Mindscan

5

Three more people arrived while we were waiting: others who’d decided to upload. But the receptionist called for me first, and I left Karen chatting with her fellow very senior citizens. I followed the receptionist down the brightly lit corridor, enjoying the swaying of her youthful hips, and was taken to an office with walls that looked gray to me—meaning they could have been that color, or green, or magenta.

“Hello, Jake,” said Dr. Porter, rising from his chair. “Good to see you again.”

Andrew Porter was a tall bear of a man, sixty or so, slightly stooped from dealing with a world populated by shorter people. He had squinty eyes, a beard, and hair combed straight back from a high forehead. His kindly face was home to eyebrows that seemed constantly in motion, as if they were working out, in training for the body-hair Olympics.

“Hello, Dr. Porter,” I said. I’d seen him twice before now, on previous visits here, during which I’d undergone various medical tests, filled out legal forms, and had my body—but not yet my brain—scanned.

“Are you ready to see it?” asked Porter.

I swallowed, then nodded.

“Good, good.” There was another door to the room, and Porter opened it with a theatrical flourish. “Jake Sullivan,” he declared, “welcome to your new home!”

In the next room, lying on a gurney, was a synthetic body, wearing a white terry-cloth robe.

I felt my jaw dropping as I looked down at it. The resemblance was remarkable.

Although there was a touch of department-store mannequin to the general appearance, it still was, without a doubt, me. The eyes were open, unblinking and unmoving. The mouth was closed. The arms lay limply at the sides.

“The boys and girls in Physiognomy tell me you were a cinch,” said Porter, grinning. “Usually, we’re trying to roll back the clock several decades, recreating what a person had looked like when they were in their prime; after all, no one wants to upload into a body that looks like it’s on its last legs. You’re the youngest person they’ve ever had to do.”

It was my face, all right—the same long shape; the same cleft chin; the same thin lips; the same wide mouth; the same close-together eyes, the same dark eyebrows above them. Crowning it all was thick dark hair. All the gray had been removed, and—I craned to look—the duplicate had no bald spot.

“A few minor touch-ups,” said Porter, grinning. “Hope you don’t mind.”

I’m sure I was grinning, too. “Not at all. It’s—it’s quite amazing.”

“We’re pleased. Of course, the underlying synthetic skull is identical in shape to yours—it was made with 3D-prototyping equipment from the stereo x-rays we took; it even has the same pattern of sutures, marking where the separate skull bones fused together.”

I’d had to sign a release for the extensive x-rays used to produce the artificial skeleton. I’d received a big enough dose in one day to increase my future likelihood of cancer—but, then again, most Immortex clients were going to die soon, long before any cancers could pose a problem.

Porter touched the side of the simulated head; the jaw opened, revealing the highly detailed mouth within.

“The teeth are exact copies of your own layout—we’ve even embedded a denser ceramic composite at the right points to match the two fillings you have: dental biometrics would identify this head as being yours. Now, you can see there’s a tongue, but, of course, we don’t actually use the tongue for speech; that’s all done with voice-synthesizer chips. But it should do a pretty good job of faking it. The opening and closing of the jaw will match the sounds being produced perfectly—kind of like Supermarionation.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Thunderbirds? Captain Scarlet?”

I shook my head.

Porter sighed. “Well, anyway, the tongue is very complex—the most complex part of the recreation, actually. It doesn’t have taste buds, since you won’t need to eat, but it is pressure sensitive and, as I said, it will make the appropriate movements to match what your voice chip is saying.”

“It’s really … uncanny,” I said, and then I smiled. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever actually used that word.”

Porter laughed, but then pointed at me. “Now, sadly we haven’t been able to replicate that: when you smile, you’ve got a great dimple in your left cheek. The artificial head doesn’t do that. We’ve noted it in your file, though—I’m sure we’ll be able to add it in a future upgrade.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You’ve done a terrific job as is.”

“Thanks. We like people to become familiar with the appearance before we transfer them into an artificial body—it’s good that you know what to expect. Are there any particular activities you’re looking forward to?”

“Baseball,” I said at once.

