I thought this piece was wonderfully ambitious. Mira's fear and her will to live were visceral. Her pride in the face of her humiliating powerlessness as activated in a deft and engaging way. But there were a few things that held "Bridesicle" back from being a really outstanding story.
McIntosh tied one hand behind his back by choosing to tell the story from Mira's severely limited perspective. But I think that with a little more imagination he could have used this limitation to his advantage. ("What year is it?" "2345." vs. "What year is it?" "Year? Year? Oh, how quaint!"). Instead, he just worked around it. More than a century goes by, but nothing significant changes in the outside world. The grandson's orange skin and futuristic garb were kind of a flaccid attempt to show that the times, they were a-changin' without making Mira and the men in her death actually comprehend the world in different ways. To paraphrase Steve Eley regarding Knights of the Old Republic, a civilization that doesn't change throughout the generations is kind of...leotarded.
I could forgive the idea that language, laws, and relationships all remain stagnant over the one hundred plus years of Mira's death, except that the innovation of mental singularity seems like such a game changer. How would a century of this practice fail to utterly transform the nature of identity, individuality, and social hierarchy? How many votes would a man with 29 Hitchers get? What does a PhD in physics do when all the jobs are taken by people who've got twelve of them rattling around in their brains? After enough time, how would the Hitcherless ever hope to compete with the, um...Hitched...in anything that has to do with experience, wisdom or plain old knowledge?
It's not that I think the subject can't be tackled or that it can't be tackled in an approachable way. James Kelly's "Candy Art" had a very humorous take on the consequences of digitized consciousness, even though his spectral baby boomers made use of "puppets" rather than their offspring. I still remember laughing a little nervously at the narrator's inner monologue: "You don't die! You own everything, and you don't die!"
Long story short: I thought the mechanics of reviving people from premature deaths and how bodies are doomed to wear out were well established, but that the Hitchers aspect of the story just raised more questions than it helpfully answered. Maybe that sounds picky, but sci-fi is not a buffet table.
