Karmawhore , shame on you , OP ! <| sep |> For me , I ' m still thinking of getting the standardday one edition for its reversible cover insert along with the DX edition that I have on preorder . <| sep |> ENFPBeach HouseI don ' t know if I have the talent to do what I really love to do . <| sep |> I woke up to the sound of someone breathing in my ear . A woman . Or at least the body of one . I could feel her breasts pressed against my back . Her arms lay lightly draped across my shoulders . She must have felt the slight twitch I made away from her . Instinct . After so long , I still flinched away from the touch of strangers . Even though everyone in the world was a stranger now . Good morning , she whispered . I rolled over and stared into her eyes , which were bright green . Your eyes are blue , she told me . You ' re a man , today . About 5 ' 8 in height . I woke up and found a note on your iPad case that says your name is George Jeffries . I told her the same physical details about herself . It was a ritual since ' the Occupation ' started . That ' s what the news people called it , anyway . Or the people in the newscasters ' bodies , stuttering their way through attempts at reading the teleprompter . The skills people took for granted were gone now . Even if you could find a specialist ' occupier ', the combination of brain memory and muscle memory of the ' occupied ' body rarely came together right . People only had a day to learn their way around their new residence . Then they were gone again . I wonder what he was like , I said . Not poor . The room I was sleeping in still had heating , which meant I was probably in a suburb , not a slum . The sheets under me were nice , if dirty . Nobody wanted to spend time doing laundry for someone else . There were burn marks in the pillow . A cigarette . I could feel the craving for nicotine making my hands tremble , even though I had never smoked in my old body . Maybe you ' ll meet George some day , the woman said . It was possible . That was one of the upsides of the Occupation . Tomorrow , you could wake up next to the President , or even in the President ' s body . Of course , you also could wake up in the dying body of some starving child in Somalia on the day he finally dies , but I didn ' t like to think about that . I had to think of the good side . If I didn ' t . well , there ' d already been too many suicides . Running away to a new life was a common thing to want before the change . But it gets tiring , having to rebuild everything you care about from scratch every day . There ' s a website I check every morning called ' The Body Watch ', where people from each region post the names of the bodies who ' ve died that day . The list is incomplete , of course , but there are good Samaritans who try to keep it updated . It ' s almost a religion to them . Something concrete to do , to believe in , when all our prayers have gone unanswered for so long . I haven ' t seen my name yet , but I know it ' s only a matter of time . Stupid that I should care . After six years , I know that I ' m probably never going back to that body . But I still care what happens to it . My wife ' s body is one of the dead ones . I don ' t know if she ' s alive or not . I mean the Occupier . The essence . The soul . Beside me , the woman with the green eyes stretches like a cat . I feel good today . You take it for granted , feeling young . And then one day , you ' re tired all the time . And it ' s harder to remember things , because of the pain . I used to feel this ache in my shoulder She shook her head . Were you old , then ? I asked . I mean , originally ? Eightyseven , she said . If there ' s one good thing that ' s come of all this , it ' s that people can understand what other people are going through . Walk a mile in another man ' s moccasins sort of thing . Seeing with another ' s eyes . You ' d think it would create empathy . That ' s what I thought it would do , before . I laughed bitterly . There ' s no time for empathy when you ' re trying to survive . What was your name ? Back when you were eightyseven ? She shrugged . Does it matter ? Names are all we have left , I pointed out . That means they matter more , not less . Instead of answering my question , she only rubbed her arm . Someone else is feeling that shoulder pain , I suppose . I should feel sorry for them . I do , I guess . I got shot yesterday , I said , touching my stomach where the pain had been . It always surprised me , to wake up dying and find myself living again . Luckily it had only happened five times now . Five times in six years . The woman with the green eyes laughed , awkwardly . I ' d hate to be the sucker who woke up to that . Do you think you were dying ? Maybe , I said . Who do you think it was ? I shrugged . Probably a Life Gang . She nodded , biting her lip . Life Gangs were getting bigger and more popular . They started out as regional clubs , where people from the same city or state would go online and exchange information about the new world . Then people started creating warehouseslittle pockets of food that only the Gang members knew about . If you had access to the passwordprotected forums which you usually did , since your password went with you when your mind moved you could log in and find the GPS coordinates of the hidden caches nearest you . All you had to do was delete your cookies and you could make sure that the only people who could access the cache were ' your kind '. Of course , caches had to be filled , even if that meant taking from others . Community forum leaders made everybody check in with their username and location each morning and would boot people who didn ' t leave their little treasure pockets complete the way they found it . And some people got joy out of it . Killing and sadism and selfmutilation . You could kill without consequences , now . Or even cripple the body you were in out of pure spite , just as a prank . I used to be a psychiatrist , and it wouldn ' t surprise me if people with dark triad sociopathic tendencies tended to survive better in this world . I heard rumors about one man who was determined to kill everybody in the world except his current body and his original one , so that when he was the only man left , he could at least die in the body he started in . It was probably just an urban legend . Something to post on Snopes . But it could happen . And even if we found people like that , what could we do about it ? There was no point to consequences , to imprisonment , when escape was as inevitable as the midnight jump . Of course , killing didn ' t have to happen because they would like . Then there was garden variety anger . A lot of people felt angry . All the time . I was still angry . Six years of rage . I was angry at life , and at people . At human nature . I ' d had this online cloud cache of photos I had with my wife , Rebecca . Wedding pictures . Pictures of the birth of our daughter . But I ' d gotten careless with the passwords and fell asleep with things logged in . Whoever had owned that body had deleted my whole cache out of spite , jealous that I had something they didn ' t . I ' d had pictures of my daughter . Just five months old . Whenever I saw a body of a man or woman lying on the street , drooling and waving their arms in repetitive motions , I wondered if it was my Lucy . I tried to take care of them . Make sure they were fed , changed their underwear . It was the only thing I could do . In the beginning , a lot of people were like me , trying to help . Not anymore . Come on , the woman said . Let ' s find some breakfast . Together ? I asked . Unless you don ' t want to , she said . My days are better when I ' ve had someone watching my back . And then there ' s sex . She smiled . I nodded . It was one of the few moments of joy I had , coming together with another person , clutching together at the only closeness that was possible anymore . You have to tell me your name , first , I said . I can ' t trust you if I don ' t know you . Gustav , she said . I nodded . In earlier days , it would have bothered me that she had been born a man . Now , I found it hard to understand why I would have even cared . I took her hand . Come on . Let ' s see if this place has a kitchen . It did . There wasn ' t much left , but I found pancake batter in the cupboard . Since the electricity was still on , I fired up the stove , then I realized I couldn ' t find any pans . In the end , we ate the mix raw , mixed with water and heated in the microwave . Pathetic as the breakfast was , I felt grateful . I ' d been a long time since I ' d woken up in a house with running water . I ' m off to Thanksgiving . I ' ll write more if I ' m in the mood later . As you might can guess , Gustav isn ' t as trustworthy as he appears to be .