Who's Watching Who?

WHO'S WATCHING WHO?

By Benjamin Finateri

Copyright 2013 Benjamin Finateri

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design by Joshua Blaker

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

William and Caroline

Rebekah and Margaret

Michael and David

Rachel and Adam

Paul and Alice and Eva

William and Caroline

Caroline, my wife, suggested voodoo. She’d done the research behind my back--compiling the history, the lit, the spells and incantations. I think she worried the task might be too much for me, even with all my talent and experience. I expressed shock that she would ever question my skills, so I got my way, and built the machine.

The idea started as nothing, a tossed-off comment on one of Caroline’s bad days. She was in bed, like she always was on her bad days, the pain from her injuries too much to be productive, too much to get up, too much to breathe. She groaned and said something about trading in her body for a younger model, a buxom eighteen-year-old redhead. That’s my recollection anyway. Caroline tells a different story. She says I first thought of the idea, after watching Beyoncé do her thing in a music video. In Caroline’s version, only then did she chime in. If she were going to be the one getting the new body, she preferred younger, buxom, and redheaded.

Believe whatever you want, who suggested the new body doesn’t matter. What does matter is we progressed from vague notion to making the machine our life goal, and once Caroline and I were working full time on finding a body, and I was immersed in building a functional apparatus, it was as though the machine had always been inevitable, the one real shot Caroline had to overcome the effects of the accident. I won’t share the accident with you except to say without it my wife is happy. Middle-aged to be sure, with some of the associated aches of getting older, but content with what she has gotten from life, and confident the future will continue to be full of good. The accident happened though, and it changed Caroline, caused her body to betray her, filled her with damage and pain, which in turn led to anger and depression, and words too, words that say the accident wasn’t my fault, but we both know it was. Caroline wanted the machine. I needed the machine.

In the early going, I struggled. I worried we were desperate fools, chasing an impossibility. Caroline had confidence it could be done. Even when she suggested voodoo, she knew I was up for the challenge. As she liked to point out--correctly--I was always going on about how the human brain was a computer, the most advanced, complex computer in the known universe, nevertheless, a computer full of data that could be copied and transferred to a similar device along as you had the storage capacity. Caroline also respected my skills, skills that enabled me to have a hand designing computer hardware you no doubt use on a daily basis. In order to protect both the innocent and the guilty, I won’t give you any more details about exactly what I’ve done, but if you pay attention to tech news, you know the Silicon Valley company where I toiled for twenty+ years in large part because of the work I did for them. If you’re clever, you can even find reference to me in articles and announcements about some of the most celebrated technological developments of the last two decades. I’ve also fulfilled contracts for the United States Defense Department, the type of computers you won’t hear about for many more years, if ever, and I’ve given you too much already. I’m not trying to sound arrogant, or to scare you, or to brag, only to help you recognize my ability to build the machine.

I’m sure some of you are curious about how I created the machine and how it worked. I respect that. Much of my career success was based on exploring my own curiosity, so I can oblige yours, a little. If you’ve ever transferred the contents of a computer to an external hard drive, or burned a CD, you’ve performed a miniature version of what I was hoping to accomplish with Caroline and the body. A human brain, however, is too complex, its contents too vast, to just transfer data from one to another. The machine acted as a necessary hub, a temporary home for the entirety of Caroline’s brain. It provided me the opportunity to check the quality of the data, maintain its form and structure, and tweak it if I had to, before sending it into the new body.

Building the machine was an undertaking the size of which nobody had ever attempted, and some of the technical know-how appeared to be above even my pay grade, at first blush anyway, before I immersed myself in the problem solving, the creative side of the project. I constructed the machine in a room in the back of our house that had in turn served as a guest bedroom, work-out area, and home office, and I installed a number of strong dead-bolts on the door to help keep it hidden, just in case. As the machine took shape, filling the space, I gained insight into what the men who worked on the large computers of the 1950s must’ve felt like. I could continue, give you all the nuts and bolts, talk you through the technical minutia--it’s not hard to understand--but I didn’t set out to write a how-to tech manual, so if that’s what you came for, I’m sorry. This is a different story altogether, one not about machines, but about bodies.

Let me go on to the moral considerations. We would be permanently hijacking the body of a young person in her prime. A life. A mind. Memories, emotions, experiences, dreams, desires. Overwritten. Erased. What rationale could we possibly devise to make our goal not evil? We brainstormed, a lot, and most of our discussions only reminded us what we were planning was no different from murder. But the machine was going to be a reality, so we went forth undaunted and settled on finding someone not fulfilling her potential, a rotten individual, with no one to miss her. As Caroline put it, an unloved, underachieving bitch. Who were we to make such a judgment, I argued, but my heart didn’t mean it. I wanted Caroline to be happy again. I wanted the vibrant woman I had fallen in love with. She deserved freedom from her injuries. The pain moved incessantly through her back and shoulders and legs, kept her awake at night, and in bed all day. Drugs and therapy, physical and psychological, helped, but not like a new body would. Does it sound cold and heartless to consider taking the life of another, so your wife can be happy? So she can feel healthy again? Yes, yes it does. I don’t care. The world is always creeping, waiting for a chance to do you in, and young people, good people, die everyday, so you and I can go on living. Yes, I’m implicating you. You’re not innocent. Ask yourself what you would do to provide a long and productive life to the person you love most of all. You’ve already made choices that have turned lives miserable, and you’ll do it again. I’m sorry. I’m getting preachy. I promised myself I wouldn’t. The point is, morality be damned, I needed to take care of me and mine, so I built the machine.

