actual lives would be.”
He pushed open the set of swinging doors leading to the next corridor. “What? Oh! No, I’m not a doctor.”
He flicked at the tag hanging from his scrubs. Jeanette leaned in to see. Steven Milton, LifeMedia Surgical Sales Associate, North Coast District.
“Oh! Ohhhh.”
“Actually, let me give you my card,” he said, reaching into his blue drawstring pants. Jeanette pocketed the card without looking. “Call me if you or, um, the other Miss Porter— Josephine— have any problems whatsoever.”
“Joey,” Jeanette corrected. “And certainly. Thank you, so much.”
They stopped in front of a door that was windowless and streaked with water damage. The corridor was narrow, quiet, and unpeopled. To Jeanette, it looked like they were facing the entrance to a broom closet. Milton gestured at it, and she gripped the knob carefully.
“This is it? She’s— it’s— she’s in there?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said flatly. He turned on his heels, but then stopped. “Oh, wait, I need you to sign the discharge paperwork!”
He thrust a metal clipboard with carbon-copy paper into her hands. Hurriedly, Jeanette dropped her bag and the LifeMedia folder and scrawled across the pages. Her hands were cool and moist, and the ground seemed to shake below her soles. Everything in her field of vision was fuzzy, except for the door. Name. Date. Next of Kin. Payment Plan. Emergency Contacts (she listed their father and their cousin).
She flipped through the pages, scribbling her name where Milton had made an X, and checking all that applied. Address. Employer. Bank. Co-Signer? No. She turned another page: the death certificate.
“That’s just the application for the death certificate,” Milton said, tapping the sheet. “The real thing will come in the mail in six to twenty-four weeks. Also, you should indicate if you want an autopsy.”
Jeanette let her arms drop to her sides, smacking the clipboard against her legs. She blew her bangs from her face.
“I think we all know how she died,” she said.
Milton shifted his weight.
“I’m sorry. Some people want them anyway.”
His eyes were blue and shallow like an antique doll’s. It seemed like Jeanette could stare into his face all morning and never see more than a tidy, pale corporate void. She saw her own reflection in him, one dark twin in each eye. Finally, she relented and returned to the paperwork, checking “No” on the autopsy form.
She handed it to him. “She burned to death.”
“I. Yup. I know.” Then he chuckled softly. “I’m sorry. I just never know what to say in this moment. ‘I’m sorry for your loss?’ Or ‘Congratulations?’ ”
He rapped his fingers on the clipboard.
“You say nothing,” Jeanette said. “Nothing’s happened. There is no loss. Just a really, really, exceedingly expensive procedure.”
She leaned into the doorway, and turned the knob. Milton lifted her bag and folder off the floor, and handed both to her with a stiff nod.
“Thank you,” Jeanette said, darting her eyes away. She entered the room.
It was an office. Windowless, dark, dry, with a dusty smell. Jeanette clicked on the light and stepped forward, still feeling oppressively heavy, her breath short and hesitant.
The box was sitting on the middle of a rusty metal desk covered with fake wood laminate. It was about five inches tall and five inches across, a bright, sanitized white silicone with no seams or visible buttons. It looked impossibly clean and fresh sitting in a room full of old furniture and janitor’s buckets. It was bigger, too, than Jeanette had anticipated, and it was shaped like an octagonal prism. She didn’t expect that. She had heard the word ‘box’ and pictured a perfect cube—
“You’re catching flies,” the box said. It glowed when the sound emanated from it; a strong, bright blue light shone from inside, under the white silicone. The voice was laced with static, but recognizable.
Jeanette jammed her mouth shut. Catching flies was what their paternal grandmother called open-mouthed gawking. She used to rap them on the chin with a wooden spoon when they did it. Jeanette held her chin now, more as an acknowledgment of the message than to keep it shut. The box could see her.
“Sorry,” she whispered like a child.
“That’s better,” the box said, glowing brightly. “They told me you’ve been sitting here for days. Your morning breath by now has got to be a-fucking-trocious—”
“JOEY!” Jeanette sobbed, running forward.
She bent over the table and pressed her face against the soft plastic, ran her fingers across the corners on the prism’s top, and cried. The blue light shone dimly. Her chest heaved.
