Between Two Minds: Awakening

by D C Wright-Hammer

  On my feet? On my feet! It almost sounded like a joke to me, but then I remembered I did in fact have functioning feet and a working spine, and it was only a matter of time before I would be—

  My mind wandered the length of my spine, past my pelvis, and down my legs. I discovered what had to be my feet!

  Holy hell! My feet!

  Then I quickly channeled all my energy into trying to take it farther.

  My toes!

  I could wiggle them, and wiggle them I did! They were amazing. I started to do the mental equivalent of crying. I had no idea if the tears were running down my face, but it was the most cathartic bawling I had done in a long time.

  People had never understood just how hard it was to be a paraplegic from birth. I did my best to get by, and was applauded for it by literally everyone. But it was difficult for people who could walk to truly understand how society was created with the image of a biped in mind. Even with all of the awareness and technology, there always seemed to be something holding people like me back. Too often I had to abandon my hopes of going into a building or joining my friends on the subway because there was no ramp or the elevator was out of commission. Worse yet, the nightly news always ran pieces about people with disabilities overcoming their circumstances to accomplish their goals. They paraded around the winners of the Special Olympics and did human interest pieces on quadriplegics who’d graduated with honors from prestigious universities. They made such a big deal about war veterans returning home with missing limbs, yet starting successful businesses. Truth was, those pieces always seemed more like indictments of the general population than true praise of my brethren with disabilities. They were basically saying, “If this disabled person can do it, what’s your excuse, you lazy bastard?” I never appreciated being indirectly pitted against the fully abled.

  Dr. Little must have been pressing buttons next to me when she noticed my feet.

  “Wow, Ryan. You’ve found your toes. Let me know if you can feel this.”

  The softest pinprick confirmed that I was, indeed, wiggling my toes. I twitched my left arm.

  “I’ll check that off the list as ahead of schedule. While I don’t want to get your hopes up, you should be walking on schedule or maybe even a little quicker. Bet your friends won’t do anything nearly as impressive as taking their very first steps any time soon.”

  Dr. Little was technically correct, though Helen’s migration would be a close second. She had been able to walk as a toddler, all the way up until age four when she had a tragic accident in a swimming pool. She mentioned that her walking experiences were like fleeting memories and she still had ghost pains in her legs, though they had no nerve function. To avoid any issues from ghost pains, she approached her mind migration as if she had never walked in the first place, and I thought that was smart.

  “Also, Ryan, I wanted to let you know that your mother called. We let her know you should be ready for visitors in the next few days, but for now, we want you to focus on recovery.”

  Just the mere mention of Mom improved my mood exponentially. Mom had always been there for me. She always told me the story about getting the ultrasound and seeing that my spine was malformed inside of her. The doctors broke the news to her, and she was initially devastated. Then they told her that my chances of survival were about 20%, and she knew in an instant that 20% was all the reassurance she needed. She knew, getting that little bit of hope, that everything would be fine—fine in the sense that I would be born even if I would be disabled. She gave everything she had to taking care of me from that day on and never seemed to flinch in the face of adversity. It was that kind of love that had always kept me going. And while Mom was apprehensive about the mind migration because of the dangers associated with it, she still gave me her blessing in the end.

  “Okay, Ryan. I will be placing a button near your left arm. If you need anything in the coming days, just press it. This includes when you feel like you’re able to open your eyes. You’ll want to give that button a good press because the nursing staff and possibly a doctor will need to be here to assist. I’ll come if I’m available. Now let’s give it a test press to make sure the button works.”

  Gently lifting my left arm, she placed a small, rubbery object under my hand.

  “Go ahead, Ryan. Give that button a push.”

  I rattled my left arm as hard as I could, and was rewarded with a loud, dull tone throughout my room.

  “Great, Ryan! I’m anticipating that in the next day or so, you will get your vision back. It will probably be blurry at first, but again, make sure to hit that button so we can help out. For today, Sheila will be here in a little bit to give you something to manage the headache and let you get some rest. I’ll be back in a couple of days to check up on you. In the meantime, the nursing aides will continue to take care of you and monitor your progress.”

  The doctor’s footsteps were unusually loud as she left the room and closed the door behind her. I was surprisingly relieved for her to leave because it gave me a chance to take everything in.

  It appeared that I had gotten through the hell of the migration and come out alive. All the sleepless nights, lost appetites, and grief-induced nausea leading up to the procedure seemed like they were all for naught. Sure, things had been rough since I gained consciousness, but it seemed like the preparation had been sufficient. Hell, it might have been overkill with all the scary stories that circulated throughout the mind migrators in the program with me. Since the exact origin of the mind migration procedure had never been fully disclosed to the public, we were left to reconcile the truth from rumors and urban myths.

