"I lie cold and dormant on silicon flab while my mind crawls elsewhere." — excerpt from guest alumnus Joe Hall's career week presentation to Rockway Mennonite High School's graduating class of 2047, billed "RIP Drivers: Surrogate Consciousness for Remote Intelligent Prostheses."

A dog trots over to where I'm sitting by myself on the floor and drops a slimy rubber ball in my lap. It's a social gesture, a friendly overture. The dog, an old golden retriever, feels sorry for me. The ball's blue skin has been chewed completely away except for a few small flecks. It is now a pitted sphere of spongy umber foam. It would not be hard to wring half a cup of saliva from it. I don't like throwing things for large animals to fetch inside other people's houses, so I roll the ball across the carpet and out into the kitchen where it disappears among many pairs of feet. The dog watches it go, then turns its attention back to me. The ball is no longer needed. The ice is broken. When it offers to shake a paw, I stop feeling sorry for myself.

I attended Rockway Mennonite High School for Grade 12 — enough for a lifetime of junk mail soliciting donations to its wholesome brand of Christian education, but not enough for me to form any lasting friendships. I don't know how I have come to be at this reunion. I don't know anyone.

An emaciated woman, whose stooped posture probably allowed her to notice the ball rolling through the kitchen, brings me a plastic cup of something red. I stand to accept it, smile and take a sip. It has a medicinal, Hawaiian punch-like flavour.

"I'm Belinda White," she says. "Do you remember me?" It is not a casual question; there is the lilt of fear behind it, wind of senility. Her pallid skin is stretched across her delicate features like a sheet in which holes have been cut for her eyes and mouth. Lips and lashes have been drawn and painted on with meticulous care and skill. The effect is almost lifelike. She has the perfect blonde hair and pert bosom of a teenager.

"Yes," I say. "Of course I remember you. The senior skip to Ottawa ..." Belinda blushes orange through flesh-toned powders.

"I never forget a good necking session," I explain, "probably because I've enjoyed so few." I do not tell her that it was she who provided my first feel underneath a bra.

She places a hand on my forearm. "We were pretty drunk I imagine?"

"We were extremely drunk," I lie. I can tell she doesn't remember. "So how has life treated you?" I ask.

"I got cancer," she answers, brightening. "First I got it in my thyroid, for which they gave me high doses of radioactive iodine. Then I got it in my breasts. But, because I was already in treatment, they caught it right away. Then I got acute myeloid leukemia, the worst kind, the kind that is caused by other cancer therapies."

The dog is lying on the floor between us looking up. We lean across it for a sympathetic embrace. Her breasts press against me, each like half a rubber ball. And I wonder whether they are prosthetics or implants. Her wig has come slightly askew.

"But I am well now," she assures me. "As a Master Teacher of Ramachandran Enlightenment I have learnt to exercise complete control over my physical body. I have cured myself through the realisation that I am God." She pauses for meaningful effect, staring into my eyes.

The dog rests its chin on its paws and emits an audible sigh.

"Did you know that we exist as a part of a universal mind?" she says. "I could teach you to manifest your infinite will." Her pupils are narcotised pinpricks.

I smile and nod. Screening for my line of work involves extensive psychological testing. I have answered thousands of questions, each designed to measure some minuscule facet of my worldview. She has reminded me of a question involving a pair of poems.

Like a politician, she takes my hand in both of hers. "What is your cancer?" she asks. Her skin is cold and brittle.

"I do not yet have a cancer," I say. The corners of her mouth pull down. Slowly, she shakes her head. "At least none that I know about," I add, in order to appease her.

She releases my hand. "How very fortunate for you. So what is it you do, then?"

I break eye contact with her to look down at the dog. It too is staring at me. "I am in robotics," I reply. "I travel a lot. It's hard to describe."

The dog blinks. Its pupils are huge, dark and deep; they pull me in.

"I understand," she says. "I was married to this kind of secrecy once — a sure sign of success, you know."

