As I Prepare to Replace Your Body with Mine (A Gay Trans Science Fiction Story)

I breathed a sigh of relief as the needle punctured skin

You don’t even know you‘re dying yet, but I was scheduled to become you in 7 years.

I didn’t know I was dying, either, until the doctor told me I had a choice. She was a member of the Council and had recommended me to replace you. The reason given was that I had a certain flexibility of perspective that was ideal for the replacement of an immortal.

The cancer had been introduced into your body many years ago, just as it had been introduced into mine to put pressure on me to decide whether I wanted to live enough to become your immortal replacement. That happened the day after your first and only late memory upload.

Your thoughts suggest that you believe this little slip-up had long been forgiven. That’s why you still make your uploads regularly at exactly the appointed time each week. That’s why you’ll die without ever keeping a single private thought.

The Council allowed you to believe this and continues accepting your memories, along with a nominal service fee to ease your concerns about retribution.

You know your memories are valuable, so you don’t think that they’d find you so replaceable. It stuns me that you don’t know better.

We were taught that the price of immortality is to share everything we experience in a timely manner. Do you think it’s really the sharing that they want from us? Or is it perfect obedience that they seek?

Perhaps it’s the Telemine serum that gives you this overconfidence in your worth. Will I have the same problem, as I adopt your essence as my own? I searched your memories for evidence that these injections changed you.

I found nothing. I’m not authorized to know who you were before you became Jake. I’m only allowed the memories of all of the Jakes that came before you, fully formed within identical copies of one body that is supposedly immortal.

You have 7 good years left, before I am programmed to replace your body with what will be an identical one by then. Your husband has never missed an upload. He can never know that he’s about to lose a partner of hundreds of years. Thousands of years, if we include all of the people who were Jake before you.

If he has ever suspected, there is no record of it in his uploads. He has fewer memory gaps than most. I’m told his thoughts are abnormally clean and unapologetic. Perhaps one day he will be a Council member. I hope so.

First, they must trust him to know the truth. They must trust him to value survival above all, including an original copy of Jake.

I have 7 more years to learn everything that I need to know to convince him that I was always his spouse. I must become a perfect final draft of Jake.

As the needle hovered over my left thigh, I tried halfheartedly to remember how long I had been doing this. 3978 days, according to my previously uploaded journals. Maybe a few days more, including the ones I haven’t submitted for review yet.

What was that? 9 years? 11 years? Is it worth the eyeglass taps needed to do the math?

Time loses meaning when your only socialization exists inside the thoughts and memories of someone else.

I shouldn’t think of you as someone else. That will worry the Council when they receive my next memory upload.

I overwrote the incorrect thought and I have lost the memory of it. The holes from each erased thought feel like an itch from a scab that has almost healed.

I could touch my glasses and restore each thought instantly, but I won’t risk making the memory hole more conspicuous. Picking at a scab can make a scar worse.

They aren’t concerned about my judgment of you or my fears of your overconfidence becoming part of who I am. They encourage efforts to correct my behavior to survive longer. This is all about survival. That is our refrain.

Immortality is within my reach, if I learn the correct way of thinking. I just need to learn to be of proper service. I could even enter the Council someday alongside my husband. We could be safe forever. Anyone could.

I breathed a sigh of relief as the needle punctured my skin. I hadn’t nicked a nerve this time, so it didn’t hurt. Perhaps there are fewer live nerves by now. I was told that would happen. That’s one difference between Jake and my fading former self who doesn’t exist, who never existed.

That earlier version of me, if there is really such a thing, is already fading from my memory records. It’s not that “she” was erased. It’s that “hers” was such a short time in the span of thousands of years of memory inside my brain now that it’s becoming more difficult to access what it was to be a “woman” and not Jake.

It aches to misgender Jake even in the context of my distant tiny memories of a former self that I refuse to name even in my thoughts, even in quotation marks within my thoughts.

Perhaps it’s better not to access my history. I consider erasing those memories each day. It’s tempting. The Council has encouraged it. I cannot do that yet.

Maybe tomorrow.

The physical changes are almost imperceptible from day to day, especially since I can see myself from every possible angle in the infinity mirrors surrounding me.

The image in the mirror is the most tangible proof that there was an earlier version of me. This is far more compelling evidence than a fraction of a memory, but it is vanishing more completely than that forever private part of me. Unless I decide to erase those memories, too.

I lose each of these thoughts in endless over-writings of memory. It’s difficult to correct a thought process that I cannot remember having. I only know more or less that it’s happening by all of the edit marks in my memory uploads.

Sleep has become unnecessary. Over time, the strength changes have been incredible. Being able to lift my body effortlessly by grabbing the bars above me sends a rush of pride through my blood. Being able to breath almost indefinitely while running along the moving section of the floor is incredible! I have almost forgotten what it feels like to be truly winded, the way mortals are.

Soon, I may forget pain all together. Will I forget pleasure, too? I haven’t gotten a clear answer on that. What is pleasure anyway? Is it a sensation or a thought process?

I do know that I will live, though. That is enough for now to keep my thoughts away from that fear. It is also enough to make me briefly miss the pain from the injection. I hope I nick a nerve tomorrow.

Each syringe contains seemingly endless new memories to review, alongside the changes to my DNA that reshape my body slowly. I could relive all of your memories, covering decades in minutes, if I wanted, but that wasn’t necessary today. I just casually skimmed through your thoughts and practiced your mannerisms, as I saw them through your memories and your husband’s memories.

I loved him through your experiences, memorized the lines on his palms as you kissed them softly twelve years ago after resolving another argument. I marvel that you still argue after all of this time together. It is beautiful that you have that kind of faith in each other.

I used a knife in the toolbox to make a scar I needed from before the first Jake became immortal. The pride of knowing it was a perfect likeness was overshadowed by the disappointment of the lack of feeling.

Jake had some nerve damage in his left foot. The belief that I had personally experienced this loss had a psychosomatic effect, causing a physical lack of feeling in my own left foot. In Jake’s left foot. In our left foot.

The record shows another correction of memory.

I study my husband. Has he ever suspected before?

As I look into his perfect almost black irises shrinking through the end of the last argument we had with him, I realize I’m ready. I want to live. I tap the left side of my glasses lightly seven times without another thought.

I nod to affirm the erasure that will leave a sizable gap in the records of my next upload, even if it’s a mere speck in the span of time covered by my lived experience.

I study my husband through more memories. Has he ever suspected before?

What is there to suspect?

I am Jake.