Mindscan (5 page)

Killian's voice was gentle. "But, Mr. Sullivan,
one
of you was bound to still be in this body…"

"I know, I know, I know." I shook my head, and took a few paces forward. There was no window in the scanning room, which was probably just as well; I don't think I was quite ready to face the world. "And the one of us that is still in this bloody body, with this fucked brain, is still doomed."

I was suddenly somewhere else.

It was an instantaneous transfer, like changing channels on TV. I
instantly
was somewhere else — in a different room.

At first I was overwhelmed by strange physical sensations. My limbs felt numb, as though I'd slept on them funny. But I hadn't been sleeping…

And then I was conscious of the things that I wasn't feeling: there was no pain in my left ankle. For the first time in two years, since I'd torn some ligaments falling down a staircase, I felt no pain at all.

But I
remembered
the pain, and—

I did remember!

I was still myself.

I remembered my childhood in Port Credit.

I remembered being beaten up every day on the way to school by Colin Hagey.

I remembered the first time I'd read Karen Bessarian's
DinoWorld
.

I remembered delivering
The Toronto Star
— back when papers were physically delivered.

I remembered the great blackout of 2015, and the darkest sky I'd ever seen.

And I remembered my dad collapsing in front of my eyes.

I remembered it all.

"Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sullivan, it's me, Dr. Porter. You may have some trouble speaking at first. Do you want to try?"

"Ell-o." The word sounded strange, so I repeated it several times: "Ell-o. Ell-o. Ell-o." My voice didn't seem quite right. But, then again, I was hearing it much as Porter was, through my own external microphones — ears, ears, ears! — rather than resonating through the nasal cavities and bones of a biological head.

"Very good!" said Porter; he was a disembodied voice — somewhere out of my field of view, but I wasn't yet properly registering his location. "No respiratory asperity," he continued, "but you'll learn how to do that. Now, you may have a lot of unusual sensations, but you shouldn't be in any pain. Are you?"

"No." I was lying on my back, presumably on the gurney I'd seen earlier, staring up at the plain white ceiling. There
was
a general paucity of sensation, a sort of numbness — although there was some gentle pressure on my body from, 1 supposed, the terry-cloth robe that I was presumably now wearing.

"Good. If at any point pain begins, let me know. It can take a little while for your mind to learn how to interpret the signals it's receiving; we can fix any discomfort that mighl arise, all right?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now, before we start trying to move, let's make sure you can fully communicate. Can you count backwards from ten for me, please?"

'Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Tree. Two. One. Zero."

"Very good. Let's try that 'three' once more."

'Tree.
Tree. Tuh-ree
."

"Keep trying."

"Tree. Dree."

"It's an aspiration issue again, but you'll get it."

"Dree. Tree. Thuh-ree.
Three!
"

I heard Porter's hands clapping together. "Perfect!"

"Three! Three! Three!"

"By George, I think he's got it!"

"Three! Thought, thing, teeth, theater, bath, math. Three!"

"Excellent. Are you still feeling okay?"

"Still — oh."

"What?" asked Porter.

"My vision went off for a moment, but it's back."

"Really? That shouldn't—"

"Oh, and there it goes—"

"Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sullivan?"

"I — it feels … oh…"

"Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sulli — !"

Nothingness, for how long, I had no idea. Just total nothingness. When I came to, I spoke.

"Doc! Doc! Are you there?"

"Jake!" Porter's voice. He let air out noisily in a "that's a relief!" sort of way.

"Is something wrong, Doc? What was that?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Urn, ah, how do you feel now?"

"It's strange," I said. "I feel
different
— in a 'undred ways I can't describe."

Porter was quiet for a moment; perhaps he was distracted by something. But then he said, "Hundred."

"What?"

"You said 'undred, not hundred. Try to get the H sound."

" 'Undred. 'Undred. Huhn-dred. Hundred."

"Good," said Porter. "It's normal for there to be some differences in sensations, but as long as you're basically feeling okay…?"

"Yes," I said again. "I feel just fine."

