Mindscan

6

I was suddenly somewhere else.

It was an instantaneous transfer, like changing channels on TV. I instantly was somewhere else—in a different room.

At first I was overwhelmed by strange physical sensations. My limbs felt numb, as though I’d slept on them funny. But I hadn’t been sleeping…

And then I was conscious of the things that I wasn’t feeling: there was no pain in my left ankle. For the first time in two years, since I’d torn some ligaments falling down a staircase, I felt no pain at all.

But I remembered the pain, and—

I did remember!

I was still myself.

I remembered my childhood in Port Credit.

I remembered being beaten up every day on the way to school by Colin Hagey.

I remembered the first time I’d read Karen Bessarian’s DinoWorld.

I remembered delivering The Toronto Star—back when papers were physically delivered.

I remembered the great blackout of 2015, and the darkest sky I’d ever seen.

And I remembered my dad collapsing in front of my eyes.

I remembered it all.

“Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sullivan, it’s me, Dr. Porter. You may have some trouble speaking at first. Do you want to try?”

“Ell-o.” The word sounded strange, so I repeated it several times: “Ell-o. Ell-o. Ell-o.” My voice didn’t seem quite right. But, then again, I was hearing it much as Porter was, through my own external microphones—ears, ears, ears!—rather than resonating through the nasal cavities and bones of a biological head.

“Very good!” said Porter; he was a disembodied voice—somewhere out of my field of view, but I wasn’t yet properly registering his location. “No respiratory asperity,” he continued, “but you’ll learn how to do that. Now, you may have a lot of unusual sensations, but you shouldn’t be in any pain. Are you?”

“No.” I was lying on my back, presumably on the gurney I’d seen earlier, staring up at the plain white ceiling. There was a general paucity of sensation, a sort of numbness—although there was some gentle pressure on my body from, I supposed, the terry-cloth robe that I was presumably now wearing.

“Good. If at any point pain begins, let me know. It can take a little while for your mind to learn how to interpret the signals it’s receiving; we can fix any discomfort that might arise, all right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, before we start trying to move, let’s make sure you can fully communicate. Can you count backwards from ten for me, please?”

“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Tree. Two. One. Zero.”

“Very good. Let’s try that ‘three’ once more.”

“Tree. Tree. Tuh-ree.”

“Keep trying.”

“Tree. Dree.”

“It’s an aspiration issue again, but you’ll get it.”

“Dree. Tree. Thuh-ree. Three! ”

I heard Porter’s hands clapping together. “Perfect!”

“Three! Three! Three!”

“By George, I think he’s got it!”

“Three! Thought, thing, teeth, theater, bath, math. Three!”

“Excellent. Are you still feeling okay?”

“Still—oh.”

“What?” asked Porter.

“My vision went off for a moment, but it’s back.”

“Really? That shouldn’t—”

“Oh, and there it goes—”

“Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sullivan?”

“I—it feels … oh…”

“Mr. Sullivan? Mr. Sulli—!”

Nothingness, for how long, I had no idea. Just total nothingness. When I came to, I spoke.

“Doc! Doc! Are you there?”

“Jake!” Porter’s voice. He let air out noisily in a “that’s a relief!” sort of way.

“Is something wrong, Doc? What was that?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Urn, ah, how do you feel now?”

“It’s strange,” I said. “I feel different—in a ’undred ways I can’t describe.”

Porter was quiet for a moment; perhaps he was distracted by something. But then he said, “Hundred.”

“What?”

“You said ’undred, not hundred. Try to get the H sound.”

“ ’Undred. ’Undred. Huhn-dred. Hundred.”

“Good,” said Porter. “It’s normal for there to be some differences in sensations, but as long as you’re basically feeling okay…?”

“Yes,” I said again. “I feel just fine.”

And I knew, in that instant, that I was fine. I was relaxed. For the first time in ages, I felt calm, safe. I wasn’t going to suddenly have a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Rather, I was going to live a full normal life. I’d get my biblical three-score-and-ten; I’d get the Statistics Canada eighty-eight years for males born in 2001; I’d get all of that and more. I was going to live. Everything else was secondary. I was going to live a good, long time, without paralysis, without being a vegetable. Whatever settling-in difficulties I encountered would be worth it. I knew that at once.

“Very good,” said Porter. “Now, let’s try something simple. See if you can turn your head toward me.”

I did so—and nothing happened. “It’s not working, doc.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll come. Try again.”

I did, and this time my head did loll left, and—

And—and—and—

Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

“That chair over there,” I said. “What color is it?”

Porter turned, surprised. “Um, green.”

“Green! So that’s what green looks like! It’s—cool, isn’t it? Soothing. And your shirt, doc? What color is your shirt?”

“Yellow.”

“Yellow! Wow!”

“Mr. Sullivan, are you—are you color-blind?”

“Not anymore!”

“Good God. Why didn’t you tell us?”

Why hadn’t I told them? “Because you hadn’t asked” was one true answer, but I knew there were others. Mostly I was afraid if I had told them, they’d have insisted on duplicating that aspect of who I’d been.

“What kind of color blindness do—did—you have?”

“Doo-something.”

“You’re deutanopic?” said Porter. “You’ve got M-cone deficiency?”

“That’s it, yes.” Almost nobody has true color blindness; that is, almost no one sees only in black and white. We deuteranopes see the world in shades of blue, orange, and gray, so that many colors that contrast sharply for people with normal vision look the same to us. Specifically, we see red and greenish-yellow as beige; magenta and green as gray; both orange and yellow as what I’d been told was a brick color; both blue-green and purple as mauve; and both indigo and cyan as cornflower blue.

Only medium blue and medium orange look the same to us as they do to people with normal vision.

