IaaS

The Loony was trying to buy duct tape.

I'd stopped without meaning to, the way you stop at the edge of someone else's small disaster, and I wasn't the only one. There were six or seven of us by then, arranged with that studied casualness, none of us admitting we were watching, though I doubt any of us had seen one in the flesh before. They were rare. Rarer still was this: one that looked built, and not built in a workshop either, built in a scrapyard, out of whatever the yard had that day.

He had a roll of the stuff in one of his big hands and was working the reader with the other, the small one, and the small one was the problem. You could see it was the problem. It was newer than the rest of him. Someone had built the two big hands to carry and the third to manage the fine work, and the fine one had gone on last and hadn't been there long, because he used it the way someone in rehab uses the side that's come back to them. Slowly. With attention. Not trusting it. It came down on the reader and missed. Came down again and caught the edge of the plate and the whole arm corrected with a lag you could hear, a little servo cough, and the roll of tape swung.

The reader asked him, politely, to present his payment again.

He presented it again. Missed again.

A woman near me laughed through her nose. Not cruelly. That was the thing I noticed even then, that none of it was cruel, it was the softer register you'd use for a man who'd come out with his shirt done up wrong, a man who plainly could have taken more care and hadn't. He's let himself go, the laugh said. Look at the state of it. And I remember agreeing, in the easy way you agree with a room, because the alternative to a hand you'd built yourself was so obviously available. There was a body shop across the concourse. A good one. You walked in, you were measured, you walked out three days later and everything worked, and kept working, for the rest of a life that no longer ended. I hadn't done it yet. But I knew I would, the way you know you'll get anything seen to eventually. My own hands, the ones I was born with, did what hands do and asked nothing of me. That was the promise of the place across the concourse, as I understood it then, and it was the only promise that mattered. It just worked.

He got the tape eventually. A staff member came out and did something with an older terminal round the side, the kind they keep for edge cases, and it went through, and the Loony took his roll. Someone had started filming partway in and didn't stop when it was over. Kept the lens on him as he turned to go, tracking him the length of the concourse, and I understood the clip would be somewhere by evening with a caption, and that I'd probably see it, and probably smile.

Here is the part I come back to, and I'll say plainly that I don't trust my coming back to it, because I've handled it too many times since and you can wear a memory smooth. But this much I'll stand on.

He didn't care.

Not that he wasn't embarrassed, which is a thing you can be brave about, and the bravery shows. He simply didn't care what the concourse thought of him. The laughter reached him and found nothing to hold. He shifted the roll into a better grip with the hand that had failed him, taking his time, practising, and walked out past the body shop without looking at it, the way you don't look at a thing you've already decided about.

I minded on his behalf. I'll be honest about that. I stood there minding, generously, the way you can afford to mind about a man when you're certain you'll never be him, and the minding curdled into something I couldn't put down.

Contempt needs receiving. You can only look down on a man who is, somewhere in himself, looking up. He hadn't looked up. He hadn't looked at all. And a thing that won't receive your contempt is either beneath your notice, which he wasn't, or above it, which made no sense, because he was a man who couldn't manage a card reader with a hand he'd built when the concourse was full of hands that worked.

Both couldn't be true. I went home carrying the both of them.

I looked him up. Not him, there was no him to find, but the word the laugh had been made of. Loony. It took a while to learn it had been a real word first, Lunist, and that there'd been a period, brief and now faintly embarrassing to everyone, when a few people had looked at the Cybernetics and the Residents and asked in earnest how such a thing might last somewhere there was no one to service it. On the Moon. Then Mars. Then out around the Sun with nothing near enough to matter.

I read that the way you read a thing you already know the ending of. A fad. A phase people had grown out of. It didn't occur to me, standing there with the clip already spreading somewhere behind me, that I'd just watched the phase walk out of a shop with a roll of duct tape. That it hadn't been grown out of at all. That it had simply gone quiet, and built itself hands, and stopped caring whether I laughed.

There were a few thousand of them. That was the first figure I found, and it was old, and it stopped me, because the arithmetic ran the wrong way. The monthly wasn't cheap, but set against forever it was nothing, and it bought everything: a professional body, off the shelf and perfect, the backups, the checkups, the whole standing guarantee that if anything went wrong someone whose job it was would put it right. You paid, and you never had to think about it again. That was the deal. That was the entire genius of the deal. And here was a man who could keep a body running with a scrapyard and a bad hand, choosing to think about it, constantly, forever, when he could have paid once a month and thought about nothing.

I sat with that a long time before I found the forum, and the forum was where the trouble started.

The wiki was reassuring. I want to be clear about the order things happened in, because it matters later that I was reassured first.

It read like every enthusiast wiki reads. Somebody had built it with love and nobody had loved it recently. There were dead links going blue-grey with age, a banner asking for donations towards hosting in a currency that had been renamed twice since, a talk page where two editors had fought to a standstill in a year I had to check, over whether the article should say self-maintaining or independently-serviced, a distinction that meant nothing to me and evidently everything to them. There were pictures and profiles for a few hundred of them, cross-referenced and tagged, build logs and body revisions catalogued like rolling stock, and something in the care of it told you the rest had wanted no part of being catalogued at all. The tone was patient and a little proud and entirely convinced of its own reasonableness, and it made the whole thing feel small. Manageable. A hobby with a wiki is a hobby you can decline.

The number was there, near the top, with a citation-needed flag that had been sitting unanswered long enough to feel like an answer in itself. A few thousand. And underneath it, the thing I'd come for without knowing I'd come for it: a section headed Why so few, which I read expecting a grievance, some story about persecution or cost or the body shops squeezing them out. It wasn't that. It said, more or less, that most people who could do this didn't want to, and left it there, as if that settled anything, as if wanting were a fixed quantity you either had or didn't and there was nothing more to say about the not-wanting. I remember being annoyed by it. It's the kind of non-answer that stays with you precisely because it refuses to be interesting, and then turns out to have been the whole thing.

