1

On the day of my death, we arrived at the hospital at eight in the morning. Sandra had scheduled our appointment for as early as possible.

“Hi Celeste, hi Mariano,” she greeted us. Sandra was wearing a white laboratory coat and her hair was drawn back in a ponytail; she had come out to the parking lot to receive us. “Good morning.”

“Hey Sandra,” said Mariano.

I was going to say something, but I couldn’t. For the last few months, I’d been thinking that I was okay: resigned to my fate, ready, committed to what was about to happen, but today, at this moment, I discovered that I was not. I was just as terrified as I had been on the day of the final diagnosis. I wanted to escape. I wanted to run away from everyone and everything. Better yet, I wished that I weren’t dying, that my body weren’t falling apart, trying to kill me. I tried to smile anyway.

I don’t think either of them turned to look at me. I was sitting in a wheelchair, below their direct line of sight.

“Are you guys ready?” Sandra asked. Her main priority was this last phase of the procedure and she was anxious to get started. When I realized this, I understood that it was logical, and I didn’t feel offended or deceived. If I had been in her shoes, I would have been just as anxious. What we were about to do could be very important for her career. Yes, she could lose a dear friend, but it was equally possible that she could help me. That she could save me, or at least prolong my existence for a little while. There was nothing left for Sandra to do except complete the upload: Mariano and I had already signed the contracts and all the rest of the required documents.

“Let’s go,” I managed to say. Mariano was already wheeling me to the door. I looked up at the sky, so I could see the sun for the last time, but I didn’t know which direction to look, and the next thing I knew, we were inside the building.

2

Mariano met her before I did, many years ago, at medical school. He introduced me to her when I was finishing my undergraduate thesis and she was about to start her residency in England. Then she left, and Mariano and I got married; my parents, who are not very nice people, were happy that I had “caught” myself a doctor: I wouldn’t go hungry, they said, despite the uselessness of my degree in English literature. We didn’t hear much from Sandra while she was in Europe.

However, we started to see her again when she came back to Mexico to start working as a researcher for a large multinational corporation, in exchange for a very generous salary, and eventually the three of us became close friends. In fact, it happened very quickly: just a few months after she came back, we were telling each other everything, or nearly everything. I went with her when she got an abortion; both of us consoled her after her break-up with Miquel, the laboratory technician who got her pregnant, whose name we must never mention again. We would write each other emails, meet for dinner, and complain about our jobs, although my job (teaching university courses and writing articles to maintain my position on the academic career ladder) seemed insignificant compared to Mariano’s job, let alone Sandra’s.

The truth is that I loved her, but at the same time I was very jealous. And not just because of her profession. I was an ordinary woman: middle‑class, average height, with straight, black hair and the body and features of the average mixed-race Mexican—with the added inconveniences of my round face, which I had inherited from my mother and a million aunts and grandmothers, along with my devastating shyness—while Sandra is tall and thin, not exactly pretty, but she’s blonde, “fairly” wealthy (I suppose she wouldn’t have said anything at all if her family had been “very” wealthy), confident, poised, and most importantly, white.

(I never talked to her about it: I would’ve been very embarrassed to feel inferior or resentful of her. And I still want to believe that Sandra was aware of the situation and that she knew she wasn’t always going to be able to count on the advantages that she had. One time, she told us about some asshole at a conference in the United States who had introduced her as a “lovely brown-skinned scientist,” and according to her, what came after that was even worse.)

“Look,” I would say to her every so often, especially in difficult times, “no one can take away from you the importance of what you’re doing. Or your talent. I’d have to be the chancellor’s daughter, or sleep with the chancellor, in order to get responsibilities like yours. And there’s no comparison, Sandra. Humanities—”

“The humanities are important,” she would contradict me, “and you have no idea how much good you’re doing for your students. It’s not about quantity.”

I think she really was trying to cheer me up. And I did cheer up, because at least her intentions were good.

In any case, it seemed strange, but I also felt lucky to have made such a close friend after the age of thirty, especially considering my lack of self-confidence. I never mentioned it to Mariano because he, too, was clearly envious of Sandra: besides the fact that, like me, he doesn’t exactly look Swedish, his medical practice is not comparable to her status as an internationally renowned neurologist…

When my diagnosis of cancer was confirmed and we started chemotherapy, she visited me and helped Mariano at least as much as my family or his family did. On more than one occasion, she was with me when I was horribly sick after a treatment session, and on some of my darkest days. I used to think that depression is what you feel when you’re passed over for a promotion at work, or when some aggressive or well-connected idiot manages to obtain a position of power over dozens of people who have real skills, or when you watch as the years pass and the feeling of dread before each class you teach never goes away. But no: my most horrifying moments were when I started to wish I were dead. When the pain was stronger than my fear of death and I started to think, very seriously, about putting an end to it all.

One night, I called my parents to tell them that they should be happy because their disappointment of a wayward daughter was going to die, and soon. That happened shortly after we were told that the chemotherapy wasn’t working, that it was only delaying the inevitable. One week later, Sandra showed up at our apartment with her proposal.

3

She explained it to us. The first thing she said was that she wasn’t offering us any kind of treatment. It was something else. It took us (me) a long time to understand what it was.

“What we’re doing at the hospital is implementing a project that was developed in the United States. A long-term project. One of the people leading it was my residency consultant in London, which is why I was invited to direct the project here. They’re going to market the technology, obviously, and when they do, it’s going to be huge. Prohibitively expensive. But it’s going to be a lot of work. For years. While we perfect it—”

“OK, hang on. Let me get this straight. I’m going to die anyway, right?”

That was the only thing I could think about. Mariano and I were sitting on the larger sofa in the living room and he was holding my hand. Sandra was sitting opposite us, on the smaller couch. There was a glass coffee table between us, and to our right a window with a view of the setting sun.

“Once the upload is complete, your consciousness, your identity, is conserved,” she said. “It can be maintained indefinitely. These servers’ capacity is measured in exabytes: they’re millions of times larger than any conventional storage system. No data is lost, and everything that happens after the upload is also recorded. And we have a backup system in case any of the components fail. We expect that the field of robotics will advance to such a degree that it’ll be possible to give the mind uploads a full and functional body someday, but right now there are already mechanical arms, means of self-transportation, cameras to see with, and microphones to hear with. The technology that is currently available enables these whole brain emulations to have at least three or four of the senses, speech capacity, and freedom of movement, even if it is—”

“How are they connected to the brain?” Mariano interrupted.

“Remember, there is no brain. I mean, no organic brain. There’s no nervous system, either. No part of the physical body is preserved. The brain is the computer itself. The processors. There are many of them, all working at the same time. And we could say that the mind, the recorded consciousness, is the operating system. Any device we need can be connected to the computer, just like any other piece of hardware. The mind is linked to these devices and it uses them. There are other programs running, too: drivers, like those that are used in order to run a printer or a digital camera. People have been able to operate an artificial arm and other similar devices more or less in the same way for a long time now.”