  Oceanus Laboratories, also known as OL, was a former competitor of ADG. They had been working with the government and military on rehabilitating veterans who’d returned from war with physical trauma. As the depressing story goes, it all started with a very young but gifted soldier who had steadily risen through the ranks of infantry and was being considered for an officer’s role. In his last battle, he took a piece of shrapnel to the neck, leaving the once exceptionally intelligent and highly skilled soldier a delirious and spasming mess. The doctors had done their best to put him back together, and as they’d run more tests, they realized that his mind was relatively intact. It had only been his physical body and nervous system that betrayed him after the injuries. In one of his brief moments of clarity, he’d spoken the words that would later become famous for initiating the whole mind migration program.

  “Doc, all I need is for my mind to be put into a working body, and I’ll be good as new.”

  Coincidentally, the soldier had been talking to Dr. Rex Martin, a world-renowned neurosurgeon. He was intimately familiar with the difficulties of brain surgery and transplants, and coincidentally being a PhD in data migration, had begun to conjure up an alternative. It involved downloading a person’s mind to a temporary storage location, processing it, and then uploading it to the brain of another body. Sounding great on paper, the doctor had been intimately aware of the obvious and numerous ethical and moral issues with a procedure of that sort. Having studied Isaac Asimov, creator of the Laws of Robotics, Dr. Martin had decided it necessary to create a framework of principles to mitigate the possible human rights violations that could come from such a procedure.

  The Laws of Mind Migration

  One: Migration must be safe for the migrator and the host.

  Two: Migrators, or those with power of attorney over potential migrators, must be of sound mind to consciously consent to the procedure.

  Three: Hosts must never have established minds (i.e., organic thoughts or memories) but should otherwise be fully functional specimens.

  Four: Migrators must be physically, mentally, and emotionally supported before, during, and after the process if at all possible.

  Five: Migrators’ original minds, and all copies thereof, must be fully deleted from their biological brains and comput
er storage devices once the success of their migration has been confirmed.

  The theory had been that the minds of physically disabled veterans could be migrated into able-bodied, able-brained hosts, and they could live normal lives after serving their country. But even with the laws established, the process hadn’t sat well with veterans’ rights groups. They’d vehemently rejected the procedure, stating it was like performing medical experiments on individuals who had already sacrificed enough. As a result, no one in Congress had supported legislation legalizing it at first. No one had wanted to risk losing veteran, active-duty, and military-family votes.

  That had only slowed down the industry’s lobbyists. They leaned heavily on a congressman who had been in a wheelchair, and eventually were able to sneak the Alternative Physical Rehabilitation provision into a much larger bill that had supposedly been meant to improve the lives of people with disabilities. Once word came in of its passing, protests had broken out all over the country and at least one hundred lawsuits were filed. In the end, the language in the provision had been altered to specifically exclude active duty and veterans. In their place, the disabled public became fair game. Shortly after, OL ran an advertisement targeting people with major physical disabilities.

  “Be the first to complete our revolutionary new process that could vastly improve the quality of life for people like you. OL means a new lease…on life.”

  They’d done a lottery system where eventually they whittled down the millions of applicants to a single candidate. While the facts of the case were sealed in court documents, the story goes that there was a woman named Amanda Robinson who had been born without arms. Growing up, she had done all right for herself, considering. She had gotten a decent education, eventually landed a good job, and finally, started a lovely family. It had seemed like she had it all. But Amanda had dreamed of so much more. While some had painted her as greedy, I understood her desires. She wanted to feel the world with hands. She wanted to hug her children and husband. More than anything, she had wanted to feel normal.

  On top of all the personal reasons, OL had assured Amanda the process had proven safe in laboratory trials. They had trained hundreds of mice to solve a variety of puzzles involving a running wheel, a maze, a red button, and a box covering a hunk of cheese. Once migrated, the mice in their new hosts solved the puzzles exactly as they were trained before the procedure. After years of studies, they had finally gotten their success rate above 99%. With those assurances, Amanda willingly agreed to be the first human participant. Part of the requirement of doing so, as rumor had it, was that she had been required to become an official employee of OL and would have to travel the world advocating for the procedure. And they’d even told Amanda she could seek out lucrative endorsements. It had been a pretty sweet deal on paper. But like the majority of pioneers throughout history, it hadn’t ended so well for Amanda.

  Depending on who was telling the story, there were usually two or three reasons why Amanda’s migration had failed. Many said there had been faulty cryogenic hardware used to slow down her heart rate. Others professed that there had been a computer glitch that scrambled Amanda’s brain. Still others claimed Amanda’s host had been an actual person with existing thoughts and memories. A few had even said it was all of the above. Whatever the issue, Amanda’s original body had been in jeopardy of dying right before the migration. They’d had to rush the process in an attempt to save her life, but unfortunately, preparing for the procedure had put her life in danger in the first place. Even though she survived the migration, she was a shell of her former self after the fact.