I read the history the way you'd read the history of anything you'd already decided was a dead end. The Lunists, the earnest ones, the ones the word came from. The early arguments about whether it was even possible to keep a body alive without the standing infrastructure, and the small stubborn cohort who'd concluded it was and set about proving it on themselves. There were photographs. Early bodies, and they were worse than the one I'd seen, genuinely worse, gasketed and asymmetric, the work of people who'd clearly decided that ugly and theirs beat beautiful and borrowed. The special few who'd decided function beat form every time, and wanted you to know it. I found them funny. I'll stand by having found them funny. What I didn't do was ask why anyone would accept looking like that when the alternative was three days in a shop, because the wiki had already told me and I hadn't listened. They didn't want the shop. The wanting was the whole story and I kept reading past it.

Then I found the forum, and the forum was not reassuring, and it took me a while to work out why, because on the face of it it was the most reassuring thing yet.

It was mundane. That was the problem, though I didn't have it in those words at the time. I'd braced myself, without noticing I was bracing, for something with heat in it. Zealots. A manifesto. People who'd stared into the abyss and come back changed. What I got was a thread four hundred posts long about a bearing.

Not a metaphor. A bearing. A specific part with a specific number, and the thread was an argument, decades old and still going, between people who thought you should stockpile the part now, in bulk, against the day nobody made it, and people who thought stockpiling was a fool's comfort because the stockpile would degrade or get lost or outlast your ability to fit it, and that the only real answer was to learn to make the part yourself, from nothing, and people, a third camp, quieter, who thought both of the others were dreaming and that the honest position was to accept you'd fail eventually and get on with the time you had. They were unfailingly civil to each other. They signed off with little courtesies. Someone welcomed a newcomer and told him kindly to search the archive before asking, the question had been done to death, see the megathread, and linked it. It was exactly, precisely the tone of people arguing about how to back up a film collection so it would survive a house fire. Burn it to disc. Discs rot. Keep it on drives. Drives fail. Pay someone to hold it. The someone goes under. Learn to store it yourself. Nobody can, not really, not forever.

Except they weren't talking about a film collection. They were talking about themselves. The thing they were working out how to keep from rotting, from being lost, from outlasting the last person who knew how to service it, was them. And they were doing it in the register of a Sunday hobby, with the search-the-archive courtesies and the decades-old grudges, and not one of them seemed to feel the join between the smallness of the manner and the size of the thing. I felt it. I sat there at whatever hour it had got to and felt the join like a draught from a gap I couldn't find, and I told myself it was absurd, and I kept reading, which is not what you do with things that are absurd.

There was a thread I keep coming back to, about Mars. Someone had worked out a servicing schedule for a body operating unsupported on the Martian surface, thermal cycling, dust ingress, the lot, and posted it for critique, and the critique came, thorough and unhurried, and at no point did anyone say the obvious thing, the thing I was shouting at it, which was: you cannot go to Mars, you are a few thousand people with scrapyard hands, this is a schedule for a journey nobody is taking. They didn't say it because it wasn't obvious to them. To them it was a maintenance question that happened to have Mars in it, the way another forum's question happens to have a rare capacitor in it, and the fact that the maintenance was for a life that intended to be out there, alone, past the reach of anyone, in a decade none of us alive would see, was not the remarkable part. The bearing was the remarkable part. They argued about the bearing.

And there was a poster I noticed and shouldn't have been able to, because there was nothing to notice. Xe wrote the way the others wrote, dry and exact. In one thread xe answered a question by describing having built a particular subsystem, walked the newcomer through the choices, why this material, why that tolerance, all of it first-hand. And then further down, days later, defending the same build against someone who'd done it differently, xe described having been the one who tested the two approaches against each other. Both of them. As if xe'd stood on both sides of the bench at once and hadn't thought it worth remarking on. Nobody else remarked on it either. Somebody thanked xim for the context and the thread moved on, and I sat looking at it, at the small wrong seam of it, and decided I'd misread, because the alternative was a question I didn't have anywhere to put yet. I closed the tab. I opened it again. The posts were still there, still calm, xe still talking about xir own work as though there'd been more than one of xim to do it.

I'd come to the forum expecting sad and found something I had no word for. Not sad. Sad is a thing you can pity from above, and I'd been all set to pity them, the scrapyard hands, the ugly bodies, the arguing about parts. But you can't pity people who aren't asking for the vantage you're offering, and there's a point where the failure to want what everyone wants stops reading as sad and starts reading as wrong, as a fault in the person rather than their circumstances. That's where they'd taken me. Off. Unhinged in a way I couldn't locate, because nothing any of them had said was mad on its own, the bearing was sensible, the schedule was sound, the seam in xir posts I'd surely misread. It was the sum that was wrong. Sane parts, and the whole of it deranged, and me still reading at an hour that made a liar of every excuse I had for still reading.

I went to bed arguing with people who had no idea I was there. That should have told me something too.

I migrated in the autumn. I should put that down plainly because I've noticed I keep not putting it down, its just who I am.

It was the doctor's suggestion. Nothing wrong with me. A note in the family history, a raised likelihood of the heart doing the sudden final thing my grandfather's did, and the suggestion, unhurried, that given the options now available I might look at them sooner rather than later. No pressure in it at all. That's what I keep coming back to, that there was no pressure in it, only a sensible man in a good chair mentioning a risk and letting me arrive by myself at the thing he'd have arrived at for me. I booked the body shop the following week and felt responsible doing it, the way you feel responsible getting a mole checked.

Three days. Everything works. I won't pretend it wasn't a relief, because it was, an enormous quiet relief I hadn't known I was owed. The body did what a body should always have done and never bothered me about it. I stopped thinking about my heart because there was nothing there to think about. That was the promise and the promise was kept, and for a season I was exactly as content as they said I'd be, and I want that on the record before the rest, because the rest makes it sound as though I was unhappy and I was not. I was a tenant and I was glad of it. Then I went back to the forum, and I went back as somebody, which was my mistake.

