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.”
CHAPTER 7
I was sitting in a wheelchair in Dr. Porter’s office, waiting for him to return. I wasn’t the first Mindscan to have trouble walking, he said. Perhaps not. But I probably hated being in a wheelchair more than most—after all, that was how they moved my father around. I’d been trying to avoid that fate, and instead had ended up echoing it.
But I wasn’t brooding too much about it. Indeed, the combined excitement of getting a new body and seeing new colors was overwhelming, so much so that I was only dimly aware of the fact that the original me must now have started on his journey to the moon. I wished him well. But I wasn’t supposed to think about him, and I tried not to.
In some ways, of course, it would have been easier just to shut that other me off. Funny way of phrasing it: the other one was the biological version, not this one. But “shutting it off”—it, now!—had been the way the thought had come to me. After all, this whole rigmarole with a retirement community on Lunar Farside would be unnecessary if the original could be discarded now that it was no longer needed.
But the law would never stand for that—not even here in Canada, let alone south of the border. Ah, well, I’d never see the other me again, so what did it matter? I—this me, the new-improved, in-living-color Jacob Paul Sullivan—was the one and only real me from now on, until the end of time.
Finally, Porter returned. “Here’s someone who might be able to help you,” he said. “We’ve got technicians, of course, who could work with you on your walking, Jake, but it occurred to me that she might be better able to give you a hand. I think you already know each other.”
From my position in the wheelchair I looked at the woman who had just entered the room, but I couldn’t place the face. She was plain, perhaps thirty, with dark hair sensibly short, and—
And she was artificial. I hadn’t realized it until she moved her head just so, and the light caught her in a certain way.
“Hello, Jake,” she said, with a lovely Georgia drawl. Her voice was stronger than before, with no quavering. She was wearing a beautiful sun dress with a floral print; I was still sulking in my teny-cloth robe.
“Karen?” I said. “My goodness, look at you!”
She spun around—apparently she was having no difficulty controlling her new body. “You like?” she said.
I smiled. “You look fabulous.”
She laughed; it sounded a bit forced, but that was surely because it was generated by a voice chip, rather than that the mirth was insincere. “Oh, I’ve never looked fabulous. This”—she spread her arms—“is what I looked like in 1990. I’d thought about going younger, but that would have been silly.”
“Nineteen-ninety,” I repeated. “So you would have been—”
“Thirty,” Karen said, without hesitation. But I was surprised at myself; I knew better than to ask a woman her age; I’d intended to keep my little bit of mental math private.
She went on: “It seemed a sensible compromise between youth and maturity. I doubt I could fake how vacuous I was at twenty.”
“You look great,” I said again.
“Thanks,” she said. “So do you.”
I doubted my synthetic flesh was capable of blushing, but that’s what I felt like doing. “Just a few touch-ups here and there.”
Dr. Porter said, “I asked Ms. Bessarian if she would work with you for a bit. See, she’s been through this in a way even our technicians haven’t.”
“through what?” I asked.
“Learning to walk again as an adult,” said Karen.
I looked at her, not getting it.
“After my stroke,” Karen supplied, smiling.
“Ah, right,” I said. Her smile was no longer lopsided; the stroke damage would have been faithfully copied in the nanogel of her new brain, I supposed, but maybe they had some electronic trick that simply made the left half of her mouth execute a mirror image of whatever the right half was doing.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” said Porter. He made a show of rubbing his belly. “Maybe I’ll grab a late lunch—you folks are lucky enough not to need to eat anymore, but I’m getting hungry.”
“And besides,” said Karen, and I swear there was a twinkle in one of her synthetic green eyes, “letting one Mindscan help another is probably good for both of them, right? Lets them both know that there are others like them, and gets them away from the alienating feeling of being poked and prodded by scientists.”
Porter made an impressed face. “I could have sworn you didn’t opt for the x-ray vision option,” he said, “but you see right through me, .Ms. Bessarian. You’re a psychologist at heart”
“I’m a novelist,” Karen said. “Same thing.”
Porter smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me …”
He left the room, and Karen appraised me, hands on hips. “So,” she said, “you’re having trouble walking.”
She was reasonably small, but I still had to look up at her from the wheelchair. “Yeah,” I said, the syllable mixing embarrassment and frustration.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll be fine. You can teach your mind to make your body obey it. Believe me, I know—not only did I have to deal with a stroke, but when I was a girl down in Atlanta, I used to dance ballet—you learn a lot about how to control your body doing that. So, shall we get started?”