I don't correct her.

"Well, it's been nice chatting with you …"

I don't embarrass her by providing my name. She would still not remember me, and she is a poor liar. "With you as well," I say, leaning forward to hug her again, feeling firm hemispheres compress against my pectoral muscles, fragrant dusty skin against my neck. "Thanks for the memories. And good luck with your will."

"Off to mingle then," she says, and drifts away.

"Do you hate these things as much as I do?" I ask the dog. I am sitting on the floor again. It shifts its large shaggy head onto my lap. Its breath has a tangy, sewer smell. I scratch behind its ears while it makes groaning noises. Together we try to forget Belinda White.

A fat man with thin hair and thick glasses wanders over to where I'm mingling with the dog. "Hey, I remember you. You're … you're …"

"Joe Hall," I say, without standing.

"Joe! Joe! Geez it's been a long time! How've you been keeping?" He doesn't remember me. I don't remember him either. He senses this. "Bob … Bob Martin."

I stop scratching the dog to reach up and shake his hand. His grip is firm, desperate. Now I remember him: golden once, starting centre for the basketball team, top OFFSA wrestler in the 83 kilogram class, senior class president, regular organiser of fun disease-oriented fundraisers, and steady consort to the voluptuous Carolyn Wickers, heiress to the calorie-empty, high-sodium Cheesy Snack line of children's lunchables, certified inoculated-at-birth against herpes and HIV, and proud subscriber to the Orvo Ethra, once-a-year birth control implant. They married shortly after graduation. This is their house, their party — their dog.

"So tell me Joe, what line of work are you in?"

The phrasing and timing of his question tells me that he is not in any line of work, and that this bothers him.

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I was consulting for this clean-air-for-kids thing at the university," he says. "Some offshoot of our Tasty Treats division. I was supposed to be sub-contracting promotional domes and doing PR. But mostly I just sat in on a lot of teleconferenced meetings. Carolyn set up most of it." He glances off towards some furniture. "But then the whole project just kind of petered out."

The dog coughs and rolls its head. I resume scratching it.

Bob again looks to the furniture. "I know she just sets that shit up to keep me out of her corporate hair. I guess you'd call them placebo projects, mercy chores … pretty pathetic, I know."

A high-backed, motorised chair begins to turn.

"So exactly what is it you do, Joe?" Bob leans down to rest his hands on his thighs. Talking has made him out of breath.

"My title is Ninth Degree Virtual Remote Intelligent Prosthetics Controller," I say. "It sounds a lot more technical and impressive than it really is though. Right now I'm stuck in this 14-year excursion on Ganymede."

The notion that I cannot be in two places at once tiptoes past in the shadows.

The wide, honeycombed bank of cylindrical pods often makes Li think of a Tokyo beehive hotel. But today, for some reason, she imagines a Lego-like array of missile silos. Inside, packed in cool pressure-distributing therma-gel, turning every eight minutes like meat on a rotisserie, nourished by intravenous and esophageal drips, lungs sucking oxygen-rich liquid fluorocarbons, hearts thumping to the metronomic pace of beta-blockers and implanted cardioverter-defibrillators, muscles stretching and tensing to the programmed exercise regimes of subcutaneous nerve stimulators, the travellers' bodies wait. Li likes to imagine they are waiting to be born, again.

The ocular monitor on pod 18 is indicating REM activity; EEG confirms it. Li enters a code and the pod door opens with a depressurising hiss. Like a long, soft tongue protruding, a tray extends and unfurls. The naked, abundantly catheterised body of a man lies before her. Li begins to massage around the tubes in his neck and chest.

Bob, a maintenance technician, tiptoes up behind her. "You get some kind of kick out of, like, touching these guys, or what?"

Li, absorbed in her therapeutics, has not noticed his approach. His question has an accusatory tone that makes her skin feel dirty. "They are like babies," she explains. "They like being touched; they need to be touched."

