Mindscan

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Time delay. “Really?”

  “Yes. They found a cure for what was wrong with me, and they fixed it. Dad’s fate is not going to be my fate.”

  Time delay. “That’s—that’s terrific. I’m delighted.”

  “I’m tickled pink myself—say, what does pink really look like? No, never mind. But, look, we both know that I’m the real person, don’t we?”

  An interminable couple of seconds. “Oh, come on,” said the other me. “You fully accepted the conditions of what we were doing. You understood that I—not you, I—was going to be the real us from now on.”

  “But you must have been watching the news, too. You must know that there’s a case involving Karen Bessarian going on right now in Michigan, where it’s being argued that the upload is not really a person.”

  Time lag. “No, I didn’t know that. And besides—”

  “How could you not know that? We never miss the news.”

  “—it doesn’t matter what they’re doing in Mich—”

  “How are the Blue Jays doing?”

  “—igan. This isn’t about what lawyers say, it’s about what we agreed to.”

  I waited for the two-plus seconds to pass. But the android me just stood there, looking off camera. Presumably he would be in Toronto, and so there was a good chance the person off-camera was Dr. Andrew Porter. But Porter had said he didn’t follow baseball.

  “I asked you how the Blue Jays are doing,” I said again, and waited.

  “Umm, they’re doing fine. They just beat the Devil Rays.”

  “No, they didn’t. They’re doing terribly. Haven’t won a game in two weeks.”

  “Um, well, I haven’t been following …”

  “Which past president just died?” I asked.

  “Um, you mean an American president?”

  “You don’t know, do you? Hillary Clinton just passed on.”

  “Oh, that—”

  “It wasn’t Clinton, you lying bastard. It was Buchanan.” Of course Smythe had stopped him from answering when I’d asked him what a field of grass looked like. This android had never seen one. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’re not the me that’s out in the world. You’re a—a backup.”

  “I—”

  “Shut up. Shut the hell up. Smythe!”

  The camera changed to show Smythe. “I’m here, Jake.”

  “Smythe, don’t fuck with me like that again. Don’t you dare.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. It was a dumb thing to do.”

  “It was damn near a fatal thing to do. Get the copy of me that’s out and about on Earth. I want to see him, face to face. And have him bring a hardcopy of …” What the hell newspaper still had hardcopies? “Of the New York Times, showing the date he left Earth—that would at least prove someone had come up from there. But he’s still going to have to prove to me that he’s the one with the legal rights of personhood.”

  “We can’t do that,” said Smythe.

  My head was pounding. I rubbed my temples. “Don’t tell me what you can and cannot do,” I said. “He’ll have to come here eventually, anyway. You heard what I want, and I’m going to get it. Have him come here—bring him to the moon.”

  Smythe spread his arms. “Even if I agreed to ask him, and he agreed to come, it would take three days to get him to the moon, and most of another day to bring him via moonbus from LS One.”

  Out of the comer of my eye, I saw Hades starting to get up from his seat. I aimed the piton gun at him. “Don’t even think about it,” I said. Then I turned back to the image of Smythe: “Send him on a cargo rocket,” I said. “Highpowered acceleration for the first hour. He doesn’t need life support, right? And he can pull lots of gees, I’m sure.”

  “That will cost …”

  “A whole heck of a lot less than if I blow up this moonbus and take out half of High Eden.”

  “I need to get authorization.”

  “Don’t do it!” I swung around. Hades was shouting. “Gabe, do you hear me? I’m ordering you not to do that!”

  Gabe sounded flustered, but he said, “I’ll see what I can manage.”

  “Damn it, Gabe!” shouted Hades. “I’m the senior Immortex official on the moon, and I’m telling you not to do this.”

  “Shut up,” I said to Hades.

