Mindscan (8 page)

"Happy to see him go?" I said.

"Aren't you?"

"Oh, I don't know. He certainly was no friend of Canada, but, you know, his 'Soviet Canuckistan' nickname for us became a rallying cry for my generation. 'Live up to the name,' and all that. I think Canada became even more left-wing just to spite him."

"So maybe you're just in favor of multiple marriages because it'll be another distinction between our two countries," said Karen.

"Not at all," I said. "I told you why I'm in favor of it."

"Sorry." She glanced at the screen. The piece about Buchanan's death was over, but apparently she was still dwelling on it. "I'm happy he's dead, because I see it as maybe the end of an era. It was the judges he packed the Supreme Court with, after all, who overturned
Roe v. Wade
, and I can't forgive him for that. But he was twenty years older than me — his values came from a different generation. And now he's gone, and I'm thinking maybe there's some hope for change. But…"

"Yes?"

"But
I'm
not going away, am I? Your friends who want to have their relationship recognized as a group marriage will have to contend with people like me, set in their ways, sticking around forever, standing in the way of progress." She looked at me.

"And it
is
progress, isn't it? My parents never understood about gay marriage. Their parents never understood about desegregation."

I looked at her with new eyes — figuratively, and, of course, literally. "You're a philosopher at heart," I said.

"Maybe so. All good writers are, I imagine."

"But I guess you're right, to some degree, anyway. They call it the retire-or-expire factor in academia…"

" 'Retire or expire'?" said Karen. "Oooh, I like that! And I certainly saw something similar in Georgia, where I grew up, in relation to civil rights: great strides weren't made by changing people's minds — no one slaps himself on the forehead and exclaims, 'What a fool I've been all these years!' Rather, progress was made because the worst racists — the ones who remembered the good ole days of segregation or even slavery — died off."

"Exactly," I said.

"But, you know, people's beliefs
do
change over time. There's the long-established fact that people become more politically conservative as they get older — not that it happened to me, thank God. When I found out what Tom Selleck's politics were, I was appalled."

"Who's Tom Selleck?"

"Sigh," said Karen. Apparently she hadn't learned to make the sound yet. "He was a gorgeous hunk of an actor; played
Magnum P.I
. I had posters of him in my bedroom when I was a teenager."

"I thought you had posters of … who was it? That Superman guy?"

Karen grinned. "Him, too."

We'd both been ignoring the TV, but now the sports came on. "Oooh!" said Karen.

"The Yankees won. Terrific!"

"You like baseball?" I said, feeling my eyebrows lift this time — there was a definite jerk as they did so; I'd have to get Porter to file down whatever they were catching on.

"Absolutely!"

"Me, too," I said. "I wanted to be a pitcher when I was a kid. It wasn't in the cards, but…"

"You a Blue Jays fan?" asked Karen.

I grinned. "What else?"

"I remember when they won back-to-back World Series."

"Really? Wow."

"Yup. Daron and I had just gotten married back then. He and I used to watch the World Series together every year. Big bowls of popcorn, lots of soda, the works."

"What was it like — those two times Toronto won? How did people react?"

The sun was rising; light spilled into the room.

Karen smiled. "Let me tell you…"

We transferred from the spaceplane to the moonship, a metallic arachnid designed only for use in vacuum. I had my own small sleeping compartment — like one of those coffin hotels in Tokyo. When I was out of it, I was enjoying being weightless, although Quentin was still nattering on about moonbuses and other things that interested him. If only he were a baseball fan…

"Now, remember, folks," said one of the Immortex staff on the third morning of our flight, "the moonbase we're about to land at is
not
High Eden. Rather, it's a multinational private-sector R D facility. It wasn't built for tourists, and it wasn't built for luxury — so don't be disappointed. I promise you, you'll be pleased when you get to High Eden."

