Mindscan

15

Karen and I talked for hours. She listened with such attention and compassion that I found myself sharing things with her I’d shared with no one else. I even told her about the big fight I’d had with my father, and how he’d collapsed right in front of my eyes.

But you can only talk for so long before running out of things to say, at least temporarily, and so we were just relaxing now, lying in the bed in Karen’s suite at the Fairmont Royal York. Karen was reading a book—an actual, physical bound volume—while I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t bored, though. I enjoyed looking up at the ceiling, at the blank white space.

Karen probably had had a different reaction, early in her career, staring at a sheet of paper in her writetyper, or whatever those things were called. I suspect empty whiteness was daunting for an author whose job it was to fill it, but for me the featureless expanse of the ceiling—here in the bedroom not even broken by a lighting fixture, since all the illumination came from floor or table lamps—was soothing, free of distractions. It was perfect, as the saying goes, for hearing myself think.

Can’t remember…

Huh?

Can’t remember that either. Are you sure?

What couldn’t I remember? Well, of course, if I could remember it—whatever it was—then I wouldn’t be worried about my inability to remember it…

No. No, I have no recollection of…

Of what? What don’t I have any recollection of?

Well, if you say so. But this is very strange…

I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts. Although a cliche, that usually worked for me—but this time the thoughts didn’t go away.

I’m sure I’d remember something like that…

It wasn’t like I was hearing a voice; there was no sound, no timbre, no cadence. Just words, tickling at the periphery of my perception—articulated but unspoken words, identical to everything else I’d ever thought.

Except—

No, I have an excellent memory. Trivia, facts, figures…

Except these didn’t seem to be my thoughts.

Who did you say you are, again?

I shook my head more violently, my vision whipping from the mirrored closet doors on my left to a more ghostly reflection of myself hi the window on my right.

Good, okay. And my name is Jake Sullivan…

Strange. Very strange.

Karen looked over at me. “Is something wrong, dear?”

“No,” I said automatically. “No, I’m fine.”

Heaviside Crater was located at 10.4 degrees south latitude, and 167.1 degrees east longitude—pretty close to the center of the moon’s backside. That meant that Earth was straight down—separated from us by 3,500 kilometers of rock, plus almost a hundred times that much empty space.

Heaviside measured 165 kilometers across. The High Eden habitat was only five hundred meters across, so there was plenty of room to grow. Immortex projected there would be one million people a year uploading by 2060, and all the shed skins would have to be housed somewhere. Of course, it wasn’t expected that skins would stay in High Eden very long: just a year or two, before they died. Despite Immortex’s claims that their Mindscan process copied structures with total fidelity, the technology was always getting better, and nobody wanted to transfer any earlier than they had to.

High Eden consisted of a large assisted-living retirement home, a terminal-care hospital, and a collection of luxury apartments for the handful of us who had checked in here but didn’t require ‘round-the-clock aid. No—not checked in. Moved in. And there was no moving out.

Inside High Eden, all the rooms and corridors had very tall ceilings—it was too easy to send oneself flying up by accident. Even so, the ceilings were cushioned, just to be on the safe side; lighting fixtures were recessed into the padding. And there were plants everywhere—not only were they beautiful, but they also helped scrub carbon dioxide out of the air.

I’d always distrusted corporations, but, so far, Immortex had been true to its word.

My apartment was everything I could have asked for, and just as it had been shown in the Immortex VR tour. The furniture looked like real wood—natural pine, my favorite—but of course wasn’t. Although the motto of the company was that you could have any luxury you could pay for, I couldn’t very well take my old furniture from Toronto—that had to be left behind for my … my replacement—and it would have been outrageously expensive to ship new stuff up from Earth.

So instead, as the household computer politely informed me in response to my queries, the furniture was made of something called whipped regolith—pulverized, aerated rock, reformed into a material like very porous basalt—that had been covered with a microthin plastic veneer printed with an ultra-high-resolution image of real knotty pine. An exterior mimicking the natural over a manufactured interior. Not too disturbing, if you didn’t think about it much.

At first, I thought the overstuffed furniture was a bit miserly in its padding, but after I sat on it, I realized that you don’t need as much padding to feel comfortable on the moon. My eighty-five kilos now felt like fourteen; I was as light as a toddler back on Earth.

