It is a sacred trust among our sisterhood, inherited from Rhea, our template-matriarch: Live through all your deaths, she resolved with iron determination, and I honor her memory. Whenever one of us dies, we retrieve her soul chip and mail it around our shrinking circle of grief. Reliving endings is painful but necessary: Dying regularly by proxy keeps you on your toes — and is a good way to learn to recognize when someone is trying to kill you.

(That last is a minor exaggeration; we are friendly and anxious to please, and few would want to murder us — except when we are depressed. But please bear with me.)

We all find it increasingly hard to go on. We are old enough that critical anniversaries hold a fatal allure, for birthdays bring unpleasant memories, and if the best of all possible days have come and gone, why persist? It’s a common failure mode for my lineage — first we become nostalgic, then we bog ourselves down in a fatal lack of purpose, and finally we start to obsess. In the final soul-agony that precedes the demise of our sibs, we horrified onlookers perceive a fragment of our own ending. Live through all your deaths. Harsh irony, then, that Rhea, the original from whom we are all copied, was one of the first to inflict this terrible burden upon us.

And so, on my hundred and thirty-ninth birthday, near as I can count it — for I was born for the second (and more definite) time exactly sixty-one years after my existence was forever rendered purposeless by a cruel joke of fate — I spend my carefully hoarded savings so that I might sit on the edge of a balcony outside a gaming hall thronged with joyful gamblers, the ground far below a ruddy metallic counterpoint to the clouds boiling overhead: And I look down, contemplating eternal death, and try to convince myself that it’s still a bad idea.

It could be worse, I tell myself. I’m not eleven anymore; it’s a choice I’m free to make.