I’d lived and had people I’d loved and where I’d ultimately betrayed them had been decorated in various ivory shades like this room, although I also had the impression that much of it was adorned with vines and other greenery, hanging like garlands like every balcony. This world I saw now, or at least this location in this city on this world, was dominated by shades of purple, and most of the people seemed to favor it in clothing and hair color, their shades of skin welcome relief from what overwise would have been a cityscape that refused to wander far from a grape palette. The atriums were crossed by escalators and the balconies were teeming with merchants selling food and clothing and things that only the inhabitants of this purple place could want, and in the few seconds the image lasted I saw people ascending, people descending, children being the nasty horrors that children can be in public, single men drifting without vital purpose, women lingering next to kiosks, and a few beings of indeterminate nature having insistent arguments in the shadows. There were a few non-humans, too; there always were, and I spotted a few alien races I cared for and a few others I did not, wandering to and fro, going about their business, and looking isolated among all the humanity.

Then the image faded out, and the man said, “Did you see him?”

“See who?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“I didn’t see anybody!”

“You saw crowds,” the man said. “And in that crowd, there is a single individual, who crossed your field of vision twice, impossible to distinguish from all the people who had thirst and hunger and sleep and homes. Any individual who remains in motion at the same pace as the crowd is an unremarked, impermanent part of his environment. He never sits down on a bench and finds himself in casual conversation with anyone who might then become part of his life. He is never a chatty or charming neighbor who anyone would ever want to know better. He is never a co-worker, a fellow parishioner, a member of organizations. He is always proceeding at a steady pace from point A to point B, never needing to eat, never needing to attend to the other needs of his body, and never being established as someone who stops at a home location on a predictable schedule. Nor will he ever come to the attention of any organization that might want to stop him from doing what he has been put in place to do. Oh, it is possible that if anybody ever notices his isolation,” and here he hesitated, “her isolation, someone might seek to follow her, but otherwise, she is invisible. She is a permanent stranger, someone who the vast majority of humanity will just naturally assume to have an ongoing life they are not privileged to see.”

“People will keep seeing me, though. They’ll recognize me by repetition.”

“They will see. They will not register. Few human beings are awake enough to consider the oddness of one individual who never seems to stop wandering. Additionally, you reckon without the capabilities of the devices that will keep you going. They will make constant, subtle changes to your appearance. Your hair will change. Grow longer. Grow shorter. Your features will cycle through a virtually infinite series of possibilities. Even your clothing, which we will provide, will cycle through a series of never-ending changes. You will often catch a glimpse of yourself in mirrored glass and be surprised, whether in a pleased or displeased manner, by the way you look, which will range from prosperous to derelict. You will never know the person you see. And it will be all surface and it will bear no resemblance to who you will be most of the time, which is nobody. Because being somebody in particular is one of those inefficient things, like thirst, that you no longer need.”

“I’ll go mad.”

“Not at all. Your devices will pay constant heed to your mental health. As you walk, looking like any other vacant person who is not thinking of anything in particular, you will have access to any media you desire. Music, prose, dramatizations in multiple perceived media, the full library of human art, will all be accessible to you as you travel from place to place. As long as you do not have any other agenda to follow—and the nature of the being you are about to become is that of one who may not have an agenda for some time—you may do anything you wish as long as you remain in motion.”

“It’ll still be hell.”

“Not at all. It would be foolish of us to create a being like the one you are about to become and then allow her to become disabled through ennui or mental illness. Fortunately, human happiness is largely the response of the brain to the chemicals generated by stimuli. Your nanites will, again, see to your well-being. You will feel joyful, and alert, and loved; at the very least, never crushingly unhappy. From what I know of you, it will be a significant improvement over your previous life.”

I said, “I doubt that.”

And he shook his head, the way one does with a child who has not managed to pick up the simplest of lessons, and said, “Most of our recruits to this program say that. I’m afraid that it makes the next part necessary. I can only apologize in advance.”

