Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “George…” said the robot mouth. “Please.”

  But the biological George shook his head. “If you really believe that you, as a copy of me, are more real than the original that still exists—if you really believe that you have a soul, just like this woman does, inside your robotic frame—then there’s no particular reason why you should sacrifice yourself for Dr. Ng here. But if, down deep, you’re thinking that I’m correct, that she really is alive, and you’re not, then you’ll do the right thing.” He pressed the scalpel’s blade in slightly, drawing blood again. “What’s it going to be?”

  George Rathburn had returned to Shiozaki’s office, and Detective Lucerne was doing his best to persuade the robot-housed mind to agree to GR-7’s terms.

  “Not in a million years,” said Rathburn, “and, believe me, I intend to be around that long.”

  “But another copy of you can be made,” said Lucerne.

  “But it won’t be me—this me.”

  “But that woman, Dr. Ng: she’s got a husband, three daughters…”

  “I’m not insensitive to that, Detective,” said Rathburn, pacing back and forth on his golden mechanical legs. “But let me put it to you another way. Say this is 1875, in the southern US. The Civil War is over, blacks in theory have the same legal status as whites. But a white man is being held hostage, and he’ll only be let go if a black man agrees to sacrifice himself in the white man’s place. See the parallel? Despite all the courtroom wrangling that was done to make uploaded life able to maintain the legal status, the personhood, of the original, you’re asking me to set that aside, and reaffirm what the whites in the South felt they knew all along: that, all legal mumbo-jumbo to the contrary, a black man is worth less than a white man. Well, I won’t do that. I wouldn’t affirm that racist position, and I’ll be damned if I’ll affirm the modern equivalent: that a silicon-based person is worth less than a carbon-based person.”

  “‘I’ll be damned,’” repeated Lucerne, imitating Rathburn’s synthesized voice. He let the comment hang in the air, waiting to see if Rathburn would respond to it.

  And Rathburn couldn’t resist. “Yes, I know there are those who would say I can’t be damned—because whatever it is that constitutes the human soul isn’t recorded during the transference process. That’s the gist of it, isn’t it? The argument that I’m not really human comes down to a theological assertion: I can’t be human, because I have no soul. But I tell you this, Detective Lucerne: I feel every bit as alive—and every bit as spiritual—as I did before the transfer. I’m convinced that I do have a soul, or a divine spark, or an élan vital, or whatever you want to call it. My life in this particular packaging of it is not worth one iota less than Dr. Ng’s, or anyone else’s.”

  Lucerne was quiet for a time, considering. “But what about the other you? You’re willing to stand here and tell me that that version—the original, flesh-and-blood version—is not human anymore. And you would have that distinction by legal fiat, just as blacks were denied human rights in the old south.”

  “There’s a difference,” said Rathburn. “There’s a big difference. That version of me—the one holding Dr. Ng hostage—agreed of its own free will, without any coercion whatsoever, to that very proposition. He—it—agreed that it would no longer be human, once the transfer into the robot body was completed.”

  “But he doesn’t want it to be that way anymore.”

  “Tough. It’s not the first contract that he—that I—signed in my life that I later regretted. But simple regret isn’t reason enough to get out of a legally valid transaction.” Rathburn shook his robotic head. “No, I’m sorry. I refuse. Believe me, I wish more than anything that you could save Dr. Ng—but you’re going to have to find another way to do it. There’s too much at stake here for my people—for uploaded humans—to let me make any other decision.”

  “All right,” Lucerne finally said to the robotic Rathburn, “I give up. If we can’t do it the easy way, we’re going to have to do it the hard way. It’s a good thing the old Rathburn wants to see the new Rathburn directly. Having him in that operating room while you’re in the overlooking observation gallery will be perfect for sneaking a sharpshooter in.”

  Rathburn felt as though his eyes should go wide, but of course they did not. “You’re going to shoot him?”

