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verged on sensual nirvana, I told wicked jokes about Kat that made her laugh till tears rolled down her cheeks. Then I coaxed her into helping me with my stretches. Sitting face-to-face with Shee in her workout shorts transformed the dull therapy routine into an act of libidinous pleasure. I drew the session out, asking for special guidance with the yoga moves and savoring the feel of her hands on my newly cloned skin.
    As soon as she left, though, I linked into the Agonist Web site and browsed the latest video. Our crew had logged several fairly interesting surfs, and watching their archives made me antsy to get back in the action. I scanned their blogs all night.
    Chad, my cyberassistant, called every few hours to go through my mail, doctors’ appointments and day trades. When I missed board meetings, Chad voted my proxy. He was also remodeling several floors of my eighty-story condo, and he kept flashing me color swatches. Avocado, lime, mint green—Chad blissed on the cutting edge of style.
    “Stick with white. It goes with anything,” I said, which made Chad heave a quantum sigh.
    One by one, the Agonists dropped in to see me. Verinne came first. Two meters tall, slender and cool, she stalked into my room like a frigid fashion model. Her pewter-colored hair lay flat to her skull like a pelt, and she’d plucked her widow’s peak into a sharp point, dividing her high forehead into two pale half-moons. Her narrow gray eyes canted upward at a slight angle, hinting Siberian lineage. She glanced at me briefly and dabbed her lips with gloss.
    Her voice crackled. “You look better man I expected, Nasir.” Then she planted a dry kiss on my cheek.
    Verinne’s ghoulish beauty had once bewitched me. But now, her dead-white skin wrinkled like fine crepe. After exhausting cosmetic creams and surgeries, Verinne resorted to high collars and long sleeves. She suffered from Sjogren’s Syndrome, a disease of desiccation mat not even bioNEMs could heal. Her skin, eyes, mouth, even her internal organs were literally drying up.
    Once you love a woman, you never stop caring. That’s my belief. Verinne wasn’t beautiful anymore, but she’d always been a true friend. Solid. No nonsense. The sound of her failing voice tore at my heart.
    “Do me a favor, Verinne.” I kicked restlessly at my bed covers. “Convince me why any sane person would choose to live this long.”
    She coughed into her fist. “No time for chitchat. I need your condo password. The crew wants to meet tonight”
    “You’re planning a surf?”
    “I have to hurry. Watch the Web site. You’ll see.” Verinne was not the type to discuss personal issues.
    Grunze visited the next morning. He brought me a gift, an ePage calendar he and some of his weight-lifter pals had self-published, with pictures of themselves in various brawny poses. Grunze was February. His pale blue spandex jumpsuit displayed every swell of his physique, knotted and overdeveloped to the point of grim vulgarity. All execs doped their genes to improve muscle mass, but Grunze went radical. A few decades ago, the docs diagnosed him with sarcopenia—age-related muscle weakness. Since then, he’d fixated on bodybuilding.
    Grunzie’s fondness for me sometimes came out in awkward ways. Attached to the calendar was a schmaltzy gift card, and while I read the poem inside, he paced and blushed and rubbed his boulder head. He’d eliminated the problem of hair by surgically cauterizing his follicles.
    “Grunze, why do we keep doing this?” I was in a pensive mood. The tedium of convalescence gave me black thoughts. “Why do we keep putting our bodies through this recuperative torture?”
    He grinned uncertainly and shook my foot with rough affection. When we first met, his blue eyes had been round and bright, but now they looked like raisins, lost in the heavy musculature of his face. “How’s the new ear?’ he said. “Should’ve grown yourself a new prick while you were at it.”
    I pounded