I type this now with strange fingers, it is not as if I have never resleeved before. Far from it, when I was a younger man swap parties where the big thing. Find a player and trade your body with theirs for a while. But it has always been a choice that I have made where my stream of consciousness remained uninterrupted. You have feeds from whatever new sites you follow on the mesh, there will be a story about someone suffering from the Lack. They are usually never more then a blurb unless it is a media icon claiming Lack as to what they did the previous night. You might read it, your muse might flag it and you, as I did, dismiss it. That person is clearly not as tough as you, you're the top dog here. A little time loss isn't a big deal to you. Hell turn off you medichines for a night and you can drink yourself into a black out, the night gone to you and it doesn't seem to be that bad.
But then you wake up on that cold slab and find out a day, a week, an hour, a month, a second is gone. It isn't a whole in your memories like the more chemically induced kind of black out, that with some effort and a perhaps viewing some inebriated vid streams can shock back into place. No, this is something that no matter how much you think, fork, muse playback it is gone. That time is gone forever. Even as I write these words I have the vid of the me that is not me acting out what will be his final moments. I watch the not me fall and not get up. I have all of not me's memories up til the final morning. Then not me goes out and does things that I would do but I did not do, I was an imprint back in some computer just waiting for not me to fail at living. Then I get to come back but the thought never leaves your mind, what am I? You can no longer be certain that you are really going forward or just a memory being played back for another not me to catch up to the present. I type these words with strange fingers, and hope that they are my own.