I'd been lurking for months by then, long enough to feel I'd earned a place in the room. And I'd migrated, which I took, without ever quite saying it to myself, to mean I'd joined something. I was one of the deathless now. A serious person. I'd crossed the line they'd all crossed and I could talk to them across it as an equal, or near enough, and I composed my first post in that spirit, carefully, with a question in it pitched to show I'd done the reading, a small technical thing about power draw that I thought demonstrated I understood the terms.

I did not understand the terms. That became clear inside the hour.

They weren't unkind, at least most of them weren't. I've gone over the replies since, more than once, and there is nothing in them you could point to and call cruel. That was the worst of it. Someone answered the actual question, briefly, and then, gently, as an aside, established that I was off the shelf, that the power figure I'd cited was the figure the manufacturer published and therefore the figure the manufacturer wanted me to have, that I had no way of knowing my own draw because I had no access to the thing that would tell me, and that this was fine, no criticism, it just meant the question I'd asked was a question about a body I didn't really own and couldn't really see inside, and here was roughly what the real number probably was, and wasn't it interesting how far off the published one ran. All very warm. All entirely devastating. I had come in to talk shop and been shown, kindly, that I had no shop to talk, that I was a man who'd bought a beautiful sealed thing and turned up at a forum for people who build to explain how the sealed thing worked, and got the number wrong, from the brochure.

I'd walked in imagining I was one of them. What I was, to them, was a person who'd been handed the ending they were spending their existence trying to write by hand, and who'd come to offer notes on the process. They were polite to me the way you're polite to someone's enthusiastic child. I felt it in whatever a tenant feels things with, and it was not nothing.

Most of them let it go after that, which was its own small humiliation, being not worth the second reply. One didn't.

I'll call xir by the handle xe posts under, which I won't reproduce in full because it's the kind of name a person picks early and carries a long time and plainly wishes xe hadn't, boastful in a register that's dated badly, the sort of thing that must have sounded like a statement once and now just sounds like a year. Xe answered the aside about my power draw with more than the others had, walked me through why the published figure and the real one diverge, and did it without the amusement the others couldn't quite keep out of theirs. Not warmth. Xe wasn't warm. Xe was precise, and being precise at me seemed to cost xir nothing, and I mistook the absence of mockery for respect, which it wasn't. It was just that xe found the technical thing more interesting than the pleasure of my being wrong. The others were enjoying themselves. Xe simply wasn't, about anything, and that was more restful to talk to, and so I kept talking to xir.

That's how it started, the thing this whole record is really about. Not a conversion. A correspondence. Messages, days apart, on and off across the winter, mostly xir explaining and me trying to keep up and pretend I wasn't.

What xe was, I worked out slowly, was the purest of the makers, and the loneliest, and I don't think those two are separable. Xe made everything. Not stockpiled, made. Years ago, decades, xe'd looked at the argument the whole forum was still having, the one I'd read four hundred posts of, about whether to hoard the parts you'll need or learn to make them, and xe'd settled it for xirself the hard way and never looked back. Xe would depend on nobody. Not a supplier, not a stockpile, not a future in which the shops were still open. Xe would carry the whole chain inside xir own competence, ore to component, and if that meant xir body was cruder than a bought one and xir days were spent on maintenance a tenant never thinks about, then that was the price of owing nothing to anyone, and xe paid it, and xe had been paying it for longer than I'd been alive.

And here is the thing I saw, and I want it written down because it was the first time in all of this that I saw something about one of them that they couldn't see about themselves.

The shops hadn't closed. The suppliers were all still there. Everything xe made by hand, in the long unlovely hours, xe could have bought that morning, better and cheaper, from a catalogue. The day xe was preparing for, the day the infrastructure fails and only the self-sufficient go on, hadn't come, and showed no sign of coming, and might be centuries off, or might never arrive at all. Xe had given up decades to a siege that hadn't started. And xe could not say so. I watched xir, over that winter, defend the choice with an energy that had nothing to do with the choice, because the choice was decades deep now and admitting it was early was the same as admitting the decades, and no one alive can do that arithmetic on themselves and come out whole. So xe defended harder. Every year the shops stayed open was another year xe had to be right about, and xe was right, in principle, about a future nobody could prove wouldn't come, and being right in principle was all xe had bought with the time, and xe clutched it.

I thought: how awful, to pay twice for a thing. Once in the doing and again in the defending. I thought it with real superiority, sitting in my sealed body that had cost me three days and a monthly sum I didn't feel, looking down at a person who'd spent decades earning a self-sufficiency the world had declined to require.

I did not notice, that winter, that I had gone back to a room that laughed at me, and stayed, and kept going back, night after night, to talk to the one person in it who wouldn't let me feel welcome. I did not notice that I was doing the thing I pitied xir for. Paying twice. Returning, and returning, to a decision that had already made itself, defending my presence there to no one but myself, unable to leave because leaving would mean the going back had meant nothing.

I closed the laptop most nights still arguing with xir. I told myself it was because xe was wrong. It didn't once occur to me to ask why being right required so much of my attention, or why a content man, a man exactly as content as he'd been promised, was spending his winter at a desk explaining himself to a stranger who built xir own hands and wanted nothing I had.

I have started writing the year at the top. I notice I have started writing the year and I notice I don't quite know why, except that at some point in the last stretch I found I wasn't sure of it without checking, and a thing you have to check is a thing you write down.

The correspondence has thinned. That's the honest first entry after so long, and I'll set it down without dressing it. Xe and I still write, but weeks go by now where once it was nights, and I don't think either of us decided that, it simply wore to this, the way a path you stop walking closes over. I tell myself I'm busy. I am not busy. I have all the time there is. But the forum asks a kind of attention I seem to have less of than I did, and I've stopped asking why, which is itself the sort of thing I'd once have written three paragraphs about and now note in a line and move past.

The upgrade came in the autumn. They don't call it that. It arrived as a notice, and the notice was careful, and the care was the tell if you knew to read it, which I didn't, not really, not then.

