Mindscan

12

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 U of 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.”