Mindscan

33

There were cameras inside the moonbus, of course. In theory, they were off.

Right. As if.

I took a tube of suit-repair goop and squirted it over each of the lenses, watching it harden quickly and turning to a matte finish as it did so. The only one I left uncovered was the unit for the videophone next to the airlock—and it was soon bleeping, signaling an incoming call. I pushed the answer button and Gabriel Smythe’s florid face appeared.

“Yes, Gabe,” I said. “Have you gotten ahold of the artificial me?”

“Yes, we have, Jake. He’s in Toronto, of course, but he’s willing to talk to you.”

“Put him on,” I said.

And there he—I—was. I’d seen the artificial body before I’d uploaded, but never since it had been occupied. It was a slightly simplified version of me, with a slightly younger face that looked a little plastic. “Hello,” I said.

He didn’t reply for a moment, and I was about to protest that something was wrong, but then he said, “Hello, brother.”

Of course. The time lag: one-and-a-third seconds for my words to reach him on Earth; another one-and-a-third seconds for his reply to reach me. Still, I was wary.

“How do I know it’s really you?” I asked.

One Mississippi. Two Mis—

“It’s me,” said the android.

“No,” I replied. “At best it’s one of us. But I’ve got to be sure.”

Time delay. “So ask me a question.”

No one else could possibly know this—at least not through me, although I suppose she could have told someone. But given that she’d been dating my best friend at the time, I rather suspected her lips were sealed—after the fact of course. “The first girl to ever give us a blowjob.”

“Carrie,” said the other me. “At the hydro field behind our high school. After the cast party for that production of Julius Caesar.”

I smiled. “Good. Okay. One more question, just to be sure. We’d decided before undergoing the Mindscan process to keep one little fact secret from the Immortex people Something about, ah, um, traffic lights.”

“Traffic lights? Oh—we’re color-blind. We can’t tell red and green apart. Or, at least, we didn’t used to be able to: I can now.”

“And?”

“It’s … um…”

“Come on, make me see it.”

“It’s … it’s … well, red is warm, you know? Especially the deeper shades, like maroon. And green—it’s not quite like anything I can describe. It’s not cold, the way blue is. Sharp, maybe. It looks sharp. And … I don’t know. I like it, though—it’s my favorite new color.”

“What’s a field of grass look like?”

“It’s, ah…”

Smythe’s voice, cutting in: “Forgive me, Jake, but surely we have more pressing matters to discuss.”

I was still fascinated, but Smythe was right. The last thing I wanted to do was get emotionally involved with this bogus me. “Right, okay. Now, listen, copy-of-me. You know exactly why we agreed to this copying process. We thought the biological me was going to die soon, or end up a vegetable, and now I’m not; I’ve got decades left.”

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 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 corner 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. “High-powered 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, 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 isn’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 response 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 reelings. 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.