Mindscan

16

The American-style restaurant at High Eden was mostly empty: a couple of old white people dining together near what I presumed was a holographic fireplace, and a black man dining alone. The black man had close-cropped white hair. He looked a bit like Will Smith, who’d won an Oscar last year for his portrayal of Willy Loman in the new version of Death of a Salesman. For that role, Smith had had to suppress the natural twinkle in his eye, but this Smith-like fellow had no need to do that here, and even just sitting by himself he had a lively, alert face. On a whim, I walked over to his table.

“Hello,” I said. “Would you like some company?”

The man smiled. “If I wanted to eat alone, I’d eat at home.”

I pulled out a chair and sat down. As I did so, I was briefly conscious of the fact that the chair’s legs must have been heavily weighted—I guess people had a tendency to pull out chairs and send them flying in this low gravity.

“Jake Sullivan,” I said extending my hand.

“Malcolm Draper,” said the man. I noticed he had a Tafford ring on his right index finger, but because of my color blindness I couldn’t tell if it was red or green; didn’t matter—I wasn’t about to proposition him. I’d left my own Tafford in my suite; couldn’t imagine needing it here, among all these old people. I’d been celibate for a couple of years at a go in the past, although never by choice, and, indeed hadn’t had sex with anybody since that one wonderful, poignant time with Rebecca Chong back on New Year’s Eve. So, I could certainly manage being celibate for the couple of years I had left, before my Katerinsky’s would either completely kill me or cause my sworn advance directive to be executed. Anyway, my lack of a Tafford should discourage cougars. Of course, my Tafford was green, or so I’d been told, meaning I was straight. Still, the luck I had with women sometimes made me think the sales clerk had taken advantage of my color blindness and sold me a red one.

“Nice to meet you, Jake,” said Malcolm after we’d shook hands.

“Malcolm Draper,” I said, repeating the name he’d proffered. Something tickled at the back of my brain. “Should I know you?”

The man looked wary. “You a Fed?”

“Pardon?”

“Agent for one of my ex-wives?”

“No. Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

A sly smile. “Oh, you’re not. I’m just teasing. Some people have heard of me, yes. I used to be the Dershowitz Professor of Civil Liberties Law at Harvard.”

“Right! Right. High-profile cases. That primate research lab, no?”

“That was me. Put an end to vivisection of great apes anywhere in the U.S., and to their unlawful confinement.”

“I remember that. Good for you.”

He shrugged amiably. “Thanks.”

“You don’t look that old,” I said.

“I’m seventy-four. Hell, I could still be a Supreme Court justice … not that a black liberal has had a chance at an appointment for, well, forever.”

“Hmm,” I said, having no better response. “Did you ever argue before them?”

“Who?”

“The Supreme Court. The U.S. one, that is. I’m a Canadian myself.”

“You were a Canadian,” said Draper. “Now you’re nothing at all.”

“Well,” I said.

“But, yes, to answer your question, I argued before the Supreme Court several times. Most recently in McCharles v. Maslankowski.”

“That was you?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Draper.”

“Malcolm, please.”

He looked so chipper, I couldn’t believe he was near death. “So … so are you just visiting?”

“No. No, I’m a resident. I transferred my consciousness, too. The legal Malcolm Draper is still practicing law back on Earth. There are lots of battles that still need to be fought, and lots of great young minds to train to be jurists, but I was just getting too tired to keep doing it. The doctors said I was probably good for another twenty years, easy, but I just didn’t have it in me to work that hard anymore. So I retired up here—now they tell me I might live another thirty years in this gentle gravity.”

“Thirty years…”

He looked at me, but was too polite to ask the question. I wondered how it was for lawyers—able to ask any pertinent question, no matter how direct or personal, in the courtroom, but constrained the way the rest of us are outside it. I decided there was no reason not to tell him. “I’ve probably only got a short time left.”

“A young guy like you? Come now, Mr. Sullivan, you’re under oath…”

“It’s the truth. Bad blood vessels deep in the brain. They can image it, but can’t get in with anything to repair it. I could go at any time, or, even worse, end up a in a vegetative state.”

“Oh,” said Draper. “Ah.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “At least a version of me will continue on.”

“Exactly,” said Draper. “Just as with me. And I’m sure they’ll do us both proud.” He paused. “So, finding any companionship here?”

Surprised by his directness, I said nothing.

“I saw you with that writer woman—Karen Bessarian.”

“Yeah. So?”

“She seems to like you.”

“Not my type.”

“Not your age, you mean.”

I didn’t reply.

“Well,” said Malcolm, “they’ve got great hookers here.”

“I know. I read the brochure.”

“I used to write a civil liberties column for Penthouse. Just like Alan Dershowitz, before me.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Its slogan was ‘The magazine of sex, politics, and power.’ ”

“And of women peeing.”

“That, too,” said Malcolm, smiling. I used to sneak the occasional peek when I was a teenager, before Penthouse and Playboy went bankrupt, unable to compete with Web alternatives. “What’s the matter?” Malcolm continued. “Don’t like paying for it?”

