“Your body is a prison! It is a thing of disgusting meat parasitically clinging to your soul, draining the life out of you! It dooms you to an eternity of rotting death!”
It’s not a bad speech, Edith thought, at least as far as these things go. The woman—and it’s odd that it’s a woman, but it takes all sorts—hadn’t gotten to a call to action, and no one else in the busy plaza was really paying attention to her, but she was still working up a good head of steam. Frothing at the lips, which was a good touch. Definitely dehydrated, though; the hot summer sun seemed unable to wring a single drop of sweat from her wrinkled skin.
“You will die having never known the truth of your existence! Trapped in the demiurge’s prison, trapped in your rotting bodies, trapped in hell! Because this world is hell, it has always been hell, and no amount of ‘restorative justice’,” she screamed the worlds like they were full of bile, “or ‘hashtags’ or ‘socialism’ will ever change that! True liberation is impossible within flesh!”
If Edith were the betting sort, she’d put good odds on a cynical reading of the discolorations marring the woman’s beige skin: impending liver failure exacerbating the bruising around the track marks on her arms, malignant skin cancer in its early stages, and badly healed sunburns. Slowly rotting, raging at a world that refused to do anything to help her, Edith supposed.
Not a formal diagnosis, of course, but it was the best she could do from her seat on a shady bench nearly ten meters away. The woman could have taken five steps sideways and gotten out of the sun—but if she had that much sense then she wouldn’t be preaching to a bunch of office drones on their lunch breaks and kids playing hooky and the little group of seniors with their incomprehensible domino-based games.
And to Edith, of course, who didn’t cleanly fit into any of those types.
“Yeah?”, a man yelled, “then what are we supposed to do about it?”
The heckler didn’t fit any of the types either. White trash, Edith judged, meth-skinny and wearing barely enough to cover the circuit-motif tattoos that (apparently) covered his entire body. Cutoff jeans and a cutoff tank-top and dirty brown hair in a pixie cut that might as well have been done by the same pair of scissors. Cheap synth-leather shoes, but well cared for. He was probably a plant, Edith decided.
“But it’s not! True liberation is possible! The oligarchs have already ascended! And they mean to leave us here to rot as they remake the heavens in their own image, creating a world where death is our birthright but not theirs! But they can be stopped, there is still time, their machines are waiting for us below the surface! We still have a chance and all we have to do is take it and we’ll be free, really free!” She sounded like she was about to cry. “The true liberation is at hand!”
“At hand?” The heckler yelled. “Where is it?”
“Yes! It’s there,” she pointed at the building where Edith worked, “right there! In the sub-basement! All we have to do is get inside, and,” she cast around the crowd, searching for a sympathetic eye," and," a spec of attention, “and just … take it …”
Nothing.
Because really, how could a single madwoman raise a mob from a crowd of people doing their best to ignore her? She was lucky, really. If anyone had cared enough to listen—anyone except Edith, anyway—they’d have called the cops minutes ago.
But no one cared.
The obvious plant ran up as she started to cry. Edith had to strain her ears to hear what they said to each other as he led her away. “Hey, it’s okay, ma. We’ll try again later. These fucks are too indoctrinated to recognize what’s going on, right?”
“B-brainwashed. It doesn’t have to be like this. W-why won’t they listen? The liberation …”
“I know, ma. The liberation. We’ll get it right next time.”
“Yeah. W-we will. True freedom …”
And that was that. The plaza collectively exhaled a sigh of relief; being around crazy-types was never comfortable, even when they weren’t trying to demand attention. And it’s easier to relax when you don’t have to unsee and unhear things.
Edith stretched. Moving her muscles always felt good, better than almost anything. Perhaps she was only meat but she was glorious meat, muscular and well-toned in a way that most people thought took hours of daily effort and a strictly managed nutritional regime. Her body was still a luxury good, at least until anyone but the crazies started to catch on.
Ah, well, Edith thought. Show’s over. Back to work.
Edith is a connoisseur of the flesh. She was trained for it, first voluntarily and then not, but it has always enraptured her—she would not be suitable for her work otherwise. Once it was her first love, when she had not yet learned self-control or how to make herself useful, though she was never any good at cleaning up after herself. Three times, only that, and then a decade spent in prisons and asylums until God reached down and lifted her up and wiped away her sentence, which had grown bloated by the corpses of half a dozen others laid out on her cells’ concrete floors, each one the most fascinating model kit in the world. She was going to rot in solitary, but God found her, and saw her use, and now Edith is Theirs.