One wall was a smart window—and a first-rate one, too. You couldn’t make out the individual pixels, even if you put your face right up against it. The current image was Lake Louise, near Banff, Alberta—back before the glacier had mostly melted and flooded the whole area. I rather suspect it was a computer-generated image; I don’t think anybody could have made a high-enough resolution scan back then to produce this display. Gentle waves were moving across the lake, and blue sky reflected in the waters.

All in all, it was a cross between a five-star hotel suite and a luxury executive condo; very well-appointed, very comfortable.

Nothing to complain about.

Nothing at all.

It’s a modern myth that the majority of human communication isn’t verbal: that much more information is conveyed by facial expression and body language, and even, some would say, by pheromones, than by spoken words. But as every teenager knows, that’s ridiculous: they can spend hours talking on a voice-only phone, hearing nothing but the words the other person is saying, and interact totally. And so, even though my new artificial body was somewhat less expressive in non-verbal ways, I still had no trouble making even my most subtle nuances understood.

Or so I’d kidded myself into believing. But, the next morning, still in Karen’s hotel suite, as I looked again at her plastiskin face, at her camera eyes, I found myself desperate to know what she was thinking. And if I couldn’t tell what was going on inside her head, surely others couldn’t tell what was going on inside mine. And so I resorted to the time-honored technique. I asked: “What are you thinking?”

We were still lying in bed. Karen turned her head, looking away. “I’m thinking that I’m old enough to be your mother.”

I felt something I couldn’t quite quantify—it wasn’t like anything else. After a second, though, I recognized what it was an analog of: my stomach tightening into knots. At least she hadn’t said she was old enough to be my grandmother—although that was technically true, as well.

“I’m thinking,” she continued, “I have a son two years older than you.”

I nodded slowly. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“A woman my age with a man your age? People would look askance. They’d say…”

I told my voice box to laugh, and it did—rather unconvincingly, I thought. “They’d say I was after your money.”

“But that’s crazy, of course. You’ve got lots of money of your own … um, don’t you? I mean, after the transfer procedure, you still have lots left, no?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Honestly?”

I told her how much was in my stock portfolio; I also told her how much real estate I owned.

She rolled her head again, facing me, smiling. “Not bad for a young fellow like you.”

“It’s not that much,” I said. “I’m not stinking rich.”

“No,” she said, with a laugh. “Just a bit redolent.”

“Still…” I said, and let the word hang in the air.

“I know,” said Karen. “This is crazy. I’m almost twice as old as you are. What can we have in common? We grew up in different centuries. Different millennia, even.”

It was true beyond the need to comment.

“But,” said Karen, still looking away from me, “I guess life isn’t about the part of the journey that’s already done; it’s about the road ahead.” She paused. “Besides, I may be 200% of your age now, but a thousand years from now, I’ll be less than 105% of your age. And we both expect to be around a thousand years from now, don’t we?”

I paused, considering that. “I still have a hard time wrapping my head around what the word ‘immortality’ really means. But I guess you’re right. I guess the age difference isn’t so big a deal, when you put it that way.”

“You really think?” she said.

I took a moment. If I wanted out, this was the perfect opportunity, the perfect excuse. But if I didn’t want out, then we needed to put this issue behind us, once and for all. “Yeah,” I said. “I really do think.”

Karen rolled over, facing me. She was smiling. “I’m surprised you know Alanis Morissette.”

“Who?”

“Oh,” said Karen, and I could see her plastic features go slack. “She was a singer, very popular. Canadian, now that I think about it. And”—she imitated a husky voice that I’d never heard before—“ ‘Yeah, I really do think’ was a line from a song of hers called ‘Ironic.’ ”

“Ah,” I said.

Karen sighed. “But you don’t know that. You don’t know half the stuff I know—because you’ve only lived half as long.”

“Then teach me,” I said simply.

“What?”

“Teach me about the part of your life I missed. Bring me up to speed.”

She looked away. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Start with the highlights,” I said.

“There’s so much.”

I stroked her arm gently. “Try.”

“Wellllll,” said Karen, her drawl attenuating the word. “We went into space. We fought a stupid war in Vietnam. We turfed out a corrupt president. The Soviet Union fell. The European Union was born. Microwave ovens, personal computers, cell phones, and the World Wide Web appeared.” She shrugged a bit. “That’s the Reader’s Digest version.”

