Something dull thudded against the side of Chim's head. Something thick and hard and dull. It took him a moment to realise that it was the window of the pod he was floating in. Two seconds ago the pod had ejected from what was now a decimated shell, previously a mining freighter. Now he felt another dull thud from behind and all too late realised that the structure of the pod was falling away around him. 

When he was nine years old his father broke his arm as punishment for lying to him about not going to school. From that day forward he was schooled at home, where his father could keep his eye on him.

When he was fourteen, he kissed his first girlfriend for the first time. It took her four days to find someone else to kiss for the first time. He broke that other boy's arm as punishment. It felt like the right thing to do then.

When he was fifteen, he was put into a home where he would be "properly looked after". He wasn't. It was a converted internment camp where they sent the junkie kids and the girls who had stabbed their parents to death and the boys who had set their houses on fire.

When he was fifteen he left and got a job as a scrubber on an old carrier. It was a lot better than waiting to be stabbed or burned. Here he felt useful. There was always something to do, and provided you did the job right, you were praised. It made more sense to Chim than being ignored until you did it wrong.

When he was fifteen he died for the first time. He didn't remember anything much about it. Just that the list of memories to go through in that last second was a lot shorter back then. But he never did remember much about anything after that first death.

"It's not death," they told him at training. "Consider it...relocation."

They had a funny way of trying to make everything sound more palatable. It simultaneously made him feel more comfortable, and nauseous.

As the last breath left his lungs, he felt his muscles snap into the position in which this body would be found. He always tried to starfish his body. For no other reason than it was amusing to him in that final moment before relocation. Someone would find the frozen body of a clone and it would haunt them. Why did he stretch his limbs out like that? What did he see that made him do that? Who was this man that would put his last ounce of strength into trying to take up as much space as possible? These questions fled through his head as his body froze solid, and the last muscle movement would be the corners of his mouth twisting upwards into a sly grin.

****

He woke up groggy, as usual. He stood up slowly and walked to the mirror. It was a little ritual of his every time this happened. He felt as though he needed to check that he was still himself. That he hadn't somehow accidentally had his thoughts, his essence, inserted into a different body. There were stories, where a friend of a friend would know a guy that had been put into the body of a woman, or the other way around. But it had not happened to him.

Not yet.

He cursed under his breath.

Maybe next time.