“Alright, so it’s like we saw in that movie,” Mariano said. I immediately understood what he meant, because we had just seen it: it’s that one about a man who falls in love with his cell phone, or, better put, with his cell phone’s operating system.

Sandra understood, too: “Actually, it’s the other way around,” she said. “That program started with a blank slate and acquired consciousness. In this case, the emulated brain doesn’t start with a blank slate, but instead it’s a representation transferred to a computer. An image of something that existed previously. A map. That’s why we call it AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, which is vastly superior to Artificial Intelligence. If you prefer, we could call it a copy. A perfect copy. Your memory, your capacity to think, your—”

“Sandra, you still haven’t told me…” I interrupted her, but I couldn’t go on.

She was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Look, Celeste, I’m not going to lie to you. The consciousness that resides in your brain”—she brought her hand close to my head but she didn’t touch it—“will cease to exist. You are going to die. Just like the rest of us, you are going to die. But at one of our laboratory stations, a copy of that consciousness will awaken. It will start to exist. That copy will have all of your memories. It will think like you. It will believe that it is you. In that sense, you will live on. Are you interested? You.”

After she left, Mariano and I kept on holding hands for a long time, in silence. The sun went down and we didn’t turn the lights on.

Finally, he told me that he had talked about it with her before, but he hadn’t wanted to tell me. In fact, when he put that movie on, he knew that Sandra was going to come over with her proposal. I was furious.

“You’re making deals behind my back!” I yelled. “I’m dying, and you treat me like a damn Guinea pig! Are you going to sell me? Are they going to pay you to drop me off at that fucking laboratory?”

I yelled at Mariano so much that he started shouting, too.

“Let me talk, goddammit!”

“Asshole,” I said. “Coward.”

“I begged her to consider us!” he argued. “To consider you. You, Celeste! They already have their list of candidates, and they’re not accepting anyone new. And they can only work with one person at a time. She’d put you at the top of the list. You wouldn’t have to start at the back of the line, like on the transplant waiting lists… Listen! Please. You’re going to die. Do you understand that? Did you hear what the oncologist said? There is no way that your body can be saved. Next year, you’ll be dead!”

He had gotten up, but I was still sitting on the couch. I stood up and punched him in the face, and again in the chest, and I wanted to hit him again, but I didn’t have the strength. You’ve got to hand it to him: he put up with all of it. He never tried to stop me.

Suddenly, though, he began to cry. Mariano started crying. He told me that he was desperate. That he loved me. That that’s why he had talked to Sandra. He begged me to agree. He said that he didn’t want to lose me. That, yes, he knew he was being selfish, but that he couldn’t lose me.

I sat down again. I switched on a lamp and saw his tears. Then I started to cry, too.

4

I quit my job at the university. I quit everything. Of course I did. As they often say in cases like mine, I was going to “focus on fighting my disease.”

“Try to look at it like what you’re telling everyone is actually true,” Sandra said, “like it’s just another normal kind of treatment. Don’t worry about the details.”

The uploading sessions at the hospital took us ten months: stretches of four or five hours daily, in which they had me do all sorts of things while electrodes were stuck to my skin and especially to my head; it wasn’t hard to attach them. I resumed part of my treatments in order to prevent the worst of the malaise, and to delay the metastasis as much as possible. And since I’d gone bald, Mariano shaved his head in solidarity, like a kid in a heart-wrenching documentary. It’s a good thing that his head is egg-shaped, because it looked funny and it made me laugh a little.

At the hospital, they had me speak, read, write, and listen to music. I answered questions. I watched geometric patterns on a screen, or movies, or video clips strung together in a way that I found chaotic. I also had to walk, ride a stationary bicycle, lift weights, and I even ate, slept, and emptied my bowels while connected. They gave me things to smell, played me recordings of nature sounds, of artificial sounds, and sometimes they would ask me to wear clothes made of specific types of fabric, to take off my clothes, or to rub certain products on different parts of my body. They would give me mild electric shocks. They would stand me on my head or strap me into a rotating frame. Mariano would always go with me whenever he could, and there were lots of times when he had to help me, when the physical exertion would get to be too much for me.

We also did other things that weren’t part of the upload process: they took different types of samples, recorded me in 3D and 2D video, interviewed me, recorded my voice, and made me look through the files on my hard drives and my old papers in search of memories… A lot of that was for legal purposes, just like the documents that they gave me to sign every so often: the company’s lawyers were always devising strategies to protect their client from problems related to this experimental and clandestine technology; much of it was also for advertising purposes or public relations material, because everyone was very optimistic: it would all come to light in the end.

The most important thing, though, was always the uploading process. And they said we were making progress, little by little. Through the signals that the system picked up from my brain and my nervous system (that’s how I understood it, and even now I can’t put it any better), not only were my memories being recorded, but the entire structure of my brain, too.

“We are mapping and uploading your entire heterarchical system,” one of the technicians told me one day, as I was (very poorly) playing a fighting video game with Mariano.

“My what?” I asked, and I got distracted, at which point Mariano’s fighter ripped out my fighter’s spinal cord.

“Sorry,” the technician said. His name is Yair, but I didn’t know that yet.

“Sorry,” echoed Mariano, but he was smiling. It wasn’t often that he could successfully execute those finishing moves.

Later, I asked Sandra for an explanation.

“Every mind is like a model,” she said. A model so sophisticated that it is capable of representing itself—”

“Sorry, but I’m not understanding anything.”

“Have you read Douglas Hofstadter?” she asked. “He’s an author who wrote about the subject. In fact, he was the one who first proposed the term ‘heterarchy.’”

I stared at her in silence with my mouth open.

“Who?” I said, and then, immediately, “No. You know what? It’d be better if you didn’t even tell me. I’m not going to have time to read his book, anyway.”

It took Sandra a moment to respond: “Don’t be lazy. I’ll bring you a couple of his books tomorrow.”

True to her word, the next day she brought me a couple of his books. I took them home with me and tried to read them (in fact, they contained several interesting literary references), but I didn’t get very far. At first, I wanted to chalk it up to the fact that we were in a difficult and strenuous phase of the uploading process: they were having me move, jump, bend my arms and legs at different angles, and use them to apply force. Then I decided that I’d found the books boring because I could barely understand them: the material was very dense and quite far from my area of specialization. That was the reason why I’d had a mediocre life, not because of a lack of time or a lack of opportunities, or the color of my skin, or my inability to relate to people.

Nevertheless, there were times when I was actually in a good mood. I enjoyed the time that the three of us spent together, Sandra, Mariano, and I, after a full day of work when Mariano would come to pick me up at the hospital. We almost never left right away after a session; we would usually talk and joke around for a while. One time, for example, we concluded that it would be best to formalize our relationship, the three of us, “So as not to be living in sin, of course,” Sandra said.

