“It’s only a language,” Brigitte said, head cradled in her hands, “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

 

“I don’t know Mandarin,” Lonny muttered. It was the best answer he could muster after two days without sleep. By the way his wife’s mouth fell open, he knew it was absurd.

 

“Christ, Lonny,” whispered Brigitte, “Yes you do. And so what if you do? One little implant can’t change who you are.” She lifted her head and reached across the kitchen table, but Lonny kept his hands in his lap.

 

One little implant.

 

The incision behind his ear throbbed as he considered her words.

 

“I shouldn’t know it. It shouldn’t work like that.”

 

“Well, it does work like that, and I don’t think you’d be making such a fuss about it if you weren’t so tired. Can we please just go to bed?”

 

“If you need to go to bed—”

 

“You need to go to bed!” Brigitte snapped, sitting up straight and slapping the table with her open hands. “Your flight to Beijing leaves in twelve hours, and you’ve been awake since the surgery. Didn’t they say they’d give you something to help you sleep?”

 

“Somnolozenges,” muttered Lonny, resisting the urge to scratch the pinhole behind his right ear. “They gave me Somnolozenges.”

 

Brigitte was on her feet before the last syllable was out of his mouth, heading for the en-suite, no doubt in search of the sleep aids.

 

“I flushed them,” Lonny said, and Brigitte stopped just outside of the kitchen. “I’m not letting them put anything else in me.”

 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked, rounding on him, face darkened by anger and despair. She loved him, she worried about him, and Lonny knew he’d been testing her patience.

 

“The Mandarin’s not supposed to be there,” he said, “I didn’t learn it. French and German I learned. Took me a long time, but it was all me. I could have learned Mandarin too. Few months at one of those Immersion Institutes stateside and I could have had it down pat. I’m good with languages, you know.”

 

“What does that have to do with sleep, Lonny?”

 

“Nothing, I guess.” he muttered, sucking back the saliva pooling behind his lower lip. God, but he was tired. “Just don’t want anybody fixing me anymore. I’m sick of how easy it all is.”

 

“Nobody wants to fix you, Lonny. It’s a language implant. So what? You said yourself that half the team has them. It’s just something you need for work, like sleep.”

 

“It’s like I’ve known it all my life, Brigitte.” Lonny almost retched with the effort of raising his voice. “I started speaking it as soon as the anaesthesia wore off. I didn’t even realize it until the nurses started laughing.”

 

The knot in his stomach tightened as he spoke, and his vision blurred with each throb of his aching head. “I told the Board I didn’t want to do it. I begged them not to make me.”

 

“Nobody made you do anything, Lonny.” Brigitte said. Her voice had gone flat, and her features too. She’d heard all this before.

 

“Marchuk asked me what good I’d be without it,” Lonny answered with a snort, “Said they had a whole army of entry-levels waiting to take my place. It would have meant my job, and you’re telling me they didn’t make me.”

 

“You made a choice.”

 

“Made the only choice there was.”

 

Brigitte stood in the entry to the kitchen for a few moments more. Lonny knew he was repeating himself, and her face told him her patience was all used up. He didn’t say anything when she turned and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. He didn’t flinch when she slammed the door to their bedroom. He just sat and stared, head slouched so low it rested between his shoulders.

 

Lonny removed his left hand from beneath the table, flinching at the seven-segment time display glowing through the skin on his wrist. Another accessory, like Mandarin.

 

He let himself scratch the incision now. It had been itching ever since Brigitte had found him in the kitchen, and he sighed with relief as he went to work. It was mostly healed by then, and had been tiny to begin with, but he felt a trickle of blood run down his neck as he dug in.

 

When he removed his right hand from under the table, it still clutched the Dremel tool he’d purchased that morning. He was glad Brigitte hadn’t noticed it.

 

Still scratching behind his ear, he stood up and walked out the sliding glass door into the backyard, where the garage loomed slate grey under the starless glow of the city sky.

 

When he entered the cool interior and flicked on the light, his FiltraFilm retinal inserts adjusted instantly, and he was greeted by the sight of everything that made him him. Squash racquets hung from hooks on the walls, the workbench was arrayed with hand-painted model Moonracers, and a dusty bin in the corner bulged with old textbooks and Bescherelles. Lonny considered how a person could train their nervous system for racquet sports while they slept, how they could finesse their brushstrokes with exo-gloves, how they could have a new language implanted in an afternoon.

 

What a waste to have spent all those years becoming himself, he thought, when becoming  was quick and cheap.

 

“Only one way to be an original these days,” he muttered, sucking back another gob of saliva, “Gotta lose the doodads. Get back to basics. Back to — heh.” He was tired. He didn’t bother to finish the sentence, although later he would write on the garage floor in his own blood: Getting Back to What God Made Me to Be.

 

For now, he just thought it and rolled his eyes. It was terribly melodramatic, even if it was the truth.

 

He turned on the Dremel.