“So he got a crater named after him?”
“Two, actually. One here on the moon, and another on Mars. But, see, in a way we’re not just going to Heaviside crater. We’re going to the best place ever—the ideal retirement community. The perfect heaven for old cats.”
“Heaven,” I repeated. I felt my spine tingle.
Toronto. August. A warm breeze off the lake.
The play had been terrific—perhaps Widdicombe’s best—and the evening was pleasantly warm.
And Karen looked—well, not lovely; that would be going too far. She was a plain thirty-year old woman, but she’d dressed up very nicely. Of course, some people had stared at us, but Karen had just stared right back. In fact, she’d told one gawking man that if he didn’t look away, she’d turn on her heat vision.
In any event, I could hardly complain about Karen’s appearance. I hadn’t been any bargain to look at when I’d been flesh—too skinny, I knew, eyes too close together, ears too large, and …
And …
Funny, that. I only remembered those things because Trista, that cruel girl, had enumerated them in high school, ticking off my faults when I’d asked her out on a date— another of the great moments in Jake’s love life. I could remember her words, but …
But I was having a hard time conjuring up a mental picture of my current self. The psychologists at Immortex had advised us to get rid of any photos of our old selves we had on display in our homes, but I hadn’t had any. Still, it was days since I’d seen myself in a mirror, and even then—now that I no longer had to shave—they’d only been cursory glances. Could I really be forgetting what I used to look like?
Regardless of appearances, though, it was doubtless easier for an eighty-five-year-old woman to put her hand on the knee of a forty-four-year man than the other way around.
And, to my shock, Karen did just that, back in her hotel suite, after the play, the two of us sitting side by side on the lush, silk-upholstered couch in the living room. She unfolded her hand in her lap, lifting it, moving it slowly, giving me plenty of time to signal with body language or facial expression or words that I didn’t want it to complete its obvious trajectory—and she let it come to rest on my right thigh, just above the knee.
I felt the warmth of her touch—not quite 37 degrees Celsius, but certainly more than room temperature.
And I felt the pressure, too: the gentle constricting of her fingers on the shifting plastic over the mechanics and hydraulics of my knee.
The hand of the biological Karen would have been liver-spotted, with translucent, loose skin, and swollen, arthritic joints.
But this hand …
This hand was youthful, with clean unblemished skin, and silvery white nails. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring; she’d still been wearing one at the Immortex sales pitch. I guess maybe she’d let the biological original take it to the moon.
Still, that hand …
I shook my head slightly, trying to dispel the picture of her old biological appendage that my mind kept superimposing on the new, sleek, synthetic one.
I remembered taking a psychology course, years ago, in which the prof talked about intentionality—the ability of the mind to affect external reality. “I don’t think about moving my arm,” she said. “I don’t work out the steps involved in contracting the muscles. I just move my arm!” And yet I realized what I did next would have enormous consequences, would define a road, a path, a future. I found myself hesitating, and—
There, my arm moved. I saw it twitch slightly. But I must have aborted the move, overriding my initial impulse, exercising that conscious veto Porter had spoken about, for my arm was almost immediately still again.
Just move my arm!
And, at last, I did, swiveling it at the shoulder, hinging it at the elbow, rotating it at the wrist, gently curving the fingers, placing my hand over hers.
I could feel warmth in my palm, and—
Electricity? Isn’t that what it’s called? The tingle, the response to the touch of—yes, damn it, yes—another human being.
Karen looked at me, her cameras—her eyes, her beautiful green eyes—locking on mine.
“Thank you,” she said.
I could see myself reflected in her lenses. My eyebrows went up, catching, as always, a bit as they did so. “For what?”
“For seeing the real me.”
I smiled, but then she looked away.
“What?”
She was silent for several seconds. “I … I haven’t been a widow that long—only two years—but Ryan … Ryan had Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t …” She paused. “It’s been a long time.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle, I suspect.”
“You think?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
And Karen smiled her perfectly symmetrical smile back at me. She had a luxurious two-room suite. We repaired—funny word, that—to the bedroom, and …
And I found nothing sexy about it, dammitall. I wanted it to be sexy, but it was just plastic and Teflon rubbing together, silicon chips and synthetic lubricants.
On the other hand, Karen seemed to be enjoying it. I knew the old joke about having a cherry sundae every day for years, and then suddenly not being able to have one anymore; you’d really want another cherry sundae. Well, after several years, I guess any cherry sundae tasted good …
Eventually, Karen came—if the term had any etymological validity in this context. She closed her plastiskin lids over her glass eyes and made a series of increasingly sharp, and increasingly guttural, sounds as her whole mechanical body went even more rigid than it normally was.
I felt kind of sort of a bit close to coming myself while Karen was; I’d always felt more aroused, more sexy and sexual, when someone was orgasming thanks to me. But it didn’t crest, didn’t peak, didn’t last. I pulled out, my prosthetic member still rigid.
“Hi, stranger,” said Karen, gently, looking into my eyes.