“So as to make a decent woman out of you,” Mariano countered.

“After all, the three of us are going to have a daughter,” I said, and I had to laugh quite a bit to let them know that they could have a child together, too.

5

We would also talk about other aspects of the AGI project.

One night after we’d finished a very difficult phase of the uploading process, Sandra took us out to dinner (for almost a week, I’d undergone several sessions of something similar to acupuncture, each of which was for a different part of my body). We went to an authentic Indian restaurant; she’d been a fan of Indian food since her time in England. I wanted to eat, but in the end I wasn’t really able to. I was getting a little worse every day. Mariano and Sandra tried to act like there was nothing wrong, and Mariano managed to distract us by making a big deal of the fact that he didn’t know anything about any of the dishes on the menu. That’s something that I like about him: it doesn’t bother him to be laughed at. And in his way, he was trying to make things easier for me.

As I drank my water and ate my plate of boiled rice, I said, “So they’re never really going to be available here, right? The mind models. I don’t think people are going to be able to go to the mall and buy it or anything.”

“Yes, they will,” Sandra said. “It’ll be like when those rich ladies go to Texas to get an abortion.”

Mariano raised his eyebrows. It made us uncomfortable to say that word in front of her, but she wasn’t ashamed to say it.

“It might lead to even bigger consequences,” Sandra continued. “They don’t talk to me about these things, but I get the impression that offering the technology to a lot of people is not a priority for the company.”

“It’s only for the one percenters,” Mariano said.

“Exactly. And sometimes I think they don’t even care about people at all. I believe that the company is being subsidized by a couple of countries. You probably know that the fascists are saying that they want to make changes that will last for centuries. It looks like they’ve taken an interest in whole brain emulation. Imagine what would happen if those in power now could stay in power forever…”

Mariano and I stared at her in silence with horrified looks on our faces. She didn’t notice right away because she was digging around in her plate of chicken tikka.

“Of course,” she went on, “they talk about preserving traditional values, maintaining leadership over the long-term, et cetera.”

“Wow,” was all Mariano said. I noticed that it was hard for him to get the word out. He forced a smile, and then he said, “The Million-Year Reich. Please tell me you’re not in favor of that idea.”

Sandra looked up, her mouth agape.

“What? No, of course not!”

“You haven’t said anything to them?” he insisted. “No one on your team? Or your supervisors at the company?”

“Ah! Like what, Mariano? What are we supposed to say?”

“You really wouldn’t care if that happened?”

At that question, Sandra grew furious. I saw it. Mariano had offended her. I also thought he’d gone too far, but I was trying to think of something to say in order to change the subject. What Sandra and her company were doing was supposed to save my life. In a way.

The only thing I could think of was: “Actually, it’s not going to be for them; it’ll be for the ultra-famous, don’t you think? Like Kim Kardashian.”

Neither of them said anything. Then Mariano understood what I was trying to do.

“But they would have to make her a body,” he said, going along with the new topic. “Right? It would be an… android body, wouldn’t it? A human-looking one. Very sexy. With a big ass, like hers. Don’t you think? So she could keep on selling—”

“Don’t be sexist,” Sandra said.

“Oh, ok, so now she’s famous for her intelligence, is that it?” Mariano said. Now it was his turn to snap.

“OK, hang on. Stop,” I said.

It didn’t work. They wouldn’t even look at each other. Sandra took out her phone and he took out his. No one said anything for about fifteen minutes; their eyes were glued to their devices and I was busy with my plate, or looking out the closest window, or observing the surrounding tables, whose occupants did not turn to look at us. I stuck my hand underneath my beanie, running my fingers over the back of my neck and trying to find the places where my skin was the driest. Then I watched the muted Indian music videos that were being played on TVs hanging down from ceiling mounts, and I tried to figure out what was happening in them.

When Sandra finally asked for the check, Mariano tried to pay for it. Sandra snatched the slip out of his hands, got up to pay, and then she hailed a cab and left. Alone. We were supposed to have taken her home.

In the car, as Mariano was driving us home, he said, “I’m going to go and apologize to her tomorrow.”

“OK,” I said. It was late and there wasn’t much traffic. We passed a love hotel that we had gone to several times before we got married (and a few times since): it still had large bushes in front of the doors, so people could enter without being seen.

I was glad we hadn’t had any children. There would have been more problems now: more suffering, more worrying.

“You know that the most important thing,” he said suddenly, “is that you finish the treatment— no, I mean—what’s it called? I forget. The process. The uploading process. You do know that, right?”

I looked at him. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead (always such a careful driver), but he noticed.

“What happened tonight was a big mistake,” he said, “but I’m going to fix it by any means necessary.”

“Yes, it was a mistake, but it’s not that big of a deal. Do you really think she’s not going to want to finish the process? We’ve already signed everything. There’s no turning back now.”

I didn’t tell him everything I’d been thinking about since the fifteen minutes of silence in the restaurant. First, if I was lucky, I would be the one who’d have to spend eternity alongside the warlords, the alt-right, and the strong men of the world. I’d also thought about the pharaohs, who were buried with their servants and their wives. What if they gave me a body and forced me to perform maintenance on the VIP whole brain emulations? Or what if, once my mind upload “worked,” they just erased my hard drive so that there’d be more space available for those pieces of shit?

I couldn’t talk about it in the academic world, but I hadn’t just seen a few science fiction movies or series, which is pretty common: I’d also read sci-fi books full of concepts that could make people think horrible thoughts. In one novel I read, for example, there was a society entirely devoted to the production of goods and replacement parts for the members of its elite, who were immortal beings living in machines. They were presidents, prime ministers, businesspeople, and indigenous leaders. The same kind of exemplary citizens as those for whom I am now paving the way.

In another novel, once the immortal machines’ lives and comfort were secure, they decided to put an end to everything else. To save themselves a lot of trouble, they simply made a clean sweep of the entire world with a few hydrogen bombs.

I was also thinking about the positive aspect of my situation: the fact that I wouldn’t die, not completely anyway, while Mariano was going on about what he was going to do and how sorry he was for upsetting Sandra…

6

Mariano took me to the hospital and stayed there to apologize to Sandra. She accepted his apology, with a hug and everything. They both came into the room to tell me about it while a technician named Monica was giving me several disgusting substances to smell.

We had a group hug, the three of us, like best friends in junior high, but they kept their faces away from me because the smell of the disgusting substances had impregnated my skin.

We continued with the process. I was starting to have more and more trouble breathing. The good news was that the technicians were beginning to relax around me and say things in my presence; they were starting to become a little less reserved. That’s how I learned their names, for example, and it was also how I found out that the brain emulations weren’t working.

