Mindscan

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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 floormounted 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.”

  CHAPTER 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 an
d 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. Um, 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 Portet “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. “Astonishring.”

  “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, welt—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 understimulated: 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 wa
sn’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.