I listened, thinking High Eden indeed better be good. Of course, I'd taken the virtual tour, and read all the literature. But I'd miss — hell, I already was missing — Clamhead, and Rebecca, and my mother, and…

And, yes, even my father. I'd thought him a burden, I thought I'd feel relief to hand off worrying about him to the other me, but I found myself very sad at the prospect of never seeing him again.

Tears float in zero-gravity. It's the most astonishing thing.

I went to see Dr. Porter about the problem with thoughts I intended to keep private being spoken aloud.

"Ah, yes," he said, nodding. "I've seen that before. I can make some adjustments, but it's a tricky mind-body interface problem."

"You've got to fix it. Unless I explicitly decide to do something, it shouldn't happen."

"Ah," said Porter, his eyebrows working with glee, "but that's not how humans work — not even biological ones. None of us consciously initiate our actions."

I shook my head. "I've studied philosophy, doc. I'm not prepared to give up on the notion of free will. I refuse to believe that we live in a deterministic universe."

"Oh, indeed," said Porter. "That's not what I meant. Say you walk into a room, see someone you know, and decide to extend your hand in greeting. Of course, your hand doesn't instantly shoot out; first, stuff has to happen in your brain, right? And that stuff — the electrical change in the brain that precedes voluntary action — is called the readiness potential. Well, in a biological brain the readiness potential begins 550 milliseconds — just over half a second — prior to your hand beginning to move. It really doesn't matter
what
the voluntary act is: the readiness potential occurs in the brain 550 milliseconds before the motor act begins. Okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"Ah, but it's not okay! See, if you ask people to indicate exactly when they decided to do something, they report that the idea occurred to them about 350 milliseconds before the motor act begins. A guy named Benjamin Libet proved that ages ago."

"But — but that must be a measurement error," I said. "I mean, you're talking about milliseconds."

"No, not really. The difference between 550 milliseconds and 350 milliseconds is a fifth of a second: that's quite a significant amount of time, and easy enough to measure accurately. This basic test has been replicated over again over again since the 1980s, and the data are rock solid."

"But that doesn't make sense. You're saying—"

"I'm saying that what our intuition tells us the sequence of events
should
be, and what the sequence actually is, don't agree. Intuitively, we think the sequence must be:
first
, you decide to shake hands with your old friend Bob;
second
, your brain, in response to that decision, begins sending signals to your arm that it wants to shake hands; and
third
, your arm starts to swing up for the handshake. Right? But what really happens is
this: first
, your brain starts sending signals to shake hands;
second
, you consciously decide to shake hands with your old friend; and
third
, your arm starts to swing up. The brain has started down the road to shaking hands
before
you have consciously made any decision. Your conscious brain takes ownership of the action, and fools itself into thinking it started the action, but really it's just a spectator, watching what your body is doing."

"So you
are
saying there's no free will."

"Not quite. Our conscious minds have the free will to
veto
the action. See? The action begins 550 milliseconds prior to the first physical movement. Two hundred milliseconds later, the action that's already been started comes to the attention of your conscious self — and your conscious self has 350 milliseconds to put on the brakes before anything happens. The conscious brain doesn't initiate so-called voluntary acts, although it can step in and stop them."

"Really?" I said.

Porter nodded his long face vigorously. "Absolutely. Everybody's experienced this, if you stop and think about it: you're lying in bed, quite mellow, and you look over at the clock, and you think to yourself, I really should get up, it's time to get up, I've got to go to work. You may think this a half-dozen times or more, and then, suddenly, you
are
getting up — the action has begun, without you being consciously aware that you've finally, really made the decision to get out of bed.

And that's because you
haven't
consciously made that decision; your unconscious has made it for you. It — not the conscious you — has concluded once and for all that it really is time to get out of bed."

"But I didn't have this problem when I was biological."

"No, that's right. And that was because of the slow speed of chemical reactions. But your new body and your new brain operate at electrical, not chemical, speeds, and the veto mechanism sometimes comes into play too late to do what it's supposed to do. But, as I said, I can make a few adjustments. Forgive me, but I'm going to have to pull back the skin on your head, and open up your skull…"

Finally, it was time to go back home. And when I got to the house in North York, I couldn't wait to see my lovable old Irish setter. "Clamhead!" I called out, as I came through the front door. "Here, girl! I'm home!"