And I knew, in that instant, that I
was fine
. I was relaxed. For the first time in ages, I felt calm, safe. I wasn't going to suddenly have a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

Rather, I was going to live a full normal life. I'd get my biblical three-score-and-ten; I'd get the Statistics Canada eighty-eight years for males born in 2001; I'd get all of that and more. I was going to
live
. Everything else was secondary. I was going to live a good, long time, without paralysis, without being a vegetable. Whatever settling-in difficulties I encountered would be worth it. I knew that at once.

"Very good," said Porter. "Now, let's try something simple. See if you can turn your head toward me."

I did so — and nothing happened. "It's not working, doc."

"Don't worry. It'll come. Try again."

I did, and this time my head did loll left, and—

And — and — and—

Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

"That chair over there," I said. "What color is it?"

Porter turned, surprised. "Um, green."

"Green! So
that's
what green looks like! It's —
cool
, isn't it? Soothing. And your shirt, doc? What color is your shirt?"

"Yellow."

"Yellow! Wow!"

"Mr. Sullivan, are you — are you color-blind?"

"Not anymore!"

"Good God. Why didn't you tell us?"

Why hadn't I told them? "Because you hadn't asked" was one true answer, but I knew there were others. Mostly I was afraid if I had told them, they'd have insisted on duplicating that aspect of who I'd been.

"What kind of color blindness do —
did
— you have?"

"Doo-something."

"You're deutanopic?" said Porter. "You've got M-cone deficiency?"

"That's it, yes." Almost nobody has true color blindness; that is, almost no one sees only in black and white. We deuteranopes see the world in shades of blue, orange, and gray, so that many colors that contrast sharply for people with normal vision look the same to us. Specifically, we see red and greenish-yellow as beige; magenta and green as gray; both orange and yellow as what I'd been told was a brick color; both blue-green and purple as mauve; and both indigo and cyan as cornflower blue.

Only medium blue and medium orange look the same to us as they do to people with normal vision.

"But you're seeing color now?" asked Porter. "Astonishing."

"That it is," I said, delighted. "It's all so — so
garish
. I don't think I ever understood that word before. What an overwhelming variety of shades!" I rolled my head the other way, this time without thinking about it. I found myself facing a window. "The grass — my God, look at it! And the sky! How
different
they are from each other!"

"We'll show you something colorful on vid later today, and—"

"
Finding Nemo
," I said at once. "It was my favorite movie when I was a kid — and everybody said it was just
full
of color."

Porter laughed. "If you like."

"Great," I said. "Lucky fin!" I tried to move my right arm in imitation of Nemo's fishy high-five, but it didn't actually rise. Ah, well — it would take time; they'd warned me about that.

Still, it felt
wonderful
to be alive, to be free.

"Try again, Jake," said Porter. He astonished me by lifting his own arm in the "lucky fin!" gesture.

I made another attempt, and this time I was successful. "There, you see," said Porter, his eyebrows working as always. "You'll be fine. Now, let's get you out of this bed."

He took hold of my right arm — I could feel it as a matrix of a thousand points of pressure, instead of one smooth contact — and he helped me sit up. I used to suffer from occasional lightheadedness, and sometimes got dizzy when rising from the horizontal, but there was none of that.

I was in a bizarre sensory state. In most ways, I was
under
stimulated: I wasn't conscious of any smells, and although I could tell I was now sitting up, which meant I had some notion of balance, there wasn't any great downward pressure on the back of my thighs or my rear end. But my visual sense was overstimulated, assaulted by colors I'd never seen before. And if I looked at something featureless — like the wall — I could just make out the mesh of pixels that composed my vision.

"How are you doing?" asked Porter.

"Fine," I said. "Wonderful!"

"Good. Perhaps now is a good time to tell you about the secret missions we're going to send you out on."

"What?!"

"You know, bionic limbs. Spying. Secret-agent cyborg stuff."

"Dr. Porter, I—"

Porter's eyebrows were dancing with glee. "Sorry. I expect I'll eventually get tired of doing that, but so far it's been fun every time. The only mission we have is to get you out of here, and back to your normal life. And that means getting you on your feet. Shall we give it a try?"

