There was a soaring, wonderful emptiness, a warm light that comforted and that cherished. Gradually a part of that emptiness began to think and to enjoy the comfort of the light, and as it thought, it found itself not the emptiness but a somewhat fuzzy awareness within the light, a consciousness in a wider world.

It tried to remember how it had come to be in this place, but there was no memory; it was as if it had simply come to be, anew, already with the full mental acuity of an adult.

It came to understand that it had eyes which were drinking in the light; it had a body which soaked in the warmth; that part of the pleasant sensation of that warmth was in fact the nerves of its skin tingling with pleasure.

It was, it thought, smiling. No; she was smiling. Very definitely she, she decided. She felt a degree of femininity that startled her, though she had no idea why it would be a surprise.

She had a notion that she should have memories, that her existence extended back before the light, before the warmth, before the pleasure, but there was nothing there.

That was alright, though. Everything was alright. She was absolutely sure of it.

She had been looking happily at the light, lying perfectly still in whatever strange, featureless cocoon she found herself in, for some time before a melodic chime sounded in her head.

No. In her ear? Yes - now she had reason to pay attention, she could feel small buds nestled in her ears. That was new knowledge. A voice spoke from them. It was hauntingly familiar. “Hello,” it said. “My name is Bernadette Page.” In the light in front of her, a picture of a smiling woman appeared, although her smile was a nervous one.

The listener saw at once the haunted look, the bags under her eyes, the nervous glances and darts that her eyes made constantly. She felt sorry for this Bernadette.

“I prefer Bernie, but it’s important to know your full name. Bernadette Rose Page.” The picture was moving; her lips were in sync with the words now. The person she could see was the one speaking to her.

“That’s your name too, you see. Um. Shit. Hang on.” Somewhere below the shoulders, where the image stopped, this Bernadette must have done something. And once she did, the quality of the warmth and the light surrounding the listener changed. Before, she had gradually found herself distinct from her surroundings. Now they once again enveloped her, joined with her, were absorbed into her. Bernadette spoke again. “That’s your full name too. Bernadette Rose Page. You prefer Rose.”

The words seeped into the listener and were absorbed into her in a way they had not been when spoken before. The listener was Bernadette Rose Page, but she preferred Rose. This was simply how things were. Rose felt her lips quirk into a smile.

Bernadette’s shoulders moved again, and the light and the warmth were no longer part of Rose.

“I used to be a soldier,” Bernadette said. “We used to be a soldier, I guess. I’m telling you this because you have neighbours who know, but you won’t remember any of what you did, what you saw.”

She was quiet then, quiet for a long while. “And you’ll be better off for that,” she said. “You’re changing your way of life. I mean, uh,” Rose saw the other woman - the earlier woman? - move her shoulders again and the light and the warmth once again filled her.

“You’re making a change, Rose. A new way of life. A loving way of life. A way of lire where you don’t always have to win, don’t always have to be right. Where the last word can happen to other people.”

Rose felt herself changing, felt her mind and her opinions shimmer and adjust as Bernadette kept talking.

“Family’s always important, but…” Bernadette swallowed, and sounded apologetic as she continued, “I’m afraid you’ve lost yours. Left them behind. You’ll figure out how to build a new one, the way I couldn’t.”

Rose shivered at the other woman’s certainty, at her faith in her. Yet she could feel the tingling in her own head as things changed; a messy tangle of not-exactly-reflexes that had become so much a part of her mindscape that she’d never noticed it was unfurling and unpicking itself, the better to form into new reflexes, new attitudes.

“You’ll find a way to be happy,” Bernadette said, and she paused. “I think a lot of it is in being able to listen when others offer you the opportunity, and being able to accept that they can bring you happiness. I was too independent.

“Find someone you can rely on. And yes, be careful. Watch out for people who’d abuse that dependence. But give yourself to someone, Rose.”

She was quiet for a while, and the warmth that let her words remake Rose faded back away. “I’m asking you to do a lot, but I swear it will be its own reward.

“I love you, Rose. You carry my hopes with you. Find happiness, and learn the skills you need to keep it.”

*

When the cylinder door rotated open, the light in which Rose had been suspended was suddenly gone. In its place were the clinical white bulbs of the clinic; a definite downgrade, though as Dr Jemison helped Rose out of the cylinder and back to her feet it didn’t seem so bad.

“How was that?”

“I’m… still digesting it,” Rose said slowly. “I can’t imagine it was what I expected, though. Assuming I expected anything.” And she gave Jemison a curious look, watching for her reaction.