Clamhead came bounding down the stairs, but stopped short when she saw me. I'd expected her to leap up and kiss my face, but that didn't happen. Indeed, she lowered her forelegs, lay her ears flat, reared up her hind legs, and barked menacingly at me.

"Clamhead, it's me!" I said. "It's just me."

The dog barked again, and then growled.

"Clammy, it's just me, honest!"

The growl became a snarl. The front door was still open and I thought about making a run for it. But no, damn it, no. This was my house.

"Come on, girl, it's just me. It's just Jake."

Clamhead leapt. I managed a half-step backward, but she slapped her paws against my chest, and barked loudly, over and over and over again.

"Clammy, Clammy!" I said. "Sit, girl! Sit!"

I'd never known Clamhead to bite anyone, but she bit me. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt; she closed her jaws on my naked forearm and yanked backward, tearing out a ragged piece of plastiskin, revealing fiber-optic nerves, bungee-cord muscles, and a blue metal armature within. She fell back on her haunches, and sniffed at the piece of plastic, then turned tail, and bounded away up the stairs, whimpering.

My heart wasn't beating fast — because I had no heart. My breathing wasn't ragged — because I did not breathe. My eyes weren't stinging — because I could not cry. I just stood there, letting time pass, shaking my head slowly left and right, feeling rejected and alone.

The spider-shaped moonship landed next to a small cluster of mirrored domes, near the crater Aristarchus. After three days of zero-g, having any weight at all felt oppressive. But, really, it was a gentle tug, only one-sixth of what was normal on Earth.

The Immortex staffer had been wise to warn us: the moonbase here was utilitarian at best — it felt like the inside of a submarine. Sadly, we had to spend three days here, going through decontamination procedures. With hundreds of potential points of departure from Earth, and only one possible lunar arrival point, it made sense that the elaborate decontamination facilities were up here, not down there.

This had been the first permanent base established on the moon. It had originally been built by the Chinese, and a lot of the signage was still in that language, but it was now administered by a multinational consortium. Its official name was LS

One — Lunar Settlement One — but in honor of the arriving immigrants, someone had erected a big sign that said "LS Island," a pun it took me a few moments to get.

And I was indeed an immigrant: this world, this airless, dusty sphere, was going to be my home for the rest of my life — however long that might be. Of course, here on the moon, the vessels in my brain would be subject to less stress, so perhaps I'd last longer than I would have had I stayed down on Earth.

Perhaps. In any event, the doctors at High Eden would know precisely what to do if I had an …
incident
. The advance directive I'd sworn out was a contract, and contracts must be honored.

"All Immortex passengers," said a voice over an intercom, "please report to decontamination."

I headed down the corridor with a bounce that I didn't feel in my step.

I am a Mindscan, an uploaded consciousness, a transferred personality, and yet, despite having fewer external indicators of my internal mental state, I am still very much corporeal.

For centuries, humans have claimed to have out-of-body experiences. But what is the mind divorced from the body? What would a recording of my brain patterns be without a body to give them form?

I've always pooh-poohed the notion of out-of-body experiences, of the idea that you can look down upon your own body from above. After all,
what
are you looking with? Surely not your eyes — they're part of your body. Could an incorporeal entity sense anything? Photons need to be arrested to be detected; they have to hit something — the back of the eye to be seen as light, the skin to be felt as heat. A disembodied spirit could not see.

And, even if it did somehow detect things, no one ever claimed to have anything but normal vision when out of their body. They see the world around them as they always have before, just from a different angle. They don't see infrared; they don't see ultraviolet — vision without eyes seems exactly the same as vision with eyes. And yet if eyes are not really necessary for sight, why does plucking them out — or even just covering them — always, without fail, result in a loss of vision? And if it's just a coincidence that out-of-body perceptions happen to resemble what eyes see, why do color-blind people, like I was, never report a world of hues previously unknown to them when they have out-of-body experiences?

