Hopscotch by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

experiencing a seesaw of anger, fear, and disgust. “Don't think I'm not grateful. I owe you one.” He pursed his lips, thinking. “Yeah, I'll have to be more careful next time.”
    “Next time? Are you sure you want to do something like this again?” Daragon just shook his head. “Remember when you told me how you wanted to become a Phantom, how you wanted to live forever?”
    Eduard smiled with the recollection. “Still sounds good to me.”
    “Risking your life like that, Eduard, you can forget immortality—you'll never make it to twenty-five!”
    Eduard rubbed his chest again, then reached out to hug his friend, but the uniform seemed to be a barrier between them. “Thanks anyway, Daragon. I mean it. Are you going to be able to see us more often now?”
    “I'm with the BTL, so you never know when I might be watching.” Daragon said a brief, brusque farewell and left to rejoin the other Beetles.

16
    When joining the Sharetakers, Teresa was asked to donate all her worldly possessions—which, in her case, were little enough. Happy with her new sensation of total belonging, she presented Rhys with the credits remaining from her Falling Leaves stipend, plus a little of the money Eduard had given her from one of his body-trade jobs.
    Each month Rhys leveraged the Sharetakers' assets to purchase larger and larger sections of their building. Under his guidance, the size of their “togetherment” increased. From talking with him in private, Teresa knew the (usually) redheaded man had dreams of eventually commanding the whole building as his fortress. He was very goal-oriented, a good thing for the leader of so many people.
    Today Teresa knelt on the floor using a pointed sledgehammer to pound out the separating wallboard. Her arms ached from the constant effort. Rhys would probably ask her to hopscotch into a fresh, rested body so she could finish the job. She didn't mind. It made her happy to feel so useful.
    Finally, she broke through into the adjacent two-room condominium newly annexed to the togetherment. After ripping out the walls, the Sharetakers would add firepoles for fun sliding down to other levels and new lifters to take them up through the ceilings. They installed new light tiles to eliminate any concealing shadows. Rhys insisted that there be no private places, because “hiding” ran contrary to the Sharetaker philosophy of openness.
    Oddly, the enclave held no COM terminals at all, unlike most dwellings Teresa had ever seen. When she asked him about it, Rhys had glared. “Sharetakers want no interference from a Big Brother network. We create our own universe.”
             
    Teresa went through a dizzying succession of bodies. At times it gave her a disjointed feeling to see her familiar body doing tasks that she was not aware of, while she was stuck in a different form on a manual-labor assignment. It was like a shell game with human forms, and she never knew at any given time who was wearing a specific body. She often had to be reminded to synch her ID patch immediately after a swap.
    But she had also heard about the dangers of too much hopscotching, the minuscule but not nonexistent danger each time a person detached herself and relocated into a new brain. Finally she asked one of her coworkers, “Aren't you worried about slippage? I mean, with all the hopscotching we do, there's always a chance one of us will get . . .
lost,
don't you think? I've read COM reports—”
    “Rhys says we shouldn't be concerned about it,” the coworker said, and that ended the discussion.
    More than any other assignment, Teresa enjoyed working in the rooftop gardens, growing fresh food in the high-density agricultural area. She could smell the plants, listen to breezes rustling leaves together. It reminded her of the most peaceful times in the monastery, and she felt content.
    Teresa carried heavy bags of chemical fertilizers and mulch; she bent over for hours, straining among bean plants to pluck the