30
The man was so incredibly obese he could barely walk. His girth was enormous, his garments made from acres of cloth. He took each plodding step with care and intense concentration, like a captain guiding an oil tanker through treacherous reefs. He overheated easily, sweating from the simple effort of moving his own mass across the street.
As soon as Garth spotted him, he knew that this must be one of the first targets on his List. With no inhibition whatsoever, he jogged up to the puffing man who stood on the street corner. “Excuse me! This is . . . this is amazing.” Garth took a deep breath. “Sir, I’d like to swap with you, live in your body for an hour or so. Would that be possible?”
The man looked at him with suspicion. “What do you want?”
“I want to hopscotch into your body. If I paid you . . . uh, fifty credits, would that be enough?” Garth blinked at him like an optimistic puppy. “I don’t have a lot of money to spare.”
Looking at the artist’s healthy body, the obese man reacted to the offer with astonishment, then with even greater suspicion. Breathlessly, his words tumbling together, Garth explained his creative quest to experience different aspects of being human. The man cautiously agreed, still suspecting some kind of practical joke. “No paperwork? Nothing?”
He quickly transferred the credits directly from Garth’s card onto his own. His massive ham-hands touched Garth’s face, thick fingers resting against his temples. They switched, then synched ID patches to legally complete the identity transfer.
Dizzy and overwhelmed, Garth stood motionless, needing the time to settle into the enormous new body with its heavy burden of flesh. He flexed his pudgy fingers. This physique seemed so clumsy, so unwieldy—like an overloaded truck rather than a sporty hovercar. When he inhaled, his lungs didn’t seem to have enough capacity.
“This is amazing,” Garth said. “I’ve never felt anything like this before.” The spaces around him seemed closer, smaller. Fascinating. His agility was affected, but not his reflexes. The body itself adapted to balancing the weight.
The other man, delighted with the resilience of Garth’s slender and healthy body, seemed to burst with energy. He laughed out loud.
And then bolted.
Garth couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Inside Garth’s body, the stranger ran harder, crossing the street, ducking under low-flying hovercars, through a disorganized farmer’s market full of fruits and vegetables. Garth realized with a start that they hadn’t arranged a meeting point. “Wait!”
The man sped away with Garth’s blond, muscular physique, moving nimbly as he dashed down the street. He didn’t know the man’s name; worse, he didn’t know how to find him ever again.
Puffing and lumbering, Garth tried to pursue the body-snatcher, but his overburdened leg muscles wouldn’t cooperate. Simple movement seemed to require an effort equivalent to that needed for construction machinery, and within moments he was exhausted.
His face flushed with the effort, Garth staggered to a halt on the next corner. Winded, he tried to get the attention of other pedestrians, but he could not raise his voice.
Meanwhile, the man wearing Garth’s body fled through a skyscraper doorway and disappeared into a crowded building.
The body-snatcher sprinted up the escalator stairs. His muscles felt electrified, his body so responsive, his footsteps light, as if he were running in reduced gravity. He pushed his way across the slide tube, deeper into the building complex . . . trying to get away. And succeeding.
He couldn’t believe the stupid innocence of the artist, but couldn’t let an opportunity like this go to waste. After a lifetime of hormonal imbalances, of enduring extreme obesity, he had never imagined that such a ridiculous chance would simply be thrust into his arms. After a clean transfer, he retained his identity. The patsy had no idea who he was, or how to track him down. The obese man would never go back to his clumsy, worthless form.
On a higher level, he reached a glass-walled mezzanine that contained a suite of clothes stores. From this vantage he looked down into the street and saw, far below, his lumbering body, unmistakable in the crowd. The guy was hopelessly lost. What a fool!
He could barely restrain himself. He touched his new body with delight. It had been so easy, so fun. He hadn’t paused to think about what he was doing. He had just run. Now he dashed up a staircase, bounding two steps at a time—and he didn’t even get short of breath!
