Mindscan

10

It was well after midnight. Dr. Porter had long since gone home, but there were all sorts of Immortex staff still around to cater to our every need—not that we had many.

We didn’t eat, so there was no point in putting out a fancy buffet for us. I should have thought that through, should have had a special last meal just before uploading. Of course, Immortex hadn’t suggested we do so, I guess because a final meal was what the condemned, not the liberated, were supposed to enjoy.

More: we didn’t drink, so there was no point in having an open bar. Indeed, I realized with a pang of guilt that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a Sullivan’s Select … and now I never would again. My great grandfather—Old Sully himself—was probably spinning in his grave at the thought of a scion of his dynasty giving up beer for anything, even immortality.

And, most astonishing of all, we didn’t sleep. How often I’d said there were too few hours in a day! But now it seemed as though there were far too many.

We, this little band of new uploads, were to spend the night together in this party room; the first night was apparently very difficult for a lot of people. Two Immortex therapists milled about, as did someone who seemed to be the landlocked equivalent of a cruise director, coming up with activities to keep people occupied. Being up constantly, not getting tired, not needing to sleep, not wanting to sleep: it was going to be quite an adjustment, even for those who, in their old age, had slept lightly and had needed only five or six hours a night.

Two of the recently uploaded women were chatting away about things that didn’t interest me. The third woman and Draper were playing a trivia game that the cruise director had brought up on a wall monitor, but the questions were geared toward their youth, and I knew none of the answers.

And so I ended up spending more time with Karen. Part of it was kindness on her part, I’m sure; she seemed to recognize that I was a fish out of water. Indeed, I felt compelled to comment on that as we went outside, exiting onto the treed Immortex grounds, a gibbous moon overhead. “Thanks,” I said to Karen as we walked along, “for spending so much time with me.”

Karen smiled her new-and-improved perfectly symmetrical smile. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Who else would I talk to about physics or philosophy? In fact, I’ve got another joke for you. Rene Descartes goes into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender serves it up. Old Rene, he nurses it for a while, but at last it’s gone. And so the barkeep says to him, ‘Hey, Rene, care for another?’ To which Descartes replies, ‘I think not’—and disappears.”

I laughed, and even though my new laugh sounded strange to me, it made me feel good. August nights were filled with mosquitoes, but I quickly recognized another advantage to an artificial body: the bugs left us alone. “But, y’know,” I said, as we walked along, “I’m actually surprised that we don’t need to sleep. I thought it was necessary for the consolidation of memory.”

“A popular misconception,” said Karen, and, with her lovely Georgia accent, the words didn’t sound condescending. “But it’s just not true. It takes time to consolidate memories, and normal humans can’t go for any length without sleeping—but the sleeping has nothing to do with the consolidation.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. We’re going to be fine.”

“Good.”

We walked for a while in companionable silence, then Karen said, “Anyway, I should be the one thanking you for spending time with me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, half the reason I uploaded was to get away from old people. Can you imagine me in an old-folks’ home?”

I laughed. “No, I guess not.”

“The other people here who are my age,” she said, shaking her head. “Their goal in life was to become rich. There’s something ruthless about that, and something shallow, too. I never intended to be rich—it just happened, and no one was more surprised by it than me. And you didn’t intend to be rich, either.”

“But if it weren’t for money,” I said, “we’d both be dead or worse soon.”

“Oh, I know! I know! But that’s bound to change. Immortality is expensive right now, but it’s got to come down in price; technology always does. Can you imagine a world in which the only thing that mattered was how rich you are?”

“You don’t sound very—” Damn it! Another thought I’d intended to keep to myself partially leaking out.

“Very what?” said Karen. “Very American? Very capitalist?” She shook her head. “I don’t think any serious writer can be a capitalist. I mean, look at me: to my own astonishment, I’m one of the best-selling authors of all time. But am I one of the best writers ever in the English language? Not by a long shot. Work in a field in which financial reward has no correlation with actual worth and you can’t be a capitalist. I don’t say there’s a negative correlation: there are great writers who sell very well. But there is no meaningful correlation. It’s just a crapshoot.”

“So, are you going to go back to writing now that you’re a Mindscan?” I asked. It had been years since there’d been a new Karen Bessarian book.

“Yes, I intend to. In fact, being a writer is the main reason I uploaded. See, I love my characters—Prince Scales, Doctor Hiss. I love them all. And, as I told you before, I created them. They came right out of here.” She tapped the side of her head.

“Yes. So?”

“So, I’ve watched the ebb and flow of copyright legislation over my lifetime. It’s been a battle between warring factions: those who want works to be protected forever, and those who believe works should fall into public domain as fast as possible. When I was young, works stayed in copyright for fifty years after the authors’ death. Then it was lengthened to seventy years, and that’s still the current figure, but it isn’t long enough.”

“Why?”