My whole life, I’d been terrible at asking for help; I somehow thought it was a sign of weakness. But here I wasn’t asking for it; it was being freely offered. And, I had to admit, I did need it.
“Um, sure,” I said.
Karen brought her hands together in front of her chest in a clap. I remembered how swollen her joints had been before, how translucent her skin. But now her hands were supple, youthful. “Wonderful!” she exclaimed. “We’ll have you back to normal in no time.” She held out her right hand, I took it, and she hoisted me to my feet. Porter had given me a dark brown, wooden cane. It was leaning against the wall; I gestured to it. Karen handed it to me, and I managed to make my way out of the room into a long corridor. Fluorescent light panels covered its ceilings, and I also spotted tiny camera units hanging down at intervals. Doubtless Dr. Porter or one of his minions was watching.
“All right,” said
Karen, standing in front of me and facing toward me. “Remember, you can’t hurt yourself by falling; you’re way too durable for that now. So, let’s give it a try without the cane.”
I propped the cane against the corridor wall, but no sooner had I done so than it fell to the floor; not an auspicious start. “Leave it,” said Karen. I lifted my left foot, and immediately teetered forward, slamming it back into the ground as I did so. I quickly lifted my right leg, swinging it around stiffly, as if it lacked a knee.
“Pay attention to exactly how your body is responding,” said Karen. “I know walking is something we normally do subconsciously, but try to recognize exactly what effect you get with each mental command.”
I managed a couple more steps. If I’d still been biological, I’d have been breathing deeply and sweating, but I’m sure there was no external indication of my exertion. Still, it was enormously hard work, and I felt as though I was going to tumble over. I stopped, standing motionless, trying to regain my balance.
“I know it’s hard,” said Karen. “But it does get easier. It’s all a question of learning a new vocabulary: this thought produces that action, and—ah! Look, see: your upper leg moved just fine that time. Try to reproduce that mental command exactly.”
I tried again to move my left leg forward, putting my weight on it, then I tried moving my right leg. This time I got a little bending to occur at the knee, but it still swung widely as it came forward.
“There,” said Karen. “That’s right. Your body wants to do the right things; you just have to tell it how.”
I would have grunted, but I didn’t know how to make my new body do that yet, either. The corridor looked frightfully long, its sides converging at what might as well have been kilometers away.
“Now,” said Karen, “try another step. Concentrate—see if you can keep that right leg more under control.”
“I am trying,” I said testily, lurching forward once more.
Her drawl was kind. “I know you are, Jake.”
It was hard work mentally—like the frustration you feel when trying to recall a fact that’s just out of reach, multiplied a thousand fold.
“You’re doing great,” she said. “Really, you are.” Karen was walking backwards, a half-step at a time. I briefly wondered how many years it had been since she’d walked backwards; an old woman, desperately afraid of breaking a hip or a leg, doubtless took small, shuffling steps most of the time, and forward—always forward.
I forced myself to take another step, then one more. Despite all of Immortex’s best efforts to exactly copy the dimensions of my limbs, I was conscious that the center of gravity in my torso was higher up, perhaps due to my lack of hollow lungs. No big deal, but it did make me even more prone to falling forward.
And, at that moment, I realized I’d been thinking about something other than planting one foot in front of another—that my subconscious and conscious were now at least in some degree of agreement about the mechanics of walking.
“Bravo!” said Karen. “You’re doing just fine.” Beneath the fluorescent lights, she looked particularly artificial: her skin had a dry, plastic sheen; her eyes, not really moist, likewise looked plastic—although, as I now could appreciate, they were a really lovely shade of green.
We continued on, lurching step after lurching step; I imagined if I looked back over my shoulder, I’d see the villagers chasing me with their torches.
“That’s it!” said Karen. “That’s perfect!”
Another step, and—
My right leg not moving quite the way I intended—
“God—”
My left ankle twisting to one side—
“—damn—”
My torso tipping farther and farther forward—
“—it!”
Karen surged forward, easily catching me in her outstretched arms, before I could fall flat on my face.
“There, there,” she said, soothingly, her new body having no trouble supporting my weight. “There, there. It’s okay.”
I felt humiliated and furious—at Immortex, and at myself. I pushed hard against Karen’s arms, forcing myself back into a standing position. I didn’t like asking for help—but I liked even less to fail when someone else was watching; indeed, it was doubly bad, since we were surely also being observed on closed-circuit video.