“The what?” But then I smiled. “No, just pulling your leg. My mom subscribed when I was a kid.”

But the joke had bothered her, I could tell. “It’s not history that separates us; it’s culture. We grew up reading different magazines, different books. We watched different TV shows. We listened to different music.”

“So what?” I said. “Everything’s online.” I smiled, remembering our earlier discussion. “Even copyrighted stuff—and the owners get micropayments automatically when we access it, right? So we can download your favorite books and all that, and you can introduce me to them. After all, you said we’ve got all the time in the world.”

Karen looked intrigued. “Yes, but, well, where would we start?”

“I’d love to know what TV shows you watched growing up.”

“You wouldn’t want to see old stuff like that. Two-dimensional, low-res … some of it even in black-and-white.”

“Sure, I would,” I said. “It’d be fun. In fact”—I gestured at the bedroom’s giant wall screen—“why don’t you pick something right now? Let’s get started.”

“You think?” said Karen.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to copy her imitation of this Alanis person’s voice, “I really do think.”

Karen’s lips moved strangely—perhaps she was trying to purse them as she considered. Then she spoke to the suite’s computer, accessing some online repository of old TV shows. And, a few moments later, white letters were appearing on the wall screen, one at a time, spelling out words, while a drum was beating in the background: THE…

Karen seemed quite excited as she sat up in the bed. “Okay, I’ve jumped ahead to the opening credits just so you’ll get the background—then we’ll go back and watch the teaser.”

…SIX MILLION…

“Okay,” she said. “See that guy in the cockpit? That’s Lee Majors.”

… DOLLAR MAN.

Karen went on. “He’s playing Steve Austin, an astronaut and test pilot.”

“How old is this show?” I asked, sitting up as well.

“This episode is from 1974.”

That was … Christ, that was as many years before I was born as … as Dad’s collapse was before today. “Was six million a lot then?”

“It was a fortune.”

“Hunh.”

There was crosstalk between pilots and ground control overtop of the images on the screen. “It looks good at NASA One.”

“Okay, Victor.”

“Landing rocket arm switch is on. Here comes the throttle…”

“See,” said Karen, “he’s testing an experimental aircraft, but it’s about to crash. He’s going to lose an arm, both legs, and an eye.”

“I know some restaurants he couldn’t eat at,” I said. I waited the perfect comic beat.

“They cost an arm and a leg.”

Karen whapped me lightly on the forearm as the little test aircraft dropped from the wing of a giant airplane. The craft looked like a bathtub—no wonder it was going to crash. “Anyway,” she said, “they replace his missing limbs with super-strong nuclear-powered duplicates, and they give him a new eye with a twenty-to-one zoom and the ability to see infrared.”

More crosstalk: “I’ve got a blowout, damper three…”

“Get your pitch to zero.”

“Pitch is out! I can’t hold altitude!”

“Correction: Alpha hold is off. Trim selectors, emergency!”

“Flight Com, I can’t hold it. She’s breaking up! She’s brea—”

The bathtub somersaulted across the screen, in very grainy footage. “That’s actual archival film,” said Karen. “This crash really happened.”

Something that I guessed was supposed to look like computer graphics appeared on the screen—apparently they drilled a hole all the way to the back of Steve Austin’s skull to put in his artificial eye—and soon the rebuilt human was running on a treadmill. I read the boxy numbers on its display. “Sixty kilometers an hour?” I said, disbelieving.

“Better,” said Karen grinning. “Sixty miles an hour.”

“Did he get insects spattered all over his face, like cars do on their windshields?”

Karen laughed. “No, and his hair never gets mussed either. I had posters of him in my bedroom when I was a teenager. He was gorgeous! ”

“I thought you were into that Superman guy, and—what was his name—Tom something?”

“Tom Selleck. Them, too. I had more than one wall, you know.”

“So this introduction to your culture is going to be one teen heartthrob after another, is that it?”

Karen laughed. “Don’t worry. I also used to watch Charlie’s Angels—I had my hair like Farrah Fawcett’s when I was seventeen. I’ll show you one of those next time; you’ll like it. It was the first jiggle show.”

“Jiggle?”

She snuggled close to me. “You’ll see.”