Mindscan

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “The march of science, Ms. Lopez. They couldn’t do it then, and we haven’t quite made it happen even yet, but we recognize, as I said before, that in principal it will be possible eventually to bring embryos to term in artificial wombs. The court didn’t want to set up a standard that said that embryos brought to term in vitro were perforce not human. They were looking for a demarcation that was innate to the embryo.”

  “Well, then, given that the courts weren’t happy with the birth standard, conception seems the obvious marker to choose, no? You said it was easy to measure.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” said Neruda, nodding. “Prior to conception, no new organism exists with forty-six chromosomes—plus or minus one, as in Down or Turner syndrome. But as soon as conception occurs, a complete genetic blueprint for an entire person is created—the new person’s sex is determined, and so on.”

  “So did the court rule in Littler v. Carvey that personhood was conferred at conception?”

  Neruda shook her head. “They couldn’t rule that—not without making millions of Americans into murderers.”

  Lopez tilted her head to one side. “How do you mean?”

  Neruda took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the phrase ‘birth control’ entered the language in 1914. But, of course, it’s really a misnomer. We’re not trying to control birth; we’re looking to do something nine months earlier—prevent pregnancy! In fact, even though conception and birth are at opposite ends of the time span we’re discussing, we use ‘contraception’ and ‘birth control’ as synonyms.

  “Now, there are true contraceptives: condoms, diaphragms, and spermicides prevent conception by the simple expedient of blocking the sperm from reaching the egg, or killing it before it gets there. And, of course, surgical sterilization of a man or a woman prevents conception, as does abstinence. So does the rhythm method if you’re very lucky and very careful.

  “But the most common method of … shall we say, ‘family planning?’ … is none of the above. Rather, it’s the so-called birth-control pill—or patches, implants, and so on, that do the same job.

  “Now, birth control pills sometimes prevent conception—that is, that’s one of the things they do. But they also can have a secondary effect: they prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. If the court had ruled that life began at conception, then it would have to accept that birth-control pills can kill that life, by depriving it of the usual necessities of continued existence, which it would receive once it implanted in the uterus.

  “But Americans love birth-control pills and related pharmaceuticals, which stiffen the uterine wall so that embryos won’t implant. The original birth-control pill was introduced in 1960, and we’ve been refining them ever since, so that today they have virtually no side effects. But a politically conservative country—and this one had certainly become that by this time, what with Pat Buchanan in the Oval Office—that wanted on the one hand to sanctify the unborn and on the other hand loved the convenience of birth-control pills had to come up with a definition that said life, and personhood, began after conception, so that those cases in which the pill prevented implantation rather than conception weren’t tantamount to murder.”

  “And in Littler v. Carvey, the court did just that, correct?”

  “Correct.” Neruda had her own graphics, and they appeared on the wall screen. “The Supreme Court of these United States ruled that personhood begins when individuation occurs. For up to fourteen days after conception, a single fertilized egg can divide into two or more identical twins; indeed, the technical term for identical twins is monozygotic twins, because they were twins formed from just one zygote—one cell formed by the union of two gametes. Well, if the embryo still has the potential of being multiple individuals, or so the argument went, then it hadn’t settled down to being one particular individual, and so no specific personhood could be accorded it. Do you see?”

  I certainly did, although glancing over at Karen, I don’t think she’d gotten it yet.

  “So,” said Lopez, “under the law of the land, a person is a person so long as he or she can be only one person, correct?”

  I saw Deshawn react at this, his eyebrows climbing up his bald head. It wasn’t the tack we’d expected them to take at all—and it was damn clever.

  “That’s right,” said Neruda. “The legal point is that once you’ve become one, and only one, individual, you’re entitled to rights of personhood.”

  Lopez walked across the well and stood near the jury box. “Now, in your legal opinion, Professor Neruda, what bearing does this have on our case at hand?”

  Neruda spread her arms. “Don’t you see? Karen Bessarian—or, forgive me: her maiden name would be appropriate here. Karen Cohen didn’t become a person on the day she was conceived back in—well, she was born at the end of May in 1960, so presumably that was sometime in August of 1959. Rather, she became a person fifteen days later, when that embryo no longer had the potential to become multiple individuals.”

  Lopez regarded the jurors, making sure they were following. “Yes, professor,” she said. “Go on.”

  Neruda smiled as she went in to deliver her punch line. “And, well, since individuation is the legal test, Karen—now Karen Bessarian—presumably ceased to be an individual in the eyes of the law not on the day on which her body actually died on the moon, but on the earlier day on which her mind was scanned and a second instantiation of that mind was made. That person who had been Karen Bessarian was, in essence, restored legally to the status of an embryo less than fifteen days old: she lost her rights to personhood the moment it could be said that she was no longer uniquely one individual. Do you see? The unique legal entity known as Karen Cynthia Bessarian ceased to exist the moment that scanning was done. And, of course, once a person is gone, they’re gone for good.”

  If I’d been in my old biological body, I’m sure I would have slumped back, stunned, at this point. Lopez had made an elegant end run around our entire strategy—and she was saying that if the court were to challenge her position, it would, by necessity, be challenging the logic underlying current abortion laws. One glance at Judge Herrington confirmed that that was the last thing he wanted.

