The Brochure That Comes After the Funeral
A frequently-asked-questions format is the least alarming way to deliver bad news that humans have ever invented, which is presumably why Colonial Genetics chooses it to explain that John Perry's new body is patented, sterile, and not legally his to reproduce. "Can I Pass These Amazing Improvements to My Children? No." The brochure says this between a paragraph about chlorophyll-infused skin and a cheerful sign-off — "Thanks for your service to the colonies — and enjoy . . . Your New Body." Perry reads it in his stateroom mirror, looking at cat's-eye pupils that used to be muddy brown, and the book does not pause to flag the horror of the document. It doesn't need to. The horror is in the font.
The contract that gets him there runs the same register. Paragraph five transfers his citizenship and bars him from Earth forever. Paragraph six declares him legally dead in the state of Ohio, effective in seventy-two hours, "for the purposes of law in all relevant political entities." The recruiter reads this in the voice of someone who has said it daily for a decade, then jokes that if you're murdered during your three days of legal death, the killer can only be charged with "disturbing a corpse." Perry signs. Of course he signs — the alternative is dying slowly and for real, on Earth, at seventy-five. The contract doesn't coerce him. It outcompetes his other option.
This is a different kind of military science fiction than the genre's founding texts. Starship Troopers dresses its violence in civic virtue; Heinlein wants you to believe the suffering earns something. Scalzi's recruits suffer for a corporation that owns the patent on their new blood. The dead don't even keep their DNA to themselves — the Ghost Brigades are built from genetic material harvested off corpses who never consented to the harvesting, grown into soldiers who carry a stranger's muscle memory and none of her life. Jane Sagan exists because somebody's cells were useful after she stopped needing them. Ageing, in this book, stops being a thing that happens to you and becomes a thing you license — but the license has an owner, and the owner is not you.
Reread now, the part that reads strangest isn't the green skin or the brain-to-brain transfer. It's the seventy-two-hour cooling-off window — the recruiter telling Perry he can call and cancel, no penalty, before the ticket is punched. Real consent architecture in 2026 doesn't offer that. You don't get a human on the phone reading you paragraph six aloud; you get a scroll bar and a checkbox, and the box is pre-checked. Scalzi, writing in 2005, still imagined that the taking of a life's remaining rights would require a conversation. The gene-patent fights that followed — Myriad, CRISPR licensing, the entire architecture of owning the molecule rather than the person — came for the body exactly as the brochure predicted. They just came without the recruiter, without the folding chairs and the donuts, without anyone reading the terms out loud.
What happens to a species that keeps signing documents it understands and can't afford not to sign?