  “No,” said Gabe. “No, it’s all right, Jake. I’m sorry, Brian—really, I am. But I can’t take orders from you just now. We’ve got advisors from Earth on the line, as you can imagine, and I’m tied into various resources. And they all say the same thing on this point. A hosta—a detainee’s orders are not to be followed, no matter how senior they are, since the orders are obviously given under duress. You’re going to have to trust my judgment.”

  “Damn it, Smythe,” said Hades. “You’re fired!”

  “Once I’ve gotten you out of this mess, sir, if you still want to do that, you’ll be able to. But right now, you simply aren’t in a position to fire anyone. Mr. Sullivan—Jake—I’ll do what I can. But I’ll need time.”

  “I’ve never been a patient man,” I said. “Maybe that’s related to living under a death sentence, and I haven’t quite gotten used to my change of circumstances. In any event, I don’t expect to wait. A cargo rocket can fly here in twelve hours; I give you another twelve to take care of logistics, and getting the other me to a rocket-launch site. But that’s all. If I’m not talking face-to-face to the android that’s usurped me in twenty-four hours, people will begin to die.”

  Smythe blew out air. “Jake, you know I’m a psychologist, and, well, I’ve been reviewing your file. This isn’t you. This isn’t like you at all.”

  “This is the new me,” I said. “Isn’t that the whole point? There’s a new Jake Sullivan.”

  “Jake, I see a note here that you recently had brain surgery—nanosurgery, to be sure, but …”

  “Yes. So?”

  “And you were having trouble balancing neurotransmitter levels after that. Are you still taking the Toraplaxin? Because if you’re not, we can—”

  “Right. Like I’d take any pills you’d offer.”

  “Jake, you’ve got a chemical imbal—”

  I slammed my fist against the OFF switch.

  Judge Herrington called it a day, and Karen and I went home. I was still seething from the way Lopez had attacked Karen on the stand. That Karen wasn’t too upset herself helped, but not enough. Although my plastiskin couldn’t turn different shades, I felt livid—and the feeling wasn’t dissipating on its own.

  It used to be that if I was angry, I’d walk it off. I’d go outside, and stroll around the block a couple of times. But now I could walk for miles—a unit I only used figuratively, but that Karen actually had a feeling for—without it in the slightest changing my mood.

  Likewise, when I was depressed, I used to rip open a bag of potato chips and a thing of dip, and stuff my face. Or, if I was really feeling like I couldn’t face the day anymore, I’d crawl back into bed and have a nap. And, of course, nothing was better for relaxing than a nice cold Sullivan’s Select.

  But now I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t sleep. There were no easy ways to modify my moods.

  And I did still have moods. In fact, I remember reading once that “mood” was one of the definitions of human consciousness: a feeling, a tone, a flavor—pick your metaphor—associated with one’s current self-awareness.

  But now I was wicked pissed—“wicked pissed,” that’s what one of my friends liked to say whenever he was angry; he liked the sound of it. And it certainly had enough harshness associated with it to do justice to my feelings.

  So, what was I supposed to do? Maybe I should learn meditation—after all, there are supposed to be time-honored techniques for achieving inner peace without recourse to chemical stimulants.

  Except, of course, everything that affects our feelings, at least in our biological instantiation, is a chemical stimulant: dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, testosterone. But if you become an electrical
machine instead of a chemical one, how do you mimic the effects of those substances? We were the first generation of transferred consciousnesses; there were still bugs to be worked out.

  It was raining outside, a cold relentless rain. But that wasn’t going to have an effect on me; I’d only be aware of the coolness as an abstract datum, and the rain would just roll off. I went out the front door and started down the walkway that led to the street. The sound of fat drops hitting my head beat out an irritating tattoo.

  Of course, no one else was walking in our neighborhood, although a few cars did pass by. There were earthworms out on the sidewalk. I remembered their distinctive smell from my childhood—funny how little walking in the rain we do as we get older—but my new olfactory sensors weren’t responsive to that particular molecular key.