“Well, because if I had a child today—not that I could—and I died tomorrow—not that I’m going to—that child would receive the royalties from my books until he or she was seventy. And then, suddenly, my child—by that point, an old man or woman—would be cut off; my work would be declared public domain, and no more royalties would ever have to be paid on it. The child of my body would be denied the benefits of the children of my mind. And that’s just not right.”

“But, well, isn’t the culture enriched when material goes into the public domain?” I asked. “Surely you wouldn’t want Shakespeare or Dickens to still be protected by copyright?”

“Why not? J.K. Rowling is still in copyright; so is Stephen King and Marcos Donnelly—and they all have had, and continue to have, a huge impact on our culture.”

“I guess…” I said, still not sure.

“Look,” said Karen, gently, “one of your ancestors started a brewing company, right?”

I nodded. “My great grandfather, Reuben Sullivan—Old Sully, they called him.”

“Right. And you benefit financially from that to this day. Should the government instead have confiscated all the assets of Sullivan Brewing, or whatever the company’s called, on the seventieth anniversary of Old Sully’s death? Intellectual property is still property, and it should be treated the same as anything else human beings build or create.”

I had a hard time with this; I never used anything but open-source software—and there was a difference between a building and an idea; there was, in fact, a material difference. “So you uploaded in order to make sure you keep getting royalties on DinoWorld forever?”

“It’s not just that,” Karen said. “In fact, it’s not even principally that. When something falls into public domain, anyone can do anything with the material. You want to make a porno film with my characters? You want to write bad fiction featuring my characters? You can, once my works go into public domain. And that’s not right; they’re mine.”

“But by living forever, you can protect them?” I said.

“Exactly. If I don’t die, they never fall into public domain.”

We continued walking; I was getting the hang of it—and the motor in my belly could keep me doing it for weeks on end, or so Porter had told me. It was now almost 5:00 a.m.—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been up so late. I hadn’t realized that Orion was visible in summer if you stayed up this long. Clamhead must be missing me something fierce, although the robokitchen would be feeding her, and my next-door neighbor had agreed to take her for walks.

We passed under a lamp, and to my astonishment I noticed that my arm was wet; I could see it glistening in the lamp light. Only a little later did I experience a physical sensation of dampness. I rubbed a finger along my arm. “Good grief!” I said. “It’s dew.”

Karen laughed, not at all perturbed. “So it is.”

“You’re taking all this so well,” I said to her.

“I try to take everything in stride,” Karen replied. “It’s all material.”

“What?”

“Sorry. Writer’s mantra. ‘It’s all material.’ It all goes into the hopper. Everything you experience is fodder for future writing.”

“That’s, um, an unusual way of going through life.”

“You sound like Daron. When he and I used to go for dinner, he’d be embarrassed when a couple at a nearby table was having a fight. Me, I’m always leaning closer and cocking my head to hear better, thinking, ‘Oh, this is great; this is pure gold.’ ”

“Hmph,” I said. I was getting good at making all those sounds that aren’t words but still convey meaning.

“And,” said Karen, “with these new ears—God, they’re sensitive!—I’ll be able to hear even more. Poor Daron would hate that.”

“Who’s Daron?”

“Oh, sorry. My first husband, Daron Bessarian, and the last one whose name I took; my maiden name was Cohen. Daron was a nice Armenian boy, from my high school. We were a funny couple, in a way. We used to argue about whose people had suffered the worse holocaust.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that, so instead I said, “Maybe we should go inside before we get too damp.”

She nodded, and we headed into the party room. Draper—the black lawyer—was now playing chess with one of the women; a second woman—the faux sixteen-year-old—was reading something on a datapad; and the third woman was, to my astonishment, doing jumping jacks, under the supervision of an Immortex personal trainer. I thought it incredibly pointless—an upload’s artificial form hardly needed the exercise. But then I realized it must in fact be luxurious to suddenly be nimble and limber again, after years of being trapped in an aged, decaying body.

“Want to catch the 5:00 a.m. newscast?” I asked Karen.

“Sure.”

We walked down a corridor, and found a room I’d noted earlier in the day that had a wall screen.

“Do you mind the CBC?” I said.

“Not at all. I watch it all the time from Detroit. It’s the only way I can find out what’s really going on in my country—or in the rest of the world.”

I told the TV to turn on. It did so. I’d watched newscasts on this channel hundreds of times before, but this one looked completely different, now that I was seeing in full color. I wondered about that, about where the connections in my brain that allowed me to perceive colors I’d never seen before had come from.

The newscaster—a turbaned Sikh whose shift, I knew, went until 9:00 a.m.—was speaking while news footage ran behind him. “Despite another protest on Parliament Hill yesterday afternoon, it seems almost certain that Canada will go ahead and legalize multiple marriages later this month. Prime Minister Chen has scheduled a press conference for this morning, and…”

Karen shook her head, and the movement caught my eye. “You don’t approve?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” I said it as gently as I could, trying to keep my tone from sounding confrontational.

“I don’t know,” she replied, amiably enough.