No, vision can't exist without a body. "The mind's eye" is metaphor, nothing more.

You can't have a disembodied intellect — at least, not a human one. Our brains are parts of our bodies, not something separate.

And that monad that was me — that inseparable combination of brain and body — was mostly glad to be home, although, I/we/it had to admit that it was all very strange. Everything looked different now that I had color vision. I wasn't quite sure about such matters yet, but it was arguable that things I'd thought had gone nicely together were actually clashing.

More than that, things didn't feel the same. My favorite chair was no longer as comfortable; the carpet had almost no texture beneath my bare feet; the banister's rich woodgrain, ever so slightly raised on some swirls, just as delicately indented on others, had become a uniform smoothness; the comforter I kept slung over the back of the couch no longer had its agreeable scritchiness.

And Clamhead still hadn't recognized me, although, after a lot of wary sniffing, she had consented to eat the food I put out for her. But when she wasn't eating, she spent hours staring out the living-room window, waiting for her master to come home.

Tomorrow — Monday — I would go see my mother. As usual, it was a duty I was not looking forward to. But tonight, a beautiful autumn Sunday night, should be fun: tonight was a little party at Rebecca Chong's penthouse. That would be great; I could use some cheering up.

I took the subway to Rebecca's. Although it wasn't a weekday, there were still lots of people on the train, and many of them stared openly at me. Canadians are supposed to be known for their politeness, but that trait seemed entirely absent just then.

Even though there were plenty of seats, I decided to stand for the trip with my back to everyone, making a show of consulting a map of the subway system. It had grown slowly but surely since I was a kid, with, most recently, a new line out to the airport, and an extension of another all the way up to York University.

Once the train got to Eglinton, I exited and found the corridor that led to the entrance to Rebecca's building. There, I presented myself to the concierge, who, to his credit, didn't bat an eye as he called up to Rebecca's apartment to confirm that I should be admitted.

I took the elevator up to the top floor, and walked along the short hallway to Rebecca's door. I stood there for a few moments, steeling my courage … literally, I suppose … and then knocked on the apartment door. A few moments later, the door opened, and I was face to face with the lovely Rebecca Chong. "Hey, Becks," I said. I was about to lean in for our usual kiss on the lips when she actually stepped back a half pace.

"Oh, my God," said Rebecca. "You — my God, you really did it. You said you were going to, but…" Rebecca stood there, mouth agape. For once, I was happy that there was no outward sign of my inner feelings. Finally, I said, "May I come in?"

"Um, sure," said Rebecca. I stepped into her penthouse apartment; fabulous views both real and virtual filled her walls.

"Hello, everyone," I said, moving out of the marbled entry way and onto the berber carpet.

Sabrina Bondarchuk, tall, thin, with hair that I now saw as the yellow I supposed it always had been, was standing by the fireplace, a glass of white wine in her hand.

She gasped in surprise.

I smiled — fully aware that it wasn't quite the dimpled smile they were used to. "Hi, Sabrina," I said.

Sabrina always hugged me when she saw me; she made no move to do so this time, though, and without some signal from her, I wasn't going to initiate it.

"It's … it's amazing," said bald-headed Rudy Ackerman, another old friend — we'd hiked around Eastern Canada and New England the summer after our first year at Uof T. The "it" Rudy was referring to was my new body.

I tried to make my tone light. "The current state of the art," I said. "It'll get more lifelike as time goes on, I'm sure."

"It's pretty funky as is, I must say," said Rudy. "So … so do you have super strength?"

Rebecca was still looking mortified, but Sabrina imitated a TV announcer. "He's an upload. She's a vegetarian rabbi. They fight crime."

I laughed. "No, I've got normal strength. Super strength is an extra-cost option. But you know me: I'm a lover not a fighter."

"It's so … weird," said Rebecca, at last.