"Hey, I need it too," says Bob. "I like to be touched too. I'd even be willing to touch you back." He winks.

Even were he not old and so overweight, Li knows she would still find him repugnant. Afraid the sleeping man will sense her rising tension, she withdraws her hands. She takes three deep breaths before speaking. "How is your wife today, Bob?" she asks. "How is Carolyn?"

Bob glances up at a special pod near the top of the hive. "Dead, as far as I'm concerned," he answers. "Long past gone."

Li resumes her caressing manipulations. "Strange you should feel that way," she says, "because admissions found her to be not only highly creative and aware, but well suited to the rigors of entanglement — in the top fraction of a percentile, actually."

Bob huffs and takes a step closer. "Yeah, well, first off, all that junk on her head makes her seem a lot smarter than she ever was. And second off, if she's so brilliant and talented and everything, how come she had to pay for the trip. I mean, like, shouldn't they be paying her or something?"

Li smells his body odour and wonders how this is possible in a sterile environment with strong sanitising protocols. "From what I have heard, they would have been happy to compensate her. But being a wealthy woman, she declined. She wanted to make a donation." Li resists the urge to tell him rumour has it that his job, a job he is by any benchmark ill-equipped to perform, was only given to him in deference to his wife's wishes before she left, as a stipulation of her generosity.

A left-axis deviation in the sinus rhythm on the EKG monitor catches Li's attention and she returns to the task at hand. Bob leans in to watch her work. "Please give me some room," she says.

"So you ever see one of those little critters they upload these guys into?" asks Bob, without moving. "They showed me one as part of my training. Christ, the thing still gives me nightmares."

Li is too busy to comment now. The sinus rhythm is deteriorating.

"Goddamn things look like some kind of creepy-crawly cross between a spider and a millipede," Bob adds. "I mean, I know they're really just tiny robot-like super-computers made out of nanites and carbon fibre and whatnot, but it totally freaked me out. It looked so alive, like something you Japanese would maybe eat. Man, I can't believe I once wanted to do what this guy does."

Li catches Bob's hand before it can touch the body. "Please be quiet."

Tent-shaped T-waves, usually indicative of hyperkalemia, lead her to scan the blood serum potassium level. Even though it is normal, she reduces it in a feeding solution that drizzles into his arm.

The man's lips begin to move. At first it appears to her as if he is trying to suckle the tracheal hose through which oily, blue fluids flow in and out of his lungs. Then Li realises he is trying to speak.

P-waves dissolve into a bizarre idioventricular rhythm that makes her think of a rollercoaster. Tiny spikes appear, then flatten, as the defibrillator embedded in his chest begins to prod his heart. The man continues to try to speak. His lips grow cyanic.

Li knows that he is dying. It takes a five-digit code to extract the tubing and fluid from his lungs. "Breathe," she says, slapping him on the sternum. "Talk to me." She places her ear close to his lips. Saliva and blue liquid bubble into it. Li listens. His mouth tickles her earlobe, his words trickle down the walls of her auditory canal and into her tympanic membrane.

Bob bends closer, and then blanches. "Is he like waking up or something?"

Li embarrasses technology by pressing her ear to the man's ribs. "No, not waking," she says. "Dreaming …"

The dog has fallen asleep. Tiny, arrhythmic jerks and twitches play up through my fingers. The motorised chair approaches. It emits a lullaby-like melody of subsonic harmonics. There is a woman in it.

"Shut the hell up!" says Bob. "No freaking way! You're one of those RIP guys? Man, I saw something about that on the web." He is flushed and wheezing now. "You … what's the word? Mingle? No. Tangle! You tangle with these robot things, things that, even though they're like a zillion times smarter than us, aren't conscious, have no clue that they even exist. And that's where you come in: you give them your awareness, right?"

Rolling on its single wheel, the chair pulls up beside us. Bob plops down on its arm. Internal gyros adjust for his additional weight. "You remember Carolyn don't you Joe?"