“Do gay marriages bother you?”

She sounded slightly miffed. “No. I’m not that old.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s a fair question. I was in my forties when Canada legalized gay marriages. I actually came to Toronto in the summer of—what was it? Two thousand and three?—to attend the wedding of an American lesbian couple I knew who came up here to get married.”

“But the U.S. doesn’t allow gay marriages—I remember when the constitutional amendment was passed, outlawing them.”

Karen nodded. “The U.S. doesn’t allow a lot of things. Believe me, many of us are uncomfortable with the continued drifting to the right.”

“But you are against multiple marriages.”

“Yes, I am, I suppose. But I’m not sure I can articulate why. I mean, I’ve seen lots of single moms do just fine—including my sister, may God rest her soul. So certainly my definition of family isn’t limited to two parents.”

“What about single dads? What about single gay dads?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s fine.”

I nodded in relief; old people can be so conservative. “So, what’s wrong with multiple marriages?”

“I guess I think you can really only have the level of commitment that constitutes a marriage in a couple. Anything bigger than that waters it down.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Most people have an infinite supply of love; just ask anyone who comes from a big family.”

“I guess,” she said. “I take it you’re in favor of multiple marriages?”

“Sure. I mean, I don’t have any interest in one myself, but that’s not the point. I’ve know several triads over the years, and two quads. They’re all genuinely in love; they’ve got stable, long-term relationships. Why shouldn’t they be entitled to call what they have a marriage?”

“Because it’s not. It just isn’t.”

I certainly didn’t want to start an argument, so I didn’t say anything further. Looking back at the TV, I saw the anchor was now doing a story on the death of former U.S. President Pat Buchanan, who had passed away yesterday at a hundred and six.

“Good riddance,” said Karen, looking at the screen.

“Happy to see him go?” I said.

“Aren’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He certainly was no friend of Canada, but, you know, his ‘Soviet Canuckistan’ nickname for us became a rallying cry for my generation. ‘Live up to the name,’ and all that. I think Canada became even more left-wing just to spite him.”

“So maybe you’re just in favor of multiple marriages because it’ll be another distinction between our two countries,” said Karen.

“Not at all,” I said. “I told you why I’m in favor of it.”

“Sorry.” She glanced at the screen. The piece about Buchanan’s death was over, but apparently she was still dwelling on it. “I’m happy he’s dead, because I see it as maybe the end of an era. It was the judges he packed the Supreme Court with, after all, who overturned Roe v. Wade, and I can’t forgive him for that. But he was twenty years older than me—his values came from a different generation. And now he’s gone, and I’m thinking maybe there’s some hope for change. But…”

“Yes?”

“But I’m not going away, am I? Your friends who want to have their relationship recognized as a group marriage will have to contend with people like me, set in their ways, sticking around forever, standing in the way of progress.” She looked at me. “And it is progress, isn’t it? My parents never understood about gay marriage. Their parents never understood about desegregation.”

I looked at her with new eyes—figuratively, and, of course, literally. “You’re a philosopher at heart,” I said.

“Maybe so. All good writers are, I imagine.”

“But I guess you’re right, to some degree, anyway. They call it the retire-or-expire factor in academia…”

“ ‘Retire or expire’?” said Karen. “Oooh, I like that! And I certainly saw something similar in Georgia, where I grew up, in relation to civil rights: great strides weren’t made by changing people’s minds—no one slaps himself on the forehead and exclaims, ‘What a fool I’ve been all these years!’ Rather, progress was made because the worst racists—the ones who remembered the good ole days of segregation or even slavery—died off.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“But, you know, people’s beliefs do change over time. There’s the long-established fact that people become more politically conservative as they get older—not that it happened to me, thank God. When I found out what Tom Selleck’s politics were, I was appalled.”

“Who’s Tom Selleck?”

“Sigh,” said Karen. Apparently she hadn’t learned to make the sound yet. “He was a gorgeous hunk of an actor; played Magnum P.I. I had posters of him in my bedroom when I was a teenager.”

“I thought you had posters of … who was it? That Superman guy?”

Karen grinned. “Him, too.”

We’d both been ignoring the TV, but now the sports came on. “Oooh!” said Karen. “The Yankees won. Terrific!”

“You like baseball?” I said, feeling my eyebrows lift this time—there was a definite jerk as they did so; I’d have to get Porter to file down whatever they were catching on.

“Absolutely!”

“Me, too,” I said. “I wanted to be a pitcher when I was a kid. It wasn’t in the cards, but…”

“You a Blue Jays fan?” asked Karen.

I grinned. “What else?”

“I remember when they won back-to-back World Series.”

“Really? Wow.”

“Yup. Daron and I had just gotten married back then. He and I used to watch the World Series together every year. Big bowls of popcorn, lots of soda, the works.”

“What was it like—those two times Toronto won? How did people react?”

The sun was rising; light spilled into the room.

Karen smiled. “Let me tell you…”