I looked at her, and smiled as warmly — as
humanly
— as I could. " 'Weird' is just an anagram of 'wired,' " I said, but she didn't laugh at the joke.

"What's it like?" asked Sabrina.

Had I still been biological, I would, of course, have taken a deep breath as part of collecting my thoughts. "It's
different
," I said. "I'm getting used to it, though. Some of it is very nice. I don't get headaches anymore — at least, I haven't so far. And that damn pain in my left ankle is gone. But…"

"What?" asked Rudy.

"Well, I feel a little low-res, I guess. There isn't as much sensory input as there used to be. My vision is fine — and I'm no longer color-blind, although I do have a slight awareness of the pixels making up the images. But there's no sense of smell to speak of."

"With Rudy around, that's not such a bad thing," said Sabrina.

Rudy stuck his tongue out at her.

I kept trying to catch Rebecca's eye, but every time I looked at her, she looked away. I lived for her little touches, her hand on my forearm, a leg pressing against mine as we sat on the couch. But the whole evening, she didn't touch me once. She hardly even looked at me.

"Becks," I said at last, when Rudy had gone to the wash-room, and Sabrina was off freshening her drink. "It is still me, you know."

"What?" she said, as if she had no idea what I was talking about.

"It's me."

"Yeah," she said. "Sure."

In day-to-day life, we hardly ever speak names, either our own or those of others.

"It's me," we say when identifying ourselves on the phone. And, "Look at you!" when greeting someone. So maybe I was being paranoid. But by the end of the evening, I couldn't recall anyone, least of all my darling, darling Rebecca, having called me Jake.

I went home in a pissy mood. Clamhead growled at me as I came through the front door, and I growled back.

"Hello, Hannah," I said to the housekeeper as I came through my mother's front door the next afternoon.

Hannah's small eyes went wide, but she quickly recovered. "Hello, Mr. Sullivan," she said.

Suddenly, I found myself saying what I'd never said before. "Call me Jake."

Hannah looked startled, but she complied. "Hello, Jake." I practically kissed her.

"How is she?"

"Not so well, I'm afraid. She's in one of her moods."

My mother and her moods. I nodded, and headed upstairs — taking them effortlessly, of course. That much was a pleasant change.

I paused to look into the room that had been mine, in part to see what it looked like with my new vision, and in part to stall, so I could work up my nerve. The walls that I'd always seen as gray were in fact a pale green. So much was being revealed to me now, about so many things. I continued down the corridor.

"Hello, Mom," I said. "How are you doing?"

She was in her room, brushing her hair. "What do you care?"

How I missed being able to sigh. "I care. Mom, you know I care."

"You think I don't know a robot when I see it?"

"I'm not a robot."

"You're not my Jake. What's happened to Jake?"

"I
am
Jake," I said.

"The original. What's happened to the original?"

Funny. I hadn't thought about the other me for days. "He must be on the moon, by now," I said. "It's only a three-day journey there, and he left last Tuesday. He should be getting out of lunar decontamination today."

"The moon," said my mother, shaking her head. "The moon, indeed."

"We should be heading out," I said.

"What kind of son leaves a disabled father behind to go to the moon?"

"I didn't leave him. I'm here."

She was looking at me indirectly: she was facing the mirror above the bureau, and conversing with my reflection in it "This is just like what you — the real you — do with Clamhead when you're out of town. You have the damned robo-kitchen feed her.

And now, here you come, a walking, talking robokitchen, here in place of the real you, doing the duties the real you should be doing."

"Mom, please…"

She shook her head at the reflection of me. "You don't have to come here again."

"For Christ's sake, Mom, aren't you happy for me? I'm no longer at risk — don't you see? What happened to Dad isn't going to happen to me."

"Nothing has changed," said my mother. "Nothing has changed for the real you. My boy still has that thing in his head, that AVM; my son is still at risk."

"I—"

"Go away," she said.

"What about visiting Dad?"

"Hannah will take me."

"But—"

"Go away," my mother said. "And don't come back."