Reaching out, I squeeze the arm of the chair that Bob is not sitting on. It twitches like the sleeping dog, but its skin is soft and yielding. Porous titanium shielding coats her face and torso. Her limbs are wrapped in flexor bandaging and gnarled like the branches of a bonsai tree. It is not clear where Carolyn ends and the super-ergonomic chair begins. She blends in well. "Hello Carolyn," I say. "It's good to see you again."

"Bullshit." Hers is still the perfect voice of youth, but thrown, as though by a ventriloquist, so that it seems to emanate from somewhere inside my chest. "And just so you don't have to ask, Joe, I had an aneurism a few years ago. It destroyed most of my cerebral cortex. This wonderful device to which I am now assigned augments my cognitive functioning and sensory inputs, as well as my physical abilities, of course."

The dog whimpers its way through a dream. I stroke the arm of the chair.

The chair glides closer. "I guess you could say that we are similarly engaged now, you and I. You have a very nice touch by the way, Joe. It's a shame we never got together when we were young. I thought about you sometimes …"

A curious mixture of joy and regret washes over me.

Bob laughs. "Since the operation, Carolyn has become an insatiable flirt."

"I'm not teasing you know." The chair leans into me. "If you hadn't been such a shy boy, and Bob such a monopolising jock …"

Vibrations build in the pit of my stomach, like nervous butterflies. "I could sing for you, Joe. Would you like me to sing for you now?" Her voice is so low and so deep inside me that I wonder if Bob can even hear it. The vibrations build into a pleasurable ache that spreads up into my solar plexus and down into my prostate and testicles.

Squeezing the dog's neck and the arm of the chair, I shudder. The fingers of one hand burrow into old fur, and of the other into warm synthetic fabric — fabric that grows moist.

"I can tell you like my song, Joe. I only wish I could have sung it for you sooner."

Her buzzing moan stretches out along me. The dog whines in a dream in which it is surely being choked.

"You mustn't embarrass our guest," says Bob, removing a card-like remote from his pocket.

The song stops. I am deflated, empty.

"I'll behave, I'll behave," says Carolyn. "Just let me stay. So seldom do I have the opportunity to meet in the flesh one so like myself. Tell me about your work, Joe. Is it true what they say about your career: that it is a voyeur's dream? Is it true that microwaves have given way to atomic entanglement for long-range connections? That this is why they are called tangles? That it is … How do I put this? That it is often dangerous to disengage?"

"The term is psychoretractive disorder," I say. "Yes, some never recover. It is as though their consciousness just keeps right on regressing, right back to wherever it originates. But I have never had a problem with this kind of death."

"So it's true! Returning from a long tangle is like dying. But you never really die, do you Joe? You just return to who you were. Do you think that when I am disconnected from this chair, I will die?"

Bob shifts his bulk off Carolyn and stands. "Forget that, man. Do you think I could do what you do?" His hands are clasped as though in supplication. "I mean, how would I break into something like that?"

"Do you like virtual gaming?" I ask. "Because the fact is, most of us in the RIP trade have been gaming our entire wasted lives. It's not really a career you choose, but one that chooses you. Most talent is recruited from the major VMMPG servers."

Bob hangs his head as though being reprimanded. "Those virtual interfaces scare me. I don't like giving up control I guess. Plus, they make me dizzy, nauseated too."

Carolyn's laughter tickles. "Isn't it funny how the slothful are always drawn to the things at which they most suck? That is because it is so much easier to give your all when you have little to give. To explore talent — now that requires real work, takes real commitment. That is why you will never amount to much, Bob: you are lazy."

Bob gives the chair a shove, causing it to execute a graceful pirouette. "Maybe if you had given me a chance to find out what I was good at …"

Carolyn laughs harder. It is the feeling of being poked in the ribs with many stiff fingers. It hurts a little. "You marry well Bob. That is where you excel. But you are past your prime now."

