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“Sure, you can sleep with me,” she said,
with a small, cool smile. “But only after I’m dead.”
    I have to admit that this was not precisely the
answer I’d been expecting when I made my rather incoherent
proposition, and if I hadn’t been a bit the worse for wear due to a
combination of vodka and spray-on opiates, I doubt whether I’d have
had the courage to proposition her in the first place. She was so
far out of the league of blokes like me as to be practically out of
sight. She was one of those international girls: tall, with skin
like suede plastic and a slight crease to her long eyelids that
made me suspect Asian ancestry – unless, like so many of the
fashion set these days, she’d had her eyelids tucked to give her
that essential Pacific Rim mystique. The accent was neutral;
anywhere between Sydney and Beijing. It did not occur to me that
she might be native to Singapore Three; only the poor remained
where they were born these days and the franchise city was full of
voyagers. I’d been here for almost eighteen months now, which made
me virtually indigenous. I was supposed to be making videos, but I
ended up working in a bar in the backstreets of Jiang Min and it
was here, fortunately on my night off, that I made my disastrous
proposition. I peered at her through the haze.
    “Sorry?” I mumbled. “Did you say ‘dead’?”
    She reached into her Miucci wallet and took out a
sliver of something. It had the soft glaze of organic material;
like a very thin slice of liver.
    “Here,” she said, distantly. “This is my necrochip.”
Her voice took on the sing-song note of a rote lesson. “If you’d
like to sleep with me after my death, we can put it on your credit
card now and then when I’m dead, you will be notified and can come
and visit me.” She added in a more normal tone, “I’m due to be
placed in one of the franchise facilities in Reikon, so you won’t
have far to go.”
    “I’m sorry,” I echoed. I felt like a complete idiot;
this was obviously some game she enjoyed playing on hapless
Westerners. “I’d really rather you were alive when we, um, I
mean...” My voice trailed uncomfortably away. She shrugged.
    “As you wish.”
    She slipped the necrochip back into her wallet and
stood up to leave. She was wearing a pair of hydraulic Japanese
pattens, I remember, and when her weight came down on them I heard
a faint hiss. She gained an inch or so in height and stood looking
down on me. This wasn’t difficult: at that point in the
conversation I felt about three feet high.
    “Wait,” I said. “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why are you doing this? I mean – hiring out one’s
corpse for sexual purposes... It’s hardly usual, even these days. I
just wondered – well, why ?”
    “Isn’t it usual?” she said, with vague
curiosity.
    “Not unless I’m very far behind the times.”
    “The man at the facility said there’d be plenty of
interest,” she said. “And you’d be number six – there is a queue,
you know.” She made it sound as though I’d questioned her
desirability.
    “Wouldn’t you be a bit – well, past it by then?”
    Disdainfully, she said

    “I’d be perfectly preserved. Quite flexible. I
wouldn’t want to be involved in something distasteful .”
    “But why are you doing it in the first place?”
    “To pay for my treatment.”
    “Your treatment?”
    At that point, a group of similar girls swept in,
giving those thin high cries that Japanese women seem to emit at
moments of astonishment or pleasure. They clustered around my new
friend and gathered her up with them. The last thing that I saw of
her was her blonde head at the bar, bobbing over the assembled
crowd. She seemed to be laughing, but I wasn’t. I drained my drink
and left; the alcohol didn’t seem to be working any more and the
opiates had long since worn away. I scratched absently at the rash
they had raised on my skin and shambled out into the street. Before
I headed home, I bent down and