[1][2] After a horrible car crash, which completely shattered the body of her husband Chris Perrini, his wife Carla Perrini is offered a strange solution to restore his former life as their insurance only covers the cheapest option: By enclosing his brain in a fluid-filled membrane, putting it inside her uterus and connecting it to her bloodflow, it can be kept alive while a new brainless body is cloned for him.
The short story was translated into French by Sylvie Denis and Francis Valéry (1994 and 2006), Finnish by Tapani Ronni (1997), German by Irene Holicki (1998), Hungarian by Orsolya Erdo (1998), Spanish by Carlos Pavón and Sonia Baldrés (1998), Czech by Petr Kotrle (1998), Romanian by Mihai-Dan Pavelescu and Florin Pîtea (1999), Italian by Riccardo Valla (2003), Japanese by Makoto Yamagishi (2003) as well as Korean by Kim Sang-hoon (2002).
[1][2] Russell Letson, writing in Locus magazine, states that "Egan does not shrink from looking into any abyss, whether the topic is the authenticity of subjectivity or the genuineness of the most intimate relationships."
He adds that "the agent of change is not some neurological black box but, ironically, the severe physical and emotional adaptations the narrator undergoes in order to save her husband's life.
"[3] Karen Burnham writes in Greg Egan (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), that the short story "asks how much trauma we may require loved ones to go through in order to preserve the life of a family member" and that "Egan’s fiction paints a rather cynical view of the healthcare industry as a whole and the insurance industry in particular."