“Hi,” I replied. And I smiled, doubting it was easy to tell a forced smile from a real one with these artificial faces.
“That was …” she said, trailing off, seeking a word. “That was fine.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “I never used to come during intercourse. It took … um, you know.” She made a contented sound. “There must be some women working on Immortex’s bodydesign team.”
I was happy for her. But I also knew that the old saying was true. Sex didn’t happen between the legs; it happened between the ears.
“What about you?” asked Karen. “How are you doing?”
“It’s just …” I trailed off. “It’s, ah, it’s going to take some getting used to.”
I closed my eyes and listened to Karen’s voice, which, I had to admit, did sound warm and alive and human. “That’s okay,” she said, snuggling her body against mine. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
CHAPTER 15
Karen and I talked for hours. She listened with such attention and compassion that I found myself sharing things with her I’d shared with no one else. I even told her about the big fight I’d had with my father, and how he’d collapsed right in front of my eyes.
But you can only talk for so long before running out of things to say, at least temporarily, and so we were just relaxing now, lying in the bed in Karen’s suite at the Fairmont Royal York. Karen was reading a book—an actual, physical bound volume—while I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t bored, though. I enjoyed looking up at the ceiling, at the blank white space.
Karen probably had had a different reaction, early in her career, staring at a sheet of paper in her writetyper, or whatever those things were called. I suspect empty whiteness was daunting for an author whose job it was to fill it, but for me the featureless expanse of the ceiling—here in the bedroom not even broken by a lighting fixture, since all the illumination came from floor or table lamps—was soothing, free of distractions. It was perfect, as the saying goes, for hearing myself think
.
Can’t remember …
Huh?
Can’t remember that either. Are you sure?
What couldn’t I remember? Well, of course, if I could remember it—whatever it was—then I wouldn’t be worried about my inability to remember it …
No. No, I have no recollection of …
Of what? What don’t I have any recollection of?
Well, if you say so. But this is very strange …
I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts. Although a cliché, that usually worked for me—but this time the thoughts didn’t go away.
I’m sure I’d remember something like that …
It wasn’t like I was hearing a voice; there was no sound, no timbre, no cadence. Just words, tickling at the periphery of my perception—articulated but unspoken words, identical to everything else I’d ever thought.
Except—
No, I have an excellent memory. Trivia, facts, figures …
Except these didn’t seem to be my thoughts.
Who did you say you are, again?
I shook my head more violently, my vision whipping from the mirrored closet doors on my left to a more ghostly reflection of myself in the window on my right.
Good, okay And my name is Jake Sullivan …
Strange. Very strange.
Karen looked over at me. “Is something wrong, dear?”
“No,” I said automatically. “No, I’m fine.”
Heaviside Crater was located at 10.4 degrees south latitude, and 167.1 degrees east longitude—pretty close to the center of the moon’s backside. That meant that Earth was straight down—separated from us by 3,500 kilometers of rock, plus almost a hundred times that much empty space.
Heaviside measured 165 kilometers across. The High Eden habitat was only five hundred meters across, so there was plenty of room to grow. Immortex projected there would be one million people a year uploading by 2060, and all the shed skins would have to be housed somewhere. Of course, it wasn’t expected that skins would stay in High Eden very long: just a year or two, before they died. Despite Immortex’s claims that their Mindscan process copied structures with total fidelity, the technology was always getting better, and nobody wanted to transfer any earlier than they had to.
High Eden consisted of a large assisted-living retirement home, a terminal-care hospital, and a collection of luxury apartments for the handful of us who had checked in here but didn’t require’round-the-clock aid. No—not checked in. Moved in. And there was no moving out.
Inside High Eden, all the rooms and corridors had very tall ceilings—it was too easy to send oneself flying up by accident. Even so, the ceilings were cushioned, just to be on the safe side; lighting fixtures were recessed into the padding. And there were plants everywhere—not only were they beautiful, but they also helped scrub carbon dioxide out of the air.
I’d always distrusted corporations, but, so far, Immortex had been true to its word. My apartment was everything I could have asked for, and just as it had been shown in the Immortex VR tour. The furniture looked like real wood—natural pine, my favorite—but of course wasn’t. Although the motto of the company was that you could have any luxury you could pay for, I couldn’t very well take my old furniture from Toronto—that had to be left behind for my … my replacement—and it would have been outrageously expensive to ship new stuff up from Earth.
So instead, as the household computer politely informed me in response to my queries, the furniture was made of something called whipped regolith—pulverized, aerated rock, reformed into a material like very porous basalt—that had been covered with a microthin plastic veneer printed with an ultra-high-resolution image of real knotty pine. An exterior mimicking the natural over a manufactured interior. Not too disturbing, if you didn’t think about it much.
At first, I thought the overstuffed furniture was a bit miserly in its padding, but after I sat on it, I realized that you don’t need as much padding to feel comfortable on the moon. My eighty-five kilos now felt like fourteen; I was as light as a toddler back on Earth.