  “You’ve left us no other choice. Standard procedure is to give the hostage-taker everything he wants, get the hostage back, then go after the criminal. But the only thing he wants is for you to be dead—and you’re not willing to cooperate. So we’re going to take him out.”

  “You’ll use a tranquilizer, won’t you?”

  Lucerne snorted. “On a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat? We need something that will turn him off like a light, before he’s got time to react. And the best way to do that is a bullet to the head or chest.”

  “But…but I don’t want you to kill him.”

  Lucerne made an even louder snort. “By your logic, he’s not alive anyway.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “But what? You willing to give him what he wants?”

  “I can’t. Surely you can see that.”

  Lucerne shrugged. “Too bad. I was looking forward to being able to quip ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips.’”

  “Damn you,” said Rathburn. “Don’t you see that it’s because of that sort of attitude that I can’t allow this precedent?”

  Lucerne made no reply, and after a time Rathburn continued. “Can’t we fake my death somehow? Just enough for you to get Ng back to safety?”

  Lucerne shook his head. “GR-7 demanded proof that it was really you inside that tin can. I don’t think he can be easily fooled. But you know him better than anyone else. Could you be fooled?”

  Rathburn tipped his mechanical head down. “No. No, I’m sure he’ll demand positive proof.”

  “Then we’re back to the sharpshooter.”

  Rathburn walked into the observation gallery, his golden feet making soft metallic clangs as they touched the hard, tiled floor. He looked through the angled glass, down at the operating room below. The slab-of-flab version of himself had Dr. Ng tied up now, her hands and feet bound with surgical tape. She couldn’t get away, but he no longer had to constantly hold the scalpel to her throat. GR-7 was standing up, and she was next to him, leaning against the operating table.

  The angled window continued down to within a half-meter of the floor. Crouching below its sill was Conrad Burloak, the sharpshooter, in a gray uniform, holding a black rifle. A small transmitter had been inserted in Rathburn’s camera hardware, copying everything his glass eyes were seeing onto a datapad Burloak had with him.

  In ideal circumstances, Burloak had said, he liked to shoot for the head, but here he was going to have to fire through the plate-glass window, and that might deflect the bullet slightly. So he was going to aim for the center of the torso, a bigger target. As soon as the datapad showed a clean line-of-fire at G.R., Burloak would pop up and blow him away.

  “Hello, George,” said the robotic Rathburn. There was an open intercom between the observation gallery and the operating theater below.

  “All right,” said the fleshy one. “Let’s get this over with. Open the access panel to your nano-gel braincase, and…”

  But GR-7 trailed off, seeing that the robotic Rathburn was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, George. I’m not going to deactivate myself.”

  “You prefer to see Dr. Ng die?”

  Rathburn could shut off his visual input, the equivalent of closing his eyes. He did that just now for a moment, presumably much to the chagrin of the sharpshooter studying the datapad. “Believe me, George, the last thing I want to do is see anyone die.”

  He reactivated his eyes. He’d thought he’d been suitably ironic but, of course, the other him had the same mind. GR-7, perhaps suspecting that something was up, had moved Dr. Ng so that she was now standing between himself and the glass.

  “Don’t try anything funny,” said the skin.
“I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Rathburn looked down on his former self—but only in the literal sense. He didn’t want to see this…this man, this being, this thing, this entity, this whatever it was, hurt.

  After all, even if the shed skin wasn’t a person in the cold eyes of the law, he surely still remembered that time he’d—they’d—almost drowned swimming at the cottage, and mom pulling him to shore while his arms flailed in panic. And he remembered his first day at junior-high school, when a gang of grade nines had beaten him up as initiation. And he remembered the incredible shock and sadness when he’d come home from his weekend job at the hardware store and found dad slumped over in his easy chair, dead from a stroke.

  And that biological him must remember all the good things, too: hitting that home run clear over the fence in grade eight, after all the members of the opposing team had moved in close; his first kiss, at a party, playing spin the bottle; and his first romantic kiss, with Dana, her studded tongue sliding into his mouth; that perfect day in the Bahamas, with the most gorgeous sunset he’d ever seen.

