The Unincorporated Man - By Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin Page 0,2

the imagination.

The El Dorado and the Francisco mines are played out for gold and silver, however they, like the No Timbers mine, still may have substantial amounts of lead and zinc. But it is doubtful the amounts present can be extracted economically with the present state of mining technology.

—COLORADO MINING COMMISSION REPORT ON THE EL DORADO MINEOWNERSHIP TRANSFER, JULY 19, 1978 (ONE OF ONLY TWO SOURCES INWHICH THE NO TIMBERS MINE IS MENTIONED)

Neela Harper was not a country girl. In fact, she’d always preferred the big city. Anything with only a million and a half people in it just didn’t seem natural. If she had had any inkling that the career she had chosen for herself would dump her in this remote part of the world she probably wouldn’t have chosen it. Then again, being a minority shareholder in herself, she would have had little or no say whatsoever about her place of employ. Luck of the draw, she thought somberly to herself. And this year I’m clearly down on my luck. Anybody looking at her would not be displeased. She was five feet eleven inches—about average for a woman. A very healthy thirty-seven, but this was not surprising in the era of nano-medicine; positively everyone was healthy, and everyone looked great. Still, if everybody was a giant health-wise, then Neela, by her rigorous adherence to exercise, stood on the shoulders of those giants. Her appearance was 97 percent original, with only minor changes to control her hair growth and the removal of some facial bone damage suffered in a childhood accident. She hadn’t had a sex change or so much as a boob job by her eighteenth birthday, something that was practically a rite of passage for her generation. Nope, just chestnut hair, green eyes, a tiny nose, freckles, and a supremely athletic body. Her problem was not so much physical as it was economic.

Not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, she spent all of high school and most of college studying the basics. Nothing wrong with that. And she did well with all the courses she took. In some ways it was helping her now, but not in terms of her percentages. At an age when most of her peers owned 35 percent of themselves, she only owned a paltry 30.5 percent. It had nothing to do with gambling or expensive trips. Her debt was an investment. Those who knew they were going to go into an expensive or prestigious field prepared themselves by maintaining a stellar GPA. Further, they specialized in a chosen field all through high school and university. Thus, by the time they got to the advanced, and therefore expensive, part of their training, they were better able to bargain for lower percentages. And so the university-cum-investor was held to grabbing only 7 to 9 percent of that student’s self-equity, as opposed to the standard 12 to 15 percent. Rumor even had it that one top-flight student had received her education from San Francisco State University, the top Pacific League school, for an amazingly low 4 percent. But Neela wasn’t prepared to commit to a major she didn’t feel strongly about, and it wasn’t until her junior year that she felt such passion. And while her patience at the time was seen as somewhat virtuous, it was now turning out to be a costly virtue indeed. As far as majors went, she’d picked a doozy. Neela was going to be a reanimation psychologist with a subspecialty in social integration. Since reanimation psychology was considered a prestigious field, what institution of higher learning would risk educating a latecomer when they could get more valuable stock in a better prospect?

The answer was a not-so-great institution of higher learning, Harvard, and the loss of more personal stock than she would have preferred—14 percent, to be exact. That, combined with what her parents, the government, and various other organizations held, gave her what in this day and age amounted to a measly 30.5 percent of herself. This also meant she had very little bargaining power as to where she was going to start her glorious career. If she had realized her dream, or just a better percentage of it, she would have been working in the famed Vegas reanimation clinics. They had suspendees yet to be reanimated who were, given their late ages of suspension, rumored to be close to two hundred years old. Those suspendees would be from the early days of the incorporation movement