“Or?” Kestrel said, because she was a ferret, and ferrets always look for the other door.
“What’s in it for you besides science?”
Mister Rom Packs opened the door himself. He was not what anyone expected. In a world of chrome augments and LED tattoos, he looked like a retired librarian who’d gotten lost on the way to a tax seminar. Soft-bodied, round-shouldered, wearing a cardigan with actual elbow patches. His glasses were thick, bottle-bottom things that magnified his pale eyes to an unsettling degree. His most notable feature, however, was the back of his head. From the occipital ridge down to his cervical spine, his skull was a patchwork of ports, jacks, and data-clusters—a hundred tiny sockets, each one labeled in fading marker: MOTION. COLOR. TASTE. NOSTALGIA. FEAR. DÉJÀ VU. Mister Rom Packs
And beneath all of it, she felt Mister Rom Packs. Not as a man in a cardigan, but as a vast, gentle silence. He was not a librarian. He was the library. Every lost moment he had ever collected lived inside him, and he carried them not as a burden but as a promise. I remember you. You existed. That counts for something.
Kestrel woke up on the floor of the workshop. Her cheek was cold and blank—just a patch of dead synthetic skin. The CRT monitors were dark. And on the cot, Harold P. Driscoll opened his eyes. In a world of chrome augments and LED
“I found it ,” Kestrel said, shivering. “It found me first. Crawled out of a disposal vent in Level 7. It was trying to type on a dead terminal. What the hell is it, Mister?”
Mister Rom Packs took the hand from Kestrel with surprising gentleness. He carried it to a workbench littered with soldering irons and spools of copper thread. He plugged a cable from the back of his skull—from the port labeled TOUCH —into a reader on the bench. His eyes went distant. The static on the monitors rippled. His most notable feature, however, was the back of his head
Mister Rom Packs pointed at her. “In you.”
She touched her synthetic skin patch. It was warm.
“We’re missing the core,” Mister Rom Packs said on the eighth night. They sat in his workshop, surrounded by the hum of CRT monitors. The reassembled Harold—now a torso, one arm, and a head that had not yet opened its eyes—lay on a cot in the corner, breathing in shallow, mechanical gasps. “The SELF fragment. Without it, he’s just a collection of reflexes. He’ll wake up, but he won’t be anyone.”
“The hand is a later development. The fragments, you see, want to be whole again. But they have no bodies. So they’ve started… borrowing. The hand was grown by a cluster of Harold’s anxiety subroutines using stolen biomatter and a hacked 3D meat-printer. It’s not trying to type. It’s trying to remember how to type. Harold was a hunt-and-peck typist. It’s the only motor memory that survived.”