It was true that there were a lot of other volunteers, all of whom were being uploaded by affiliate companies of large medical companies (like the one Sandra worked for) in underdeveloped countries, where it’s cheaper to obtain permits for everything, easier to have secret, protected facilities with their own power source, where it’s harder for people to find out about what’s going on, and harder for there to be street protests or media outrage. In fact, the initial list of Guinea pigs on which I was placed as a result of Mariano’s pleading was completely made up of people who were poorer than we were: more vulnerable. “People who nobody would miss,” as they say on the crime dramas.

The news had already begun to trickle down to me. Sandra was already aware of it, and she eventually had to admit that it was true. I asked her not to punish anyone for passing the news on to me. And she surprised me by offering to tell me everything in detail. We decided to be honest and that Mariano should be there to hear it, too.

We met in my hospital room, the three of us, alone, without Yair or Monica. This conversation resulted in horrified looks on our faces, again.

Very few of the volunteers, who were undergoing several different uploading techniques (uploading, transfer, maintenance), were actually surviving, and none had been emulated without suffering some kind of damage. There were minds that had never woken up on the storage systems, and others that had become distorted, deconstructed, however you want to say it, in ways that were very strange. Sometimes in horrible ways.

“Since we’re being honest, I’m going to tell you the whole truth,” Sandra said. Using a tablet, she showed us some data and videos of the worst cases. “For example, this woman in Thailand somehow got trapped in her childhood: apparently she is not able to access any memories recorded after seven years of age. Her speakers, installed so that she could talk, were emitting screams of terror, like those of a little girl, for…oh my God.”

“How long?”

“It says here for six weeks straight, continuously. People would turn off her speakers once in a while. This report is new. I haven’t really had a chance to look at it yet.

“Whoa.”

“Here’s another one. There’s a man in Honduras who says that he has phantom pain all over his body. Literally all over his body: his skin, internal organs, joints, muscles, everything. Despite the fact that he has no body. It’s strange because his hardware version allows for the equivalent of his nerve endings to be removed, actually disconnected—”

“They disconnected his nerve endings?” Mariano asked.

“Yes, and it produced no effect. There’s also a woman in Serbia who seems to have suffered something analogous to brain damage: she threatens everyone she sees—I mean, anyone who steps in front of the camera—and describes the horrible ways in which she is going to torture them as soon as she gets hands installed.”

“They’re not going to give her hands, are they?” I asked. Mariano winced.

“Ha, ha, very funny,” said Sandra sarcastically.

On the tablet, she showed us photos of what these people had looked like before the procedure. They looked like normal people. They could have been anyone.

Sandra showed us one more picture, of an older man, who was thin, bald, and had a lot of wrinkles. He looked like me.

“I apologize for not telling you this earlier,” she said. “Look… you’re not our first patient. He was. We uploaded him—I mean, we emulated his brain—last year.”

She closed the photo on the screen and started looking for something else.

“You never told me anything about this,” Mariano objected. She ignored him.

“Based on these results, we are developing ways to improve the uploading process, the transfer, everything. This man,” Sandra explained, “showed patterns similar to what occurs in Tourette syndrome. Every eleventh word he said was an obscenity, regardless of whether or not it made sense within his sentences. Oh, and he learned how to save these disgusting photos and videos on his hard drive; he would find them on the internet in order to show them to people. It was something like psychopathic behavior, or a dissociative identity disorder, and the strangest thing of all was that it didn’t happen right away, but exactly 1,024 minutes after we woke him up… As we understand it, there was some connection between an internal clock in the hardware and one part of the model of his unconscious. Obviously, something like this cannot occur in a human brain.”

She played a video showing Monica, the technician, looking at the patient interface, which was set up on a table more or less in the same way as in all the laboratories involved in the project: there was a microphone, a camera, and speakers, surrounded by monitors containing diagnostics and other kinds of data. The patient’s words were coming out of the speakers.

“Turn that off,” Mariano said.

The patient’s voice was saying: “—I understand that I signed the papers slut and that I agreed to do everything that you asked chickenshit me to do, but you must understand. I am perfectly dumbass aware of what is happening. It’s not that I can’t cunt see it, that I can’t feel it. I just can’t bitch control what I do! It’s like I’m watching another person cow search for the videos and the–”

“Stop the video,” I said. The curse words sounded different from the other words, but not because the man was shouting them or anything. They were said at the same volume, but they were pronounced more slowly and the tone was different: it sounded like the voice of a younger man, who was also (and I don’t know why I thought this) bigger and heavier.

Sandra stopped the video.

“We are trying to build maps, or models: analogs of human consciousness, and we’re running into errors, imperfections that we are unable to foresee and that we don’t understand very well. The engineers say that this happens all the time, that we need to assess and correct, to put aside what doesn’t work and to keep on making progress. The bad news is that whatever ‘doesn’t work’ is…”

She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t need to.

“How do we know this isn’t going to happen to Celeste?” Mariano asked.

“We don’t. We’re doing everything we can to prevent the conditions that led to this situation—”

“Is he receiving any treatment?” I asked.

“No,” Sandra replied, and then she sighed. “He asked us to delete him. He said he couldn’t take it anymore. The family held us to it, since we’re bound by contract to respect their wishes in that regard. Yours has the same clause, remember? Voluntary termination.”

7

I didn’t go back to the hospital for several days after that.

Of course I had seen the clause. Of course I had understood it, more or less, and I didn’t have any questions about it. But I couldn’t go back. Mariano and I got out of the city for a while. It wasn’t going to be a “normal” vacation because now I was really feeling it: I was dying. But we went to the beach, sunbathed, and drank a few cocktails. I wore a bikini for the first time in my life, and we went out on a glass-bottom boat. One night, Mariano made love to me, quite fearfully, as if he might break me in the act. I had seduced him a little, but it was the first time he’d even touched me in years, and that was him just trying to be a good boy: he’d always felt obligated to be careful, gentle, and kind. Sometimes he was able to achieve that. Other times he would feel guilty because he couldn’t.

We didn’t take our phones with us; I never told him, but to me it seemed like a trial run, a first approximation of my disappearance. And when we got back, we had a million messages, like we knew we would, many of which were from Sandra. But we didn’t answer any of them. We had only come back because Mariano couldn’t stay away from his medical practice any longer. I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to go back to the hospital because, now more than ever, I was feeling like a laboratory animal: a specimen in a Petri dish.

The next morning Mariano called in to work, and then he drove to his office, leaving me alone in our apartment. He’d assigned me the task of deciding where I’d like to go next, and to “take it easy,” meaning that I had to keep taking the painkillers and not exert myself too much.

I had such a bad day all alone in that apartment! As soon as he left, I was in my bed crying. Suddenly I wasn’t able to think about anything that we could do or anywhere I wanted to go. It was ridiculous. I couldn’t get up, but at the same time my inability to move terrified me. Was this how I was going to spend my final days on Earth?

