Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“Come on, girl, it’s just me. It’s just Jake.”

Clamhead leapt. I managed a half-step backward, but she slapped her paws against my chest, and barked loudly, over and over and over again.

“Clammy, Clammy!” I said. “Sit, girl! Sit!”

I’d never known Clamhead to bite anyone, but she bit me. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt; she closed her jaws on my naked forearm and yanked backward, tearing out a ragged piece of plastiskin, revealing fiber-optic nerves, bungee-cord muscles, and a blue metal armature within. She fell back on her haunches, and sniffed at the piece of plastic, then turned tail, and bounded away up the stairs, whimpering.

My heart wasn’t beating fast—because I had no heart. My breathing wasn’t ragged—because I did not breathe. My eyes weren’t stinging—because I could not cry. I just stood there, letting time pass, shaking my head slowly left and right, feeling rejected and alone.

The spider-shaped moonship landed next to a small cluster of mirrored domes, near the crater Aristarchus. After three days of zero-g, having any weight at all felt oppressive. But, really, it was a gentle tug, only one-sixth of what was normal on Earth.

The Immortex staffer had been wise to warn us: the moonbase here was utilitarian at best—it felt like the inside of a submarine. Sadly, we had to spend three days here, going through decontamination procedures. With hundreds of potential points of departure from Earth, and only one possible lunar arrival point, it made sense that the elaborate decontamination facilities were up here, not down there.

This had been the first permanent base established on the moon. It had originally been built by the Chinese, and a lot of the signage was still in that language, but it was now administered by a multinational consortium. Its official name was LS One—Lunar Settlement One—but in honor of the arriving immigrants, someone had erected a big sign that said “LS Island,” a pun it took me a few moments to get.

And I was indeed an immigrant: this world, this airless, dusty sphere, was going to be my home for the rest of my life—however long that might be. Of course, here on the moon, the vessels in my brain would be subject to less stress, so perhaps I’d last longer than I would have had I stayed down on Earth.

Perhaps. In any event, the doctors at High Eden would know precisely what to do if I had an … incident . The advance directive I’d sworn out was a contract, and contracts must be honored.

“All Immortex passengers,” said a voice over an intercom, “please report to decontamination.”

I headed down the corridor with a bounce that I didn’t feel in my step.

I am a Mindscan, an uploaded consciousness, a transferred personality, and yet, despite having fewer external indicators of my internal mental state, I am still very much corporeal.

For centuries, humans have claimed to have out-of-body experiences. But what is the mind divorced from the body? What would a recording of my brain patterns be without a body to give them form?

I’ve always pooh-poohed the notion of out-of-body experiences, of the idea that you can look down upon your own body from above. After all, what are you looking with? Surely not your eyes—they’re part of your body. Could an incorporeal entity sense anything? Photons need to be arrested to be detected; they have to hit something—the back of the eye to be seen as light, the skin to be felt as heat. A disembodied spirit could not see.

And, even if it did somehow detect things, no one ever claimed to have anything but normal vision when out of their body. They see the world around them as they always have before, just from a different angle. They don’t see infrared; they don’t see ultraviolet—vision without eyes seems exactly the same as vision with eyes. And yet if eyes are not really necessary for sight, why does plucking them out—or even just covering them—always, without fail, result in a loss of vision? And if it’s just a coincidence that out-of-body perceptions happen to resemble what eyes see, why do color-blind people, like I was, never report a world of hues previously unknown to them when they have out-of-body experiences?

No, vision can’t exist without a body. “The mind’s eye” is metaphor, nothing more. You can’t have a disembodied intellect—at least, not a human one. Our brains are parts of our bodies, not something separate.

And that monad that was me—that inseparable combination of brain and body—was mostly glad to be home, although, I/we/it had to admit that it was all very strange. Everything looked different now that I had color vision. I wasn’t quite sure about such matters yet, but it was arguable that things I’d thought had gone nicely together were actually clashing.

More than that, things didn’t feel the same. My favorite chair was no longer as comfortable; the carpet had almost no texture beneath my bare feet; the banister’s rich woodgrain, ever so slightly raised on some swirls, just as delicately indented on others, had become a uniform smoothness; the comforter I kept slung over the back of the couch no longer had its agreeable scritchiness.

And Clamhead still hadn’t recognized me, although, after a lot of wary sniffing, she had consented to eat the food I put out for her. But when she wasn’t eating, she spent hours staring out the living-room window, waiting for her master to come home.

Tomorrow—Monday—I would go see my mother. As usual, it was a duty I was not looking forward to. But tonight, a beautiful autumn Sunday night, should be fun: tonight was a little party at Rebecca Chong’s penthouse. That would be great; I could use some cheering up.

I took the subway to Rebecca’s. Although it wasn’t a weekday, there were still lots of people on the train, and many of them stared openly at me. Canadians are supposed to be known for their politeness, but that trait seemed entirely absent just then.

Even though there were plenty of seats, I decided to stand for the trip with my back to everyone, making a show of consulting a map of the subway system. It had grown slowly but surely since I was a kid, with, most recently, a new line out to the airport, and an extension of another all the way up to York University.

Once the train got to Eglinton, I exited and found the corridor that led to the entrance to Rebecca’s building. There, I presented myself to the concierge, who, to his credit, didn’t bat an eye as he called up to Rebecca’s apartment to confirm that I should be admitted.

I took the elevator up to the top floor, and walked along the short hallway to Rebecca’s door. I stood there for a few moments, steeling my courage … literally, I suppose … and then knocked on the apartment door. A few moments later, the door opened, and I was face to face with the lovely Rebecca Chong. “Hey, Becks,” I said. I was about to lean in for our usual kiss on the lips when she actually stepped back a half pace.

“Oh, my God,” said Rebecca. “You—my God, you really did it. You said you were going to, but…” Rebecca stood there, mouth agape. For once, I was happy that there was no outward sign of my inner feelings. Finally, I said, “May I come in?”

“Um, sure,” said Rebecca. I stepped into her penthouse apartment; fabulous views both real and virtual filled her walls.

“Hello, everyone,” I said, moving out of the marbled entry way and onto the berber carpet.

Sabrina Bondarchuk, tall, thin, with hair that I now saw as the yellow I supposed it always had been, was standing by the fireplace, a glass of white wine in her hand. She gasped in surprise.

I smiled—fully aware that it wasn’t quite the dimpled smile they were used to. “Hi, Sabrina,” I said.