Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

Two of the recently uploaded women were chatting away about things that didn’t interest me. The third woman and Draper were playing a trivia game that the cruise director had brought up on a wall monitor, but the questions were geared toward their youth, and I knew none of the answers.

And so I ended up spending more time with Karen. Part of it was kindness on her part, I’m sure; she seemed to recognize that I was a fish out of water. Indeed, I felt compelled to comment on that as we went outside, exiting onto the treed Immortex grounds, a gibbous moon overhead. “Thanks,” I said to Karen as we walked along, “for spending so much time with me.”

Karen smiled her new-and-improved perfectly symmetrical smile. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Who else would I talk to about physics or philosophy? In fact, I’ve got another joke for you. Rene Descartes goes into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender serves it up. Old Rene, he nurses it for a while, but at last it’s gone. And so the barkeep says to him, ‘Hey, Rene, care for another?’ To which Descartes replies, ‘I think not’—and disappears.”

I laughed, and even though my new laugh sounded strange to me, it made me feel good. August nights were filled with mosquitoes, but I quickly recognized another advantage to an artificial body: the bugs left us alone. “But, y’know,” I said, as we walked along, “I’m actually surprised that we don’t need to sleep. I thought it was necessary for the consolidation of memory.”

“A popular misconception,” said Karen, and, with her lovely Georgia accent, the words didn’t sound condescending. “But it’s just not true. It takes time to consolidate memories, and normal humans can’t go for any length without sleeping—but the sleeping has nothing to do with the consolidation.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. We’re going to be fine.”

“Good.”

We walked for a while in companionable silence, then Karen said, “Anyway, I should be the one thanking you for spending time with me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, half the reason I uploaded was to get away from old people. Can you imagine me in an old-folks’ home?”

I laughed. “No, I guess not.”

“The other people here who are my age,” she said, shaking her head. “Their goal in life was to become rich. There’s something ruthless about that, and something shallow, too. I never intended to be rich—it just happened, and no one was more surprised by it than me. And you didn’t intend to be rich, either.”

“But if it weren’t for money,” I said, “we’d both be dead or worse soon.”

“Oh, I know! I know! But that’s bound to change. Immortality is expensive right now, but it’s got to come down in price; technology always does. Can you imagine a world in which the only thing that mattered was how rich you are?”

“You don’t sound very—” Damn it! Another thought I’d intended to keep to myself partially leaking out.

“Very what?” said Karen. “Very American? Very capitalist?” She shook her head. “I don’t think any serious writer can be a capitalist. I mean, look at me: to my own astonishment, I’m one of the best-selling authors of all time. But am I one of the best writers ever in the English language? Not by a long shot. Work in a field in which financial reward has no correlation with actual worth and you can’t be a capitalist. I don’t say there’s a negative correlation: there are great writers who sell very well. But there is no meaningful correlation. It’s just a crapshoot.”

“So, are you going to go back to writing now that you’re a Mindscan?” I asked. It had been years since there’d been a new Karen Bessarian book.

“Yes, I intend to. In fact, being a writer is the main reason I uploaded. See, I love my characters—Prince Scales, Doctor Hiss. I love them all. And, as I told you before, I created them. They came right out of here.” She tapped the side of her head.

“Yes. So?”

“So, I’ve watched the ebb and flow of copyright legislation over my lifetime. It’s been a battle between warring factions: those who want works to be protected forever, and those who believe works should fall into public domain as fast as possible. When I was young, works stayed in copyright for fifty years after the authors’ death. Then it was lengthened to seventy years, and that’s still the current figure, but it isn’t long enough.”

“Why?”

“Well, because if I had a child today—not that I could—and I died tomorrow—not that I’m going to—that child would receive the royalties from my books until he or she was seventy. And then, suddenly, my child—by that point, an old man or woman—would be cut off; my work would be declared public domain, and no more royalties would ever have to be paid on it. The child of my body would be denied the benefits of the children of my mind. And that’s just not right.”

“But, well, isn’t the culture enriched when material goes into the public domain?” I asked. “Surely you wouldn’t want Shakespeare or Dickens to still be protected by copyright?”

“Why not? J.K. Rowling is still in copyright; so is Stephen King and Marcos Donnelly—and they all have had, and continue to have, a huge impact on our culture.”

“I guess…” I said, still not sure.

“Look,” said Karen, gently, “one of your ancestors started a brewing company, right?”

I nodded. “My great grandfather, Reuben Sullivan—Old Sully, they called him.”

“Right. And you benefit financially from that to this day. Should the government instead have confiscated all the assets of Sullivan Brewing, or whatever the company’s called, on the seventieth anniversary of Old Sully’s death? Intellectual property is still property , and it should be treated the same as anything else human beings build or create.”

I had a hard time with this; I never used anything but open-source software—and there was a difference between a building and an idea; there was, in fact, a material difference. “So you uploaded in order to make sure you keep getting royalties on DinoWorld forever?”

“It’s not just that,” Karen said. “In fact, it’s not even principally that. When something falls into public domain, anyone can do anything with the material. You want to make a porno film with my characters? You want to write bad fiction featuring my characters? You can, once my works go into public domain. And that’s not right; they’re mine .”

“But by living forever, you can protect them?” I said.

“Exactly. If I don’t die, they never fall into public domain.”

We continued walking; I was getting the hang of it—and the motor in my belly could keep me doing it for weeks on end, or so Porter had told me. It was now almost 5:00 a.m.—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been up so late. I hadn’t realized that Orion was visible in summer if you stayed up this long. Clamhead must be missing me something fierce, although the robokitchen would be feeding her, and my next-door neighbor had agreed to take her for walks.

We passed under a lamp, and to my astonishment I noticed that my arm was wet; I could see it glistening in the lamp light. Only a little later did I experience a physical sensation of dampness. I rubbed a finger along my arm. “Good grief!” I said. “It’s dew.”

Karen laughed, not at all perturbed. “So it is.”

“You’re taking all this so well,” I said to her.

“I try to take everything in stride,” Karen replied. “It’s all material.”

“What?”

“Sorry. Writer’s mantra. ‘It’s all material.’ It all goes into the hopper. Everything you experience is fodder for future writing.”