New briefings, new missions, always comes with a new
skills package too, and in those early days, I didn’t always lose the previous one.
I told them all was clear, all blanked but I lied. I hoarded. I retained the
knowledge of those earlier times, of the tasks and skills given to me for those
early missions. I saved those bits in folders I made and hid. Beyond the reach
of the Grid.
Now those keepsakes – I like calling them my keepsakes –
lay dormant, inactive, until those times when my cortex fires them into life.
They return to me, grey fogged thoughts without clear definition, snapping into
other memories or impulses, sometimes confusing the mix. I cope by using the
medical supplements they prescribe me. They do help limit the bouts of
psychosis, the odd sniffs of paranoia, and the haunting visions and
recollections of a life led inside a warped purpose to deny that very same
essence in others.
When the Grid hands me another task, I hack into the
vessel that someone has selected to make that task easier, the body judged to
be the most appropriate or the most suitable. I never ask where the vessels
come from, but I report to the Grid if something is wrong afterwards. I care. A
sort of post-mission after-care. I think of them as vessels or vehicles – they
call them clones or skins and at my low points, I call them carcasses – empty until I take over, but they may well be
others just like me, away elsewhere hacked into someone else, chasing their own
mission. Someone could be in my carcass, doing what I do. Would I ever know?
My keepsakes do cause me problems, like too many postcards
of places I visited (or may have visited, I don’t know) spilling out of the
crude heavy album they are kept in. Scattered keepsakes that need saving,
re-inserting, back onto the album pages. My trouble is I hid those folders so
well from the Grid, I’m a little hazy recalling where they all are. Maybe
that’s from too much critical head trauma when I was in earlier carcasses,
running Red Tasks, the tasks I find the hardest.
Perhaps it’s just age – aye, even online in a virtual domain
where my personality is a download on the Grid, I do believe I must be
degrading somehow. Should I revert to an earlier back-up file perhaps? No, I
want this all to end some day, the blessed relief of nothingness, that final
sleep into the realm of the dead. Want it some days. Absolute cravings for the
final demise after other days I have – those really bad days.
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