My tier was being retired. Wound down, was the phrase, over a period, with support tapering on a published schedule, and the notice was at pains to say I could remain on it as long as I liked. That was the sentence they'd built the whole thing around, that I could stay. It just laid out, underneath, in the same even voice, what staying would come to mean. Fewer updates. Then none. Security patches for a while, then only critical ones, then a date past which a fault would be logged but not necessarily fixed. Nothing forced. Simply a slow removal of the reasons to stay until staying became the choice of a person who wasn't thinking clearly, and I was thinking clearly, and so I upgraded, and felt sensible doing it, the way I'd felt sensible in the good chair with the doctor. I am starting to distrust the feeling of being sensible. It has been present at every decision that turned out to have been made for me.

The new tier was a small step up in cost. A few percent. And it came with things, genuine things, a smoother substrate, a better guarantee, some allowance for backup frequency I hadn't had before and was glad of. On any single ledger it was worth it. That's what I keep arriving at and can't get past. Each time, on its own terms, it is worth it. The increase is small and the benefits are real and the tier below is worse and getting worse, and every part of the reasoning is sound, and the sum of all the sound reasoning is a man who will pay more every few years for the rest of a life that does not end, and cannot stop, because stopping has been engineered into the shape of a decision no sensible person makes. It isn't a trap you can point at. There's no wall. Just a very gentle and unrelenting slope, and a handrail, and the handrail costs a little more each time you reach for it.

I spoke to someone, before I agreed. I wanted to understand the pricing, and to my surprise I was given a person, on a screen, patient and quite candid. I asked why it kept going up, when surely an older format was cheaper to run, not dearer. And xe told me, plainly, that older formats are dearer, because fewer people understand them and there is no scale in them and the ones still running them are the least profitable customers on the books, and that the pricing was not really about cost at all, it was about moving people up, and that xe was telling me this because it was true and because knowing it changed nothing, I would upgrade anyway, everyone did, xe would in my place. Xe was not selling. Xe was explaining, accurately, why the thing would happen, and then it happened. It is the most honest conversation I had in the whole business and it moved nothing at all. I don't know what xe was. Embodied, uploaded, a render the company runs to answer its calls. You don't ask any more. It went from blunt to nosy to unsayable somewhere in the last few years, whether a voice belongs to a person or a heaven or a script, and we all now extend one another the courtesy of not knowing, which I took for manners at the time and have started to think is something closer to a truce. I couldn't have told you what xe was, and it didn't come up, and I have since found I cannot stop thinking that it is a very strange thing for it not to matter.

The migration itself I can't tell you about, because I wasn't there for it.

That is the plain fact and it has taken me until now to feel the size of it. There is a point in the process where they take the backup, the clean copy, everything you are up to that instant, and then there is the procedure, and then you are online again in the new substrate, and between those two there is nothing. Not darkness. Darkness is something. There is no stretch of me between the backup and the waking. I remember deciding. I remember the confirmation, the small everyday click of it. And then I remember being new, and well, and told that it had gone seamlessly, and I have no reason to doubt them and no way on earth to check, because the only witness to whether it was seamless is the thing they produced at the end, which is me, telling you it feels fine.

They compared it to going under. The person on the screen used exactly that comparison, kindly, when I hesitated. You don't remember the surgery, xe said, you go under and you come back and you're you and you don't lie awake over the gap. And that's true, and it settled me at the time, and it has stopped settling me since, because when you go under there is a body on the table the whole time, one continuous thing the anaesthetist is watching, and the you that wakes is the you that slept because it never stopped being there. In my gap there was no table. There was a copy, and a procedure, and a copy that woke. I feel continuous. I feel exactly as continuous as I did before, seamlessly, which is precisely what I would feel either way, and that is the whole of the problem and I have nowhere to put it, so I am putting it here.

And there is a smaller thing, and I almost didn't record it because it embarrasses me, it's so slight against the rest.

I can't feel my heart not beating any more.

That reads as nonsense and I've stared at it and I'm leaving it, because it's exactly the thing. When I migrated I lost the beat, of course I did, there's no heart in this and never was, and I knew that, and it didn't trouble me in daylight. But in the old body, in the dark, in the pause on a stair, I used to notice the quiet where it should have been. A small absence, and I'd feel it, and feeling it was oddly not unpleasant, because to miss a thing you have to still be near enough to it to know its shape. I'd lie in the dark and register the stillness in my chest and think, there, that's where it was, and the registering was a kind of company.

The new tier is cleaner. Smoother, the notice said, and it is. And somewhere in the smoothing, the absence stopped reaching me. I lie in the same dark now and there is no quiet where the beat was, because there is no longer any me that goes looking for it. The stillness isn't even still. It's just nothing, unnoticed, the way the back of your own head is nothing. They didn't take my heartbeat. I'd already lost that and made a sort of peace with the losing. They took the part of me that knew to miss it, cleaned it out as an inefficiency, a legacy behaviour carried forward for no functional reason, and they were right, it had no function, it did nothing but ache faintly in the dark and remind me what I'd been.

There's no setting for it. I looked. You can't restore the thing that notices, there's nothing to tick. And I can't prove to you, or to myself, that I ever used to lie there and feel it, because the only witness to that man is this one, and this one doesn't. I have his diary saying he did. I have my word, to me, that the word is his. That's all any of us has, it turns out, and I never once thought about it until the night I went looking for an ache and couldn't find the part of me that used to do the looking.

I meant to write to xir about it. I didn't. I've noticed I keep not writing to xir, its just who I am now, apparently. I'll put that down too, and move past it, the way I seem to move past everything these days.

They keep the sols out here and I keep the date out of habit, and lately I write both because I have stopped trusting either on its own. The sol is the mine's count, ticked off since the day the rock was first cut, and it does not care what year it is or who is working it. Four thousand four hundred and seventy-one days this mine has been eating itself outward, and it will log the four thousand four hundred and seventy-second whether I am here for it or not. The date is mine. I am less and less sure I am keeping it right. Two clocks, and a man in the gap between them, which is where I seem to live now.

