Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

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. “Astonishing.”

“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, well—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 under stimulated: 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 wasn’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.

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.”

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.