A New Body for A New World - 1) Every Ending is a Beginning

September 4th, 2076. I would have been 112 now. I say would, because 112 wasn’t actually an age I reached. For that matter I never made my century, in cricket or in years. No, I died at the tender age of 73, in the spring of 2038, with the magnolia on the trees and a clear blue sky. So how do I come to be telling you this from beyond the grave? Well, thanks to the largesse of my kith and kin, for my 70th I was given NuLife.

And here I am, not 73, not 112 but eighteen. Or one minute, fourteen seconds, depending on your point of view. Eighteen years physically, one minute and counting conscious, ready, willing and able. Eighteen, nubile, cute, blond, and very female. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let me tell you how this came to be.

Mine was a generation that not only believed in immortality, but could achieve it. My grandparents made it into their seventies, my parents well into their eighties, all before retro genetic, nanotech and good old stem cell therapies hit the mainstream. In the same way my children never played an LP, my grandchildren will never see one of their peers with glasses, zits, or bad teeth. They’ll never go bald, lose their hearing, and get diabetes or heart disease. A Golden Age indeed.

NuLife took all that to the limit. When I died it was only conceptual, me buying into promises and speculation but I figured “Hey, I going to be dead anyway, so what have I got to lose?”

So for my 70th all I got was a weblink and a code. It was expensive, but it wasn’t coming out of my pocket and I knew I’d rather have this than another god-awful round-the-world cruise.

Every night, as I lay my head upon my pillow, my every thought, memory and feeling was backed up, archived and copied to a globe-spanning array of storage. The worst I would lose would be a day, the last day of my life, assuming that Mr Death came knocking unexpectedly.

Which in my case was exactly what happened.

I’ve seen the recordings. Most people don’t want to, bit morbid really, but I always did have a sense of dislocation, that I was not really grounded properly in my physical self.

With that in mind, I took an objective, 3rd party view of what happened. And what happened was actually pretty bloody amusing.

Some old codger, up a ladder in his library, put off balance by a dusty old edition of Dante’s Inferno. Fitting really, but Hell was not for me. Limbo, Purgatory, and then back to reality. I think.

The old codger falling, his robe flapping open revealing pasty, skinny legs and the last turkey in the shop at Christmas, the ladder toppling away, proving that for every action there is indeed an equal and opposite reaction. I believe I shall sue Darwin’s descendants, as it was his bust that was my final undoing, head meeting head, with stone beating bone. I’ve watched it many times, and it never fails to crack me up.

Bloody ironic that Keith Richards got away with the same falling-off-a-ladder-in-your-library act, though now, in retrospect, it’s common knowledge why he’s still around. How come he got the breaks?

Early in the 21st Century, when the possibility of reincarnation moved from the domain of the religious to that of science and commerce, the beautiful, smart people woke up to the true value of their physicality. Hair, skin, blood all became tradable commodities, assuming you could prove provenance of course.

Signed autographs? Piss off! Only if they were signed in blood, thank you very much. Or piss, for that matter. I still remember when Audrey Hepburn’s hairbrush came up for auction, with Christie’s treading where they never had before. One small step. The frenzied bidding by film studios, gene hackmen, grande dames, investment groups.

Nobody knows who walked away that day with a piece of the past to resurrect in the future. Someone’s new body, or someone’s new plaything, new fantasy. Or a harem of Hepburns.

So who am I? Hell, I did the bloke thing for long enough, this has got to be worth it. If I’m going to come back and endure the machinations of life and all that implies, why not a complete change of perspective?

Audrey? Lauren Bacall? Embeth Davidtz? Can’t be. Only they and their immediate descendants can legally clone to 99.9 to fifteen digits percent. For the rest of us, amalgams must suffice. So who am I? Ah, now that would be telling. I will tell you that, take 32 of the most beautiful, intelligent, healthy women from the early years of this century, mix well, clean up a few defects (yes, even those who walk the slopes of Olympus have the occasional genetic blemish), and Robert is your mother’s brother. Though this time around my mother was notably absent from the process.

Chapter 2 - In Which our Heroine Finds Her New Place in Life