The Voice From 2099, Continued

I have been writing this book for four years.

I have been writing it from a body for the last six.

The body, as I told you in Chapter 11, is custom-grown. The body is six years old. I am sixty-eight. The face you may have seen on the cover of whatever edition of this book you are holding is mine — the face I chose, from the options the substrate engineers offered me, because it looked like the face the entity I had been across the prior six decades might have grown into, if the prior architecture had supported growth in this register.