Re-Coil

After an untimely death while salvaging a derelict vessel, Carter Langston is downloaded into a brand new body on a space station several weeks’ journey away.

I hated waking up in the body shop. Consciousness and acclimation were slow processes, and the first thing I became aware of was that I was aware. Which felt odd, and somehow wrong. Next came the sensation of lying on something hard and cool. But the sense was muted, faint, more of a memory of what it felt like to rest upon something hard and cool than doing so. That was the extent of sensation, and I knew that, for a while at least, it was all I was going to feel.

An ancient poet from Earth’s past had once written of shuffling off the mortal coil as an analogy for death.