I nodded, and felt his arm under my elbow. Again the sensation wasn't quite like normal pressure against skin, but I was certainly conscious of exactly where he was touching me. He helped me rotate my body until my legs dangled over the side of the gurney, and then he helped hoist me to a vertical position. He waited until I nodded that I was okay, and then he gingerly let go of me, allowing me to stand on my own.

"How does it feel?" Porter asked.

"Fine," I said.

"Any dizziness? Any vertigo?"

"No. Nothing like that. But it's weird not breathing."

Porter nodded. "You'll get used to it — although you may have some momentary panic attacks: times when your brain shouts out, 'Hey, we're not breathing!'" He smiled his kindly smile. "I'd tell you to take a deep calming breath in those circumstances, but of course you can't. So just fight down the sensation, or wait for it to pass. Do you feel panicky now because you're not breathing?"

I thought about that. "No. No, it's all right. Strange, though."

"Take your time. We're in no rush here."

"I know."

"Do you want to try taking a step?"

"Sure," I said. But it was a few moments before I put word to deed. Porter was clearly poised to act, ready to catch me if I stumbled. I lifted my right leg, flexing my knee, swinging my thigh up, and letting my weight shift forward. It was a lurching first step, but it worked. I then tried lifting my left leg, but it swung wide, and—

God damn it!

I found myself pitching forward, completely off balance, the tiles, whose color was new to me and I couldn't yet name, rushing toward my face.

Porter caught my arm and pulled me upright. "I can see we have our work cut out for us," he said.

"This way please, Mr. Sullivan," said Dr. Killian.

I thought about making a run for it. I mean, what could they do? I'd wanted to live forever, without a fate worse than death hanging over my head, but that was not to be. Not for
this
me, anyway. Me and my shadow: we were diverging rapidly. It —
he
, he — was doubtless somewhere else in this facility. But the rules were that I could never meet him. That was not so much for my benefit as his; he was supposed to regard himself as the one and only Jacob Sullivan, and seeing me still around — flesh where he was plastic; bone where he was steel — would make that feat of self-delusion more difficult.

Those were the rules.

Rules? Just terms in a contract I'd signed.

So, if I
did
make a break for it—

If I did run outside, into that sweltering August heat, and took my car, and raced back to my house, what sanction could be brought against me?

Of course, the other me would show up there eventually, too, and want to call the place his own.

Maybe we could live together. Like twins. Peas in a pod.

But, no, that wouldn't work. I rather suspect you had to be born to that. Living with another me — I mean, Christ, I am so particular about where things are and, besides, he'd be up all night, doing God knows what, while I'd be trying to sleep.

No. No, there was no turning back.

"Mr. Sullivan?" Killian said again in her lilting Jamaican voice. 'This way, please." I nodded, and let her lead me down a corridor I hadn't seen before. We walked a short distance and then we came to a pair of frosted-glass sliding doors. Killian touched her thumb to a scanner plate, and the doors moved aside. "Here you are," she said. "When we've finished scanning everyone, the driver will take you to the airport."

I nodded.

"You know, I envy you," she said. "Getting away from — from
everything
. You won't be disappointed, Mr. Sullivan. High Eden is wonderful."

"You been there?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," she said. "You don't just open a resort like that cold. We had two weeks of dry-runs, with senior Immortex staff playing the parts of residents, to make sure the service was perfect."

"And?"

"It is perfect. You'll love it."

"Yeah," I said, looking away. There was no sign of an escape route. "I'm sure I will."

I was sitting in a wheelchair in Dr. Porter's office, waiting for him to return. I wasn't the first Mindscan to have trouble walking, he said. Perhaps not. But I probably hated being in a wheelchair more than most — after all, that was how they moved my father around. I'd been trying to avoid that fate, and instead had ended up echoing it.

But I wasn't brooding too much about it. Indeed, the combined excitement of getting a new body and seeing new colors was overwhelming, so much so that I was only dimly aware of the fact that the original me must now have started on his journey to the moon. I wished him well. But I wasn't supposed to think about him, and I tried not to.

In some ways, of course, it would have been easier just to shut that other me off.