God is sitting in the waiting room when Edith steps out of the elevator, tapping a pen that’s probably worth more than Edith’s life on Their clipboard. Legs crossed, opalescent hair artfully rumpled. A faint frown adorns Their perfect face. Edith cannot see Their eyes—no one can, as far as she’s been able to determine—but she feels Their gaze flick up to her, and then away. Her fingers ache. There is nothing Edith wants more in the world than to understand and worship God’s body, and for that reason God has decreed that Edith is forbidden to attend any of Their sessions with the other surgeons.
The waiting room is a breezy, elegant space, full of natural light and plants. It occupies nearly the entirety of three floors of the building’s subbasement, excepting its elevator banks, restrooms, and a number of delicately decorated offices stacked along its walls. The first thing clients see when they step out of the elevator is the massive waterfall on the waiting room’s far side, and God always makes a point of explaining that it’s a natural waterfall: it was transported in one piece from a rather fetching little tropical island that has since sunk beneath the waves.
There are exactly five seats in the entire waiting room. They are rarely used; making a client wait is a sin.
Edith scurries across the floor towards the second bank of elevators, careful to keep to the wooden “walkways” which run between the “islands” dotting the floor—patterned carpet, elaborately composed bonsai scenes, the two clusters of seats. Dirtying God’s carpets is a sin; making the lobby ugly by hurting a plant is worse.
Once, when Edith was first learning her new job, she asked her manager why there wasn’t a more direct way to reach the sub-subbasement’s theaters. The answer was, firstly, because God did not decree a second entrance; and, secondly, because the waiting room is a killing floor, always ready should the building ever be compromised by protestors, saboteurs, or God’s enemies. It should be reassuring, but ever since that Edith’s heart has always itched as she passes through, fearful of being judged and found wanting.
“Edith!” God calls, freezing her in place. “Come over here, honey.”
She hovers uneasily at the edge of the seating area. It is unlike God to sit in the waiting room, and stranger still for Them to want her presence there. Their meetings are more often undertaken in one of the rooms made for that purpose, or, occasionally, in Edith’s sterile little office, right next to her theater. The waiting room is for clients, not staff.
“Now,” God taps Their pen. Not nervously, for God cannot be nervous, but close enough to that impossibility that it puts Edith even more on edge than she always is around Them. “There’s a rather special client coming any moment, and We want you to attend the consultation. You’ll be performing the procedure after, with Us supervising, and We think the client should meet you first,” which is utterly against the usual protocol. “So—”
The elevator chimes.
In the two and a half seconds before its door opens (a carefully timed gap), God whirls to Their feet, Their immaculate suit momentarily ruffled, and thrusts the clipboard into Edith’s hands. Their opal buttons and embroidery sparkle in the light; the pen is gone. They are halfway to the elevator before its occupants emerge—first an ethnically ambiguous man, and then, half-hiding behind his fashionably muscular form, a young girl.
“Mr. Orion! We’re so glad you were able to make the time for Us.” God’s smile doesn’t reach their unseeable eyes—but then, nothing ever does. “And this must be Aria. Hello, dear, We’re so excited that you’ve finally decided to visit Our little establishment.”
“You can just call me Vince, Lydia, I always tell you that,” the man says with a chuckle. Edith’s head aches. “And yes,” he rests one hand on the girl’s shoulder, pulling her in front of him, “this is my lovely daughter. Say hello to Ms. Ambrosov, Aria.”
“Hi, Ms. Ambrosov. It’s nice to meet you,” the words are unpleasant in Edith’s ears. Overly rehearsed.
“Aww, it’s lovely to meet you too, honey. And this,” God gestures back towards Edith, like she’s an afterthought, “is Dr. Edith Nesmith. She’ll be helping you with your little problem,” the prospect of having to engage in small talk horrifies Edith. She’s not trained for this, and trying and failing is a sin, but God is merciful. “Now! If you’ll come into my office, We’d love to get caught up while Our technician takes care of your daughter …”
“I can’t spare the time, Lydia. Not today. Business, you know? There’s a merger that needs my personal attention, and I’m meeting one of the Bentners after. Can’t keep those buggers waiting, and I’m sure my people have told your people exactly what I want.”
“Oh! I see,” God’s voice is exactly the same as ever, Their words uncolored by relief or disappointment, “of course.”
“I’ll be seeing you soon, though.” The man performatively stretches out one of his arms, and rotates it. Frowns. “Been having a bit of trouble since my last fight with the old ball and chain. I’m thinking that maybe an upgrade’s in order.”
“Of course,” God smiles, “whenever’s convenient. We’ve been testing some new materials.”
“Good, good. Well. Be a good girl for daddy, okay, Aria?” He barely stoops, just speaks down in her general direction. “One of my men will come by to get her when you’re done.”