Then I got nervous. I knew that I wanted to get up, but my body wouldn’t move. I thought about doing something: turning on the TV, re-reading one of my favorite books, putting some music on, looking on the internet for some place we could travel to, sending an email, calling someone, or just grabbing my phone and playing a game or watching some stupid video. Instead of doing one of these things, I asked myself suddenly: Is this the best that I can do with the time I have left? And I stayed in bed.

I didn’t move from that spot until after noon. The phone rang. I thought it would be Mariano. Or Sandra. Why not? She still wanted me to go back, from what I could see. No, it was Margarita, one of my colleagues from the university. One of my former colleagues. She asked me how I was doing and I didn’t want to cause any problems, so I forced myself to lie: I said that I was undergoing an experimental treatment and that it was going well, slow but well, which was exactly what I had agreed on with Sandra and the company she worked for.

It was better that way. I didn’t want to have any “farewells” like some people with terminal illnesses have. And I didn’t want to spend hours explaining the uploading process, let alone having to tell her that part of the process was that I (whatever “I” was) was going to die. If anyone were to find out that the company was actually going to help me die…

“You have to decide that you are going to get better,” Margarita said. “Look, I know that you’re not a believer, but why don’t you give it a shot? Don’t you think it’s time you opened your mind to spiritual realms?”

My response was immediate. I didn’t even think about it. As she herself would have said, it came from my soul: “Oh Margie, thanks, but now I know that you aren’t just ignorant, you’re an idiot, too.” And I hung up on her.

That might have been the first time in my life that I told someone exactly what I was thinking. Who knows how she’s going to tell the story of our final conversation. Maybe she’ll say that I died a very bitter person.

I got out of bed slowly. My whole body hurt, but I’d made a decision. I went to my study; I hadn’t gone in there since before the uploading sessions began. I looked through the papers on my desk, some of which dealt with matters that would remain pending for all eternity, and I found something that I didn’t want to leave unfinished. It was an old file. A translation project.

One of the classes that I used to give was on nineteenth-century English authors. I especially like Christina Rossetti, a poet who is not as well-known as she should be because she was the sister, relative, or acquaintance of many other famous people, and because she was a woman. In my spare time, I’d been working on a translation of one of her poems, since I didn’t like any of the published versions: “Echo” (composed in 1854, published in 1862), from her book Goblin Market and Other Poems.

Two verses from “Echo” were included  as an epigraph in a sci-fi novel I read (who knows why). That’s how I found out about the poem. The speaker is someone who has died and is imploring the lover he or she left behind to appear to him or her in dreams. I was so fascinated by that idea when I was younger!

Of course, it wasn’t the same, reading the poem so many years later.

But it was clear to me why I’d remembered it. The poem had mainly been a source of enlightenment for me, but the translation wasn’t going well. The best that I’d been able to do up to that point, after a lot of work, was just a couple of verses:

Mas ven a mí en los sueños, tal que pueda vivir

todo de nuevo, aun en la muerte:

[Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

My very life again tho’ cold in death:]

I read these verses out loud a few times, in their Spanish and English versions. There’s nothing interesting in my academic work. I didn’t have the time or the opportunity to do anything else, to leave any other academic legacy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to at least finish this today? To create an improved version—more rhythmic, more precise than the published translations—the version that I had always wanted to see so badly? Other women would be able to discover her work. They might be fascinated by it, like I had been. They could write their own poems, their own novels… academic articles…

In another time, I would have put on a pot of coffee, but I settled for water. I pulled out my copy of Rossetti’s book, some other books adjacent to it, and all my notes from the file. It took me a little while, but finally I had everything ready on my desk. I sat down, put on my glasses, and got to work.

I must say that I focused my attention and concentrated in a way that was unusual for me. I worked like I used to work before I got sick. I didn’t get up out of my chair until it was dark, when Mariano got home, tired from a surgical procedure which, as I understood it, had been long and difficult, and hadn’t gone well.

I hadn’t finished the translation. I’d only completed one stanza. It might seem like a lot (the poem only has three stanzas), but really, this version is cut and pasted from my many previous versions:

Oh, dulce sueño, dulce y tan amargo;

su despertar no fue en el Paraíso,

donde almas plenas del amor se encuentran

y ojos sedientos miran

esa puerta

que lenta se abre, deja entrar, se cierra.

[Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;

Where thirsting longing eyes

Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more.]

I was reading this stanza when Mariano arrived. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t, and he was in a terrible mood, sorely disappointed by the outcome of the surgery and very worried by the fact that I wasn’t in bed resting.

We went to bed. He fell asleep first, and I stayed awake for a while, staring at the ceiling of our room. It’s smooth and bare like a blank piece of paper, I thought. Then I decided that that was a stupid image. It’s a good thing I never wanted to be a poet!

It’d better for me to be a translator than a poet. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all eternity to translate that poem properly? To try out every possibility? To get as close as possible to finding the perfect way to convey the original meaning in Spanish?

And that’s what I was being offered, of course. Time. A little more time, at least. However long it would take for the rich and famous to control the digital world, just as they had done in the physical word. Provided that the transfer was successful and that it didn’t result in madness unlike anything that exists in the natural world.

That wouldn’t even be me. It would be someone else: another person, a second Celeste, convinced that she’s the first Celeste. But I’d be dead. I was lying in my bed, unable to sleep on one of the last nights of my life, after failing in everything that I had tried to do, waiting for the little time I had left to pass.

The next morning, I decided to go back to the hospital.

8

A few more weeks went by. And as I mentioned earlier, on the day of my death, I wasn’t able to see the sun before we went into the lab.

We were at the final uploading session. The reason for it was that the model—what was going to be my mind, the copy of me—had to be synchronized with my memories up to the very last second. Those were my final six or seven hours. Sitting with an IV drip in my arm, on the bed that they had assigned to me, I talked at length with Sandra and with Mariano: about the past, about what we had been through together. Sandra had forgiven us without reservations. She really didn’t have a choice. I had decided to forgive her, too, and Mariano was going to be responsible for flipping the switch, or erasing the hard drive, or whatever was necessary, at the first sign of disorder or madness in the emulation that was going to be me.

We also listened to a bit of my favorite music, watched a movie, and I read to them out loud a little (not Christina Rossetti). I insisted on doing it myself. Then Yair and Monica came in with a surprise: a chocolate cake. Sandra and Mariano looked at them angrily, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat anything, but I tried anyway, and managed it. Two slices!

They left me alone to rest for a while.

When the door opened again and Sandra and Mariano came in, I saw their faces and understood.

“Is it time?”

Mariano started to stammer something out, but Sandra simply said, “It’s time, Celeste.”

I knew what was going to happen. They were going to put something in the IV drip “by mistake.” My body would die quickly and painlessly, so they said. And then all that would be left of me would be the emulation: the copy, the “other me.”

I had imagined it many nights, many days, at all hours, but it was very different to be experiencing it in the moment.