Caroline and I discussed the practical considerations as well. Our decision to choose someone who wouldn’t be missed helped solve the potential problem of people looking for the woman whose body we’d stolen and mind we’d erased. To increase our chances of success though, we decided better if the body was new to the Bay Area, or just passing through, minimizing the amount of connections she’d have here. We worried that on our end, people might notice when Caroline disappeared while at the same time, I had a new wife, a young buxom redhead, but as we thought it over, we realized our concerns wouldn’t prevent the creation of the machine.

Not having children was a plus, no awkward conversations about what happened to Mom. Caroline had left her job after the accident, so explanations to coworkers wouldn’t be a problem. She was an only child, her parents had died a few years before, and she had no other family aside from an elderly aunt in Florida she hadn’t talked to in forever. Caroline said to tell her friends whatever I wanted, say she ran off with a guy she’d been cheating with, and in my misery, I had decided to shack up with a much younger woman. She even suggested that someday--when we knew we’d pulled it off--she might spill to a couple people she trusted, convince them it was actually her in a new body by revealing something only Caroline could know.

We didn’t worry about me. Maintaining friendships had always taken a backseat to work, and I’d kept my colleagues out of my personal life as much as possible. I’d grown up on the East Coast, but looked west in my youth, inspired by so many dreamers who’d made the trip before me. The short of it was I wouldn’t have a difficult time passing off a story to anyone who might start asking questions about where Caroline had gone. Humans’ innate nosiness combined with the seemingly absolute ability of any joker with an Internet connection to find out anything about anybody (thanks in part to my work), did give me pause. Sometimes, usually at night, in my most anxious moments, I even imagined scenarios where the police got involved, but none of those concerns outweighed Caroline’s desire for a new body, and my wish to give her one. So, I built the machine.

We began our search for a body, together, at clubs, bars, and at Caroline’s suggestion, the occasional strip joint. She claimed we could process several bodies in one sitting, and she did have a point. As Caroline said, there’s no imagining what they look like with their clothes off; everything we want is laid bare for our perusal. I laughed, thinking she was making a pun.

We searched, but we hadn’t actually set up any strict guidelines for how we’d find exactly a young buxom redhead. On our second night out, Caroline admitted we might benefit from having a little leeway in her physical requirements, so we cast a wide net. We compared what we saw, both in the moment and later, hashing over our likes and dislikes, turn-ons and turnoffs, trying to narrow broad characteristics to preferred specifics. We picked out a few bodies we thought might require another look; we planned approaches, meet and greets to further gauge their eligibility, though we didn’t make a move. I wondered whether Caroline was having second thoughts, but when I asked her, she scoffed, and said we were merely in the prelims, that she was in a hurry, but she didn’t want to rush. Everything had to be perfect.

After three weeks of these prelims, I suggested we split up and look for bodies on our own. We’d spent hours discussing our impressions anyhow. If one of us found a body with potential, she could be revisited a second time by both of us. Caroline wasn’t buying it; she’d seen through my suggestion with ease and IDed my true intentions. I wanted to meet bodies with the purpose of cajoling them into letting me learn about them physically, talk them into allowing me to touch them. In other words, I was looking for sex. I didn’t doubt my wife and I could accomplish that together--we did live in San Francisco after all--but after we ran the body through the machine, there’d be no more threesomes. I wanted to understand the dynamic of just me and her, how the new body felt in my hands, how she moved when she let a man have his way with her, the faces she made when she got riled up, whether she was noisy or quiet.

Maybe you think most of that isn’t important, that the moves, the faces, the noises would all change after the body met the machine, and if so, very good. You are correct. They’d be my wife’s reactions from my wife’s brain. Though certainly you can understand there are some unalterable physical characteristics someone in my position might want to experience. As for the other stuff, like I told you, I’m a curious person by nature. Before I gave the body to Caroline, I wanted to learn what belonged only to it, what was going to disappear when I made it my wife’s.

For some reason Caroline refused to elaborate on (I didn’t push.), she relented and agreed to my idea of searching for a body separately. My educated guess: she understood that we share a life, that the body would belong to me as much as it would to her, so I needed to be fully satisfied with what I was getting before we brought it before the machine.

I didn’t tell Caroline, but I instituted a different method than the one we’d utilized. I expanded my search parameters to include bookstores, Meetup groups, coffee shops, gyms, any place a normal single man might find attractive bodies. I wanted to observe, be ready with a conversation starter before I made an approach. The drawback to my method was the expenditure of time and energy. My life became twofold. I worked on the machine, and when I was able to give myself a break, I trolled for bodies, reporting to Caroline on (most of) my findings.

I first saw Lauren at a coffee shop. She was with an Asian guy and a white girl. I immediately noticed how young they were--brimming with the enthusiasm of youth, their entire lives stretched out before them. They hadn’t had time yet to get kicked in the face by bad luck.

I pretended to read a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood. (I’ve been told her writing is like catnip for women.) But really I watched. They were a study group for an art history class. I learned Lauren’s name quickly because the Asian guy used it when he asked her a question. He talked in expert tones on subjects he felt genuine passion for, but had only begun to learn about. The white girl listened; her face told me she took him seriously and was trying to keep up. Lauren challenged the guy, tried to get him to defend arguments he didn’t have the language for, and she injected her opinions when he made room.

I was attracted to Lauren’s eyes, a sparkling green. She fixed them on the man when she talked to him, and looked intently at the other girl too as if giving her a chance to add her thoughts. I wanted to listen to Lauren’s eyes. I imagined gazing into them, and Caroline staring back at me. 15,000 days of that would be excellent. I waited for an opening, willing the girl and guy to leave, but they were too dedicated to their studies.

I began going to the coffee shop often, daily almost. Usually Lauren was not there, so I had to content myself with other bodies, most of which I eliminated instantly. On the days I saw Lauren, my heart fluttered. The more I scrutinized her body, the more excited I became. She was