That’s all the goodbye his daughter gets, and he’s gone.
Edith idle flicks through the clipboard while God leads her and the girl towards the elevators. Medical records; records of treatments; a schematic of desired changes. The girl is older than she looks. Neotenization has been in fashion since the ultra-wealthy learned that eternal youth is simply a matter of paying the right amount to the right person, followed by a brief period of forgettable unpleasantness in the company of someone like Edith, and children are so much cuter when they stay children.
She’s also had a whole battery of other genetic enhancements, a designer baby in every respect, tuned to perfectly match Vince Orion’s narcissistic expectations for his offspring: a trophy kid. She was born with all the advantages he could provide, and, now, looking at what the man wants changed, he obviously thinks that she’s ready to grow up and take some sort of active role.
In the elevator, Edith is already considering the process of uplifting Aria from her artificially prolonged neoteny to the cusp of adulthood. Which parts will need to be replaced entirely, which can be set to grow in situ, how to pack in the various mods that Vince has evidently demanded—but there’s something niggling at her thoughts, an unpleasant resonance in the space between “what” and “why”.
Vince Orion really has been remarkably specific.
Edith does not much like the idea of fathers in general, as a class of people, but surely one of their only redeeming characteristics is supposed to be that they don’t think about their daughters in a way that would lead to … well, this.
Other than that it’s unsurprisingly pedestrian. She’ll be everything a father could ask for, in the usual normative way, strong and smart and beautiful, just like all the other teen girls—and she’ll be host to a package of modifications that Edith regularly sees requested for mistresses and sex slaves, including increased elasticity, enhanced pheromone sensitivity, and a heat cycle.
“Um, God?” Edith says as they step out of the elevator into an empty, opal-walled hall, interrupting whatever inane conversation They are carrying on with the child. “Is this the right list? It’s a bit …”
“Why are you calling her that? That’s not her name,” the girl interjects.
“It’s a title, honey. Like ‘mrs.’ or ‘sir’.” The way God looks at Edith is horrifying. Edith didn’t think before asking, and that was probably a sin. “It is exactly what Mr. Orion requested. We transcribed it Ourself.”
“… I see.”
“Is that a problem, Edith? We pride Ourself on each of Our technician’s ability to provide clients with exactly what they want, but if you cannot …”
“No. No, it won’t be a problem, God. It isn’t one.”
“Good. You’re always such a good girl, hmm?” God reaches out to brush a single strand of hair out of Edith’s face, and she shivers at Their touch. Her lips part. The emptiness in God’s face is fixed on her expression.
“What did daddy request?” Aria asks, startling Edith. She’d almost forgotten that the girl was there.
A pause.
God looks at Edith, waiting. Edith stares at the girl, and then the clipboard. How much—?
“H-he wants you to be strong and smart and pretty, like all the older girls are,” that seems safe enough. “So that you’ll be good at anything he needs you to be.”
There. Who wouldn’t want that?
“Huh. But I don’t want to be like the girls,” she says, petulantly. “No one listens to them and they don’t have any fun.”
They are just outside the door to Edith’s operating theater, now. It’s already open—God and the ultra-wealthy cannot be trifled with such things as opening doors for themselves. They should step right through, not waste any more time, but instead God crouches down next to Aria. Lowers Themself to match her height.
“But they get to do all sorts of things, Aria. That’s what being more grown-up means.”
“No they don’t! They just do what people tell them. The boys get to go on adventures and have fun and get hurt and break the rules! And they’re strong! I want to be like them.”
Something about this seems familiar to Edith, as she stands watching, not sure what she can contribute. She has never liked children, and the children of the rich, these strange creatures held in prolonged stasis by their unaging progenitors, are worse. But a buried part of her recognizes something in Aria; a common flaw.
“Be that as it may, your parents just want the best for you. And this is for the best, Aria.”
“Daddy didn’t even ask mommy. He never asks her anything and no one ever asks what I want!”
“… well, you are still a child, honey,” God interjects. “There are choices children aren’t old enough to make.”
“Then I’m going home! You can’t make me stay.” Aria starts to stomp off, then, realizing that she’s not sure where to go, glares up at Edith. “Take me home!”
“I,” Edith looks at God; They shake Their eyeless head. “I can’t do that, Aria. You need to—this is what—”
And the girl makes a run for it.
God sighs.
“Just get prepped. We will have someone retrieve her.”
The operating theater is laid out like a proper theater, with tiers of indulgent seating rising around the central stage. God has a flare for the dramatic—and, in truth, Edith’s art is as much performance as it is surgery. It is an exercise of aesthetics, for that is at the heart of everything that transforms the body, the truth which her first fumbling explorations were far too crude to touch.