“That will take a lot of eye-hand coordination, but it will come.”

“I want to be as good as Singh-Samagh.”

“Who?” asked Porter.

“He’s a starting pitcher for the Blue Jays.”

“Oh. I don’t follow the game. I can’t guarantee you’ll ever be professional caliber, but you’ll definitely be at least as good, if not better, than you were before.”

He went on. “You’ll find that all the proportions are exactly the same as your current body—the length of each finger segment, of each limb segment, and so on. Your mind has built up a very sophisticated model of what your body is like—how long your arms are, at what point along their length the elbow or knee occurs, et cetera. That mental model is adaptable while you’re still growing, but becomes pretty firmly entrenched in middle age. We’ve tried making short people tall, and correcting for mismatched limb lengths, but it created more problems than it was worth—people have a lot of trouble adjusting to a body that isn’t like their original.”

“Urn, does that mean…? I’d thought…”

Porter laughed. “Ah, yes. We do mention that in our literature. Well, you see, the male sex organ is a special case: it varies substantially in size depending on temperature, arousal, and so on. So, yes, as a matter of course, we upsize what nature provided in the original, unless you specifically indicated you didn’t want that on the forms you filled out; the mind is already used to the penis having variable form, so it seems to deal well with an extra few centimeters.” Porter pulled at the terry-cloth sash holding the robe closed.

“My goodness,” I said, feeling awfully silly, but also awfully impressed. “Um, thank you.”

“We aim to please,” said Porter, with a beatific smile.

Ray Kurzweil had been the most vocal proponent around the time I was born of moving our minds into artificial bodies. His books from that time—the classic is The Age of Spiritual Machines, from 1999—proposed that within thirty years of then (meaning sixteen years ago from now)—it would be possible to copy “the locations, interconnections, and contents of all the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, neurotransmitter concentrations, and other neural components and levels” of an individual’s mind, so that that mind’s “entire organization can then be recreated on a neural computer of sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory.”

It’s fun re-reading that book today, with 20/20—hell, with 2045—hindsight. Kurzweil got some things right, but missed out on several other key points. For instance, the technology to scan the brain at the supposedly required level of resolution appeared in the year 2019, but it turned out to do no good because the scanning took hours to complete, and, of course, even a sedated individual’s brain undergoes all sorts of transitions during that period. Stitching together data about the brain over such a lengthy period produced a nonfunctional mess; it was impossible to match up visual impulses (or lack thereof) from the back of the head with thoughts about completely different impulses from the front of the head. Consciousness is the synchronized action of the entirety of the brain; scans that take anything more than mere moments to make would always be useless for reconstituting it.

But Immortex’s Mindscan process allowed the taking of an overall, comprehensive, instantaneous snapshot. Dr. Porter took me down the hall to the scanning room, which had walls that looked orange to me. “Jake,” said Porter, “this is Dr. Killian.” He indicated a plain-looking black woman of about thirty. “Dr. Killian is one of our quantum physicists. She’ll operate the scanning equipment.”

Killian stepped toward me. “And it won’t hurt a bit, I promise,” she said with a Jamaican accent.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I’ll get back to my end,” said Porter. Killian smiled at him, and he left.

“I think you know,” Killian continued, “that we use quantum fog to do our brain scans. We permeate your head with subatomic particles—the fog. Those particles are quantally entangled with identical particles that Dr. Porter will soon be injecting into the artificial braincase of the new body he showed you; that body is still down the corridor, but distance doesn’t matter to quantum entanglement”

I nodded; I also knew that Immortex had a strict policy about never letting the upload meet the original after transference. You could have a family member or a lawyer confirm that the upload and the original were both functioning just fine after the copying process, but despite Karen’s earlier quip about looking forward to being beside herself, it was considered psychologically bad for two versions of the same person to ever meet; it destroyed one’s sense of personal uniqueness.

Dr. Killian made a concerned face. “Now, I understand you have an AVM,” she said. “But of course your new body doesn’t rely on a circulatory system, so that’s irrelevant to it.”

I nodded. In just a few more minutes, I’d be free! My heart was pounding.