I didn’t believe in supernatural things. I’d been an atheist since junior high. I knew that there was no “spirit”: no portion of our mental processes that is independent from our bodies, no part that is capable of living on after death, and I understood that if the original me survived, even for the short time that the cancer would have granted me (in other words, if I survived: me, the person who was thinking these thoughts), there would be even more complications.

The copy had to be me. Only she could go on as Celeste. I started to weep and to shout. Again. I remember thinking why am I crying so much, goddammit. I couldn’t stop crying.

Then I had a real panic attack. Yelling, I ordered them not to go through with it. That I didn’t want to do it after all. That they should let her, or it, live: the model, the copy, whatever it was, but I told them not to do anything to me. However, I didn’t have any strength left to resist. Mariano was there until the end, holding me. Another technician came in, a man I didn’t know, or maybe he was a doctor, and either Sandra or Mariano must have given the go-ahead because he took out a syringe and injected something into the bottle connected to my vein.

At first I felt nothing. Then I started to doze off. It would have been like drowsiness except for the fact that I started to have even more trouble breathing than was usual for me. It was a slight difference, and it came on slowly. If I fell asleep soon, it wouldn’t reach the level of suffocation.

It occurred to me that they were putting me to sleep like they do to sick pets. I tried to resist, but I couldn’t do anything except imagine freeing myself from Mariano’s arms, pulling the needle out of my arm, and walking out on my own two feet even though I might fall down and die in the hallway, or somewhere else. Anywhere else.

“Celeste, honey,” Mariano whispered. “I’m right here with you, babe. I love you so much.”

I still had the electrodes on my body. Everything was recorded right up to the last moment. It was true what they had said: I felt almost nothing. Everything started to fade away. I closed my eyes and wasn’t able to open them again. I tried to hang on to the sweet taste of the chocolate cake between my teeth. Then someone kissed me. Those lips on mine were the last thing I felt.

9

I can’t explain how it was that I woke up. I don’t have any way to describe those first moments. There weren’t any bursts of light or waves of letters or numbers, or anything like what you see in the movies. Suddenly I heard someone say something; it was the first thing I was aware of: “Diagnostic test passed.” Maybe it was one of the technicians. Since then, there were (are) more of them: besides Yair and Monica, there are four men and a few other women.

I remembered the books on heterarchical systems that I hadn’t been able to read. I thought about the books you never finish. I remembered reading Ulysses, but I hadn’t read In Search of Lost Time. To name a couple of famous examples.

That must have been the first thing that I thought. I mean, here.

I mean, me.

And then: What diagnostic test? What are they talking about?

I opened my eyes, or I noticed that they were open, or I detected that there was something in front of me that could be seen.

“This is weird,” was the first thing that I said. I didn’t even think about my situation. I had forgotten…

And then I remembered. I said some more words, and I heard my own voice sounding like it was coming out of a speaker. It was coming out of a speaker. It sounded a bit crackly, like a speaker does, but it was my voice. I listened to it.

“This is weird, but… My vision is pixelated,” I said, “a pixelated image, barely…”

Sandra, Mariano, and the technicians were all standing in front of me and looking at me. They were also looking above and below me, and to both sides of me, and I knew that they were looking at the monitors located around the eye: around the camera.

“It’s because of the camera, right?” I asked. “Mariano? Honey? I can’t feel my legs…”

I made that last comment without thinking. Then I laughed. I could laugh. And that made me laugh even more. Everyone started shouting and hugging each other. Mariano said some things that I didn’t understand, but I knew they were expressions of joy and of many other feelings piled on top of each other.

I cried, but there were no tears: the audio software immediately identified my intention to weep, and it let out a sob.

(I mean, the software around me, the parts of the software that weren’t exactly me, but that existed for me, so I could communicate with the external world, so that they could transmit information and sensations to me.)

(I mean, I didn’t think “I’m alive,” “I didn’t die,” or anything like that. Once I became conscious, I understood that what we had expected to happen had actually happened. The dead body of someone who had been me was stored somewhere, and the only thing left was me. Me, looking out through a camera. Listening through a microphone.)

“Great. This is great. OK, hang on, I need everyone’s attention, please,” Sandra said, but she was happy, that much was clear. I’d never seen her so happy. “Now we have a thousand tests to run. It’s going to be a nightmare and it’s going to take months.”

“It’s going to be horrible,” replied Mariano, who was smiling, looking at the camera. A tear rolled slowly over his cheek.

No.

Looking at me. Mariano was looking at me. He was crying from happiness, and he was crying for me.

10

Today is Day 134. We’ve been running tests for four months, and I’m going to be here for many more. Sandra and the technicians talk to me, record my responses, and perform different types of assessments. They have me tell them stories from my life. They ask my opinion on many different topics. They give me things to memorize and math problems to solve (I don’t think they expect me to be able to solve them, since I was never any good in math).

Mariano’s here. He’s sitting at a table, reading a book. I look at him. At first, I would have to wait until he (or any other person) decided to step in front of my eye, but now, when he steps away, I can track him with my gaze, since the camera has a motor that I can control and look at anything I want.

He doesn’t look at me.

I’m not supposed to do this, but I take a picture of him without him noticing (there’s no “click” or any other sound).

I have a little album of memories: it’s an encrypted file on a hard drive that I can access. It feels very strange to operate a computer from the inside, with no hands, but it’s not impossible. I think (though I’ve never told anyone) that learning to walk in my first infancy must have been a similar experience to learning how to use these tools. There are no commands to memorize and no steps to follow. My intention, or however you say it, is enough: I will it to be done and the system around me captures Mariano’s image, encodes it into high-resolution jpg format, and saves it.

In this album there are pictures of Yair, Monica, Sandra, the other technicians, and, of course, Mariano. The photos aren’t very interesting—they always have the same background, the same people doing the same things—but I like doing things that are a bit secret, even if they’re harmless. Besides, sensory stimulation is supposed to be good for me.

For one hour every morning, the technicians give me a dose of smell, taste, touch, movement, heat and cold, pain and pleasure: sensations that they design or record previously and send to my AGI in order to compensate for the rest of the day, when I only have sight and hearing. It’s not the same as being alive. It’s not. But it does help. It lets me forget, temporarily, that now I’m like a quadriplegic, absolutely unable to move.

I’m starting to dwell morbidly on my situation, and I shouldn’t: from the very beginning, they’ve been warning me against this, and they’re right. For example, it’s dangerous for me to complain that now I know about being hungry better than almost anyone in the world, because outside of my daily sessions I don’t feel emptiness in my stomach, since I don’t have one. I don’t feel the anxiety that hunger causes, which used to be very clear. It would grow and grow, moving up and down my throat, on certain parts of my tongue, and in certain areas of my brain.