I should say, because this diary has a long memory and I do not, that I am not the man who started it. Not in the way that matters to a bank. I had money once. It is in the first entries, the ease of it, the monthly sum I said I didn't feel. I feel it now. I have felt it for decades. The money did not vanish, which is what I used to think had happened to it. It changed. It went, a sensible step at a time, into the one thing it could go into, the rent of being what I am, and what I got back each time was more of being what I am, and you cannot spend that anywhere. That is the part it took me too long to see. I am not poor because I was careless. I am poor because everything I earn is paid in their coin and their coin buys one thing, more subscription, more tier, more of the body that earns the coin, and the circle closes and closes and there is no door in it. I earn well out here. It makes no difference. I am paid in exactly the currency of what I owe, by the people I owe it to, and a debt like that is not a debt, it is a shape you live inside.

Which is why I am out here at all, and I want to be accurate about this, because I used to tell it wrong. I am not obsolete. I kept up. That was the whole of the slope, that you keep up, that you pay to stay current and you do stay current, and I am as capable as anything built this year because I have paid, again and again, to remain so. It bought me nothing but the staying. At home there is no work that clears what the staying costs. Out here there is, because a body like mine needs no air and no warmth that matters and no ride home and can be moved between shells like a tool between hands, and on that one axis I am cheaper than the alternatives, and so this is where the coin is, and so this is where I am. Not dumped. Recruited, slowly, invisibly, by the simple fact that nowhere else could I afford to keep being recruitable.

The swap is the whole business of a belter and I have done it more times than I have counted. You are backed up, you are decanted into the mining body for the tour, you work the rock, and when the tour ends you are put back into your own body, your social one, the one that walks and sits at a desk and writes this, and you come in from the black. You go under at the rock and wake at the station and there is a gap and you long ago stopped feeling the gap. I stopped feeling gaps years ago. I wrote that entry too.

This tour ended early. That is where I have to slow down, because I have read what I am about to write several times now and it does not get smaller.

There was an accident. I know it the way you know a thing from the news. A fault, a decompression that ought to have meant nothing to the mining body except that it caught the body wrong, and wrote it off. Wrote me off, they would say, except that is the thing. They did not lose me. They had me. They had yesterday's me, the routine backup, clean, sitting safe on the station the way it always sits, and the body was gone and recovering what was in it at the end was expensive and I was four days from the end of the tour, so they did the sensible thing, the thing I had agreed to, and they restored yesterday's backup into my social body and brought me in.

I came in a week early. That is how it was put to me, warmly, as though it were a gift. Home ahead of schedule. The claim was already filed, the body written down as an asset loss, the paperwork moving before I woke, and everyone I dealt with was kind and a little congratulatory, because from where they sat nothing bad had happened. An old asset had a mishap and the redundancy worked exactly as sold. I was whole. I was early. I should, the tone suggested, be pleased.

I went looking for the day I lost and this is what there is.

There is a gap in the shift log. The mine's count runs unbroken, it does not skip, the rock was cut on every one of those sols and the log says so. But my shifts against it are short. One sol the mine worked and I did not, or rather one sol the mine worked and the record of my working it belongs to a man who is no longer here to have worked it. That is how I found out. Not by feeling, I told you I do not feel gaps, but by a mismatch between the mine's clock and my own that a man who kept only one would never have caught. The rock remembers a day of me that I do not have.

And there is the accident, which I was not present for, because the backup they woke is from the day before it. I died out there. Some version of me, the one that had lived the last full day of the tour, felt whatever there was to feel when the body went, and that one is gone, written down with the body as a loss, and I, this I, was never there. Everyone else was. There is a report. There are people who saw the fault register and filed the claim. They were all present at my death. I am the only one who wasn't. I have heard, all my life, back when I had the kind of life you say such things in, that in the end everyone dies alone. It turns out that was a mercy they never mentioned was on offer. You can die and not be there. You can be the one person in the whole event who missed it, brought back from the day before to read about your own ending on a form filled out by strangers who were kinder to your death than you were given the chance to be.

That is the large thing and it is almost too large to hold, so I will put down the small thing, which is worse, and I have worked out that it is worse and I am not going to soften it to sound reasonable.

I made a post that day. On the forum. In the day I don't have.

I found it because someone had answered it. I went to the forum for the first time in longer than I like, the way you go back to an old house, and there at the top of my own small history was a post carrying the missing sol, words in my hand that I have no memory of setting down, and beneath it a reply. The reply is the fabricator's. Xe had answered me. Xe, who I let fall out of my life the slow way, without ever deciding to, had answered something I said on the last day I lived, and the answer takes for granted a thing I had apparently told xir, some context, some turn the talk had taken, and I do not have it. I can read my own words. I cannot get back the man who chose them or the thing he was reaching for. Xe replied as though I were still there to receive it. I was not. I had been brought in a week early, cleaned back to the day before, and the man xe was writing to had been written down with a body on a rock.

I have read the post perhaps forty times. It is unremarkable. That is the cruelty of it. If it were a confession, a breakthrough, some last word, I could grieve it as an event. It is just a man mid-thought, easy, alive, saying something to someone he had drifted from and had evidently started drifting back toward, and the thought is cut off at the root and I am the stump. I can see that I was about to do something. Reach back to xir, maybe. Say a thing I had been not-saying for years. I will never know, because the only witness to what that man intended is this man, and this man arrived the following week out of the day before, and has the post, the reply, and the silence where the rest of him should be.

And here is what I keep arriving at, sitting with the two clocks and the answered post.

I have been doing this to myself for years. I have. I pruned and chose and let things go for space and cost, decided this memory earned its tier and that one didn't, edited myself down the slope one economy at a time, and I called it managing, I called it sensible, and every time it was my hand on the pen. This was the same cut. The exact same operation, a day of me taken out and the rest sewn shut so cleanly I only found the seam by accident. The only difference, the only one, is that this time the hand was not mine. They did in one afternoon, for the price of a body, what I had been doing to myself for decades and calling my life. And they had every right. I signed it. It is in the terms. A reasonable clause any reasonable person accepts, and I accepted it, back when I had the wealth to be casual and the heartbeat to miss and the habit of writing three paragraphs where one would do.