  I continued along, trying to get some perspective on what had happened, trying to rein in my anger. There had to be some way to get rid of it. Think happy thoughts: isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? I thought about an old Frantics comedy routine I usually enjoyed, and about naked women, and about the perfect crack of the bat when you hit the ball just right, and—

  And the anger was gone.

  Gone.

  Like I’d thrown a switch. Somehow, I’d dismissed the bad feelings. Astonishing. I wondered what thought, what mental configuration, had produced this effect, and whether I could possibly ever reproduce it again.

  As I continued to walk along, my stride was the same as before—perfect, measured. But I felt as though there was a spring in my step—metaphorically, beyond the shock-absorbing coils in my legs.

  Still, if there was some combination that could turn off anger at will, was there another that could turn on happiness, turn off sadness, turn on giddiness, turn off …

  The thought hit like a fist.

  Turn off love.

  Not that I wanted to turn off my feelings for Karen—not at all! But somewhere, in the patterns that had been copied from the old me, there were still feelings for Rebecca, and they still hurt because she didn’t reciprocate them.

  If only I could find the switch to shut off those emotions, to put an end to that pain.

  If only.

  The rain continued to fall.

  CHAPTER 34

  I stood at the back of the central aisle of the moonbus, and looked at my three hostages—damn, I hated that word!

  “Honestly,” I said, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “But you will if you have to,” said Brian Hades. “That’s what you told Smythe.”

  “Smythe won’t let it go that far,” I said. “I know he won’t.”

  But Hades shook his head, his white hair glinting in the recessed roof lighting. “He has to let it go that far. Immortex has hundreds of billions invested in this uploading technology—and it’s all predicated on the assumption that the durable copy becomes the real you. We can’t let that … that conceit … be successfully challenged. Not by you here, and not by anyone down there on Earth. Fortunes are at stake. Lives—uploaded lives—are at stake.”

  Hades got up out of his chair, but he seemed just to be stretching his long legs. He glanced at Akiko and Chloë, then turned back to me. “Look, there’s no law up here—no police, no governments. So you haven’t committed a crime. And I heard what Smythe said—there are extenuating circumstances. Your surgery—”

  “Bet you wish you’d had me killed on the operating table!”

  Hades spread his arms. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You’re not responsible. Just give me the piton gun, and walk away from this. Immortex won’t do anything to you; there’ll be no repercussions. You can end this right now.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I’d like to, but I don’t know any other way to get what I want—what I deserve.”

  “God, you are so selfish,” said Akiko. “I can’t believe they picked you.”

  I felt my eyes narrowing. “Picked me? Picked me for what?”

  But Akiko ignored that. “What about us? Look at what you’re doing to us!”

  “They’re not going to force a situation in which people might get hurt,” I said.

  “No?” said Akiko. “How long do you think they’ll let you hold all of High Eden hostage? How long before the other residents start to panic? They have to put an end to this.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “I promise.”

  Now Chloë was speaking: “You promise? What the hell is that worth?”

  I moved a bit closer to the two women; I so wanted to calm them, to reassure them.

  Suddenly, Hades leapt. It’s a myth that people move in slow motion on the moon: objects fall in slow motion, but if you kick off the floor with all your strength, you’ll go flying like a bat out of Philadelphia. Hades was five meters away, but his leap easily carried him that distance, and when he collided with me, I went flying backwards, ramming against the moonbus’s rear bulkhead.

  Suddenly, the two women were in motion, as well. Akiko was out of her chair and also leaping toward us. Chloë grabbed a metal equipment case and came bounding at us, looking as though she intended to brain me with it.

  I still had the gun held tightly in my right hand. But Hades had pinned that arm against the bulkhead, keeping me from getting a shot at him or either of the women.