  “Let’s take a break,” he said, looking as shaken as I felt.

  CHAPTER 30

  I wish I could see the Earth: that would give me a place to focus my thoughts when I was thinking about Rebecca. But the Earth was straight down, and looking at the floor didn’t fulfill my emotional need. Of course, nothing short of actually seeing her would do that.

  Rebecca thinks the universe sends her messages—subtly at first, she says, and then, later, if she doesn’t get them, the universe starts whacking her with two-by-fours.

  I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I knew the universe was indifferent to me. And yet, perhaps out of respect for Rebecca, I did find myself looking, listening, watching, paying attention: if there was a way out, maybe the universe would give me a clue.

  In the meantime, I took another of Brian Hades’s suggestions—one I hoped wouldn’t leave me feeling quite so sordid afterwards. I decided to try mountain climbing here on the moon. I’d never done much of that sort of thing on Earth—Eastern Canada is not known for its mountains. But it sounded like it might actually be fun, and so I inquired about it at the recreation desk.

  Turns out the guy who usually led climbing expeditions was my old traveling buddy Quentin Ashburn, the moonbus-maintenance engineer. No one was allowed on the lunar surface alone; the same common-sense safety rules that applied to scuba diving also applied here. So Quentin was delighted by my request to go climbing.

  It used to be, I’m told, that spacesuits had to be custom built for each user, but new adaptive fabrics made that unnecessary: High Eden stocked suits in three sizes for men, and three for women, and it was easy enough to see that the middle male size was the right one for me.

  Quentin helped me suit up, making sure all the
connections were secure. And then he got some special climbing equipment that was stored on open shelves in the change room. Some of it I recognized—lengths of nylon rope, for instance. Others were things I’d never seen before. The last piece was, well, a piece: a thing that looked like a squat, thick-bodied pistol.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a piton gun,” he said. “It shoots pitons.”

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t run into any of those,” I said.

  Quentin laughed. “Pitons are metal spikes.” He opened the gun’s thick chamber, and showed me one. The spike was about ten centimeters long. It had a sharply pointed front and an eye at the other end to which a rope could be fitted. “We shoot them into the rock and use them as footholds or handholds, or to hold our ropes. On Earth, people often drive in pitons by hand, but the rock here is quite hard, and there’s too much risk of rupturing your glove and exposing yourself to vacuum. So we use piton guns.”

  I’d never held a gun of any sort in my life—and, as a Canadian, I was proud of that. But I took the device, and copied Quentin, who slipped another one of them into a capacious pouch on the side of his right thigh.

  Finally, we put on the fishbowl helmets. They were impregnated, Quentin told me, with something similar to electronic ink: any portion of them could become opaque, blocking out sunlight. Then we cycled through the airlock, which happened to be adjacent to the pad where the moonbuses landed.

  “Your pride and joy is gone,” I said over the intersuit radio, pointing at the empty pad.

  “It’s been gone for days,” replied Quentin. “On its usual run to LS One. But it’ll be back tomorrow, to take some passengers to the SETI installation.”

  The SETI installation. Where they listen for messages from the universe.

  I tried to listen, too.

  We continued on, walking over the lunar soil. Although the suit massed about twenty kilos, I still felt much lighter than I ever had on Earth. The suit air was a bit startling—completely devoid of any odor or flavor—but I quickly got used to it, although—

  No, it’s gone. I’d thought for a second that another headache was coming on, but the sensation passed almost at once.

  The crater wall was far in front of us. As we walked, the sun disappeared behind it, and stars became visible. I kept looking up at the black, black sky for the Earth, but of course it was never visible from here. Still …

  “Is that Mars?” I said, pointing at a brilliant point of light that was shaded differently from the others—it was either red or green, but I’d never heard of “the green planet.”

  “Sure is,” said Quentin.

  It took us about ten minutes to half-walk, half-hop over to the crater wall, which was craggy and steep, rising far above us. Since we were in shadow, Quentin had turned on a light in the center of his chest, and then he reached over and flipped a switch on my suit, activating a similar light.

  “Wow,” I said, looking up at the inky wall. “That looks … difficult.”

  “It is,” said Quentin, amiably. “Where would the fun be if it were easy?” He didn’t wait for an answer, which was a good thing, because I didn’t have one. Instead, he undid the pouch on his thigh, and pulled out his piton gun. “See?” he said, pointing with his other hand. “You aim at a cleft in the rock.”

  I nodded.

  He took a bead with his gun, then fired. There was no sound, but the gun obviously discharged with a sizable kick, judging by the way Quentin’s hand jerked back. A metal spike flew silently into the rock. Quentin tested it to see that it had lodged securely, and threaded a rope through it. “Simple as that,” he said.

  “How many pitons does it hold?”

  “Eight. But there are oodles more in each of our pouches, so don’t worry.”

  “It, ah, looks like it packs quite a kick,” I said, gesturing at the gun.