“That’s enough for just now,” she said, moving in next to me, and slipping an arm around my waist. She led me in a half-turn, and with her support, I hobbled back and got my cane.
CHAPTER 8
When I was a kid, I never thought Toronto would have a spaceport. But now almost every city did, at least potentially. Spaceplanes could take off and land on any runway big enough to accommodate a jumbo jet.
Commercial spaceflight was funny from a jurisdictional point of view. The spaceplane we were about to board would take off from Toronto and land again in Toronto; it would never visit any other country, although it would fly above lots of them at an altitude of up to 300 kilometers. Still, since it was technically a domestic flight, and since our ultimate destination, aboard a different vehicle, was the moon, which had no government, we didn’t require passports. That was just as well, because we’d left them behind for our … “replacements” I supposed was a good-enough word.
The Jetway was already connected by the time we arrived at the departure lounge. Our spaceplane was one giant delta wing. Engines were mounted above the wing, instead of below it—to protect them in reentry, I guessed. The upper hull was painted white, and the underbelly was black. The North American Airlines logo appeared in several places, and the plane itself had a name marked in a script typeface near the leading point of the triangle: Icarus. I wondered what mythologically challenged suit had come up with that.
There were ten of us associated with Immortex making the flight today, plus another eighteen passengers who were going into orbit for other reasons—mostly tourism, judging by the snatches of conversation I overheard. Of the ten Immortex tickets, six were shed skins—a term I’d overheard, although I rather suspect I wasn’t supposed to—and four were staff replacements, going up to change places with people already at High Eden.
We boarded by row numbers, just like an airplane. I was in row eight, a window seat. The guy next to me turned out to be one of the staff replacements. He was about thirty, with that sort of freckly face that I’m told usually went with red hair, although I couldn’t be sure what color his was.
My chair was one of the special seats Sugiyama had talked about during his sales pitch: it was covered with ergonomically sculpted padding filled with some sort of shock-absorbing gel. I wanted to protest that I didn’t need a special seat—my bones were hardly brittle—but the flight was full, so there’d have been no point.
I’d gathered that safety briefings on airplanes were usually perfunctory, but we had to spend an hour and forty-five minutes listening to and participating in safety demonstrations, particularly related to what to do once we became weightless. For instance, there were vomit receptacles with attached vacuum cleaners that we had to—had to, had to!—use if we got motion sickness; apparently it’s very easy to choke on your own puke in microgravity.
Finally, it was time for takeoff. The big plane pulled away from the Jetway and headed onto the runway. I could see shimmers in the air caused by heat. We rolled very, very quickly down the runway, and just before we reached its end, we shot up at quite a sharp angle. Suddenly, I was glad for the gel padding.
I looked out the window. We were flying east, which meant we had to go right by downtown Toronto. I took a last look at the CN Tower, the SkyDome, the aquarium, and the banking towers.
My home. The place I’d grown up in. The place my mother, and my father, still lived in.
The place …
My eyes stung a bit.
The place Rebecca Chong still lived in.
A place I’d never see again.
Already, the sky was starting to blacken.
I so
on recognized the social difficulties of being in an artificial body. Biology gave excuses: I have to eat, I’m tired, I need to go to the bathroom. All of those disappeared, at least with these particular bodies. Indeed, I wondered if Immortex would ever add such things. After all, who ever really wanted to be tired? It was an inconvenience at best; dangerous at worst.
I’d always thought of myself as a basically honest guy. But it was now immediately obvious to me that I’d been a constant purveyor of little white lies. I’d relied on the subjectively plausible—perhaps I was tired—to get out of awkward or boring activities; when I’d been biologically instantiated, I’d had a repertoire of such phrases that would allow me to gracefully bail out of a social situation I didn’t want to be in. But now, none of them would ring true—especially not to another upload. I was humiliated by my inability to walk, and desperate to get away from this ancient, mothering woman in the thirty-year-old package, but was failing to come up with a polite out.
And we had to stay here for three days of tests: this was Tuesday, so we’d be here through Friday. We each had a small room—with, ironically, a bed, not that we’d need to use it. But I did very much want to retreat there, to just be the hell alone.
I was still wearing the terry-cloth robe. I used my cane as we walked back down the corridor that had just defeated me. Karen had tried giving me a helping hand, but I’d shrugged it off, and I found myself looking away from her, and at the wall nearest me, as we continued on.
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