Three days ago I had a body and a bill, and the bill was bigger.

I read the contract twice, because that is who I am, and then I signed it, because the debt did not care who I was. Forty pages. A debt I did not run up, rolled downhill from a clinic that fixed me wrong and then closed its file. A term of service. A signature line that wanted my real name, the one nobody had paid to hear in years.

"You can stop reading," the intake woman said. She had a welfare-physician's coat and a mouth that turned down at one corner like it had given up on good news. Leda, her badge said. "Nobody reads it twice."

"I'm not nobody," I said.

"No," she agreed, flat. "You're an operator." She slid a cuff onto my wrist, cool against the old rig-burn scarring inside my forearm. "Lie back. First drop is intake only. You go under, you come up, we log a baseline. Nothing's asked of you tonight but to fit."

To fit. They put it on the brochure like that, like it was a small thing.

The dorm bunk was clean and hard under my spine. Above me the overhead light had a flicker in it, a stutter at the edge of seeing, and under everything the building hummed its low always-on hum, the sound of the inside of a machine that owns you. I closed my eyes. The ports at my temple and nape went cool, then warm, the way a held hand goes warm.

A voice came in. Not Leda's. This one was lower, level, the kind of even that does not have to try.

"My name is Reza," it said. "I'm your handler. The skin's name is INDRA. The limits are these. And before any of it, there is a word."

"A word," I said.

"Say it and I bring you home. The render collapses, you wake in your own body, the session ends. No questions. I will never go looking for who's underneath."

It was the kindest sentence anyone had said to me in three years, and it was in a contract, and I hated that both of those things were true at once.

"And if I don't say it?"

A silence with the shape of a held breath in it. "Then we go a little deeper. You decide. Every time. That's the only part of this that's yours."

Then we went under.

The seam went first. I should explain the seam. In my old life I built it on purpose, the lag between wanting a thing and the body doing it, a few tenths of nothing that I tuned out of rigs so the touch felt true. I was good at the seam. The best in the shop, before the accident took the shop and the hands and the self I'd hung on them. The seam is the proof you are a person operating a thing.

Hers had no seam.

I went to lift INDRA's hand and the hand was already lifting, was mine, had always been mine, and the small mean part of me that keeps the receipts looked for the lag and could not find it. Then the room went. The flicker, the hum, the bunk. The bill. Then the part of me that had been keeping the receipts looked away for a second, just a second, and there was only the warm weight that was not my arm and was my arm, and a wide quiet I had no word for, and the level voice somewhere above the water saying easy, that's it, you're doing nothing, just let it fit.

It fit.

It fit the way nothing in my own life had fit in three years. It fit like a coat cut for a body I used to have, before, when I was someone, and the worst part, the part they leave off the form, is that some animal in me went still with relief and did not want to come back up.

"That's enough for tonight," Reza said.

I did not want it to be enough. The wanting embarrassed me before I was even all the way awake to have it.

She brought me up slow. There is a way of being logged out, which is a door slamming. Being brought back is its opposite, something I did not have a category for yet, a hand at the surface of the water easing you to where your feet can touch. The ports cooled. The flicker came back. The hum.

I was in my own skin again. Medium, wiry, thinner than I used to be, a body with a bill attached. The render gone left an ache behind it like a phantom limb, the shape of a hand that wasn't there anymore.

"Baseline's clean," Leda said from somewhere, reading something I wasn't allowed to fully see. "You can go."

I sat up. My mouth had the mineral edge of the tap water and, under it, faintly, the metal taste of coming back. Across the prep glass a shape moved, tall and still, gone before I could fix it. Reza, I understood. The voice had a body and the body did not stay to be looked at.

In the dorm I lay in the dark with my own arm across my own chest, the weight of it merely the weight of an arm.

I should be planning how to clear the debt. It is already decided, the year is a year, I am good at letting a thing be over before I let myself feel it.

I'm thinking about how it felt to fit.