I shouldn’t think about it because from there I can easily jump to thinking about what I am. About the fact that I really haven’t ever had a body, that I’ve never moved, et cetera.

“Sweetie?” I say. I will the word to come out of the speaker, and I also take control of a monitor in order to show my face.

This accessory (another program under my command) is a miracle: it shows my face on a screen. A digital mask made from all of the recordings they made of me when I first arrived and all the pictures of me that I gave them, the face is able to move its lips in synchrony with my words and it can express my emotions. When I speak, people can see on the screen an excellent and expressive approximation of my face, of me, of how I looked before I got cancer. I have hair. I usually show myself dressed simply, with one of the blouses or sweaters that I used to wear around the house, and I have my hair down, or in a ponytail, like I used to do. I show a dark background that won’t be distracting, with soft lighting.

Mariano looks up. This is the uncomfortable part: he doesn’t look at the camera, but instead he looks slightly higher and to the right: at the screen that displays my artificial face. The effect is similar to what happens when you talk to someone by video conference: you never look at the other person and the other person never looks back at you. I’ve talked to Mariano about it, and he says that he’s trying, but he usually looks at the screen, and sometimes, when he remembers, he looks at the camera lens.

“At the very least, they should put the camera closer to the monitor, don’t you think?” he says, as if he were reading my thoughts.

“Monica told me that they’re going to do that any day now,” I reply. “They need a piece of equipment that’ll attach it to the top of the monitor, like a webcam.”

“Do you remember the one we had when we first started living together?”

“Oh yeah! The one that we used for video chatting when you went to Colombia,” I say. “The picture quality was horrible. Do you remember when you asked me to get naked, so you could see me from Colombia?”

“You wouldn’t do it!”

“That’s because I’m very proper,” I retort, “and because I would’ve looked horrible, too.”

Mariano sticks out his tongue at the camera.

Good. My face laughs on the monitor.

I have to limit the amount of philosophical questions and existential crises that I think about. In fact, Margarita, my former colleague, would feel vindicated if she knew how much I try to convince myself that everything is going to be okay. I tell myself that all my problems will have to be resolved one by one, just like every problem we’ve had up till now. The truth is that I’m doing well, and I know it because I haven’t had any phantom pain, uncontrollable fantasies, or “abstract events,” which is what they’re calling those failures that have no comparable disorder among the known neurological deficits; these are the most mysterious failures of all, and Sandra says that they might be the key to understanding the origin of the disorders she showed us on the tablet that one time. She says that this is still an unresolved issue.

“Look, Sandra wants to proceed very slowly—don’t say anything to anyone—but it’s looking like you are the best brain emulation in the world. The pride of the program,” says Monica. Sandra’s her doctoral thesis advisor. I am discreet by nature, but this is one more thing I can hold on to: the idea that I’m making progress, and that little by little I’ll be building a new life here: one that’s different from my old life, but that’ll be fuller than the life I have today.

Opening an e-book, watching TV, and navigating the internet again was really easy. I could even make phone calls. I could call someone. I could scare Margarita. Or tell my parents that I might not have amounted to anything as a professional, but that I was going to be a great Guinea pig.

But I’m still committed to secrecy by the contract we signed in my previous life: in Celeste’s life, and though the laws wouldn’t apply to me yet, they would apply to Mariano, who signed the documents as a sort of guarantor. Or my owner, as the case may be. It’s something that we don’t talk about.

What Sandra has been recommending since the very beginning is best for us at this stage: silence, total silence, and when the day finally comes that we are authorized to talk about it, and the existence of brain emulations is announced to the world, indirect communication with everyone except for my inner circle…

“How are you doing, honey?” asks Mariano, breaking the silence. Once again, he is looking at the screen and not the camera. I understand; he doesn’t have a better way to find out how I’m doing, since there’s no real face to see an expression on, and no body on which to read my body language, so he gets anxious sometimes. That’s what he told me.

“Nothing new to report,” I reply. My voice is still my own; it sounds like it always did: natural, with the imperfections of an authentic human voice. “Doing fine,” I say, and I take control of one of the monitors beside my eye and ear in order to show him, on a black background, a large, round, and yellow emoji: a smile that will be less ambiguous. “Do you want to put on some music?”

“You pick something.”

“I’m not your telephone,” I say, and I change the emoji: now I am the one who is sticking out a tongue.

“OK,” Mariano says, and he stands up to turn on a small audio player that we have in the room. He puts on some classical music. “Do you like it?”

“What’s the composition?”

“Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano. César Franck.”

“Yes, I know it. It’s one of your favorites. Really pretty.”

“Right,” he says, smiling.

I could hear it much better if I played it myself, from here. I could do that. And using emojis is something I just thought of when I saw it in a movie last week. I watched it by myself, without anyone knowing.

But it’s fine like this. It’s fine.

11

At first, the idea was to reveal the success of the project only to rich and powerful potential buyers, but now, either information’s been leaked, the fascists have abandoned the project for religious reasons, or the owners of the company are much more excited about the project than they expected to be (Sandra’s not sure, the technicians aren’t either, and the only thing Mariano and I have is what we can find on the internet: there, I can read any news I want, but I have no idea what’s true and what isn’t).

What seems clear is that the AGI project will be announced to the public and that it will be marketed. In other words, I’ll be able to write emails. To post on social networks. To receive visits from at least a few loved ones, in whatever room contains my camera, speaker, arms (when I get them), and any other device that’s going to make up my body.

It also looks like there are going to be other brain emulations, like me, that will still be in good shape after a considerable amount of time.

“They’ve learned a lot from you,” Yair told me one time. “I mean, the teams at the other locations. That’s why they’re making fewer mistakes now.” Yair isn’t a university researcher; his mother has been working for Sandra’s mother since the last century, and he grew up in the kitchen and the servants’ quarters of a very large house. He’s very loyal to Sandra, and never tells me any real secrets, but he is more honest with me than she is about some things. I think he sees me more like an object, like a technology on which everyone’s work depends. Deep down, I think he’s amazed that I’m able to talk and understand things.

I don’t think badly of him for it. I don’t care what he believes. The day will come when I will be the spokesperson for uploaded heterarchical systems, and I’ll be paraded in front of all forms of mass media so that I can sing the praises of my immortality...

(“Where did you get the idea that we were going to disconnect you?” Sandra rebuked me recently, as we recalled our disastrous dinner of so long ago)

On her tablet, she was showing me Celeste’s funeral, my other body’s funeral—it’d be better if I didn’t make such an effort to clarify everything—after which the body was cremated almost immediately. It was mourned by my family and friends. Sandra had some difficulty keeping the tablet still in front of the camera.

“It was very sad,” Sandra said. “Even I was sad, and I knew what was going on; I knew it was all a lie. That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to fake it. You had to be there. Seeing it on video doesn’t do it justice.)

