Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

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, like-wise 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 arid 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.

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 soon 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. Karen was evidently looking in the same direction, since she commented on the view through the window we were passing. “Looks like rain,” she said. “I wonder if we’ll rust?”

At another time, I might have laughed at the joke, but I was too ashamed, and too pissed off at both myself and Immortex. Still, some response seemed to be in order.

“Let’s just hope it’s not an electrical storm,” I said. “I’m not wearing my surge protector.”

Karen laughed more than my comment deserved. We continued on. “Say, I wonder if we can swim,” she said.