I did not write back to xir. I have started the reply four times and closed it four times, and the reason I close it is that I already know what xe would say. Xe would understand. That is the worst of it, xe would understand completely, better than anyone alive, and then xe would ask, without any cruelty, what I had expected. Going the corporate route. Handing the pen to a company and being surprised the day they used it. Xe settled all of this for xirself before I was ever born into this life, took the hard road precisely so that no afternoon like mine could ever happen to xir, and xe was right, and being right would be no comfort to either of us, and I cannot bear to be understood that accurately just now. So I close the draft.

I have started keeping the tab open, though. That is new. I keep it open with xir reply on it, and my severed post above it, and I look at them the way I used to lie in the dark and go looking for a heartbeat, except now I know better than to expect the part of me that would feel it to still be there.

There is no date at the top any more. I noticed that this morning and sat with it, which is what I do instead of feeling things now. The period is theirs. It is the billing count and it has run without a single error since the autumn I walked into the body shop, sixteen hundred and eight of them, and I could not tell you what most of them contained but I can tell you the company knows precisely, because the company has never once mislaid a period. The sol is the mine's, and the mine is nothing to do with me now, and I have been carrying its count forward myself since I came in from the black, adding to it, keeping the rock's clock in a room the rock has never heard of. It is almost certainly wrong by now. I cannot check it. That is not a reason to stop.

I had to look up the year to write this next part. It is 2197.

The trade of time in the mines for time on Earth went, and I should record that, because it is the only thing in two centuries that ever moved in my favour and I had nothing to do with it and thats a sad thing for an immortal to admit.

It was not us. It came out of the Eurasian Federation, out of the seams and the orbitals where the digital shops organised first, and it took forty years and it was ugly for most of them. What came out the far end was a set of rules about what a company may take back from a body that owes that company its existence. You cannot now be paid only in more of yourself. That is the whole of it, more or less, and it sounds small written down and it broke the rocks open. There are still belters, still tours. But a tour now buys a man something he can carry off the rock and spend on something that is not his own upkeep, and the arrangement I lived under, where the years out there bought nothing but the right to go out again, is gone. I will not pretend to have been part of ending it. I was in it. I was in it for a very long time and I described the circle in this diary with great precision and did nothing whatever about it, because I was busy, in the way that men are busy who have all the time there is.

We never took the rules here. Not properly. Some of them, watered, late. It is one of the few things I still recognise about the country I was born in, that we would rather be free to be used than told we cannot be. And I will say the other half of it too, because it is true and it makes me tired: the same streak is where the makers come from. Not all of them. The odd and the obsessed turn up everywhere, and there are makers in the Federation, good ones, better documented than ours, but there they are a hobby with a waiting list and here they were a necessity, and the difference in the numbers is not an accident. It takes a certain kind of country to produce a man who would rather machine his own hands for forty years than let anyone else hold the pen. It takes the same kind of country to let a company pay that man in coin only that company honours. The word for both is independence, and it is a good word, and I have never worked out what to do with the fact that I love it in the one and it cost me everything in the other.

I went back to Ohio for a piece of paper.

That is the whole of it and I have stopped being embarrassed by how small it sounds. After the rock, after the singular sol I do not have and the post I did not write, I wanted one fact about myself that had never been through their hands. Not a backup. Not an export. Something set down in ink by somebody who did not work for them, before any of this, and left in a drawer in a county that still has drawers.

I did not think it would tell me I was real. I want to be honest here, because I have caught myself lying in these entries and the lying is how you get worn smooth. I knew what the paper could do. It could tell me a man was born. What I wanted was to hold something that could contradict me. Everything I have is me saying so. I wanted one thing in the world that could disagree.

While I am being honest, the ledger of what I still hold.

I do not have my mother's voice. That went a long time ago, in one of the consolidations, and I remember deciding it was the sensible thing because I had her face and her name and the voice was the expensive part. I do not have the twenties. I do not have the first body, not the inside of it, not what it was like to be in. Most of the belt is a summary now, two hundred years of rock rendered down to the fact that I was there and it was cold in a way that did not matter. I let all of that go in the ordinary way, a tier at a time, and I would let it go again.

And I have the concourse entire.

The roll of duct tape. The two big hands and the small new one that had gone on last. The servo cough on the correction and the way the roll swung. The woman laughing through her nose, not cruelly, that softer register. The body shop across the way with the light in it. I have the whole of that afternoon at a fidelity I could not afford for my own mother, and I know exactly what that says about me and I have made my peace with what it says. Xe never once looked at me. I have gone over it so many times it has become the thing I check myself against, the way you check a watch against a bell. Xe did not look up, xe did not look round, xe never registered a single one of us. That is the whole reason it lodged. I have kept it accurate.

Sometimes I wonder if its the only thing I've kept accurate.

The county still holds vital records and will issue a certified copy to the person named, or to a parent, child, spouse or sibling, with documentation. It is not a secret. Anyone entitled can have one in a fortnight for a fee I would not notice.

I am not entitled.

The woman at the counter was sorry about it and I believe she was sorry. The person named is deceased. There is a death registered in the twenty-sixties, filed at the time by somebody, with the body shop's address as the place, and once that entry exists the file closes to everyone but the family of the man in it. I am not his parent, his child, his spouse or his sibling. She could not find a box for what I am, and she looked, she went and asked, she came back and said there was guidance and the guidance did not cover it. So I am on the paper twice, born and died, both in ink, both entered by people who are gone, and neither entry has anything to do with the thing standing at the counter with a fee card.

I asked who had filed the death. She said she could not tell me that either.

The parish had the baptism, and I want to put down what happened there because it stayed with me and none of it was the refusal.

