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Green to green, red to red. It was meant to be simple;, something that Touko could do without needing a leyline or anything beyond a pair of forceps and raw material, something that she could put together anywhere. And she must have done so at least once, though she didn’t remember; her memory was fuzzy at the best of times on the spaces between bodies, which was before she accounted for the blanks she didn’t know were blank. 1989, she was in Inner Mongolia: what had she been doing? A bit of this, a bit of that… she just shrugged and let it fade away. That memory wasn’t going to return, and many others were already gone, so why start counting deaths now? It was enough to know that she could stand here over a red mat of the human body in parts - carbon, nitrogen, calcium, iron, zinc, in various forms - hemoglobin, phosphates, ethyl methane sulfonate, bones - stand here and let her hands work autonomously and her mind wander. Her hands were evidently practiced.
Practice implies repetition, drill, the transfiguration of the exotic to routine, making everything just another day at the office. Her hands had a week of life in them now after Ogawa and Araya had ruined the last body, and you couldn’t learn like that in a week. And she hadn’t been practicing, it had just come time to pick up the violin and play. So where did the practice come from? She caught her hand in a pocket, looking for her cigarettes. Like that, exactly; all week it had been bothering her that she hadn’t started on the puppet, scratching at the back of her brain like the instinct to smoke. Dying never made her want to quit, that addiction seemed to just spring from the body, and maybe that was just the same, that the design and being of her body demanded there always being another.
A cause for concern.
—
Somehow, there was learning involved, even though Touko couldn’t remember how the process changed and improved. Well, maybe not ‘improvement’: it was faster these days, but the end result was always the same - obviously.
But being easier and faster was something, sure. It wasn’t hard to miss the first process from the basement of her Soho apartment. There were two marble slabs there; she had been on her back on one of them, and placed on the other an ether clump the size of a sarcophagus. A puppet hand holding a scalpel hung from the ceiling, with the point of the scalpel slaved to her movements. As she drew one finger up and down her skin, it obediently followed, carving a Touko effigy out of the ether.
When there was a figure of her lying on the marble block, she got up and began cutting sections away, turning it into a shell. The internals were a bit of guesswork, but after that it was simply a matter of alchemy and transfiguration that the ether took to readily so that the raw sticky matter softened, paled - she saw the new skin that was growing tiny hairs like a dusting of snow.
It wasn’t something you could really compare, map to a blueprint, give a completion percentage, she put down her tools and suddenly realized that it wasn’t a doll lying on the slab, it was just Touko. With none of her wit, the touch of cruelty, sex appeal; and who was she to say that if she ran a current into her heart and she woke up that she wouldn’t only need the course of her life to figure out those things? She spent a while walking around it, looking for weaknesses, poking and prodding because the hands occupied the brain. Except, there was nothing to do. Manual examination at that point didn’t stave off thought, it invited it. Examination needed the mind for comparison and T = T.
She went out to the park that night, sitting on a bench to watch the frost come in on the lampposts. She crossed one leg over the top of her opposing knee and took the cigarette out of her mouth, grinding it into the medial malleolus. It hurt - hell, it hurt, even as she held it for as long as she could stand before it dropped onto the wet ground and she could bite down on her finger to keep from yelling. It hurt here! It hurt now, and she knew that it didn’t hurt back in her basement on that ankle, not until she went back down there. And by then she’d have iced her ankle, deadened the pain, and it would be gone and be hers. She could never do it again, to her other ankle or to her same ankle, magically healed or on the sure-to-grow scar; it would never mean the same. That’s what she figured must be true as she lit another cigarette for the walk home. Just another failed project that she told herself was fine and could just be stowed away.
—
Four to six bodies in, she started experimenting. The last body hadn’t ended its service intact - how much, she wasn’t quite sure, but the hazy nightmares that still drifted in from time to time suggested that it was a quite dramatic end, and yet she was perfectly fine and well in the next one with fingers, toes, limbs, eyes, tongue, everything intact that still made up ‘her’. So the world didn’t figure there was a one-to-one relationship - could she get a tattoo or piercing and then suddenly never pass herself on? Touko doubted it.
Print magenta on the page, and begin to overprint yellow. An equal mixture is red; sixty and forty percent, eighty and twenty… you could take a poll, end up with two bands of certainty in opinion and a statistical middleground of disagreement. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a helpful metaphor for her: what would be the middleground? At some point changing the body enough would pass from Touko to not-Touko, and since the difference was life and death…
So, experiments. She took a week, locking herself in her workshop to make ten dolls, dispensing with the usual care and precision. One through three were increasingly degraded versions of herself, seeming normal but twisted on the inside more and more as she went on that a doctor would have given the last one a few months to live. Four was a regression, a mirror of her high school days, black haired with a barely friendly glint in the eye; five was a tribute to how she’d been when she created the original doll, an ironic image of the starting gun; six was herself perfected for another’s eye, gone over her own body and retouching the image; seven was barely human, a real heart and real skin but pure mechanics underneath; eight was denatured, stripped of hair and pores and fingerprints and cheekbones and face ground down into averages; nine was all sharpened nails and teeth and hardened bones; ten was just herself.
As she finished each one she moved it to another room, setting them all in a line. Finished, the last one took its place, and she stood back, lighting up a cigarette where she could look at all of them before her heart sank because they all seemed exactly the same. Not that it was a similar appearance, her eye was too good to miss the differences she’d thrown in and the ones that had just been allowed to slip from a careless hand, but it was the same kind of feeling in her soul she remembered from the very first time she made a body, an odd thrumming in a high register - except now it was even more obvious with ten lined up next to each other that they were all the same underneath the difference, all her, the whole room was singing like a taught wire. Barely, she was grateful for it since she had the excuse of certainty not to do a practical test of sameness, which only happened one way. That was a small part compared to the whole confusion. The soul was supposed to mediate the differences between bodies - that even as your form changed growing older the same soul kept everything on an even keel, but Touko right now was quite clear on where her soul was, and it wasn’t lending identity to any of those other bodies. So what was it, some sort of sur- or sub-soul that tied everything together… but that made little sense. And she was forced to admit she had, frankly, no idea how it all worked.
Just a trap of another kind. There was nothing else for her to do but keep making herself. She doubled down holding her knees, suddenly light-headed because she realized there was no way she could ever stop. Her memory always slipped when she moved bodies, she always wanted to make a new body after waking up - and surely she must have done something like this before, made more than one in a go, so how many of her were there around the world waiting? There would be no way to get to the last one: somewhere in eliminating all those bodies herself she’d lose the memory of her conviction and slip back on the path because she could only ever be herself.
—
When she was free she went out to the beach, taking her shoes off, and sat down right at the edge and dug her toes into the sand and let the waves wash over. It was winter, and cold out; nobody else was on the beach. There was a cold breeze coming in from the ocean that felt like it soaked into her hair, and nothing about the moment was in any way pleasurable or sensible or called for.