“I thought you were I thought you were dead, and they called me, and they told me what happened and I was so scared— so scared. And you! Here you are! You were dead, you were dead!”
She picked the box up and held it to her chest and her face, crying and blathering senselessly, smelling the synthetic odor of the plastic, feeling the receptors on the box’s base and letting its rounded edges dig into the skin on her chest and neck. She kissed the box then, wet and open-mouthed, with abandon, wailing loud enough to be heard down the hall, all the way to the nurse’s station and the waiting room where she had willed away the days, biting her nails and smacking her head against the wall, thinking her sister was as good as dead.
But she wasn’t! She was here! She was smaller, and more compact, and denser, but Jeanette held her, alive, in her hands! The cool glowing hunk of plastic held a life! Everything terrible that had happened was, at once, reversed.
“Your breath is seriously fetid,” the box said.
Jeanette pulled back. She wiped her nose with the crook of her arm. “Sorry,” she said. Then, excitedly: “You can SMELL!”
“I can smell!” the box chirped. “And you smell like Crest Brush-ups and Cool Ranch Doritos.”
They both laughed. Joey’s laugh was crunchy with static, but underneath the white noise it was normal: a deep, casual-sounding peal that came out of the box and reverberated against the tile. Jeanette giggled and swayed back and forth with the box cradled in her arms. When their laughter subsided she held the box at eye level again, inspecting it for the first time.
“Oh my God Joey, are you okay?”
The box was silent at first. Jeanette’s pulse quickened, fearing the worst and tilting the box slightly to check the bottom for a reset key. Before she had the opportunity to fully panic, Joey spoke.
“I’m okay. Little stunned. It feels fine though.”
“Does it hurt? Does it feel like anything?”
“Like the most natural thing in the world. Like it was always this way.”
“Joey, Joey..,” she hugged the box tight and rocked on her heels. “It must have been so terrible, so scary; you must have thought it was over-“
“As soon as the roof collapsed I thought I was done. It went so quick, Jean. I knew so quickly I was dying that I didn’t need to process it. There wasn’t time to think about what it meant, or how I felt about it, or whether it was what I wanted-“
“Did you wake up?”
The box dimmed. “Hmm. I remember surgery, but I was so anesthetized that it was like… the pain was far away…It just went in and out. I saw what was happening, and I felt it, then I didn’t. Then I woke up and I had all these tubes in my neck and mouth. And they were scrubbing the dead skin off, with these brushes—”
“Shhh,” Jeanette said. She patted the box. “Shhh it’s over now. Forget I asked.”
“Hold on, let me think. I remember them telling me that you bought me a new body. The air was so hot…my lungs were wet and dry at the same time, it was like sucking exhaust off a tailpipe. They said I was going to die but you were there, weren’t you?”
The living sister gulped. “They didn’t let me in. There wasn’t any time, Joey.”
“But then I was told…Good news. You have a new body. Your sister paid for it, and you??
?re going to live forever. Everything will be fine soon, just go back to sleep. How did they tell me that? I was dead. How did they tell me?”
“Shh. They probably just… uploaded the idea when they put you in the box. Hey, did they explain how everything works to you?”
Jeanette knelt and pulled the BrightBox FAQ from her folder. Uncertain, she held the sheet up to the box like a child showing her teacher a drawing.
“I know all about it,” Joey said. “Actually, I think that sheet is out of date. Headquarters uploaded a revised version 1.5 hours ago, with some additional questions.”
Jeanette dropped the paper. “How do you know that?”
The box lit up. An image rippled under the surface of the case, cast in neon blue light. It was a series of curving bars. Just as quickly as it appeared, the image dissipated, like the answer on a magic 8-ball slipping back into the murky fluid. But Jeanette had seen the symbol long enough to comprehend it.
“You have wi-fi?”
“Unlimited network data, too. You should know, it was in the service agreement you signed.” The network service provider’s logo washed over Joey’s gleaming surface, then receded.
“I was a little distracted when I filled that stuff out. As you can imagine. So! You know, like, everything?”
The light dimmed. “Everything online and in my hard drive. Well, memory is still fallible.” She paused. “Human memory, I mean, not computer memory.”
“What’s it like?” Jeanette asked. “You’re like a genius savant now.”
“I’m sure it won’t be any different from when we