Transfers

I'm gripping his hand like a vice and he's not ever going to understand why because he can't. I'm not sure what it is I'm even trying to keep pressed in my fingers. This is not the boys I grew up with. This is not the face that taught me how to ride a bike, or the voice that warned me about the special little hurricanes helicopters create when you get too close.

His fingers tighten around mine, and I wonder if he knows what I'm thinking. If the little awkward smile on his face is there because he realises every memory in his head is a record of a boy who hasn't existed since he was five. And it's strange to think like that, because it's a seventeen year old body lounging in the driver's seat, with scars from when he was ten and burns from last year. If those weren't there, would he be frightening? Are those little time indicators splashed across his skin by accident, or for reference?

It's stupid to think like this. I'm grasping for logic in a brain more suited to right-brain that left-brain thinking. A flaw that will get bigger and bigger as I get older, until I can't tell the time, or write, or speak. The blueprint that makes me up is stranger with each revision, as each translation into an older body worsens. Everything is more experimental, the older we get. I'm the age of my brother, but they're keeping me slightly younger all the time, slowing me down. The processes going on inside me are a lot more risky than the bulking-out he has to do.

Growing up should be easy. An organic process the body does for itself.

He releases my hand, reaching across space to wrap an arm around me, sitting all stiff in the passenger seat. Too tight, but it doesn't matter to me. The next body could be in a much more precarious state, and while I have this strong one, I will treasure everything it can feel. Even the red dust from the wasteland, which I wasn't able to fully wash out of my hair because of the length and thickness. It blends in with my freckles anyway, with the reddish tint in my hair. He has managed to look as if he was never in the wasteland at all. All in all, we can pretend to be civilised. As civilised as a Transfer can ever be when compared with homo sapiens.

I am nothing but the records and after-thoughts of a girl who never existed past five. It's wrong to say that I am her, because I have lived through things that she, in a natural state, would never have had to. But it is wrong to say I am not. She is all the history that I have that is consistent- her first smells, her first sight, her first steps and words and all those little memories stay buried into me with every change. In a way, she is all that is constant, and I try to build myself up from what she likes, what she hates. It's the only sensible way to grow up when you have to re-do it with each Transfer. My friend is an extreme of this- she was allowed a goldfish called Gillyflower, and ever since her first Transfer has insisted on being addressed by that name. She once remarked that we've changed from being orang utans to caribou. Orang utans are prepared for the world by mothers, while caribou are ready to run the day they're born. I asked her why that was necessary for them. She told me about the threat of wolves; that anyone is fair game after they're born.

I look at my brother. The memories of the last three years will be foggy in the next body. His current face- his moods- my moods-

-will be different.

There's a name for this. The doubt, which comes to all of us right before we are transferred. It feels like a goodbye that will never end, until it does, and we wake up again with new faces and new heartbeats and new hands that all feel different. And these changes, I am told, would drive me insane if the past wasn't blurred. I would never be able to adjust to my new appearance.

This is the first transfer I have ever been anticipating. In the past it was always announced by a clear sweet before bed time, and what happened afterwards was blanked from my head when I woke up. Maybe that way was better when I was a child, when words like mine were still prevalent, with toys and pets and myself. The shock was reduced; it was a game; I was weaned out of selfishness, because the self part didn't fit into my world.