It was the one item I knew the artificial me wouldn’t miss.
I set up the robokitchen to take care of feeding my dog while—well, I was about to say, “While I was gone,” but that’s not quite right. But it would feed her during the changing of the guard …
“Well, Clamhead,” I said, scratching the old girl vigorously behind the ears, “I guess that’s it. You be a good girl, now.”
She barked her agreement, and I headed for the door.
Immortex’s facility was in Markham, a high-tech haven in the northern part of Toronto. I drove out to my appointment, heading east along the 407—somewhat irritated that I had to do the driving. Where the hell was the self-driving car? I understood that flying cars would likely never exist—too much potential for major damage when one came crashing out of the sky. But when I’d been a boy, they’d promised there would be self-driving cars soon. Alas, so many of the things that had been predicted had been based on the school of thought known as strong AI—the notion that artificial intelligence as powerful, intuitive, and effective as human intelligence would soon be developed. The complete failure of strong AI had taken a lot of people by surprise.
Immortex’s technique detoured around that roadblock. Instead of replicating consciousness—which would require understanding exactly how it worked—the Immortex scientists simply copied consciousness. The copy was as intelligent, and as aware, as the original. But a de novo AI, programmed from the ground up, such as Hal 9000—the computer from that tedious movie whose title was the year I had been born—was still an unfulfilled fantasy.
Immortex’s facility wasn’t large—but, then, they weren’t a high-volume business. Not yet. I noted that the entire first row of parking spaces was designated for handicapped visitors—far more than Ontario law required, but, then again, Immortex catered to an unusual demographic. I parked in the second row and got out.
The wall of heat hit me like a physical blow. Southern Ontario in August had supposedly been hot and muggy even a century ago. Little incremental increases, year by year, had all but banished snow from Toronto’s winters and had made high summer almost unbearable. Still, I couldn’t complain too much; those in the southern U.S. had it far, far worse—doubtless that was one of the reasons that Karen had moved from the South to Detroit.
I got my overnight bag, with the things I’d need for my stay here at Immortex, out of the back seat. I then walked quickly to the front door, but found myself perspiring as I did so. That would be another advantage of an artificial body, no doubt: no more sweating like the proverbial pig. Still, I might have been sweating anyway today, even if it hadn’t been so bloody hot; I was certainly nervous. I went through the revolving glass door, and took a nice, deep breath of the cool air inside. I then presented myself to the receptionist, who was seated behind a long granite counter. “Hi,” I said, surprised at how dry my mouth was. “I’m Jacob Sullivan.”
The receptionist was a young, pretty, white woman. I was just as used to seeing men holding that job, but the clients of Immortex had grown up in the last century—they expected eye candy at the front desk. She consulted an air screen, holographic data floating in front of her. “Ah, yes. You’re a bit early, I’m afraid; they’re still calibrating the Mindscan equipment.” She looked at my overnight bag, then said, “Do you also have your luggage for the moon?”
Words I’d never thought I’d hear in my life. “In the trunk of my car,” I said.
“You understand the mass-allowance limits? Of course, you can take more, but we’ll have to charge you for it, and it might not go on today’s flight.”
“No, that’s fine. I ended up not bringing very much. Just a few changes of clothes.”
“You won’t miss your old stuff,” said the woman. “High Eden is fabulous, and they have everything you could possibly want.”
“Have you been there?”
“Me? No, not yet. But, you know, in a few decades …”
“Really? You’re planning to upload?”
“Oh, sure. Immortex has a great employee plan for that. It helps you save for the Mindscan process, and the expenses of keeping your original alive on the moon.”
“Well … um, see you in …”
The woman laughed. “I’m twenty-two, Mr. Sullivan. Don’t take this personally, but I’ll be disappointed if I see you again in anything less than sixty years.”
I smiled. “It’s a date.”
She indicated a luxuriously appointed waiting area. “Won’t you have a seat? We’ll get your luggage later. The airport van doesn’t show up until mid-afternoon.”
I smiled again and walked over.
“Well, look who’s here!” said a voice with a Southern accent.
“Karen!” I said, looking at the old, gray-haired woman. “How are you?”
“Soon to be beside myself, I hope.”
I laughed. I’d had butterflies in my stomach, but felt them being dispelled.