A moment later he ran into a stern-eyed man wearing a dark Beetle uniform. Weapons drawn, the BTL Inspector stood directly in his way, blocking his escape.
“I don’t take kindly to people who hurt my friends,” Daragon said.
Daragon led the prisoner to where Garth stood hopeless, helpless, and confused on the street. Barely able to move in his overexerted body, Garth just hung his head, enduring Daragon’s disappointment and fury.
“If I hadn’t already been here, Garth—if I hadn’t been watching you, because Chief Ob wanted to protect his investment—” He raised his voice, letting anger cut like a knife. “You didn’t even know his name? Didn’t check his ID? Didn’t set up an irrevocable exchange clause? No contract whatsoever? That was stupid! Every formal hopscotch must have a time limit assigned and provide an avenue for resolving disputes.”
Still wearing the enormously overweight body, Garth cringed, as if trying to shrink to a much smaller size. His chins jiggled. “It was only going to be for a few minutes.”
“Even an artist has to take simple precautions, Garth—whether the swap is for five minutes or five months. Don’t leave yourself so vulnerable. You’re in the real world now, not inside the monastery walls.”
“I never realized that what I was doing could be so . . . dangerous. I thought I could trust people.” Garth wished he didn’t have to feel so ashamed for making that assumption.
“You should know better, Garth—especially after what happened to both Eduard and Teresa.” He shook his head, as if disgusted.
Summoned by Daragon, BTL reinforcements arrived in insectile hovercars. The terrified body-snatcher babbled excuses that no one wanted to hear. Daragon gestured with his weapon, supervising while Garth and the fat man hopscotched back into their own bodies.
Once returned to his obese home-body, the stranger wept and stammered more explanations, more pleas. After BTL apprehension specialists took the man away, Garth tried to explain what he’d been doing, why he needed to share the experiences and perspectives of other people, but Daragon was unimpressed. Since he could never hopscotch at all, he didn’t know what to make of Garth’s quest to “be” everybody and everything.
Daragon sighed and took his friend’s arm. “You’ll have to be careful if you plan to hopscotch so often. I can draw up a standard, simple contract template for you.” They stopped by a tree. Seeing the BTL Inspector’s uniform, another pedestrian quickly left a nearby bench and went on his own way.
“That would be great.” Garth sat on the bench as if all the strength had gone out of him. Daragon remained standing, pacing back and forth in front of him.
“You didn’t think this through, Garth. What do you know about this stranger you just swapped with? What if he had used that disguise to commit a terrible crime, and you were positively identified? Without legal proof of a swap, you might find yourself convicted.”
Garth shuddered suddenly, uncontrollably, as he recalled the COM-upload execution he had witnessed in the open-air bazaar. Daragon saw the extreme reaction and felt ashamed. “Okay, I wouldn’t let that happen to you. The Bureau has techniques for picking up residual brain imprints. I was just trying to spook you into being more careful.”
“I’m spooked, all right, and I . . . appreciate it.” Garth’s smile was forced, but the gratitude in his eyes was real. “First you saved Eduard, and now me. Thank you, Daragon.”
As Daragon climbed aboard a BTL transport and streaked away, Garth remained seated on the bench. He had a lot of thinking to do. He had learned something about human nature he hadn’t even intended to.
From now on, he needed to take precautions, especially in wildly unequal exchanges, such as with the obese man. This insight into human nature—and the realization of his own naïveté—enriched Garth even as it saddened him. How could such a miserable person not be tempted to run off?
As he hurried back to his makeshift studio, he promised himself he would establish rules for working his way through the List. In fact, he needed to find an assistant, someone who could watch over him and attend to the business details of daily life, while handling the stipend Ob gave him.
When he got home, however, Garth’s first priority was to rush to his datapad. He powered it up and opened new files. For the next two hours, he diligently recorded all his impressions of being in such an enormous body: the sensations, the emotions, other people’s reactions to him.
Then, feeling triumphant, he crossed off the first item on his List.