Florida -- Fiction; Immortalism -- Fiction; Science fiction; Walt Disney World (Fla.) -- Fiction
I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately
pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week
sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a
crazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at
Disney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he
asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself.
Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought
of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that
my friend Dan had been so prescient.
The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a
massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the
middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet
away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted
mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they
woke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the
missing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I
felt at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found
myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I'd
built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and
working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to
my Chem thesis at U of T.
After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to
appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten
years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up
to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security
footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted
from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the
scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing
that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter
presets that had been put in place when I was restored.
Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with
hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed
the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with
a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really
loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it,
opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, "I have to pee."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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