Each of God’s chosen chirurgeons has their own decorative trappings, their own angle for the show, even though the tools they use are fundamentally the same. Edith’s theater is a place of smoke and mirrors, the trappings of magic deployed to conceal the true source of her illusions. The audience sees the body bloodlessly divided into its constituent parts, and she sees all the beauty that is denied them. God gave her the tools to make her art easy, and took away all the parts of it that did not make her mind sparkle and dance, and of course she loves Them for that. Of course. How could she not?
It’s not God who brings Aria back, but one of Their usually-unseen bodyguards. Genderless under bulky armor, their face a mass of sensors above a thin, almost-hidden speaker grill. Perhaps it’s a mask. The girl is limp and motionless, drugged; a brief conversation confirms the compound and dosage, and Edith adjusts her plans accordingly. Less additional chemical anesthesia; a slightly more forgiving setting on the neural clamp. It’s second nature, by now.
She strips the girl, first clothing and then skin. Hears God’s footsteps as she does, the noise of Them settling into Their seat. She can’t help glancing out into the darkness, and she can’t help the way Their presence makes her want to try just a bit harder. A theater’s stage is no place for a half-hearted act, after all; the performance is just as important as the outcome. It’s supposed to be dramatic, even if no one’s watching, but God is, so—
It’s just like disassembling a doll.
She reduces the girl to her constituent parts and lays her out like a diagram of herself. Bones arrayed in the shape of a body; organs between them. Here the kidneys, the liver, the coiled length of her intestines. There the lungs, the heart, the brain …
Perhaps God would laugh if she suggested a link to canopic jars, but she has never found the courage to try. The replacement parts come in glass jars, anyway, speed-grown from genetic samples taken at each client’s first consultation—or, in the case of designer children like Aria, before their birth. They shuffle out onto the stage on the backs of colorful automata: pink elephants the size of dinner-plates, a tiny donkey struggling under the weight of Aria’s new skull, oversized beetles towing individual ribs on little carts. Each hand and foot comes as a complete, ready-to-attach assemblage—they’re too fiddly to deal with on-stage, so God has a technician whose entire life is devoted to them. They gambol around her as she takes each jar, winking and whistling, absurdly cartoonish—which is the point. They are for the audience; the gore is hers alone.
She sways and bobs as she begins the process of replacing Aria’s skeleton, dancing to the music in her head, reorganizing the meat as she sets each new bone in its proper place. The automata eagerly carry away the old ones. This is protocol: first bones, then meat, then the more delicate elements—anything which interacts with the endocrine system, the nervous system, and the reproductive system. This is in part because God’s machines grow bone faster than meat, and in part because it is easier to fit organs to bones than bones to organs, but for Edith it is entirely because she finds a gratifying symmetry in this particular progression, from rendering down to reassembly, each stage mirrored about the moment of complete disassembly.
Her enjoyment is more circumspect than it once was, when it got her caught. Fantasy becomes reality becomes routine labor, and, in any case, Aria isn’t her type—she’s far too young and nowhere near enough of a woman. It is easy for Edith to squash the glimmers of that old, familiar thrill.
Perhaps God sits in judgement, out in the darkened audience, but They have trusted Edith enough for this, and why is that, exactly? Why does it matter so much? Vince Orion is both powerful and wealthy, one of the world’s few true trillionaires; his hands rest on the levers of power in ways utterly contrary to the dream of democracy, but in that he is hardly unique. Edith has worked, unsupervised, on the bodies of his lesser peers, forcefully making them into their ideal versions of themselves—or simply what the world tells them that they have to be.
But—
She lets herself remember, as she peels Aria to expose the living bone beneath. Her past is more wrinkled than anyone suspects, unless God’s hidden eyes see more than They choose to say. There used to be a word for people like Edith—and, she thinks, like Aria. Now there is not. Edith is old enough to remember why that is.
It is unlikely that Edith is the only one who survived, imprisoned and deep in stealth, but she will never know otherwise. There is no secret shibboleth, no hidden signs and deniable meeting-halls; technology has gotten too good for that. There’s just people who fell through the cracks and can never risk finding each other, and new generations who will never know what has been taken from them.
Edith usually tries not to think about it. It is easier to be numb to everything except her work.
But she cannot do what Vince Orion wants her to do to his offspring. Not if she is correct about their shared flaw, which she is, because Edith does not make mistakes about gender, and even if she is not the perversity of it should make it unconscionable. These are choices which should belong to the person who must bear them, no matter what other possibilities are denied them—though Edith is aware that her own understanding of those choices is circumscribed by her experiences and inclinations, and likely differs from that of any of the people lunching in the plaza above. She has made her peace with that.