  I was always unsure if it was dramatic storytelling or truth, but ironically, the part of Amanda’s mind that accessed the primary motor cortex had been lost in the migration. That meant not only were her new arms useless, but she was also unable to walk. To make matters worse, her ability to communicate had been greatly diminished. I still remember the saddest way it was described to me. The previously bright twinkle in her eye had fizzled, and her will to live and love had not accompanied her to her host. Needless to say, her family was devastated. Once national lawyers got wind of the situation, it wasn’t long before the Robinson family filed a gross negligence suit.

  In spite of all the waivers and insurance for the process, OL still went bankrupt from the bad publicity and suit. With OL found liable, the first part of the settlement had included paying all the Robinsons’ legal expenses, but as usual, there was a hefty lump sum for damages as well. Some say it totaled over a billion credits, or dollars, as they used back then. Next, OL was court ordered to create a trust fund to pay for Amanda’s care indefinitely and pay her husband and children ten times their yearly income for fifty years.

  But the money hadn’t been able to replace what the family had lost. While Amanda’s husband had been a patient man, having lived with a woman without arms for much of his life, he quickly succumbed to depression after tragically losing any semblance of his wife. The constant paparazzi attention hadn’t helped. It was only six short months after the industry-shaking court ruling that he had reached his limit and committed suicide. The children and Amanda, more or less a vegetable, went into state custody, and the trusts were locked until the children turned twenty-one. That had been the end of OL and Amanda’s story; it obviously hadn’t been the end of the mind migration procedure.

  The last part of the settlement had contained a provision forcing Oceanus Laboratories to sell their research to the highest bidder to help pay for their legal expenses, the damages, and the trust. Enter Atlas Digenetics. For years, they had been on OL’s coattails with a mind migration procedure. The fully detailed failures from OL proved invaluable in moving the science of the process forward, and it only took ADG two more years of trials to determine exactly what had gone wrong with Amanda’s migration. They decided that cryo-freezing was too risky to be part of the procedure and determined sedatives to be safer. They also developed better ways to monitor and manage vital signs for the duration of the procedure. Soon after, the first successful mind migration hit the news.

  Cameron Walsh, a man crippled from a motorcycle accident, had thrown caution to the wind and agreed to be the subject of the next official procedure. He was in his twenties and had no close family whatsoever, making it obvious that he was well vetted. As corporate advertising goes, the mind migration had gone off without a hitch.

  All new mind migrators were required to watch a series of holo-logs that featured Cameron before he completed his migration. He walked viewers through the process step by step at a high level. It was honestly pretty helpful because it was clear that he was no actor, and he was allowed to speak somewhat freely. At some points, he was honest about the fears he had and how the process had been created to acknowledge those fears and address them accordingly. He even went so far as to say that some fear was normal and expected even after all of their helpful measures. Cutting to Cameron after the procedure, the holo-logs presented him as a completely new person ready to take on a brand-new life. While holo-logs were dated, they helped to show just how far the process had come over the last decade.

  As tragic as it was, Cameron had become every bit the celebrity that Amanda should have been. His original body was cleaned up and became part of the Smithsonian’s display on mind migrations. Once a year, he returned to ADG’s main office—the one I was in—for interviews and a major speech. Cameron’s next visit was scheduled for a few weeks after my release, so I had my counselors guarantee me two front-row seats. I had been open to Helen about being a shameless Cameron Walsh fanboy, and while she’d cracked a couple of jokes at my expense, she had seemed relatively interested in seeing him speak too, so my plan was to ask her to join me since she’d be out by then as well.

  A bang across the room brought me back from memory lane, and I could hear the door to my room open. That could have only meant one thing. Rob, the orderly, was making his rounds.

  “Hey, Ryan! How y
ou doing today?”

  I shook my left arm.

  “Good to hear, buddy. I am just going to freshen things up. Was the doctor tough on you today?”

  My right hand moved.

  “Just let me know, and I’ll have a talk with her.”

  Detecting a hint of sexism, I still appreciated his attempt at rapport. That said, I was more impressed at how well he’d mastered his craft. His attention to detail while working expeditiously was quite astounding. As he rattled through his duties, I heard another presence enter the room. It had to be Nurse Sheila because of the number of beeps that occurred rapid-fire to my left. I assumed she was checking my numbers and about to give me the good stuff.

  “Hi, Ryan. It’s Sheila. Everything is looking good. I just gave you something for your headache, so that should subside pretty quickly. You’ll also feel a bit tired, but just relax, and you’ll be able to get some good rest.”

  As I began to shake my left arm to acknowledge her, the woozy feeling had already set in. Yet something didn’t feel right. The familiar fear I had been experiencing throughout recovery returned with an increased intensity. I wondered if the drugs they were giving me had anything to do with my anxiety, but before I could think that through, she interrupted me.

  “Okay, Ryan. We’re all done here for now. We’ll see you later.”

  Hearing them leave, I no longer had any distractions from the horror that was growing from within. Somehow, the darkness in my mind got even darker and a strange feeling of being lost overwhelmed me.

  Where am I?

  Chapter 5:

  Don’t Mind My Driving