“But you’re seeing color now?” asked Porter. “Astonishing.”

“That it is,” I said, delighted. “It’s all so—so garish. I don’t think I ever understood that word before. What an overwhelming variety of shades!” I rolled my head the other way, this time without thinking about it. I found myself facing a window. “The grass—my God, look at it! And the sky! How different they are from each other!”

“We’ll show you something colorful on vid later today, and—”

“Finding Nemo,” I said at once. “It was my favorite movie when I was a kid—and everybody said it was just full of color.”

Porter laughed. “If you like.”

“Great,” I said. “Lucky fin!” I tried to move my right arm in imitation of Nemo’s fishy high-five, but it didn’t actually rise. Ah, well—it would take time; they’d warned me about that.

Still, it felt wonderful to be alive, to be free.

“Try again, Jake,” said Porter. He astonished me by lifting his own arm in the “lucky fin!” gesture.

I made another attempt, and this time I was successful. “There, you see,” said Porter, his eyebrows working as always. “You’ll be fine. Now, let’s get you out of this bed.”

He took hold of my right arm—I could feel it as a matrix of a thousand points of pressure, instead of one smooth contact—and he helped me sit up. I used to suffer from occasional lightheadedness, and sometimes got dizzy when rising from the horizontal, but there was none of that.

I was in a bizarre sensory state. In most ways, I was under stimulated: I wasn’t conscious of any smells, and although I could tell I was now sitting up, which meant I had some notion of balance, there wasn’t any great downward pressure on the back of my thighs or my rear end. But my visual sense was overstimulated, assaulted by colors I’d never seen before. And if I looked at something featureless—like the wall—I could just make out the mesh of pixels that composed my vision.

“How are you doing?” asked Porter.

“Fine,” I said. “Wonderful!”

“Good. Perhaps now is a good time to tell you about the secret missions we’re going to send you out on.”

“What?!”

“You know, bionic limbs. Spying. Secret-agent cyborg stuff.”

“Dr. Porter, I—”

Porter’s eyebrows were dancing with glee. “Sorry. I expect I’ll eventually get tired of doing that, but so far it’s been fun every time. The only mission we have is to get you out of here, and back to your normal life. And that means getting you on your feet. Shall we give it a try?”

I nodded, and felt his arm under my elbow. Again the sensation wasn’t quite like normal pressure against skin, but I was certainly conscious of exactly where he was touching me. He helped me rotate my body until my legs dangled over the side of the gurney, and then he helped hoist me to a vertical position. He waited until I nodded that I was okay, and then he gingerly let go of me, allowing me to stand on my own.

“How does it feel?” Porter asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Any dizziness? Any vertigo?”

“No. Nothing like that. But it’s weird not breathing.”

Porter nodded. “You’ll get used to it—although you may have some momentary panic attacks: times when your brain shouts out, ‘Hey, we’re not breathing!’ ” He smiled his kindly smile. “I’d tell you to take a deep calming breath in those circumstances, but of course you can’t. So just fight down the sensation, or wait for it to pass. Do you feel panicky now because you’re not breathing?”

I thought about that. “No. No, it’s all right. Strange, though.”

“Take your time. We’re in no rush here.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to try taking a step?”

“Sure,” I said. But it was a few moments before I put word to deed. Porter was clearly poised to act, ready to catch me if I stumbled. I lifted my right leg, flexing my knee, swinging my thigh up, and letting my weight shift forward. It was a lurching first step, but it worked. I then tried lifting my left leg, but it swung wide, and—

God damn it!

I found myself pitching forward, completely off balance, the tiles, whose color was new to me and I couldn’t yet name, rushing toward my face.

Porter caught my arm and pulled me upright. “I can see we have our work cut out for us,” he said.

“This way please, Mr. Sullivan,” said Dr. Killian.

I thought about making a run for it. I mean, what could they do? I’d wanted to live forever, without a fate worse than death hanging over my head, but that was not to be. Not for this me, anyway. Me and my shadow: we were diverging rapidly. It—he, he—was doubtless somewhere else in this facility. But the rules were that I could never meet him. That was not so much for my benefit as his; he was supposed to regard himself as the one and only Jacob Sullivan, and seeing me still around—flesh where he was plastic; bone where he was steel—would make that feat of self-delusion more difficult.

Those were the rules.

Rules? Just terms in a contract I’d signed.

So, if I did make a break for it—

If I did run outside, into that sweltering August heat, and took my car, and raced back to my house, what sanction could be brought against me?

Of course, the other me would show up there eventually, too, and want to call the place his own.

Maybe we could live together. Like twins. Peas in a pod.

But, no, that wouldn’t work. I rather suspect you had to be born to that. Living with another me—I mean, Christ, I am so particular about where things are and, besides, he’d be up all night, doing God knows what, while I’d be trying to sleep.

No. No, there was no turning back.

“Mr. Sullivan?” Killian said again in her lilting Jamaican voice. “This way, please.” I nodded, and let her lead me down a corridor I hadn’t seen before. We walked a short distance and then we came to a pair of frosted-glass sliding doors. Killian touched her thumb to a scanner plate, and the doors moved aside. “Here you are,” she said. “When we’ve finished scanning everyone, the driver will take you to the airport.”

I nodded.

“You know, I envy you,” she said. “Getting away from—from everything. You won’t be disappointed, Mr. Sullivan. High Eden is wonderful.”

“You been there?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You don’t just open a resort like that cold. We had two weeks of dry-runs, with senior Immortex staff playing the parts of residents, to make sure the service was perfect.”

“And?”

“It is perfect. You’ll love it.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking away. There was no sign of an escape route. “I’m sure I will.”