One wall was a smart window—and a first-rate one, too. You couldn’t make out the individual pixels, even if you put your face right up against it. The current image was Lake Louise, near Banff, Alberta—back before the glacier had mostly melted and flooded the whole area. I rather suspect it was a computer-generated image; I don’t think anybody could have made a high-enough resolution scan back then to produce this display. Gentle waves were moving across the lake, and blue sky reflected in the waters.
All in all, it was a cross between a five-star hotel suite and a luxury executive condo; very well-appointed, very comfortable.
Nothing to complain about.
Nothing at all.
It’s a modern myth that the majority of human communication isn’t verbal: that much more information is conveyed by facial expression and body language, and even, some would say, by pheromones, than by spoken words. But as every teenager knows, that’s ridiculous: they can spend hours talking on a voice-only phone, hearing nothing but the words the other person is saying, and interact totally. And so, even though my new artificial body was somewhat less expressive in non-verbal ways, I still had no trouble making even my most subtle nuances understood.
Or so I’d kidded myself into believing. But, the next morning, still in Karen’s hotel suite, as I looked again at her plastiskin face, at her camera eyes, I found myself desperate to know what she was thinking. And if I couldn’t tell what was going on inside her head, surely others couldn’t tell what was going on inside mine. And so I resorted to the time-honored technique. I asked: “What are you thinking?”
We were still lying in bed. Karen turned her head, looking away. “I’m thinking that I’m old enough to be your mother.” I felt something I couldn’t quite quantify—it wasn’t like anything else. After a second, though, I recognized what it was an analog of: my stomach tightening into knots. At least she hadn’t said she was old enough to be my grandmother—although that was technically true, as well.
“I’m thinking,” she continued, “I have a son two years older than you.”
I nodded slowly. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“A woman my age with a man your age? People would look askance. They’d say …”
I told my voice box to laugh, and it did—rather unconvincingly, I thought. “They’d say I was after your money.”
“But that’s crazy, of course. You’ve got lots of money of your own … um, don’t you? I mean, after the transfer procedure, you still have lots left, no?”
“Oh, yes”
“Honestly?”
I told her how much was in my stock portfolio; I also told her how much real estate I owned.
She rolled her head again, facing me, smiling. “Not bad for a young fellow like you.”
“It’s not that much,” I said. “I’m not stinking rich.”
“No,” she said, with a laugh. “Just a bit redolent.”
“Still …” I said, and let the word hang in the air.
“I know,” said Karen. “This is crazy. I’m almost twice as old as you are. What can we have in common? We grew up in different centuries. Different millennia, even.”
It was true beyond the need to comment.
“But,” said Karen, still looking away from me, “I guess life isn’t about the part of the journey that’s already done; it’s about the road ahead.” She paused. “Besides, I may be 200% of your age now, but a thousand years from now, I’ll be less than 105% of your age. And we both expect to be around a thousand years from now, don’t we?”
I paused, considering that. “I still have a hard time wrapping my head around what the word ‘immortality’ really means. But I guess you’re right. I guess the age difference isn’t so big a deal, when you put it that way.”
“You really think?” she said.
I took a moment. If I wanted out, this was the perfect opportunity, the perfect excuse. But if I didn’t wan
t out, then we needed to put this issue behind us, once and for all. “Yeah,” I said. “I really do think.”
Karen rolled over, facing me. She was smiling. “I’m surprised you know Alanis Morissette.”
“Who?”
“Oh,” said Karen, and I could see her plastic features go slack. “She was a singer, very popular. Canadian, now that I think about it. And”—she imitated a husky voice that I’d never heard before—“‘Yeah, I really do think’ was a line from a song of hers called ‘Ironic.’”
“Ah,” I said.
Karen sighed. “But you don’t know that. You don’t know half the stuff I know—because you’ve only lived half as long.”
“Then teach me,” I said simply.
“What?”
“Teach me about the part of your life I missed. Bring me up to speed.”
She looked away. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Start with the highlights,” I said.
“There’s so much.”
I stroked her arm gently. “Try.”
“Wellllll,” said Karen, her drawl attenuating the word. “We went into space. We fought a stupid war in Vietnam. We turfed out a corrupt president. The Soviet Union fell. The European Union was born. Microwave ovens, personal computers, cell phones, and the World Wide Web appeared.” She shrugged a bit. “That’s the Reader’s Digest version.”
“The what?” But then I smiled. “No, just pulling your leg. My mom subscribed when I was a kid.”
But the joke had bothered her, I could tell. “It’s not history that separates us; it’s culture. We grew up reading different magazines, different books. We watched different TV shows. We listened to different music.”
“So what?” I said. “Everything’s online.” I smiled, remembering our earlier discussion. “Even copyrighted stuff—and the owners get micropayments automatically when we access it, right? So we can download your favorite books and all that, and you can introduce me to them. After all, you said we’ve got all the time in the world.”
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