“So, what are you doing here?” asked Karen.
I sat down opposite her. “I’m—oh. I never told you, did I? I have a condition—they call it an arteriovenous malformation: bad blood vessels in my brain. I—that night, I was checking out the procedure for myself.”
“I kind of thought so,” said Karen. “And you’ve obviously decided to undergo it.”
I nodded.
“Well, good—”
“Excuse me,” said the receptionist, who had walked over to join us. “Mr. Sullivan, would you like something to drink?”
“Um, sure. Coffee? Double-double.”
“We can only give you decaf before the scanning. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“And Ms. Bessarian,” asked the receptionist, “would you like anything else?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
The receptionist moved away.
“Bessarian?” I repeated, my heart pounding. “Karen Bessarian?”
Karen smiled her lopsided smile. “That’s me.”
“You wrote DinoWorld?”
“Yes.”
“DinoWorld. Return to DinoWorld. DinoWorld Reborn. You wrote all of those?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Wow.” I paused, trying to think of something better to say, but couldn’t. “Wow.”
“Thank you.”
“I loved those books.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean, I really loved them. But I guess you hear that a lot.”
Her wrinkled face creased even more as she smiled again. “I never quite get tired of it.”
“No, no. Of course not. I actually own hardcopies of those books—that’s how much I like them. Did you ever think they were going to be so successful?”
“I never even thought they were going to be published. I was as surprised as anyone when they became as big as they did.”
“What do you think made them such huge hits?”
She lifted her bony shoulders. “That’s not for me to say.”
“I think it’s that kids could enjoy them and adults could, too,” I said. “Like the Harry Potter stuff.”
“Well, there’s no doubt that I owe a lot of my success to J. K. Rowling.”
“Not that your books are anything like hers, but they’ve got that same broad appeal.”
“‘Finding Nemo meets Harry Potter by way of Jurassic Park’—that’s what the New York Times said back when my first book was published. Anthropomorphic animals: my intelligent dinosaurs seemed to appeal to people the same way those talking fish did.”
“What did you think of the movies they made of your books?”
“Oh, I loved them,” said Karen. “They were fabulous. Fortunately, they made my movies after the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films. It used to be that studios acquired novels just so they could butcher them; the end product was nothing like the original book. But after Harry Potter and the Tolkien films, they realized that there was an even bigger market for faithful adaptations. In fact, audiences got angry w
hen a favorite scene was missing, or a memorable line of dialog was changed.”
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to the creator of Prince Scales.”
She smiled that lopsided smile again. “Everybody has to be somewhere.”
“So, Prince Scales—he’s such a vivid character! Who’s he based on?”
“No one,” said Karen. “I made him up.”
I shook my head. “No, no—I mean, who was the inspiration?”
“Nobody. He’s a product of my imagination.”
I nodded knowingly. “Ah, okay. You don’t want to say. Afraid he’ll sue, eh?”
The old woman frowned. “No, it’s nothing like that. Prince Scales doesn’t exist, isn’t real, isn’t based on anyone real, isn’t a portrait or a parody. I just made him up.”
I looked at her, but said nothing.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Karen asked.
“I wouldn’t say that, but—”
She shook her head. “People are desperate to believe writers base our characters on real people, that the events in our novels really happened in some disguised way.”
“Ah,” I said. “Sorry. I—I guess it’s an ego thing. I can’t imagine making up a publishable story, so I don’t want to believe that others have that capability. Talents like that make the rest of us feel inadequate.”
“No,” said Karen. “No, if you don’t mind me saying so, it goes deeper than that, I think. Don’t you see? The idea that false people can just be manufactured goes to the heart of our religious beliefs. When I say that Prince Scales doesn’t really exist, and you’ve only been fooled into thinking that he does, then I open up the possibility that Moses didn’t exist—that some writer just made him up. Or that Mohammed didn’t really say and do the things ascribed to him. Or that Jesus is a fictional character, too. The whole of our spiritual existence is based on this unspoken assumption that writers record, but they don’t fabricate—and that, even if they did, we could tell the difference.”
I looked around the waiting room, here at this place where they mated android bodies with scanned copies of brains. “I’m glad I’m an atheist,” I said.
CHAPTER 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 re-creation, 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.”
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 re-created 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.
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