Again and Again and Again

Again and Again and Again

Rachel Swirsky (excerpt, read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

She turned out to be a breeder, so she got to find out. Her oldest son, Paolo, joined an experimental product trial to replace his eyes, nose and ears with a sensitive optic strip. Lucia crossed her DNA with an ant’s and grew an exoskeleton that came in handy when she renounced her parents’ conscientious objector status and enlisted in the army. Javier quite college to join a colony of experimental diseasits and was generous enough to include photographs of his most recent maladies every year in his holiday cards.

Things got worse, too. By the time Paolo had kids, limb regeneration was the fashion. Teens competed to shock each other with extreme mutilations. Paolo’s youngest, Gyptia, won a duel with her high school rival by cutting off her own legs, arms, breasts, and sensory organs.

When he saw what she had done, Paolo stifled his urge to scream. “Pie,” he said, carefully, “isn’t this going a bit far?”

Gyptia waited until she regrew her eyes, and then she rolled them.

By the time Gyptia reached adulthood, lifespans had passed the half-millennia mark. Her generation delayed family life. Why go through all the fuss of raising babies now when they could stay fancy-free for another few decades?

Eagle flying. “She rejected a mix of eagle and bat genes to improve her hearing and eyesight, and she kept her skin its natural multiracial brown instead of transfusing to a fashionable scarlet” (Rachel Swirsky). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At three hundred at fifty, Gyptia’s biological clock proclaimed itself noisily. She backed out of the lease on her stratoflat and joined a child-friendly cooperative in historical Wyoming that produced wind energy. Current and former residents raved about its diversity.

The co-op even included a few nuclear families bonded by ancient religious rituals.

Gyptia’s daughter, Xyr, grew up surrounded by fields of sage brush dotted with windmills. She and her friends scrambled up the sandstone bluffs and pretended to live in stratoflats like the ones their parents had left behind.

Every option was open to Xyr: a vast range of territory for her to explore, monthly trips to see the technological and artistic wonders of the modern world, educational and entertainment databases linked in by speed pulse. Her neighbors included: polyamorists, monogamists, asexuals, traditionalists, futurists, historics, misanthropists, genetic hybrids, biomechanical biblends, purists, anarchists, exortates, xenophiles, menthrads, ovites, alvores and ilps.