I sat there, staring at my reflection in the window. I didn’t look two hundred years old. Without body replacements, no one got that old. Body replacements were the domain of construct agents, because each time you replaced your old body with a new one, you lost half your identity. Each construct body fitted in a niche for which it was designed. It had a job to do, a place in society. If you grafted a mind onto it, the mind had to fit in that new world and discard much of its old personality. If you have no relatives other than the eight other bodies who come out of the same batch, and have the same identity problems as you, your brothers and your job determine who you are, simple as that.
Pristines preferred to hang onto their own identity, because it was the only one they had, and it wa