Jemison just sighed. “There’s a set of questions that comes up quite often from people in your exact situation,” she said. “How about I try answering what I think that slight jab is leading up to, and you can tell me if I’m anywhere near the mark?”

“Sure.” Her instincts were telling Rose to watch out, but a part of her was strangely fond of the other woman. That must mean they’d known each other, before… mustn’t it?

She shook her head. There was no good reason for all this to feel so complicated.

“So,” Jemison said. “In your situation, right now you don’t remember much, and some of the memories that used to be most important to you aren’t ever coming back.

“Modern technology can resolve trauma response through effectively treating the source, but memory is a strange thing; if it’s allowed to remain, sooner or later the trauma will resurface. We have to erase for some gaps on either side of any key trauma. Unfortunately in your case you’ll be missing over a decade.

“It’s not uncommon for people who come for this treatment, after they’ve had it, to worry that maybe it wasn’t their idea. To imagine that they were, perhaps, a criminal; there are dozens of movies with that idea, all from before the technology was developed, and inevitably some of the tropes from those movies stick in the mind.

“That’s one reason we ask the patient to record the instruction for themselves. The other is - yes, we help them arrive at their goals, and we help them recognise what needs to go and where their best life might lie. But it has to be your decision to be ethical. And that also means it should be your version of the best life.

“Anyway, we thought when we began this treatment, and that only starts about when you first signed up, that having the patient deliver their own programming would reassure you that it wasn’t a trick.”

She smiled. “Of course it wouldn’t, and of course it doesn’t. In hindsight that’s obvious. The idea patients come up with is that it must be a really complicated trick.”

Biting her lip, Rose nodded. She wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or concerned that the doctor evidently had this speech almost planned out.

“In time, you’ll recover some memories of the lead-up to your recording. Of the final days of what was several months of therapeutic examination. But that doesn’t help you now. So here’s what I can tell you.

“Your older self did a lot of work to direct your psyche. There’s a pretty good chance she also decided to change something pretty fundamental about you both, the way you think of yourself - I know she was planning to change her name. Rose, right?”

Rose nodded, her lips dry.

“Well, Rose. That’s stuck, hasn’t it? And before this technology was brought into therapy, it was being used by the Democratic People’s Frontier. We found a huge…” She gestured. “Just an absolutely huge building, a hospital size place, that was outfitted with hundreds of these.

“They didn’t have the capacity to record new instructions, though. They had like eight pre-set personas, and they installed whichever one had been prescribed.”

Doctor Jemison wasn’t looking at Rose, but it didn’t seem like she was lying; she was staring off into space in a way Rose felt sure was memory.

“Soldier, officer, labourer, politician, farmer, broodmare, sex worker, administrator. A self-reinforcing caste system with skill and affinity programmed in, and if you take two labourers the only things different are their physical characteristics and their serial number.”

She sighed. “I’ll tell you what, when we understood what that facility did a lot more made sense about how long that conflict had dragged out. There’s still debate about the ethics of going public with what we know, what it could do to international diplomacy versus just how horrific it is. Thing is, we’re not entirely sure there’s anyone in the Frontier who would understand that things can be otherwise.”

Rose swallowed. This was meant to make her feel better?

"So. Anyway. We have a lot of proof of how the system can work. And if this was a trick? We could just tell you, while you’re in there, that it’s not a trick, and you’d believe us, the same way Frontier citizens believe their way of life isn’t induced.

“But the rules we operate on when we’re using this technology, they make all of that illegal. Because we believe it should never be legal to do that.”

Rose nodded slowly. Her name hadn’t been Rose until she was told it was; it was easy to believe she could have been told this was her own idea, under the programming, and she’d accept it. “Okay…” she said. “So, uh, what happens from here?”

“What do you want, Rose?”

She blinked. “I want… to be happy,” she said quietly. “I want to build a new family, to honour my old one. I want to find someone who’ll complete me, someone I can grow old with. Someone who can take the lead, but who I can trust to let take the lead.”

Doctor Jemison’s smile grew wider as Rose listed off her goals, and nothing could have made her more aware that these goals had been implanted. “Didn’t Bernadette want this too?”

Jemison nodded, but the smile was no longer there. With a wistful sadness she said “Yes, but she wasn’t able to get there. She came to me for help; we talked it over, and we decided this was the best way to make what she wanted happen. Which sounds silly, I’m sure.”