  Yes, this other him wasn’t just a backup, wasn’t just a repository of data. He knew all the same things, felt all the same things, and—

  The sharpshooter had crawled several meters along the floor of the observation gallery, trying to get a clean angle at GR-7. Out of the corner of his robotic vision—which was as sharp at the peripheries as it was in the center—Rathburn saw the sharpshooter tense his muscles, and then—

  And then Burloak leaped up, swinging his rifle, and—

  And to his astonishment, Rathburn found the words “Look out, George!” emitting from his robotic mouth at a greatly amplified volume.

  And just as the words came out, Burloak fired, and the window exploded into a thousand shards, and GR-7 spun around, grabbing Dr. Ng, swinging her in between himself and the sharpshooter, and the bullet hit, drilling a hole through the woman’s heart, and through the chest of the man behind her, and they both crumpled to the operating-room floor, and human blood flowed out of them, and the glass shards rained down upon them like robot tears.

  And so, at last, there was no more ambiguity. There was only one George Rathburn—a single iteration of the consciousness that had first bloomed some forty-five years ago, now executing as code in the nano-gel inside a robotic form.

  George suspected that Shiozaki would try to cover up what had occurred back in Paradise Valley—at least the details. He’d have to admit that Dr. Ng had been killed by a skin, but doubtless Shiozaki would want to gloss over Rathburn’s warning shout. After all, it would be bad for business if those about to shed got wind of the fact that the new versions still had empathy for the old ones.

  But Detective Lucerne and his sharpshooter would want just the opposite: only by citing the robotic Rathburn’s interference could they exonerate the sharpshooter from accidentally shooting the hostage.

  But nothing could exonerate GR-7 from what he’d done, swinging that poor, frightened woman in front of himself as a shield…

  Rathburn sat down in his country house’s living room. Despite his robotic body, he did feel weary—bone-weary—and needed the support of the chair.

  He’d done the right thing, even if GR-7 hadn’t; he knew that. Any other choice by him would have been devastating not just for himself, but also for Kathryn and every other uploaded consciousness. There really had been no alternative.

  Immortality is grand. Immortality is great. As long as you have a clear conscience, that is. As long as you’re not tortured by doubt, racked by depression, overcome with guilt.

  That poor woman, Dr. Ng. She’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all.

  And now she was dead.

  And he—a version of him—had caused her to be killed.

  GR-7’s words replayed in Rathburn’s memory. Wed just never been in such desperate circumstances before.

  Perhaps that was true. But he was in desperate circumstances now.

  And he’d found himself contemplating actions he never would have considered possible for him before.

  That poor woman. That poor dead woman…

  It wasn’t just GR-7’s fault. It was his fault. Her death was a direct consequence of him wanting to live forever.

  And he’d have to live with the guilt of that forever.

  Unless…

  Desperate circumstances make one do desperate things.

  He picked up the magnetic pistol—astonishing what things you could buy online these days. A proximity blast from it would destroy all recordings in nano-gel.

  George Rathburn looked at the pistol, at its shiny, hard exterior.

  And he placed the emitter against the side of his stainless-steel skull, and, after a few moments of hesitation, his golden robotic finger contracted against the trigger.

  What better way, after all, was there to prove that he was still human?

  The Stanley

  Cup Caper

  The 2003 World Science Fiction Convention was in Toronto, where I live. The Toronto Star, Canadas largest-circulation newspaper, decided to commemorate that fact—and my then-current Hugo nomination for Hominids—by commissioning a short story from me predicting the future of Toronto some thirty years down the road (seeing as how it had been thirty years since the last time the Worldcon had been in Toronto).

  I’d just finished reading Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code (which I thoroughly enjoyed), and puzzles and mysteries were very much on my mind. I’m not a hockey fan—sacrilege for a Canadian, I know—but somehow hit on this premise.