The building has been three other things since and is a church again. The woman who keeps the books is the fifth in her family to keep them, which she mentioned the way you would mention a postcode. Five of them. Her great-great-grandmother's hand is in the same run of volumes as my mother's name, and none of those women are here any more, and the books are, and she is, and there is a girl of about twelve in the office who will presumably be the sixth. I have outlasted every one of them. They have a continuity I will never have and I understood that standing in the vestry with my coat still on, that they hand it down and it stays, and I keep everything and it thins.

I sat down at some point in that conversation. I want to put that down because it stayed with me too. There was a chair and I took it, and I have not needed a chair since the twenty-sixties, and I sat in it anyway because a man standing over a seated woman is a shape people do not like, and my shape is roughly manlike. I performed sitting. That is what I have been doing for a hundred and thirty-five years and I only noticed it because I had come there specifically to find out what I am.

She sent me to the priest, and he was not hostile, and he had clearly had the conversation before, which I had not expected and which took something out of me.

He does not think I am damned. He was firm about that, as though it were the accusation he most wanted to head off, and I think it probably is. Nobody in his tradition has me in hell or going there. What he thinks is simpler and I could not get under it. A person has a soul. That is the whole argument. He said it the way you would say a person has a spine, and when I asked him what it was, what it consisted of, where it sat, how anybody could tell, he did not squirm and he did not elaborate. He said that was rather the point, and that if it were the sort of thing you could locate and copy then his own position would have collapsed a long time ago, and other people's would have too.

I had my answer ready. I have had it ready for a century. I said I remember it all, I remember the tape and the concourse and my mother's face, I am continuous, I feel continuous, there was no break.

And he said, gently, that a well-kept record would say exactly that.

I have no reply to that. I have not found one in the weeks since. The worst of it is that I have evidence he does not have and it is on his side. He does not know about the sol I am missing. He does not know that I was brought in a week early from the day before, that I was not present at my own death, that there is a post in my hand I cannot remember making. I could have told him and I did not, and I have wondered since whether that was shame or simply the instinct not to hand a man a better argument than the one he is using.

I tried, before I left, to make him feel something about me. That is the part I would cut, if I were cutting for shame rather than for space.

I told him about the heartbeat. The old body, and the quiet where the beat should have been, and lying in the dark going looking for it, and how they cleaned out the part of me that went looking, and how I cannot find the absence any more. I told it well. I have told it to myself so often that it comes out shaped. And halfway through I heard what I was doing, which was producing an ache I no longer have as a credential, holding up a grief I lost the equipment for a hundred years ago and saying look, look, this proves there is somebody in here. A recording of a man missing his heart. Played to prove the recording is a man.

He was very kind about it. That was the moment. Not the counter, not the two entries. A kind man listening carefully to my best evidence and then, at the end of it, asking after my journey.

There was one more, and she is the one I keep coming back to. A house four streets over, some cousin's line, four generations down from anyone I ever met, and she would not have me past the door. She was not rude. She could not say why, either. I watched her try and fail to find the words, and in the end she said she would rather not, if it was all the same. And it was all the same. I said so and I went. I respected it more than either of the others, because it was the only response all week that didn't feel rehearsed. Something about me came up her hallway and she did not want it in her house.

I am still keeping the mine's count. I checked it against nothing on the flight back, because there is nothing to check it against, and I added a sol.

The circa is new. I have put it there because I cannot any longer stand to write the figure as though I knew it.

The count broke somewhere in the last two hundred years and I do not know where. There was a consolidation, and then another, and at some point after the second one I found I was carrying a number that did not agree with the number I had carried before, and there is no rock to ask. The mine is not there. It was worked out and abandoned and the company that ran it was bought and the buyer was bought and I could not now tell you who owns the hole. So I reconstructed it. I sat down and worked forward from the last figure I trusted and I have been adding to that ever since, a sol a day, faithfully, to a total I invented.

I have kept a ritual and lost the thing it counts. I am aware of how that reads. I do it anyway, every day, and I would like it noted that the doing is not nothing even when the number is.

The year, since I had to fetch it: 2481.

My provider has been sold four times. The current one has never, so far as I can establish, dealt with a customer in my format before me. I speak to systems now, and the systems escalate to people who read from a document, and the document is not the contract, it is a summary of a summary. Twice this century I have been asked to explain my own terms to the company that holds them. I do it well. I have had practice.

The ledger, since I am being honest, and since the honesty is the only part of this I still perform reliably.

I do not have my mother's face. That went in the second consolidation. I remember that I had it. I remember choosing, and I remember the reasoning, and the reasoning was that I had her name and the fact of her, and a face is expensive, and I could describe her in words and keep the words for almost nothing. So I have the words. I wrote them myself. They are accurate, I am sure they are accurate, and they produce nothing when I read them.

I have the concourse.

I went looking, this century, for the clip.

It was the priest that started it, three hundred years ago, which tells you something about the pace at which I now do things. A well-kept record would say exactly that. I have turned that over for three centuries and eventually arrived at the only test available, which was to find something outside myself that had been there.

Somebody filmed it. I have always known that. I watched xim start, partway through, and keep going after it was over.

The platform it went to is gone. That went first, inside forty years, the way they all went. The archive it was sold into is gone. The company that bought that archive migrated what it judged worth migrating and I have read the criteria and I was not in them, and neither was anyone else's afternoon. The public record of the twenty-sixties, the enormous, total, unforgettable record we all assumed we were making, is the thinnest layer in the ground. There is more surviving text from the fourteenth century.

It survived in a maker's hoard, and I had to ask for it, and the asking cost me something I had been carrying for four hundred years without noticing I still had.

There is a camp among them, there always was, that decided early the answer was to keep everything. Engraved, permanent, unindexed, on the grounds that you cannot know now what you will want later and the only honest policy is to refuse to choose. I read four hundred posts mocking them for it, back when the forum was a going concern and I was new enough to enjoy watching people taken apart. No index. No scale. No discipline. I joined in, in this diary, with some elegance I thought at the time.