Seen from a distance, her art is merely about checking boxes and fulfilling requirements. Most of her clients—the ones who make their own choices, or at least consult with the people who choose for them—prefer to imagine her as another automata, a mere function of the wealth that they pour into God’s hands. It is a necessary illusion—but flesh is messy, and Edith is allowed whatever latitude she may find hidden from the audience on her stage’s blood-slicked floor. She reconciles the contradictions in her client’s desires and teases out their unspoken wishes and, sometimes, gives them an extra gift. It’s allowed. It’s important to keep God’s customers happy, isn’t it?
So she pulls a piece of meat from its jar and peers at it. Frowns, overacting, and discards it on the floor (one of the automata snuffs it up). Looks out into the audience, sways, and bops herself on the heat with one bloody hand. Sticks her tongue out. Look at me, her body language says, I’m such a dummy! Ah, well … bleh!
The automata are confused as she follows them back to the magician’s cabinet from which they emerged, and from which they withdrew each of the jars they brought her. She pulls its doors open, gestures inside as if to show the audience that it’s nothing but bare wood, raps on its walls—and steps in. Smiles, winks, closes its doors behind her.
The cabinet’s mechanism is painfully obvious. Its shelves are different (and fully stocked) each time its doors open; its position on the stage is fixed. The cornucopia machine concealed beneath the stage is simply very quiet as it lifts each fresh load into place.
The automata open the doors while she’s in the machine, to show that she’s vanished; they are programmed for unexpected elaborations. God stretches and idly taps at Their phone, checking the latest crop of emails for anything worthy of personal consideration. Eventually, Edith returns, followed by a fresh batch of flesh-hauling automata. This time they’re neon-striped giraffes.
She plays the clown as she swaps out a few of Aria’s organs. Look at me, her gestures say, see how silly I was! But it’s all fixed now, nothing to worry about, just a little hiccup—
And it’s nothing too important. The girl’s pituitary gland, and her ovaries, and a few lymph nodes. That’s all. It would take a very careful eye indeed to see what Edith felt compelled to change, and if God sees then They do not find it fit to speak.
A few weeks later and the news is all over. The death of a titan: Vince Orion, trillionaire entrepreneur, killed in his own home! Or, that is, a home in which he was temporarily present, owned by a company that one of his companies has a controlling interest in. People like him don’t need to own anything. They simply exist and the pieces fall into place around them, and the sidewalk five hundred feet below will never be quite the same.
Edith doesn’t usually keep up on current events, but God gave her a newspaper and a little pat on the back when she went up to the surface for her lunch break. They wanted her to know.
She takes her time with lunch. Picks at it. Doesn’t have any appetite, not with the certainty that, as soon as she gets out of the elevator, one of God’s bodyguards will be on her. Or They’ll just have a sniper take her out. That would be the clean way to do it.
She thinks about running.
She doesn’t.
God is waiting for her when the elevator door opens, smiling more honestly than Edith has ever seen Them.
“Edith, honey! I have something for you,” They say, and Edith’s eyes flick down to the velvet box in Their hands. The back of her neck prickles. She has never known God to give a gift, and she is sure that she can feel a sniper’s augmented eyes staring directly at her heart.
She robotically takes the box. Refusing would be unthinkable. Stares at it sitting in her hands for a few seconds too long, and God says, encouragingly, “Well, open it!”
A bracelet. Opal, of course, shot through with little veins of silver where it might once have been broken. Edith cannot begin to guess its value, but, knowing God, it is probably obscene. It fits her wrist perfectly.
Edith parts her lips, ready to convey her gratitude. She is unprepared for the words which force their way out of her throat: “I thought You were going to stop me.”
“Why would We? You did exactly what We wanted,” God smiles, and Edith is blessed. She could want nothing more—but God continues. “Mr. Orion was an early investor, through one of his shell companies. He thought that this meant that he owned Us, rather than merely a piece of Our worldly endeavors.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Yes. We expect that it will be at least a decade before the ownership of those shares is resolved, likely in favor of one of his children. They will be more tractable than he, and all will be right with the world.”
“Good. That’s,” Edith pauses. She has to ask, doesn’t she? She shouldn’t, but, “… what if I’d done exactly what he wanted?”
“Then We would have been mistaken about you,” and God does not need to say what that would have meant. They reach out and ruffle her hair, as if she were a pet; her heart clenches. “But We were not. Now, get back to work, okay? There’s another important client coming.”