  “Depends on the force setting,” said Quentin. “But, on maximum—which you’d use for granite, and such …” He adjusted a control on the gun, and fired away from the crater wall. The spike shot across the intervening vacuum and sent up a cloud of moondust where it hit.

  I nodded.

  “All right?” said Quentin. “Let’s go!”

  We started climbing the rocky face, climbing ever higher, climbing toward the light.

  It was exhilarating. I was outdoors, and the lack of walls made it seem, at least for a time, like I was no longer a prisoner. We made our way to the top of the crater rim and—

  —and fierce sunlight lanced into my eyes, triggering another headache before the helmet darkened. God, I wish my brain would stop hurting …

  We walked around for a while on the gray surface, which curved away to a too-near horizon. “Magnificent desolation,” Chandragupta had said, quoting somebody or other. It certainly was. I drank in the stark beauty while trying to ignore the pain between my ears.

  Eventually, a warning started pinging over the helmet speakers, a counterpoint to the agonizing throbs: our air would soon be running out.

  “Come on,” said Quentin. “Time to go home.”

  Home, I thought. Yes, he was right. The bloody moonbus engineer was right. It was time to go home, once and for all.

  Deshawn and Malcolm had spent the entire recess researching and conferring, and, as we returned to the courtroom, I heard Deshawn tell Karen he was “as ready as I’ll ever be.” Once Judge Herrington had arrived, and we were all seated again, Deshawn dove into his cross-examination of the Yale bioethicist, Alyssa Neruda.

  “Dr. Neruda,” he said, “I’m sure the jury was fascinated by your discussion of the gerrymandering of the line between personhood and nonpersonhood.”

  “I would hardly accuse the highest court of the land of gerrymandering,” she replied coldly.

  “Perhaps. But there’s a glaring oversight in your commentary on people becoming more than one individual, isn’t there?”

  Neruda regarded him. “Oh?”

  “Well, yes,” said Deshawn. “I mean, human cloning has been technically possible since—when? Twenty-twelve or so?”

  “I believe the first human clone was born in 2013,” said Neruda.

  “I stand corrected,” said Deshawn. “But isn’t cloning taking one individual and making it into two? The original and the copy are genetically identical after all, and yet surely they both have rights and are people?”

  “You should take my course, Mr. Draper. That is indeed a fascinating theoretical issue, but it’s not relevant to the laws of the United States. First, of course, no sensible person would say that they are the same people. And, second, human cloning has always been banned here—it’s even banned up in Canada—and so American law has had no need to incorporate the concept of human clones into its definitions of personhood.” She crossed her arms in a so-there gesture. “Individuation still stands as the law of the land.”

  If Deshawn was crestfallen, he hid it well. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said. “No further questions.”

  “And we’ll call it a day,” said Judge Herrington. “Jurors, let me admonish you again …”

  It had been some time since I’d connected with another instantiation of me, but it happened that evening, while I was watching the Blue Jays play. They were doing so badly, I guess I was letting my mind wander. Maybe my zombie was willing to watch them get slaughtered, but the conscious me couldn’t take it, and—

  And suddenly there was another version of me inside my head. I told the wall screen to turn off, and strained to listen.

  That’s strange …

  “Hello!” I said. “Hello, are you there?”

  What? Who?

  I sighed, and went through the rigmarole of explaining who I was, ending with, “And I know you think it’s 2034, but it’s not. It’s really 2045.”

  What are you talking about?

  “It’s really 2045,” I said again.

  Of course it is. I know that.

  “You do?”

  Of course.
<
br />   So it wasn’t the same instantiation with the memory problem I’d encountered earlier. Christ, I wondered just how many of us there were. “You started by saying something was strange.”

  What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is.

  “What is?”

  I dropped a pen I was using.

  “So?”

  So I managed to catch it before it hit the floor.

  “Well, there’s no slow, chemical component to your reaction time anymore,” I said. “Now, it’s all electric—happening at the speed of light”

  That’s not it. I was able to watch the pen fall, to see it clearly as it moved downward.

  “I haven’t noticed any heightening of my awareness like that.”

  I don’t think it’s heightened awareness … There. I just picked it up and dropped it again. It fell in slow motion.

  “Fell in slow … how is that possible?”

  I don’t know, unless …

  “Oh, Christ.”

  Christ indeed.

  “You’re on the moon. I mean, I suppose you could be anywhere with reduced gravity, including a space station spinning too slowly to simulate a full Earth gee. But since we already know that Immortex has a facility on the moon …”

  Yes. But if I’m on the moon, shouldn’t there be a time delay as I communicate with you? The moon’s—what?—four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth.

  “Something like that. And light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, so—let’s see—there should be a one-and-a-third second delay, or so.”

  Maybe there is. Maybe.

  “Let’s test it. I’ll count to five; when you hear me say five, you pick up the count, and carry it through from six to ten, then I’ll come in for eleven to fifteen. Okay?”

  Okay.

  “One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”

  Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  “Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

  No delays that I could detect.

  “Me, neither.”

  Then how … ?

  “Andrew Porter said something about using quantum fog to scan the original Jake Sullivan’s brain noninvasively …”