I was nineteen when I found out. Not because anyone told me — my family doesn't tell, it arranges. I found the invoice on my father's desk, physical paper, which should have been my first clue that something was wrong because my father hasn't used paper for anything since I was a child. A monthly maintenance statement from Elysian Health Partners, a name I didn't recognize, for "Continuation Suite 7, Client A-4419." The amount was more than most people in the Shelf make in a year. I looked up Elysian Health Partners. I found nothing. I asked my mother. She told me to forget I'd seen it. I asked my father. He sat me down, poured himself a drink, and explained that he had a companion body.

He said it like he was telling me about a vacation home. Casual. Practical. "It's just planning ahead, sweetheart." He'd had it grown eleven years ago, when he turned fifty. It was maintained in a private suite in a facility he described as "very comfortable." He visited quarterly for what he called "compatibility checks" — medical assessments ensuring the clone body remained viable for eventual consciousness transfer. He told me the body was twenty-three years old physiologically, the age he was when he married my mother. He told me it was wearing clothes my mother had picked out. He told me it looked just like him, which of course it did, because it was him. He told me all of this over dinner. We had seared tuna. I don't eat fish anymore.

My mother took me to visit the facility six months later. She said it would help me "understand." The suite was beautiful — hardwood floors, real plants, a window that I later learned was a high-resolution display simulating an ocean view. The bed was king-sized. Medical equipment was built into the walls, disguised as furniture. And in the bed was my father. Not my father. My father's face on a body twenty years younger, breathing slowly, eyes closed, chest rising and falling with mechanical regularity. His hands were folded on his chest. His hair was the black my father's used to be before it went gray. He looked peaceful. He looked like he was sleeping. My mother adjusted the collar of his pajamas and said, "I picked these out last month. The blue brings out his eyes." His eyes were closed. His eyes had never opened.

I stood in that room for eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the wall — another decorative touch, a clock in a room for someone who will never need to know the time. I watched the body breathe. I watched my mother smooth the sheets. I tried to understand what I was feeling and I couldn't, because there is no framework for this. There is no self-help book for "my father has a spare body in a luxury suite and my mother dresses it." I felt grief, but nobody had died. I felt horror, but nothing violent was happening. I felt something close to jealousy, which makes no sense — jealous of what? A body that has never thought a thought? But that body will get to be young when my father is old. That body will get to keep going when my father's original heart stops. That body has a future, and I am not sure my father's original one does, because why would you maintain the old model when the new one is waiting?

I don't visit the facility anymore. I don't talk to my father about it. At family dinners I sometimes catch myself studying his face, looking for signs of age, calculating how long before he decides the original model has depreciated enough to trade in. My therapist says this is a normal response to an abnormal situation. My therapist does not know what the situation is — I told her my father is planning an elective surgery. It's not entirely a lie. It's just that the surgery involves dying in one body and waking up in another, and the body he'll wake up in has been breathing in a room with an ocean-view screen for eleven years, wearing pajamas my mother picked out, and I am supposed to be okay with this because we can afford it. Being Tier 5 means never having to call the thing by its name.