“I guess not.” Rose wasn’t sure. “What happens now?”

“You go out, and you try to make it happen, and you come visit me next month and we see where things stand,” Jemison said. “And if it’s not right, or if you start feeling like what you’ve been primed to feel doesn’t fit, you call my office immediately and we’ll try to fit you in early, OK?”

Rose nodded, mutely, uncertain how to respond.

*

The house was strange, at once new to her and incredibly familiar. She moved around it like she was discovering it, seeing it with the happy eyes of a new homeowner encountering a place that perfectly fitted her.

Yet when she cooked, she would find herself in want of something, and she’d reach out for it and find it exactly where she expected, even if she didn’t know why she expected it to be waiting there.

She went to sleep in the big old double bed on the first night she was there and found herself thinking it was too big, that it needed someone else lying there beside her and without that it just wouldn’t ever be the right size.

In the morning she found herself staring thoughtfully at the old, faded blue paint on the wall of the kitchen and wondering if it wouldn’t look better in some other colour.

*

Doctor Jemison barely recognised the Rose Page who walked into her office for the third month post-treatment. It wasn’t just that the wardrobe had changed, the long, obscuring dresses traded in for tight, skimpy items that left her tan skin and muscular body on display; wasn’t even that her makeup had gone from utilitarian and barely-there to loaded with intent.

Her body language had been starting to shift at the previous appointment, but by this point it was completely different. The soldier was only visible in the power of her body; the way she moved was utterly unrecognisable. She wasn’t looking for sight lines, either, or making sure she had her eyes on the door.

Her eyes didn’t dart from place to place every few seconds, there wasn’t anything jerky to her movement. She smiled easily, and it no longer looked like a mask.

There were times when Doctor Jemison was proud to do the work she did, and this was definitely shaping up as one of them.

Rose chose the comfortable chair in front of Doctor Jemison’s desk. She was still holding the cardboard coffee cup she’d walked into the clinic with.

“Good afternoon, Rose.”

“Afternoon, Doc. How’re you doing?”

Jemison chuckled. “You know that’s my line, right?”

“We can both care, Doc.” She smiled. “I think maybe you spend so much time looking after us I worry you might not be looking after yourself.”

“I do OK,” Jemison said, and she was pretty sure she’d kept the defensiveness out of her tone. Any issues she had in that department weren’t her patients’ affair.

A change of topic. “So how are things with Ethan?”

Rose smiled gently and shook her head. “Had to let him go, Doc.”

“Had to?”

“Turned out he thought he’d found someone cute who’d be a pushover for him.” She laughed. “Whatever else you made me, I’m no pushover.”

Doctor Jemison smiled. “Probably not,” she said. Although the way you specified things, I’m pretty sure you will be when you find the right match. “So what name should I know now?”

“What makes you think there’s someone new in the picture, Doc?”

“Well, bear in mind, I get to cheat. I know the old you as well as the new one. You’ve… how do I put this? You’ve rewired the circuit diagram but there’s still just as much charge in the battery as there ever was.”

Rose sighed. “His name is Jacob,” she said. “I’m… yeah. I’m hopeful.”

“Good. How are you feeling in yourself?”

*

Six months after the treatment, Rose walked back into Dr Jemison’s office whistling cheerfully. She was wearing a tank top now, lycra hugging her figure, which had begun to soften, though the definition in the muscles of her bare arms was still very visible.

The short skirt had become a pair of booty shorts. Both items were in a vibrant neon yellow, a matching set, and the sneakers on her tan legs were a bright orange. Her hair, having grown up long, had been gathered up in a top ponytail with a white scrunchy.

The rose tattoo on one arm now had all of its colour, and the scar it had disguised was entirely hidden. She walked in a leisurely hip-rolling stroll, somehow managing to convey a needy sensuality and a poise that left her clearly in control of herself.

The colours were colours Captain Bernadette Page had loved; the behaviour and the look, what she’d wanted to have.

Jemison didn’t have to ask if her memories were returning; as Rose lifted a hip onto her desk, sitting side-on to her and chatting away cheerfully, it was clear that many of them had - outside the ones she’d loathed - and she was feeling much more like herself.

“So,” she said once the chatter eventually came to a stop - it took much longer this time; Rose had clearly decided that Jemison could be trusted with anything, so the gossip was extensive, “How are things with Jacob?”

“You know, Doc, that’s word for word the way I asked you about Ethan.”

“It’s the way I like to ask.”