“I never have before.”

“I thought that sort of thing was legal up in Canada.”

“It is, but—”

“Besides, look at it this way. You’re not paying for it. The Jake Sullivan down on Earth, he’s the one paying the bills. Which maintenance plan are you on?”

“Gold.”

“Well, then, the hookers are included.”

“I don’t know…”

“Trust me,” said Malcolm, with that twinkle in his eye, “you haven’t really made love until you’ve done it in one-sixth gee.”

Now that I have a new body, I don’t miss sweating, or sneezing or being tired, or being hungry. I don’t miss stubbed toes, or sunburns, or runny noses, or headaches. I don’t miss the pain in my left ankle, or diarrhea, or dandruff, or charley horses, or needing to pee so bad it hurts. And I don’t miss having to shave or cut my nails or put on deodorant. I don’t miss paper cuts, or farting, or pimples, or having a stiff neck. It’s nice to know that I’ll never need stitches, or angioplasty, or a hernia operation, or laser surgery to reattach a retina—the damage Clamhead did to my arm had been fixed up in a matter of minutes, good as new; just about any physical damage could likewise be repaired, without anesthetic, without leaving scars. And, as they said at the sales pitch, it’s comforting not having to worry about diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer’s or heart attacks or rheumatoid arthritis—or God-damned Katerinsky’s syndrome.

Plus I can read for hours. I still get bored as easily as before; the book has to hold my interest. But I don’t ever have to stop reading just because of eye fatigue, or because trying to make out words in dim light is giving me a headache. Indeed, I haven’t read this much since I was a student.

Are there things I do miss? Of course. All of my favorite foods—Jalapeno peppers and popcorn and Jell-O and stringy cheese on pizza. I miss the way I used to feel after a really good yawn, or the invigorating sensation of splashing cold water on my face. I miss being ticklish and the feeling of silk and laughing so hard it’s actually painful.

But those things aren’t gone for good. A decade or two from now, the technology will exist to give me all those sensations again. I can wait. I can wait forever.

And, yet, despite having all that time, some things seemed to be progressing awfully quickly. Karen had given up her suite at the Royal York, and moved into my house. It was temporary, of course—just a convenience, since she had to stay in Toronto for a while longer, seeing Porter for check ups and adjustments two or three times a week.

Me, I still intended to live here in North York for the foreseeable future. And so I was trying to decide what to do with the kitchen. It seemed pointless to devote so much space to something I’d—we’d—never use, and, frankly, it was an unwelcome reminder of the pleasures we’d given up. Of course, I had to keep bathrooms for visitors, but a wet bar and coffee urn were all I really needed to entertain a bit, and, well, the kitchen was huge, and had wonderful windows looking out over the landscaped yard. It was much too good a room to avoid. Maybe I’d turn it into a billiards room. I’d always wanted one of those.

While I was mulling this over, Karen, as she often did, was sitting in a chair, reading from a datapad. She preferred paper books, but for catching up on news she didn’t mind using a datapad, and—

And suddenly I heard her make the sound that substituted for a gasp. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“Daron is dead.”

I didn’t recognize it in time. “Who?”

“Daron Bessarian. My first husband.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I haven’t seen him for—God, it’s been thirty years. Not since his mother died. She’d been very good to me, and we’d kept in touch, even after Daron and I divorced. I went to her funeral.” Karen paused for a moment, then said decisively, “And I want to go to Daron’s funeral.”

“When is it?”

She looked down at her datapad. “The day after tomorrow. In Atlanta.”

“Do—do you want me to go with you?”

Karen considered this, then: “Yes. If you wouldn’t mind.”

Actually, I hated funerals—but had never been to one of somebody I didn’t know; maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. “Um, sure. Sure, I’d be”—happy to didn’t seem the right way to end that sentence, and for once I caught my first thought before it got out into the air—“willing to.”

Karen nodded decisively. “It’s settled, then.”

I had to do something about Clamhead. She needed human companionship, and apparently no matter how hard I tried, she wasn’t going to accept me—or Karen, as it turned out—in that capacity. Plus, Karen and I were going away to Georgia, and had decided to stop at her place in Detroit on the way back. It wasn’t fair to Clammy to leave her with just a robokitchen for an extended period.

And, well, damn it all, but I’m an idiot. I can’t leave well enough alone; I can’t resist trying one more time, testing the waters yet again. And so I called Rebecca Chong.

I thought maybe if I selected audio only on the phone, things might go better. She’d hear my voice, hear its warmth, hear the affection in it—but not see my plastic face.

She knew it was me calling, of course; the phone would have told her. And so, the mere fact that she answered … “Hello,” came her voice, formal and stiff. I had that purely mental sensation that used to accompany my heart sinking. “Hi, Becks,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, chipper.

“Hello,” she said again, still not using my name. It was right there in front of her, a string of pixels on her call-display unit, an electronic identification, but she wouldn’t use it.