  To my delight, the four opening words—a riff on famed Canadian sportscaster Foster Hewitt’s trademark “He shoots! He scores!”—are included (along with twenty-two other quotes from me) in The Penguin Dictionary of Popular Canadian Quotations, edited by John Robert Colombo.

  “She shoots! She scores! For the first time in sixty-seven years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have won the Stanley Cup! Captain Karen Lopez and her team have skated to victory as the 2031 NHL champions. The hometown crowd here is going wild, and—wait! Wait! Ladies and gentlemen, this is incredible…we’ve just received word that the Stanley Cup trophy is missing!”

  Detectives Joginder Singh and Trista Chong let their car drive them east along the Gardiner Expressway. At Bathurst, the vehicle headed down into the tunnel. Jo shuddered; he hated the underground portion of the Gardiner. Sadly, his fear of tunnels also kept him from using the subway, even though it now ran all the way from Pearson Airport to the Pickering Solar Power Plant.

  Still, the one tolerable thing about going underground here was that he didn’t have to lay eyes on the spire of the Quebec Consulate; Trista, fifteen years his junior, didn’t really remember a united Canada, but Jo certainly did.

  At Yonge, their car resurfaced. South of them was the Toronto SunStar building. But they were going north: their car let them out across the street from the Hockey Hall of Fame. Of course, there was no place to park; the car would just keep driving around the block until they signaled it to pick them up.

  Jo and Trista had spent most of yesterday fruitlessly examining the crime scene at the WestJet Centre. Today, they were going to start by having a look at the duplicate Stanley Cup—the mockup that was on public display at the Hall of Fame—just to get a feel for the dimensions of the stolen object.

  Once inside, Jo stood in front of the glass case containing the duplicate, while Trista walked around the case, taking pictures of the duplicate’s engraved surface with her pocketbrain. When she was finished, something apparently caught her eye. “Look!” she crowed, pointing to the adjacent glass case. “There it is—taken apart, but there it is!”

  Jo glanced at the other case and laughed. “Those are just retired bands.”

  Trista made a perplexed frown. “Like the Barenaked Ladies?”

  “No. Bands from the original trophy. It always consists of the cup on top and five circular bands forming the cylindrical body.” He pointed back at the mockup. �
��See? Each of the five bands has room for listing the members of thirteen winning teams. When they fill the last spot on the bottom band, they retire the top one, slide the other four up, and add a new band. Those bands in that other case are the ones that have already been removed.”

  Trista took some pictures of the retired bands, then looked back at the mockup, peering at its base. “But the last band on the trophy is already full,” she said.

  Jo nodded. “That’s right. They’re going to have to retire the top band this year and start a new one.” He paused. “Seen enough?”

  Trista nodded. They exited, crossed the street, and waited for their car to come get them. With the Gardiner buried, it was easy to see the Central Nanotechnology Tower on the lakeshore, but there was no point going up to the observation deck anymore. Jo shook his head; he was old enough to remember when the city’s nickname had been Hogtown, not Smogtown.

  The car took them north on Yonge Street, the toll being debited automatically. It had been ten years since GTA amalgamation, combining Toronto with everything from Mississauga to Oshawa. Still, the stolen trophy had to be somewhere inside the supercity’s borders; like every other North American metropolis, T.O. was surrounded by security checkpoints, and something as big as the Stanley Cup couldn’t have been smuggled out.

  On their left now was the Eaton Centre. Jo’s sister had a condominium there, in what had once been a Grand & Toy store; with most people shopping online these days, there was little need for big malls. As they continued up Yonge, the towers of Ryerson—“the Harvard of the North,” as CNNMSNBC had recently dubbed it—were visible off to the right. Jo watched the landscape going by—a succession of Tim Hortons donut shops, pot bars, and licensed bordellos. Trista, meanwhile, had her pocketbrain out and was staring at its screen, studying the pictures she’d taken earlier.