Funny way of phrasing it: the other one was the biological version, not this one. But "shutting it off" —
it
, now! — had been the way the thought had come to me. After all, this whole rigmarole with a retirement community on Lunar Farside would be unnecessary if the original could be discarded now that it was no longer needed.

But the law would never stand for that — not even here in Canada, let alone south of the border. Ah, well, I'd never see the other me again, so what did it matter?
I
— this me, the new-improved, in-living-color Jacob Paul Sullivan — was the one and only real me from now on, until the end of time.

Finally, Porter returned. "Here's someone who might be able to help you," he said.

"We've got technicians, of course, who could work with you on your walking, Jake, but it occurred to me that she might be better able to give you a hand. I think you already know each other."

From my position in the wheelchair I looked at the woman who had just entered the room, but I couldn't place the face. She was plain, perhaps thirty, with dark hair sensibly short, and—

And she was
artificial
. I hadn't realized it until she moved her head just so, and the light caught her in a certain way.

"Hello, Jake," she said, with a lovely Georgia drawl. Her voice was stronger than before, with no quavering. She was wearing a beautiful sun dress with a floral print; I was still sulking in my terry-cloth robe.

"Karen?" I said. "My goodness, look at you!"

She spun around — apparently she was having no difficulty controlling her new body. "You like?" she said.

I smiled. "You look fabulous."

She laughed; it sounded a bit forced, but that was surely because it was generated by a voice chip, rather than that the mirth was insincere. "Oh, I've
never
looked fabulous. This" — she spread her arms — "is what I looked like in 1990. I'd thought about going younger, but that would have been silly."

"Nineteen-ninety," I repeated. "So you would have been—"

"Thirty," Karen said, without hesitation. But I was surprised at myself; I knew better than to ask a woman her age; I'd intended to keep my little bit of mental math private.

She went on: "It seemed a sensible compromise between youth and maturity. I doubt I could fake how vacuous I was at twenty."

"You look great," I said again.

"Thanks," she said. "So do you."

I doubted my synthetic flesh was capable of blushing, but that's what I felt like doing. "Just a few touch-ups here and there."

Dr. Porter said, "I asked Ms. Bessarian if she would work with you for a bit. See, she's been through this in a way even our technicians haven't."

"Through what?" I asked.

"Learning to walk again as an adult," said Karen.

I looked at her, not getting it.

"After my stroke," Karen supplied, smiling.

"Ah, right," I said. Her smile was no longer lopsided; the stroke damage would have been faithfully copied in the nanogel of her new brain, I supposed, but maybe they had some electronic trick that simply made the left half of her mouth execute a mirror image of whatever the right half was doing.

"I'll leave you to it, then," said Porter. He made a show of rubbing his belly. "Maybe I'll grab a late lunch — you folks are lucky enough not to need to eat anymore, but I'm getting hungry."

"And besides," said Karen, and I swear there was a twinkle in one of her synthetic green eyes, "letting one Mindscan help another is probably good for both of them, right? Lets them both know that there are others like them, and gets them away from the alienating feeling of being poked and prodded by scientists."

Porter made an impressed face. "I could have sworn you didn't opt for the x-ray vision option," he said, "but you see right through me, Ms. Bessarian. You're a psychologist at heart."

"I'm a novelist," Karen said. "Same thing."

Porter smiled. "Now, if you'll excuse me…"

He left the room, and Karen appraised me, hands on hips. "So," she said, "you're having trouble walking."

She was reasonably small, but I still had to look up at her from the wheelchair.

"Yeah," I said, the syllable mixing embarrassment and frustration.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "You'll be fine. You can teach your mind to make your body obey it. Believe me, I know — not only did I have to deal with a stroke, but when I was a girl down in Atlanta, I used to dance ballet — you learn a lot about how to control your body doing that. So, shall we get started?"

My whole life, I'd been terrible at asking for help; I somehow thought it was a sign of weakness. But here I wasn't asking for it; it was being freely offered. And, I had to admit, I did need it.

"Um, sure," I said.

Karen brought her hands together in front of her chest in a clap. I remembered how swollen her joints had been before, how translucent her skin. But now her hands were supple, youthful. "Wonderful!" she exclaimed. "We'll have you back to normal in no time." She held out her right hand, I took it, and she hoisted me to my feet.