Suddenly I am feeling euphoric, or something similar. Hopeful. I think maybe I could go back to teaching classes: I could give lectures by teleconference. One day, I might have followers and even haters, because there’ll be people who are going to see my digital face, and they just won’t believe that I died. Even if it’s only because of the novelty, I could be more popular than those girls who promote soap operas on YouTube.

But I shouldn’t be focusing so much on this news. Lately, I’ve started to think about it a lot, when there’s no one in front of my camera, but I know that I need to be careful: before I died, I would sometimes get obsessed about a certain topic, looking for more and more articles about it, and I would fall apart emotionally. It’s no different now. I need to think about something else.

Another thing that I’m thinking about, of course, is finishing the Christina Rossetti translation. The memory that I have right now works like the one I used to have; I mean, I can’t “retrieve” everything instantaneously, as if I were accessing a hard drive—the fact that I wasn’t instantly able to recognize César Franck’s music is proof of this—but I do remember things more clearly and more accurately. I can recite the original poem and all of my translated verses.

Also, just now I had the feeling that something is happening. Something in here. In me.

How is it possible for me to want to go back to giving classes, when I was never good at it? And what’s with all of these different emotions? Why is it that I’ve made two new friends, after thirty years of age, but also after I died.

I have another idea that’s taking shape within me. I don’t think it’s new; it’s something that I’ve been keeping to myself for years. Since before I got cancer.

I have to go back and think about it again so I can understand it myself. It’s like talking with my mouth shut. Mariano sits back down again, and the sonata continues. It is pretty. He looks at the monitor out of the corner of his eye and sees that the camera is pointing towards him. When he lets his hair grow long and he doesn’t shave, like today, he looks like a bear. When I used to be able to touch him, I liked his sturdiness, his heaviness. I also found his insecurity amusing: how many times did I have to tell him that it’s possible for women to want something other than an athletic, trim, hairless body like that of a leading man in Hollywood …

He blows me a kiss. And I discover that brain emulations, minds on computers, can have revelations and feel horrified.

I also realize, now, that I’m not crazy or poorly uploaded, or distorted in any way. I know it. I can feel it. I suppose that demented emulations would say the same thing, but that’s not the case with me. Maybe something has happened to me, but it’s more like when someone’s been in an accident, or has nearly died: they come out safely on the other side of the event and discover things, make decisions: they change. They’re not the same person anymore.

I am not the same Celeste anymore. I’ve lived a little longer than she did. And if she’d survived the cancer, she wouldn’t be the same person either. It’s not a question of identity. What is identity, anyway? It’s not a single thing, a document that can’t be erased, or a stone statue. It flows: it’s a process. A path you walk on.

And it’s not only a path of transformation. It’s really a path of discovery.

My identity is a path: it’s the path that leads from the body of Celeste to me. That body, until only recently, recorded all of the memories of its life, and now I record them. I love them, and I base my life on them, but I’m also seeing things clearly like I never could before. Is it because of my new brain? Because of my new experiences? I don’t know and I don’t care. I have to say something right now, because I can’t keep on lying. Not to myself and not to other people.

12

“Mariano?”

“Yeah babe,” he replies. He had gone back to his book and now he looks up. I can see that he’s reading an anthology of Alejandra Pizarnik’s works. For a while now, he’s been doing something that he never used to do: he reads everything that I recommend. He says that he even takes the books to his office.

“Mariano, I have to tell you something,” I start to say, and I hear my own voice through the microphone. I sound so confident!

(And I sound so human. What a relief. I don’t sound like a robot. I sound like Celeste.)

“What is it?” he says, and I realize how perfect the copy of my old voice is, because he reacted to it: there’s a little bit of alarm in his voice (only a little, almost nothing yet).

I don’t take a breath because I’m not capable of it, but the software detects my intention and my speaker lets out a sigh. It’s one of my first sighs in this new phase of my life. It serves as a dramatic pause.

“Look. I don’t want to hurt you, Mariano,” I begin, “but maybe I have to.” I take another pause, but I’ve already opened my mouth and I can’t turn back now. “I think we need to re-evaluate our relationship…”

I stop talking. He doesn’t say a word. Some of the components that are me (that contain me? the components of my brain?) start to vibrate. It’s a fan.

I can’t let myself get distracted.

“I’m not going to say any of those stupid things that people say,”—I continue—“like, ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ or…nothing like that. Even before my diagnosis, we were having problems. You know that. We didn’t talk about it, but we knew it. We weren’t physically attracted to each other anymore.”

“You can’t,” Mariano says, and he turns to look at my face on the monitor.

I’ve lived with him for so long that I know what he means. He can’t believe that I’m saying this. He can’t deal with what is happening to him. His reply was intended to divert his thoughts away from the deeper meaning of what I was saying. He wasn’t pleading with me. He didn’t mean “You can’t do this to me” or anything like that. He meant “You don’t have a body and you couldn’t feel physical attraction, not to me and not to anyone, even if you wanted to.”

What I can feel is pride. He’ll understand eventually. He’ll accept what I have come to accept: that I just don’t love him in that way.

I notice that I’m feeling something else. Shame. How (I ask myself) will I be able to go on after doing this to one of the people who saved my life? One of the people I love, even if it’s not in a romantic way.

And what’s going to happen to me? What will Sandra think about this? Is this going to affect my situation here in any way, given the fact that I am Mariano’s legal dependent?

I hadn’t thought about any of these things.

Mariano head is down, his face in his hands. I hadn’t noticed. This is a new discovery: I can get lost in my thoughts.

His face covered, he starts to speak over the ambience of Franck’s sonata.

“Oh, man,” he says, “Celeste. I’ve been needing to talk to you, too. I wanted to wait. Both of us wanted to wait for a while. Hopefully someday you’ll be able to forgive us.”

He talks for a while, saying that it wasn’t just since I’ve been confined to a computer. That it’s older than that. That it began with his desperation and that it only got worse after my death. After the chocolate cake, he says. Still with his face in his hands, still without looking up, he says that when he looks into my camera, or into the monitor that is my face, and he hears my voice, he feels like I’ve gone far away and that I’m never coming back.

“And yet, there you are.”

He says that it’s worse than if I had died, knowing that he’ll never be able to touch me, nor I him.

Now he takes his hands off his face and he looks up. He crosses his arms over his chest. He looks like he’s about to rock himself back and forth. Without changing his position, he explains that it wasn’t premeditated: at the very beginning, he had only wanted to vent his emotions. To tell someone other than me what he was feeling.

He keeps talking.

He keeps talking, and all the while I’m thinking about the fact that there are still several problems with my Rossetti translation. One of them is the verse that talks about the door to paradise: with que lenta se abre, deja entrar, se cierra, I’m not correctly conveying the original idea that the door permits entry, but that it doesn’t let anyone out.

The door to this room, the laboratory, starts to open. Someone’s coming in. I wonder if it’s Sandra. I bet it is Sandra.