Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Charlotte Incorporated

A somewhat disturbing but thought-provoking SF short story. If you like this kind of thing, it's free online here at Lightspeed magazine. Review first posted at Fantasy Literature.

Charlotte is “unincorporated”: just a brain in a jar with nutrients, able to move from place to place in a small transporter cart. But she dreams, day and night, of having a real human body. For five years Charlotte has scrimped and saved every possible penny at her low-end job in order to earn enough money to buy a body, customized to her design. Deprived of a body her entire life (apparently everyone in this world begins as a disembodied brain and needs to purchase or inherit one), she plans for a corpus with endearing details that most of us would reject, wanting a perfect body. But Charlotte’s choices show how deeply she wants to be human, including our flaws:

Charlotte’s corpus will be sixty years old, because she loves the way corpi droop at that age. Sort of like weeping willows. She’ll store extra fuel in thick padding on her belly, waist, and hips. Her black skin will be prone to flaking because Charlotte plans to try every scent of lotion they sell, once she has the chemoreceptors. Her hair will be thick, black, kinky, and unruly—like dendrites—and she’ll never try to tame it.

Charlotte initially firmly rejects the black market body that one of her co-workers has opted for, but when a traffic accident injures her and her biochamber, taking a huge chunk out of her savings, Charlotte has a difficult choice to make.

Charlotte’s devotion to her dream and her daily struggle to make it a reality, depriving herself of the slightest luxury, as well as her sense of honor, are as appealing as her world is otherwise appalling. When the traffic accident happened, I kept expecting to read that she would get a settlement for the injuries to her brain and biochamber, hopefully enough to pay for a body … and it never happened (which was hugely frustrating for me, as a lawyer!). This story gave me a renewed appreciation for my body, wrinkles and all. Including the palmaris longus.