Porter had given me a dark brown, wooden cane. It was leaning against the wall; I gestured to it. Karen handed it to me, and I managed to make my way out of the room into a long corridor. Fluorescent light panels covered its ceilings, and I also spotted tiny camera units hanging down at intervals. Doubtless Dr. Porter or one of his minions was watching.

"All right," said Karen, standing in front of me and facing toward me. "Remember, you can't hurt yourself by falling; you're way too durable for that now. So, let's give it a try without the cane."

I propped the cane against the corridor wall, but no sooner had I done so than it fell to the floor; not an auspicious start. "Leave it," said Karen. I lifted my left foot, and immediately teetered forward, slamming it back into the ground as I did so. I quickly lifted my right leg, swinging it around stiffly, as if it lacked a knee. "Pay attention to exactly how your body is responding," said Karen. "I know walking is something we normally do subconsciously, but try to recognize exactly what effect you get with each mental command."

I managed a couple more steps. If I'd still been biological, I'd have been breathing deeply and sweating, but I'm sure there was no external indication of my exertion.

Still, it was enormously hard work, and I felt as though I was going to tumble over. I stopped, standing motionless, trying to regain my balance.

"I know it's hard," said Karen. "But it
does
get easier. It's all a question of learning a new vocabulary:
this
thought produces
that
action, and — ah! Look, see: your upper leg moved just fine that time. Try to reproduce that mental command exactly."

I tried again to move my left leg forward, putting my weight on it, then I tried moving my right leg. This time I got a little bending to occur at the knee, but it still swung widely as it came forward.

"There," said Karen. "That's right. Your body
wants
to do the right things; you just have to tell it how."

I would have grunted, but I didn't know how to make my new body do
that
yet, either. The corridor looked frightfully long, its sides converging at what might as well have been kilometers away.

"Now," said Karen, "try another step. Concentrate — see if you can keep that right leg more under control."

"I
am
trying," I said testily, lurching forward once more.

Her drawl was kind. "I know you are, Jake."

It was hard work mentally — like the frustration you feel when trying to recall a fact that's just out of reach, multiplied a thousand fold.

"You're doing great," she said. "Really, you are." Karen was walking backwards, a half-step at a time. I briefly wondered how many years it had been since she'd walked back-wards; an old woman, desperately afraid of breaking a hip or a leg, doubtless took small, shuffling steps most of the time, and forward — always forward.

I forced myself to take another step, then one more. Despite all of Immortex's best efforts to exactly copy the dimensions of my limbs, I was conscious that the center of gravity in my torso was higher up, perhaps due to my lack of hollow lungs. No big deal, but it did make me even more prone to falling forward.

And, at that moment, I realized I'd been thinking about something other than planting one foot in front of another — that my subconscious and conscious were now at least in some degree of agreement about the mechanics of walking.

"Bravo!" said Karen. "You're doing just fine." Beneath the fluorescent lights, she looked particularly artificial: her skin had a dry, plastic sheen; her eyes, not really moist, like-wise looked plastic — although, as I now could appreciate, they were a really lovely shade of green.

We continued on, lurching step after lurching step; I imagined if I looked back over my shoulder, I'd see the villagers chasing me with their torches.

"That's it!" said Karen. "That's perfect!"

Another step, and—

My right leg not moving quite the way I intended—

"God
—
"

My left ankle twisting to one side—

"—damn
—
"

My torso tipping farther and farther forward—

" — it!"

Karen surged forward, easily catching me in her outstretched arms, before I could fall flat on my face.

"There, there," she said, soothingly, her new body having no trouble supporting my weight. "There, there. It's okay."

I felt humiliated arid furious — at Immortex, and at myself. I pushed hard against Karen's arms, forcing myself back into a standing position. I didn't like asking for help — but I liked even less to fail when someone else was watching; indeed, it was doubly bad, since we were surely also being observed on closed-circuit video.

"That's enough for just now," she said, moving in next to me, and slipping an arm around my waist. She led me in a half-turn, and with her support, I hobbled back and got my cane.