And I felt a click, felt it, not heard it because it made no sound. It was inside me and with it came every memory from the life now gone. I remembered my relationship with my parents, who were still alive somewhere but who had jettisoned me from their own existence for the sake of their shared sanity. I remembered the way I had treated friends. I remembered the things I had done to prosper, and how it had somehow never seemed important to worry about the needs or well-being of any other person, if there was profit to be had at the far end of any transaction; I remembered the ruins I’d left behind, in more than one place, and I remembered the justifications that I’d used to make compromises seem right, reasonable, and the only sensible things I ever could have done. I remembered people who had loved me for a while and been left with no alternative other than hating me. I remembered falling in with this figure, Magrison, and the awful things I had done in his service. I remembered the people who still loved me who were now in danger from him, and how I’d left them behind as the pursuit closed in, always thinking in entirely practical terms, about how they might slow the bastards down, give me time to make my own escape. I remembered killing the one who’d come closest, and the promises he’d made to me just before I’d been lucky and left him in a pool of his own blood. I remembered the others drawing close and the promises they’d made, when it became clear that there would be no outrunning them; and then, finally, I remembered being totally out of hope when I’d entered a certain municipal square and realized for the first time where in the city I was, and what door was within reach; a place that had always been low on my long list of emergency escape plans. I remembered thinking I can go there, and there had been no immediate instinctive response that this was a crazy thing to think, because insanity of that sort is always defined by circumstances, and my circumstances were those of a person who had set fires that had burned more people than I could count, someone who at these final steps of a journey defined by treating those I cared for as disposable now had to admit the final truth; that this was suicide, and that I didn’t care even the slightest bit whether I lived or died.

None of this came as a surprise, not exactly. It all jibed with the various memory traces I’d been able to access, and the things that the man on the other side of the table had said. But knowing something intellectually is not the same thing as knowing it emotionally, or feeling all of a lifetime’s hoarded pain in one heartbeat.

And then I felt another click and all those memories faded into near-nothingness, like bad dreams dispersed by waking.

I found myself shaking, with my head in my hands. I was only dimly aware that my arms must have been freed for the purpose, or that neither my face or my hands felt like my own. What bothered me more is that though I felt like I was weeping, my eyes released no tears. They didn’t even burn, the way eyes do when tears are imminent. That had been an unpleasant sensation and I never would have imagined myself capable of missing it, but now I did, and I believe that of all the things that had been taken from me, this was the one I would find myself missing most of all.

Above all that was the knowledge that this man, whatever his name was, and the beings he represented, were right. The life I’d been promised, the one that had struck my prior self as a living death, was going to be infinitely better than the one I’d had before. The one before was one where I’d only imagined myself unbothered by the things I had done. It had been torment, and I’d skated above it all, fooling myself into thinking I was untouched. I could no longer imagine that I wanted to go back to it.

The man said, “Put your arms down.”

I placed them back on the table. They did not stick there. I guess that I had reached the point where I could be trusted to behave. And they were not my arms. Nothing about them resembled the arms that had done the things I’d just remembered, things that were now as distant from me as a line of biographical summary written about a stranger.

The man studied my face for some time, and what I recognized in his own was a deep compassion, wavering on an invisible pendulum that vacillated between envy and pity.

That had been the source of the malice I’d imagined in his manner. He wanted to go where I was about to go. But the people behind him, behind us now, wanted him to remain where he sat, in the position of the ferryman, taking the influx of the damned from one side of the river, to the other.

When he spoke again, the overwhelming impression I received from him was kindness.

He said,

“You will be a safety measure. You are what exists beyond the law, beyond all the systems that every modern society puts into place to protect people or to further the purposes of those in charge. Someday, and that day may never come, you may hear an inner voice that it would be helpful if you ascended to, let’s say, the thirty-second level of the Mercantile Bank of the Confederacy, or descended to the mass transit tubes, and stood in a certain spot, facing in a specific direction, and waited, in expectation of the moment when you may be needed. And sometimes there will be others in the vicinity, people like you, who have also been made into society’s wanderers, and who will be sent to the same place to attend a situation that requires group action. There are now hundreds of them in any city of any size. You are a family, of sorts, and there are crises where you will work together for extended periods, and where you might get to know one another, via crises that take place no more frequently than once in a decade or so, that the regular population never gets to notice because people like you are around to intervene.”

“Robots,” I suggested.

“Yes,” he said. “That is indeed the term we use in-house.”

I turned my arms palm-up, and examined the strange new implements that were my new hands. They looked entirely human, but the fingers were thicker, and longer; clumsy-looking, I thought, though I knew that they would not be. No, these hands would be skilled at whatever they were asked to do. They were wonderments, like an exotic landscape glimpsed from a window.

I had one more question, and it was a stranger’s voice that asked it. “Magrison.”

“Contending with the threat he represents is one of our long-term projects. Not one earmarked for you.”

My old self might have been disappointed. She’d had any number of scores to settle with the man who had made her a hunted woman. She might have argued, with great passion and eloquence, to be allowed to settle those scores. But she was a stranger. Her feelings were not my feelings and her scores were not my scores. As long as there were plans in place for him, I could turn my attention to the things I needed to care about, like the plans that were in place for me. I was confident that they would be appropriate and that they would be sufficient to help whatever remained in me of the woman now gone, find whatever redemption my own actions would earn for her.

I turned my arms palm-down again, and smiled at the man who had guided me through this difficult birthing.

He smiled back, and said:

“It’s so good to meet you.”