Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

If she’d been working for a genuine furzoot outfit as she’d done once before, she’d have clocked her hours at day’s end, climbed out of her zoot, and pocketed the receipt for her e-pay. As it was, Zeb collected her in the pickup. Its logo now said, BIGZOOT – SAY IT WITH FURORE! She rolled herself into the back, still inside her zoot, and Zeb ferried her to another Gardener enclave – an abandoned bank in the Sewage Lagoon. The various banking corps had once paid the local pleebmob for protection, but soon their Tex-Mex identity-theft specialists were skipping in and out as freely as mice. Finally the banks had given up and decamped, because no employee’s idea of a business day well spent was lying on the floor with duct tape over your mouth while an identity filcher hacked the accounts, gaining access with your cut-off thumb.

The old-fashioned bank vault was a much better place to spend the night than the hydraulic-lift pit had been. Cool, rat-free, no gas fumes; a lingering odour of the gently oxidizing paper money of yesteryear. But then Toby started wondering what would happen if someone inadvertently closed and locked the vault door and then forgot about her, so she didn’t sleep very well.

The next day it was the Street of Dreams again. The duck costume was intolerable in the heat, one of her rubber feet was coming loose, and the nose-cone filter was dysfunctional. What if the Gardeners abandoned her and she was left to eddy around in the Dreams-land, transformed into a non-existent bird-animal and dehydrating herself to death, to be found one day in a welter of damp pink faux feathers, clogging up the drains?

But finally Zeb picked her up. He drove her to a clinic at the back of a Mo’Hair franchise outlet. “We’re doing the hair and skin,” he said. “You’re going dark. And the fingerprints, and the voiceprint. Plus a bit of recontouring.” The biotech for changing iris pigment was risky – there’d been some unpleasant bulging effects, said Zeb – so she’d have to use contacts. Green ones – he’d picked out the colour himself.

“Higher voice, or lower?” he asked her.

“Lower,” said Toby, hoping she wouldn’t come out a baritone.

“Good choice,” said Zeb.

The doctor was Chinese, and very smooth. There’d be an anaesthetic, and a recuperation time in the recovery unit upstairs – top of the line, said Zeb – and once Toby found herself inside it, the place did seem very clean. They didn’t do much cutting and stitching. Her fingertips lost their sensitivity – it would come back, said Zeb – and her throat was sore from the voicework, and her head itched a lot while the Mo’Hair scalp was bonding. The skin pigmentation was uneven at first, but Zeb told her it would be fine in six weeks: until then, she’d have to keep strictly out of the sun.

She spent the six weeks of seclusion at a Truffle cell in SolarSpace. Her contact, whose name was Muffy, collected Toby from the clinic in a very expensive all-electric coupé. “If anyone asks,” Muffy said, “just tell them you’re the new maid. I do have to apologize,” she continued, “but we have to eat meat at our place, it’s part of our cover. We feel terrible about it, but just about everyone in SolarSpace is a carnivore, and they’re very big on barbecues – organic, naturally, and some of it’s stretchy-rack-grown, you know, they grow just the muscle tissue, no brain, no pain – and it would be suspicious if we ducked it. But I’ll try to keep the cooking smells away from you.”

Too late for such a warning: Toby had already smelled something that came close to the aroma of the bone-stock soup her mother used to make. Though she was ashamed of herself, it made her hungry. Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

In her little maid’s room Toby read e-magazines, and practised sticking her contact lenses onto her eyeballs, and listened to music on a Sea/H/Ear Candy. It was a surreal interlude. “Think of yourself as a chrysalis,” Zeb had told her before the transformation process had begun. Sure enough, she’d gone in as Toby and had come out as Tobiatha. Less angla, more latina. More alto.

She looked at herself – her new skin, her new abundant hair, her more prominent cheekbones. Her new almond-shaped green eyes. She’d have to remember to put those lenses in every morning.

The alterations hadn’t made her stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t the object. The object was to make her more invisible. Beauty is only skin deep, she thought. But why did they always say only?

Still, her new look wasn’t bad. The hair was a nice change, though the family cats were taking an interest in it, probably because of the faint lamb-like smell. When she woke up in the morning she was likely to find one of them sitting on her pillow, licking her hair and purring.

Once her scalp was firmly rooted to her head and her skin tone was uniform, Toby was ready to move into her new identity. Muffy explained to her what this was to be.

“We thought, the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park,” she said. “They’re heavy on the botanies there, so you’d fit right in, because of the mushrooms and the potions and all, Zeb told me – so you can get up to speed on their products really fast. They have an organic garden for the café, they pride themselves on that, with a compost heap and all of that; and they’re doing some plant splice tryouts you might find interesting. As for the rest, it’s like organizing anything else – product in, value added, product out. Supervising the books and the supplies, managing the staff – Zeb says you’re really good with people. The procedural templates are already in place – you’ll just need to follow them.”

“The product would be the customers?” said Toby.

“That’s right,” said Muffy.

“And the value added?”

“It’s an intangible,” said Muffy. “They feel they look better afterwards. People will pay a lot of money for that.”

“Do you mind telling me how you got me this position?” Toby asked.

“My husband’s on the AnooYoo board,” said Muffy. “Don’t worry, I didn’t lie to him. He’s one of us.”

Once installed at the AnooYoo Spa, Toby settled into her role as Tobiatha, the vaguely Tex-Mex but discreet and efficient manager. The days were placid, the nights were calm. True, there was an electric fence around the whole place and four gatehouses with guards, but the identi-checks were lax and the guards never bothered Toby. It wasn’t a high-security posting. The Spa had no big secrets to defend, so the guards did nothing but monitor the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and despotted.

But still frightened, because when might the whole problem – the whole thing – start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby – being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We’d rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it.

We’re not selling only beauty, the AnooYoo Corp said in their staff instructionals. We’re selling hope.

Some of the customers could be demanding. They couldn’t understand why even the most advanced AnooYoo treatments wouldn’t make them twenty-one again. “Our laboratories are well on the way to age reversal,” Toby would tell them in soothing tones, “but they aren’t quite there yet. In a few years…”

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.