The term "companion body" entered Tier 5 vocabulary sometime around 2280, though its exact origin is disputed. The concept is simple and horrifying: a brain-dead genetic duplicate of yourself, maintained in a private facility, available as both a spare-parts reserve and — for those willing to pay the ultimate premium — a vessel for consciousness transfer when your original body fails. It is the final luxury. It is also, depending on which jurisdiction's laws you consult, somewhere between a medical device, a piece of property, and a person. Lazarus Pharmaceuticals offers the service through a subsidiary called Elysian Health Partners. The brochure uses words like "continuity" and "legacy preservation." It does not use the word "clone."

The investigation began with facility records obtained from a disgruntled maintenance contractor. The documents describe private suites — not medical bays, suites — where companion bodies are kept. The rooms have furniture. Some have windows. The bodies lie in adjustable beds with high-thread-count sheets, wearing clothes selected by their owners. One client sends seasonal wardrobe updates. Another has a standing order for fresh flowers every Monday. The bodies don't see the flowers. They don't feel the sheets. Their eyes never open. But the rooms are maintained to the standards of a luxury hotel, because the people paying for them need to believe that what they're doing is somehow civilized.

Interviews with facility staff paint a picture that corporate PR would prefer to remain invisible. Three nurses, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the psychological toll of caring for bodies that are simultaneously their patients and their patients' property. One described a Tier 5 client who visits his companion body every Sunday, sits in a chair beside the bed, and reads aloud from financial reports. He calls the body by his own name. Another described a client who insisted on cosmetic procedures for her companion body — hair styling, skin treatments, manicures — so that it would "look its best" for the eventual transfer. A third nurse, who lasted only four months before resigning, said simply: "They're not dead. I don't care what the paperwork says. You can feel their breath on your hand."

The legal framework enabling companion bodies is a masterwork of corporate lobbying. Lazarus spent an estimated 280 million Φ over six years ensuring that cloned bodies without activated neural tissue are classified as "cultivated biological assets" rather than persons under GLMZ corporate charter law. The distinction rests on a single criterion: demonstrated cognitive activity. No cognition, no personhood. The fact that cognition could be initiated at any time — that the infrastructure for thought exists in every companion body's intact brain — is legally irrelevant. A loaded gun isn't a shooting. A dormant brain isn't a mind. The analogy is Lazarus's own, from their legal briefs. They seem proud of it.

The market is smaller than one might expect and larger than anyone should be comfortable with. Best estimates suggest between 200 and 400 active companion body contracts in GLMZ, each costing between 8 and 15 million Φ annually for maintenance, medical monitoring, and facility fees. The clients are exclusively Tier 5 — executives, legacy families, individuals for whom death is not a personal inevitability but a logistical problem to be solved. Several clients have maintained companion bodies for over a decade. At least two are known to have completed consciousness transfers, though Lazarus denies this officially. The bodies that were left behind — the original bodies — were cremated. No death certificates were filed. The clients simply continued living, younger, in rooms they had been decorating for years.