It sounds like a goofball scheme: "Where would this person live?" you ask. "Here in this basement?"
"We'd get her a job someplace," Caleb replies. "Then get her an apartment. Maybe fake up some parents for her, eventually?"
"That's a huge freaking project. All that kind of stuff needs, like, documentation and shit. I doubt there's anything in the book about faking up birth certificates."
"Will you stop being so negative," he cries in exasperation. He pulls a metal band out of his backpack. "We just find a bureaucrat who knows that shit and do a mind swipe. That'll tell us what we need to know."
You boggle. "Jesus, you were making a new mask, and you've got another mind band? How many of those things do you have going?"
"I used to be boy scout, remember? Be prepared."
You start to make a retort, and then fall silent. Now that you think about it, Caleb's come up with a really intriguing idea, and it seems a lot less sketchy than duplicating and replacing real people.
And so you agree to it. Over the week that follows, the pieces start coming together:
First you make up a couple of metal bands and make trips to various government agencies; it's tricky, but on different pretexts you manage to get close to some key bureaucrats in their offices and jump them in order to get copies of their memories. Some of the minds you grab prove to be kind of gross and you don't have a lot of fun putting their heads inside yours, even temporarily—a sudden, vivid memory of the fat Social Security caseworker having sex with his equally fat wife leaves you shuddering with nausea at one point—but with the help of those disembodied minds you are able to hack into government databases and insert the necessary fake documentation for your new person.
The real trouble comes with figuring out who else to copy when making this girl. Some decisions are pretty easy. For instance, you are able to quickly compromise on a name by inventing a quasi-anagram on your own names: Celia Bea Williams. For her body, you figure you can get get another copy of Eva (or Jessica), and you're also limited by the wardrobe you have on hand, so you pretty quickly settle on a small selection of girls who you can add to mix: the cheerleader Yumi Saito; student council president Kim Walsh; and any classmates you are on good enough terms to get close to, like Cassie Harper and Deanna Showalter. You figure that adding two or three of these to a mask that contains Eva will result in a girl that doesn't look too much like any of them, especially since they range in looks from the Japanese Yumi to the red-headed Kim.
No, the real trouble comes with giving her a personality. Caleb points out that mind strips are not able to combine the way masks can, so you're going to have to use the personality and memories of a real person. "If our experience with the golem of you and of Eva is any guide," he says, "then the new person is going to have a personality just like the person in the mind band. Which means they are going to act and feel like that person would if they got shoved into a new body."
"But they'll be a golem," you point out. "We can tell them what's going on, order them to pretend to be this new person."
"Yeah," says Caleb. "But they still might freak out. It better not be a hysterical personality."
It's a good point. "Well, that rules out using as Eva, then," you remark. "Probably Cassie, too"
"We could also use a personality of someone totally different. Some girl with a dog's face, for instance. This girl we're making is going to be smoking hot, you know, so if we found a girl who'd be totally happy to wake up in a body like we're making—"
You raise an eyebrow. "Wouldn't it be easier to get a mind band off someone we're using for the body? Do the mask copy, then do the mind copy, all at once? I mean, if we use Yumi's body, well, she's pretty level-headed."
"Well, in that case," he says, "why not use Lisa?"
You start, and he points at the table, where the mind band for your ex-not-quite-girlfriend has been resting unused all this time.
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