I’m working on the sequel to my novel Wash Away. Zenna Cherny will be back, along with Bar Bar the robot, Alex her cousin, programmer/language mangler Gabriela, mad scientist Katya, mermaid creature Kizi, and all your other favorites. I’ve got 27 chapters finished and I’m seven months behind deadline for publishing this book. Since my publisher is me, I haven’t put too much pressure on the author to get his ass in gear.
In the sequel, tentatively titled Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, Zenna gets herself inadvertently transferred into a turtle’s body. If I say it’s “Freaky Friday” stuff, I think you’ll get it, since 100% of the people I’ve summarized for have commented “Oh, sounds like some ‘Freaky Friday’ stuff.” (I haven’t seen it, not any of the versions, but it’s a trope and a cultural reference now and I’m forging ahead without shaping my imagination into any specific directions.)
If you’re inventing a story where your character gets transferred into a turtle, eventually you’ll have to confront the core question: what exactly is it that’s getting transferred?
A member of my writing group has the opinion that what is getting transferred is a soul. My strong instinct is to lean away from using the word “soul.” It’s a highly charged word for many readers, and you can’t depend on every reader understanding it the same way. It’s got inevitable religious connotations. It’s also very poorly defined, being something that might or might not exist but is entirely intangible if it does.
I settled on the word “identity” instead, and I invented a whole technology for Fospey Industries to conduct Identity Transfer Protocol into artificial bodies that have been created for that purpose. The ostensible market for this technology is first responders. An experienced firefighter can transfer herself into an “adventure body” and she can walk fearlessly into a burning house, carrying all her experience with her. (Behind the hype, Fospey executices secretly anticipate that “adventure bodies” will have two primary markets: as sex dolls and as soldiers.)
What gets transferred with identity? Memories, yeah, personality, yeah, but I’ll tell you the part that interests me. Perspective. If it’s something intangible with no mass, you want it to be a point, right? It’s a point of view and that rough conceptual vantage, so far, is allowing me to precariously balance a highly unwieldy plot.
Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours at a business amusingly named Identogo. If you don’t want to take your shoes off at the airport and you have $78 to toss into the wind, you can get your identity verified at Identogo and then you’re going to get that blessed TSA PRE CHECK printed on your boarding pass. When I was there, the fingerprint system was down and the whole operation was running way behind schedule. When it comes to identity verification in this pre-sci-fi world we actually live in, fingerprints are the gold standard.
For prosaic system access that doesn’t rise to the level of the justice system, identity is all dependent on passwords. And when you forget the password, your recourse is your email address, your phone number, your birth date, and maybe the last four of your SSN. Facial recognition might be involved. Last time I was at my massage therapist, a woman was trying to make an appointment without an email address, and the receptionist was completely stumped about how to make it happen. When I used to work at a government agency that provided the inspiration for the Confidential Business Data Center at Fospey Industries, we did a mailing where we used the last four digits of an ID number to find the right form to stick in the envelope. We ended up mailing some confidential corporate data to the wrong company, but by golly, those last four digits matched up.
Anyway, none of these identity verification methods are going to be any good any more after Fospey Indsutries rolls out the Identity Transfer Protocol and their fun new Adventure Bodies product.
Note: Three months ago I made a firm decision that I would throw away the entire manuscript for this sequel. Since then I’ve wavered a bit, but if you never see a book called Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, you’ll know this is a ghost post and I followed through on my convictions.