  Desperate times call for desperate deeds …

  I swiveled my wrist as much as I could and fired a piton. Here, in the cabin, the report of the gun was deafening. Almost instantly, the piton hit its target. I’d wanted to just drill a hole through the outer hull, but I hadn’t been able to aim well. The piton hit a window, going through the vinyl shade in front of it as if it were tissue paper, and breaking the glass beyond. Air started hissing out of the cabin, and a whoop-whoop-whoop alarm began to sound. The shade, with a small hole in it was puckering outward. From the sounds of it, the tempered glass behind it had shattered completely, and the only thing that was keeping the atmosphere from rushing out in a torrent was the little hole in the shade that it had to go through.

  We were all looking at the vinyl shade now, watching it bow outward more and more. Any moment now, it would be torn loose by the rush of escaping atmosphere, exposing the whole empty window pane; when that happened, the cabin would lose all its air in a matter of seconds.

  Hades looked totally furious, and his pony tail was whipping out horizontally behind his head in the breeze. He still wanted to keep me pinned, but he knew if he didn’t do something soon, we’d all die. With a frustrated shout of “Damn it!” he let go of me and called to the women, “Hurry! Find stuff to cover the window with!”

  The vinyl shade was visibly tearing at its edges, and air was pouring out even more rapidly. Chloë, momentarily hesitating between beating me to death with the metal box she was holding and saving herself, dropped the box, which obligingly fell in slo-mo before clanking against the floor and bouncing up half a meter, then falling again. She moved over to the nearest chair, and tried pulling up the seat cushion—but, of course, moonbuses never flew over water; their cushions weren’t removable flotation devices.

  Akiko, meanwhile, had gone for the first-aid kit, hanging on the wall next to the entrance to the cockpit. She scrambled to get it open, and found a package of gauze. It was doubtless less solid than she’d have liked, but she rammed some of it into the hole in the vinyl shield.

  But, although the roar of escaping air diminished somewhat, that didn’t do anything for the fact that the vinyl was still tearing loose at its edges. I thought about getting everybody to cram into the cockpit; the door to it looked air-tight. Indeed, Hades had already gone in there. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to lock the door shut behind him, saving himself while leaving us to suffocate. But he emerged a moment later—with a large, laminated moon map! He rushed to the window, and—just as the vinyl blind blew out—spread out the map, and held it as tightly as he could against the curving bulkhead. It was being sucked up against the wall, but the fit wasn’t ex
act; air kept hissing out.

  Akiko found adhesive tape in the first-aid kit, and started sealing the edges around the map. Meanwhile, I got all the tubes of suit-repair goop, and tossed them to Chloe, who started squirting that around the map’s edges, too. Hades still had his arms spread out, holding the map.

  The videophone was signaling an incoming call. God knows how long it had been doing that; until the roar of escaping atmosphere abated, we couldn’t have heard it. Keeping the piton gun leveled at Hades’s back, I moved over and accepted the call. “Sullivan.”

  “Mr. Sullivan, my God, is everyone all right?” It was Smythe’s voice, panic edging the cultured tones.

  Chloe had almost finished sealing the edges of the map. Hades relaxed his crucifixion pose, and turned around to face me. His gray eyebrows went up as he saw the gun aimed directly at his heart.

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine … for the moment. We, ah, sprung a leak.”

  Another voice—one I knew—came on. “Jacob, this is Quentin Ashburn. You’re still plugged into High Eden’s life-support system. It’s not designed to rapidly repressurize a moonbus, but your air pressure should return to normal in about an hour, assuming the leak is contained.

  I looked past Hades. Chloe had finished, and the map seemed to be holding in place. “It is,” I said.

  I heard Quentin exhaling noisily. “Good.”

  Smythe came back on the line. “What in God’s name happened?”

  “Your Mr. Hades tried to rush me, and I had to fire my gun.”

  There was silence for a time. “Oh,” said Smythe at last. “Is—is Brian all right?”

  “Yes, yes, everyone’s fine. But I hope you know now that I do mean business. What the hell’s happening with getting the other me up here?”

  “We’re still trying to reach him. He’s not at his home in Toronto.”