“It’s in your script, you mean.” She grinned, tongue licking out over white teeth; teasing, not criticising, amused, not disgruntled. Thank goodness.

“Sure, if you prefer. Are you teasing me, or are you dodging the question?”

Rose laughed. “Just teasing. He’s great; he’s attentive, he’s willing to take charge, and he’s fun in bed. I’m just testing him at the moment.”

Jemison frowned. “Testing?”

“I don’t want to let Bernie down, Doc.”

“Meaning…”

“Meaning I’m giving Jacob some chances to make the same mistakes that Ethan did. If he does, he’s gone.”

Jemison nodded approvingly. “If all’s well with Jacob, that’s great,” she said. “But I did actually want to talk to you about what we do if he falls through.”

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Feeling pessimistic, Doc?”

“Actually, no.” She chuckled. “Although I can completely see why you’d ask. No, this is a different question.” She put her hand on Captain Bernadette Page’s manilla folder and she moved it to one side, revealing the other folder underneath; the name on this one was Lieutenant Peter Walkerton.

Captain Page would have waited for more, but Rose Page didn’t have the dependence on indoctrinated military discipline of her predecessor. She casually reached out and picked up the folder. Opened it. Started reading.

Doctor Jemison had never been a stickler for enforcing military discipline unless doing so would better help her patients, so she fell silent and waited.

Between Rose’s early bout of gossip and the time she spent reading and digesting the file and it’s implications, the hour allotted to the appointment was more than used up before, finally, Rose set the file down again and said only “Huh.”

“As I said,” Doctor Jemison answered, “we’d only look at this if Jacob falls through.”

“But if he does…” Rose drummed her fingers on the file, and Jemison noted for the first time that she’d adopted long, tapered nails of a studied impracticality. “You have someone who wants not quite what I want.”

“Something compatible.”

“Yeah.” Rose wouldn’t meet Jemison’s eye. “I know you’re meaning this to land like a safety net or something, Doc, but I wish you hadn’t brought it up.”

“Okay.” She knew better than to push back on a patient who was starting to achieve what she needed to.

“What I have with Jacob… I know you’ve got to look for my success, long term, all that stuff. But what I have with Jacob is something I’m building for myself. And I don’t want an escape route in case I use it when I shouldn’t.”

Jemison nodded. “Right. I’m sorry to have done that.”

“I appreciate you trying to understand.” Rose stood. “I’ll skip next month unless I’m in crisis, OK?”

“Of course. If that’s what suits you better.”

*

In actual fact, Rose Page didn’t get back to Doctor Jemison’s office again for another six months. The change, once again, was immediately visible, immediately impactful; she was back to a loose, flowing skirt and the top she wore, though sleeveless, billowed, doing its best to hide her figure.

It couldn’t do so completely, however; there was no hiding the late stage of her pregnancy. She paused in the doorway, gauging the doctor’s reaction, and laughed. “No need to ask how things are with me and Jacob this time, huh?”

“I should say not,” Jemison agreed. She stood and came out from behind her desk to hug her patient. “I’d actually wondered if your cancellations and postponements were about avoiding me bringing up Lieutenant Walkerton.” She laughed. “But I can clearly see now you just wanted maximum surprise factor.”

Rose flashed a warm smile. “You know me a lot better than I think, Doc,” she said. “One other thing…” She raised her hand and let the therapist see the wedding ring that now sat with pride on her finger.

“Oh, wonderful!”

She helped her patient sit and made her way back behind the desk. “So, tell me everything.”

For the first time, the therapist wasn’t monitoring the conversation for hidden concerns, quiet worries, or any reservations. She still picked up one or two of them, but they were swamped in enough certainty, enough confidence, enough love that she knew her patient had a better shot at happiness short, medium, and long-term than most people ever did.

At length, Rose surprised her. “I’ve had a couple of letters,” she said. “From people who know me as Captain Bernie.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I’ve told all of them I’m not willing to swap war stories or talk shop. But there’s a couple who’ve kept writing anyhow. And one of them…”

She sighed. “I think I might know someone who might maybe suit your Lieutenant,” she said. “But… I don’t know this stuff, Doc. I need you to let me know one way or another. Can you do that for me?”

“If you can persuade them to refer themself,” Doctor Jemison said, and smiled.

It was wonderful, how friendly her patients became once they were healthy. And how happy they were to go and find others.

If she had any concerns about the system they used, it was that people who’d experienced it always wanted others to try it. She was never entirely sure if that was because they’d seen that it worked, or because something in the system required it.