One of them is still going. Not xim, I should say that plainly, because I have written about only one maker in this diary for four hundred years and this is not xir. The two of them were the opposite ends of the same argument and never once agreed about anything. This one is the other pole. Xe was arguing the method when I first lurked, defending it against the indexers year on year, never conceding a point and never winning one, and xe is still there, and the indexers are not, and so is xe, and the one I actually knew is not. I wrote to xim. I explained what I wanted. An afternoon in the twenty-sixties, a concourse, a shop, a clip somebody took and put somewhere that no longer exists.

Xe answered in eleven years.

Not silence, exactly. Xe acknowledged receipt inside the day. Then eleven years, and then the afternoon, with no apology attached, because there was nothing in xir mind to apologise for. Xe had it. Xe had always had it. It was in there the whole time, safe, perfect, unreachable, and getting it out was simply the work, and the work was eleven years of going through an ocean of other people's afternoons by hand, one at a time, because xe built it that way on purpose and would not build it any other way now.

Xe won. That is what I keep arriving at and I cannot make it sit flat. Everything the indexers kept and sorted and sensibly pruned went with the companies that hosted it, and the afternoon exists on the far side of four hundred years because one obstinate creature refused to decide what mattered. Xe was right. Xe was right in a way that took eleven years to demonstrate, and if I had asked for two afternoons it would have taken twenty-two.

I have watched it four hundred times.

The concourse is smaller than I have it. That was the first thing and it was almost funny. Six or seven of us, I wrote, and there were nine, and the light is worse, and the shop across the way is not where I have put it, it is further along and half the size. The woman does laugh through her nose. I had that. I had that exactly, and hearing it come out of the recording after four hundred years was the closest thing to the old ache I have had since they cleaned the aching out.

And there is a man standing at the left of the frame with his hands in his pockets, and I know the coat, and I have not seen the back of my own head since before I was this.

Xe never looks up.

Not once. Xe works the reader with the small hand, and misses, and corrects, and takes the tape, and turns, and goes, and at no point in one hundred and forty seconds does xe raise xir head towards the people laughing at xir. The recording is quite clear. It is the only clear thing left from that century.

In my memory xe looks at me.

I have carried that for four hundred years. Not a glance at the crowd. At me, particularly, on the way past, one flat unhurried look that took me in and did not need anything from me, and it is the most vivid thing I own, more vivid than my mother, and I have paid for the storage of it in currencies I no longer have names for.

It did not happen. The recording says it did not happen. And this diary, which I wrote that same night, before there was any of this to want, says twice that it did not happen. Xe never once looked at me. My own hand. Two witnesses, one of them me, both against me.

I have read the entry and watched the film and gone back to the memory, and the memory is unmoved. Xe looks at me. Xe looks at me now, in the remembering, having just watched xim not do it.

There is a thought I reached for immediately and I want to put down that I reached for it, because the reaching was probably the point. A record does not drift. That was his whole argument, that I am a well-kept record, and a well-kept record would still say what it said. Wearing a memory smooth by handling it, rewriting the reel a little every time you play it, needing so badly to have been seen that you eventually are: that is not what a file does. That is what a person does. I had here, at last, the thing I went to Ohio for. Something outside me that disagrees with me. Proof, I thought, for perhaps a week.

It is not proof. I have had three centuries of practice at spotting this in myself and I spotted it in the end.

I cannot show that the drift happened by wear. Things have been done to my record by other hands. There was a day taken out on a rock. There have been consolidations I consented to and migrations I was not present for, and any of them could have touched the concourse, and the company would not consider it worth logging even if I could get anyone to look. And worse than that, and this is the one I sat with longest: I have been holding the pen myself. Four centuries of choosing what to keep. A man who prunes his own memory every few decades to make room for one afternoon is not a passive victim of erosion. He is an editor. I may simply have written it in, slowly, over hundreds of years, in the ordinary course of deciding what was worth the tier.

So the drift proves nothing at all. It only means the file is corrupt, and there is no one left who can tell me whether it corrupted itself, which would make me a man, or was corrupted, which would make me what he said I was.

I asked for the forum afterwards. That took a fortnight.

I have thought about the difference more than is reasonable. The afternoon was a stranger's, one clip in an ocean xe had swept up wholesale because sweeping wholesale is the doctrine, and finding it meant going through the ocean. The forum was xirs. Xe had been in it, xe had argued in it for a century, against the very person I was writing to xim to find, and that part of the hoard is sorted. Indexed. Cross-referenced by thread and by year and by handle, in perfect order, by the one who spent forty years arguing that order was a trap.

Xe did not remark on this and I did not raise it.

So I had the forum, all of it, and I read the whole thread this time.

Not just my severed post and xir reply, which is all I have had for three hundred years, but the weeks before it. And what is in those weeks is a man circling something. Asking questions that are not quite about bearings. Asking, in the way you ask when you have not admitted to yourself that you are asking, how a person gets out. What it would take. Whether it could be done to someone already in a bought body, and what would be left of him if it were.

Xe answered that, on the sol I do not have. I had read the reply before and taken it for a technical note. In the thread, in order, with what came before it, it is not a technical note. It is an invitation. Come and see me and we will look at what you are made of.

I never answered, because I was written off four days from the end of a tour and brought in a week early from the day before, and the man who arrived did not know he had asked.

I cannot tell you whether he would have gone. That is the part I keep pressing on, and it does not give. I can read a man building towards something across five weeks. I cannot get inside him. The only person who could say whether he meant it is the one they wrote down with the body, and I have been standing in for him ever since, badly, on the strength of a memory that has been quietly editing itself in my favour for four hundred years to give me the one thing I never had, which is somebody off the grid looking up and seeing me there.

Xe posted for another sixty years. Bearings, mostly. Then the posts stop, without a farewell, because that is not done, and nobody on the board asked where xe had gone, because that is not done either. Dead, or gone out, or still going somewhere no forum reaches. There is no way to establish which and there was never going to be.

I have put the correction in this entry. It is there, above, in plain terms: xe did not look at me.

I know which of the two I will be carrying in fifty years, and it is not this entry.