“All you have to do,” continued Dr. Killian, “is lie down on this bed, here. We slide it into that scanning chamber—looks a bit like an MRI, doesn’t it? And then we make the scan. It only takes about five minutes, and almost all of that is just setting up the scanners.”

The idea that I was about to diverge was daunting. The me that was going to come out of this scanning cylinder would go on with its life, heading this afternoon to Pearson to catch the spaceplane, and from there it would go to the moon to live—how long? A few months? A few years? Whatever paltry amount his Katerinsky’s would allow.

And the other Jake—who would just as vividly remember this moment—would soon go home and pick up his life where I’d left it off, but without potential brain damage or an early death hanging over his titanium head.

Two versions.

It was incredible.

I wished there was some way to copy only parts of myself, but that would require an understanding of the mind beyond what Immortex currently had. Too bad: there were plenty of memories I’d be happy to have edited out. The circumstances of Dad’s injury, of course. But other things, too: embarrassments, thoughts I wasn’t proud of, times when I’d hurt others and others had hurt me.

I lay down on the bed, which was attached by metal floor-mounted tracks to the scanning chamber.

“You push the green button to slide in,” said Killian, “and the red one to slide out.”

By old habit, I watched carefully to see which button she was gesturing to at which point. I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Press the green button.”

I did so, and the bed slid into the scanning tube. It was quiet in there—so quiet I could hear my pulse in my ears, the gurgling of my digestion. I wondered what internal sounds, if any, I’d be aware of in my new body?

Regardless, I was looking forward to my new existence. Quantity of life didn’t matter that much to me—but quality! And to have time—not only years spreading out into the future, but time in each day. Uploads, after all, didn’t have to sleep, so not only did we get all those extra years, we got one-third more productive time.

The future was at hand.

Creating another me.

Mindscan.

“All right, Mr. Sullivan, you can come out now.” It was Dr. Killian’s voice, with its Jamaican lilt.

My heart sank. No…

“Mr. Sullivan? We’ve finished the scanning. If you’ll press the red button…”

It hit me like a ton of bricks, like a tidal wave of blood. No! I should be somewhere else, but I wasn’t.

Damn it all, I wasn’t.

“If you need some help getting out…” offered Killian.

I reflexively brought up my hands, patting my chest, feeling the softness of it, feeling it rise and fall. Jesus Christ!

“Mr. Sullivan?”

“I’m coming, damn it. I’m coming.”

I hit the button without looking at it, and the bed slid out of the scanning tube, emerging feet-first; a breech birth. Damn! Damn! Damn!

I hadn’t exerted myself at all, but my breathing was rapid, shallow. If only—

I felt a hand cupping my elbow. “I’ve got you, Mr. Sullivan,” said Killian. “Upsa-daisy…” My feet connected with the harsh tile floor. I had known intellectually that it had been a fifty-fifty shot, but I’d only thought about what it was going to be like to wake up in a new, healthy, artificial body. I hadn’t really considered…

“Are you all right, Mr. Sullivan?” she asked. “You look—”

“I’m fine,” I snapped. “Fine and dandy. Jesus Christ—”

“Is there something I can—”

“I’m doomed. Don’t you get it?”

She frowned. “Do you want me to call a medical doctor?”

I shook my head. “You just scanned my consciousness, making a duplicate of my mind, right?” My voice was sneering. “And since I’m aware of things after you finished the scanning, that means I—this version—isn’t that copy. The copy doesn’t have to worry about becoming a vegetable anymore—it’s free. Finally and at last, it’s free of everything that’s been hanging over my head for the last twenty-seven years. We’ve diverged now, and the cured me has started down its path. But this me is still doomed. I could have woken up in a new, healed body, but—”

Killian’s voice was gentle. “But, Mr. Sullivan, one of you was bound to still be in this body…”

“I know, I know, I know.” I shook my head, and took a few paces forward. There was no window in the scanning room, which was probably just as well; I don’t think I was quite ready to face the world. “And the one of us that is still in this bloody body, with this fucked brain, is still doomed.”