“Becks,” I said, “it’s about Clamhead. Can you—would you be willing to look after her for a while? I’m—she—”

Rebecca was brilliant; that was one of the reasons I loved her. “She doesn’t recognize you, does she?”

I was quiet for longer than you’re supposed to be in phone conversations, then: “No. No, she doesn’t.” I paused again, then: “I know you’ve always loved Clamhead. Does your building allow pets?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And, yeah, I’d be happy to look after Clamhead.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Maybe all this talk about a dog had moved her to throw me a bone. “What are friends for?”

I was sitting in the living room of my lunar apartment, reading news on my datapad. Of course, the selection of stories displayed was based on my keywords, and—

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

Could it be true?

I thumbed the article open and read it—then read it again.

Chandragupta. That was a name I hadn’t heard before; this couldn’t really be his area, or else—

Hyperlinks; his bio. No, no, he’s the real deal, all right. And so—

My heart was pounding and my vision was blurring.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Maybe I should email him, but—

But, God damn it, I couldn’t. We were allowed to monitor Earth news here—I never would have come if I couldn’t have continued to follow the Blue Jays—but we weren’t permitted any form of communication with people back on Earth.

Christ, why couldn’t this have happened a few weeks ago, before I spent all this money on the Mindscan process and on coming here to the moon? What a waste!

But that was beside the point, really. It was only money. This was way more important.

This was huge.

This changed everything.

I re-read the news to be sure I wasn’t mistaken. And I wasn’t. It was real.

I was excited and elated and thrilled. I left my apartment, practically bouncing over to the Immortex offices.

The chief administrator at High Eden was a man named Brian Hades: tall, early fifties, light-colored eyes, silver-gray hair gathered into a ponytail, white beard. We’d all met him upon our arrival; I’d quipped that he had a hell of a name—and although his tone never veered from its habitual the-customer-is-always-right smoothness, his bearded jaw clenched in a way that suggested I’d not been the first one to make that joke. Anyway, there wasn’t much bureaucracy here; I just walked through his office door and said hello.

“Mr. Sullivan,” he said at once, rising from behind his kidney-shaped desk; there weren’t so many of us skins yet that he couldn’t keep track of us all. “What can I do for you?”

“I have to return to Earth.”

Hades raised his eyebrows. “We can’t allow that. You know the rules.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “They’ve found a cure for my problem.”

“What problem is that?”

“Katerinsky’s syndrome. A kind of arteriovenous malformation in the brain. It’s why I’m here. But there’s a new technique that can cure it.”

“Really?” said Hades. “That’s wonderful news. What’s the cure?”

I had the vocabulary of all this down pat; I’d lived with it so long. “Using nanotechnology, they endovascularly introduce particles into the AVM to clog off its nidus; that shuts the AVM down completely. Because the particles use carbon-based nanofibers, the body doesn’t reject, or even really notice, them.”

“And that means … what? That you’d live a normal lifespan?”

“Yes! Yes! So, you see—”

“That’s terrific. Where do they do the procedure?”

“Johns Hopkins.”

“Ah. Well, you can’t go there, but—”

“What do you mean, I can’t go there? We’re talking about saving my life! I know you’ve got rules, but…”

Hades held up a hand. “And they can’t be broken. But don’t worry. We’ll contact people there on your behalf, and bring an appropriate doctor to our facility here. You’ve got an unlimited medical benefit, although…”

I knew what he was thinking. That my accountant—good old Larry Hancock—would certainly notice the … what? Millions? The million this would cost. But Hades wasn’t getting the point. “No, no, you don’t see. Everything is different now. The conditions under which I agreed to stay here no longer pertain.”

Hades’s voice was infinitely solicitous. “Sir, I’m sorry. We’ll certainly arrange for you to have this cure—and right away, since I understand how precarious your current health is. But you can’t leave here.”

“You have to let me go,” I said, an edge honing my words.

“We can’t. You have no home on the outside, no money, no identity—nothing. This is the only place for you.”

“No, you don’t understand…”

“Oh, but I do. Look—how old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“Think of how lucky you are! I’m fifty-two, and I’ll have to work for many more years, but you’ve gotten to retire a decade or two before most people do, and are enjoying the absolute lap of luxury.”

“But—”

“Aren’t you? Is there anything you lack here? You know we pride ourselves on our service. If there’s something that’s not up to your standards, you just have to ask. You know that.”

“No, no … it’s all very pleasant, but…”

“Well, then, you see, Mr. Sullivan, there’s nothing to worry about. You can have anything here that you can have on the outside.”

“Not anything.”

“Tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever I can to make your stay here happy.”

“I want to go home.” It sounded so plaintive, so like my early days at summer camp, all those years ago. But it was what I wanted now, more than anything else in the world—in all the worlds. I wanted to go home.

“I’m truly, truly sorry, Mr. Sullivan,” said Hades, shaking his head slowly back and forth, the pony tail bouncing as he did so. “There’s just no way I can allow that.”