Bob presses a button on the remote and Carolyn goes to sleep. The dog's eyelids flutter as it barks three soft yelps at something from the past. Its breath warms my groin.

"Do you think she dreams?" I ask.

"No, she only surfs," he answers. "In my opinion, she died years ago." He slaps the chair. "This thing was cooked up by the board of
directors to protect stock prices. But really it's just a memorial, a high-tech tombstone."

He's wrong. She's in there. I know now. "Want to hear a question from one of the personality profiling tests they gave us, Bob?"

Bob sits back down on the chair's arm. "Yeah, OK, shoot."

The dog opens its eyes and yawns. A woman materialises behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders. "I'd like to hear the question too if I may."

I cannot place her. Back in high school she was probably a mouse, a wallflower, an invisible person like me. I wonder how long she has been eavesdropping.

"Don't be afraid," she says. "I'm both a registered massage therapist and an osteopath. I know my bodies." She begins to work the muscles of my back, kneading, stretching and probing. She is strong, but gentle. "Right now I'm under government contract to maintain and prevent atrophy in the bodies of a team of people on a deep space tangle."

My body lies supine. "Fascinating," I say. "I've never given much thought to that side of the equation."

"Actually, you are one of them."

Confusion swirls in me like the Milky Way. My eyelids are growing heavy. Her manipulations are making me sleepy.

"So let's hear the question," says Bob from far away.

"Yes," says the woman. "Give us the poems."

"How did you know?" I wonder. "How did you know the question was poetic?"

She leans into the muscles of my chest. "Everyone dreams," she says. "You talk in your sleep."

I shake my head. But the room continues to fade.

She is thumping on my sternum. "Talk to me. Breathe. Recite." It blends in with the beating of my heart.

"Listen to the following two poems," I say. "Tell me which you prefer. Here is the first:

'Day wrests its pallor from the night,
though darkness must contain it still,
and evening's shadows soon alight,
bend it to this greater will.'"

It is Carolyn who answers. "I like that one," she says. "I find it … I find it restful." When did she awaken?

Everything is blurry, as if I am underwater. "OK, here is the second:

'Night snuffs the waning flame of day,
though light must still enforce its law,
and morning's sunrise verdicts say,
yield now to this higher call.'"

"Oh, I like that one too. It's … it's so hopeful. I don't think I can decide. They seem to be part of the same thing. To favour one would only diminish it."

"That's exactly how I answered," I say. Then everything goes dark. I am weightless, floating.

"So what happens when one of these guys, like, croaks on the job?" It is Bob's voice again.

"Please exercise some respect," says the woman pressing on my heart.

"Look at the monitor for crying out loud. He's toast, gonzo, nada, history. I was just wondering what's going to happen to his robotic host, you know, like with him dead and all."

A motor hums. Rubber squeaks against ceramic.

"Well, most go autistic. They function, but in a repetitive and
rote manner. Others seem to go catatonic, plunge inward and stop working altogether."

"Yeah, that's what I kind of figured."

The sound of a sheet billowing.

"But, there are a few who, especially after a long tangle, seem to retain the gift."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't think it is possible for us to understand."

Ganymede swings around its giant planet like a ball on a million kilometres of string, once for every seven rotations of the Earth. On this narrow golden band between reflected sunlight below and the relative darkness of space above, where even from such a great distance the crescent of Jupiter fills the horizon, painting with the swirling borealis of its ionising pull retinas attuned to the full electromagnetic spectrum, in colours for which there are no human terms, sunrise is indeed spectacular.

Sunsets too, every seven days — spectacular. We are watching one together, she and I. Her compound, carbon alloy tentacles and fibres intertwine with mine and I am suffused with joy.

She nudges my attention towards a set of spatial coordinates where hangs a small blue ball, its protective ecosphere all but chewed away, soaked in man-made toxins. But still, it is beautiful. We watch it roll around the sun. It will never be forgotten.

But it is not needed now. The ice is broken.

And Carolyn begins to sing.

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