She looks up at his face as he places a hand on his leg, just below his crotch, exerts pressure with the first three fingers, one at a time, pressing down exactly so, precise distances, the exact locations of nerve endings, causing him suddenly to close his eyes, take a sharp intake of breath.
It’s not a date; it’s not a solution. But just for one afternoon, she has someone to talk with. It’s the best she’s going to get.
I was twenty-three. I was invincible, because you are when you’re twenty-three. The fact is, life sometimes traps you. Sometimes there is no way out and there is no chance to escape. Sometimes there is. Sometimes you can get away. Sometimes you die.
They come to a room that looks like a lock-up garage with walls covered in shelves full of unusual briac-a-brac and in the back of the lock-up there’s a pedestal with a tall, wide, cylinder of perspex on it and they stand her, naked against what looks like a large doll stand, and plug her head into the aluminium post at the back of the cylinder, like the ones at work, and she is back as they lock the perspex cylinder shut and she is back in her body and she cannot move or speak or scream.
She places her hand on his crotch and the small, sudden movement under her fingers shocks her into an awareness of the mechanics of the planned deed, the plugging of flesh into flesh like a cable into the port in her head —
She takes out the flash drive. She puts it on the glass table and drinks some more coffee, regarding it like a law-abiding citizen looks at a bag of cocaine.
— Oh, all right, then. Anything once.
The breakthrough comes when Jeremiah Grimslade discovers that the human soul, far from being intangible, is in fact housed within an organ the size and shape of a pea somewhere inside the sternum.
He immediately begins to investigate the possibility of a soul transplant.
She isn’t supposed to remember, she’s supposed to have archived it, but sometimes things come back. Lying in passive mode, caught in nirvanic bliss, she experiences it again, only not as herself.