Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

Eventually, Karen came—if the term had any etymological validity in this context. She closed her plastiskin lids over her glass eyes and made a series of increasingly sharp, and increasingly guttural, sounds as her whole mechanical body went even more rigid than it normally was.

I felt kind of sort of a bit close to coming myself while Karen was; I’d always felt more aroused, more sexy and sexual, when someone was orgasming thanks to me. But it didn’t crest, didn’t peak, didn’t last. I pulled out, my prosthetic member still rigid.

“Hi, stranger,” said Karen, gently, looking into my eyes.

“Hi,” I replied. And I smiled, doubting it was easy to tell a forced smile from a real one with these artificial faces.

“That was…” she said, trailing off, seeking a word. “That was fine .”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I never used to come during intercourse. It took … um, you know.”

She made a contented sound. “There must be some women working on Immortex’s body-design team.”

I was happy for her. But I also knew that the old saying was true. Sex didn’t happen between the legs; it happened between the ears.

“What about you?” asked Karen. “How are you doing?”

“It’s just…” I trailed off. “It’s, ah, it’s going to take some getting used to.”

Karen and I talked for hours. She listened with such attention and compassion that I found myself sharing things with her I’d shared with no one else. I even told her about the big fight I’d had with my father, and how he’d collapsed right in front of my eyes.

But you can only talk for so long before running out of things to say, at least temporarily, and so we were just relaxing now, lying in the bed in Karen’s suite at the Fairmont Royal York. Karen was reading a book—an actual, physical bound volume—while I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t bored, though. I enjoyed looking up at the ceiling, at the blank white space.

Karen probably had had a different reaction, early in her career, staring at a sheet of paper in her writetyper, or whatever those things were called. I suspect empty whiteness was daunting for an author whose job it was to fill it, but for me the featureless expanse of the ceiling—here in the bedroom not even broken by a lighting fixture, since all the illumination came from floor or table lamps—was soothing, free of distractions. It was perfect, as the saying goes, for hearing myself think.

Can’t remember…

Huh?

Can’t remember that either. Are you sure?

What couldn’t I remember? Well, of course, if I could remember it—whatever it was—then I wouldn’t be worried about my inability to remember it…

No. No, I have no recollection of…

Of what? What don’t I have any recollection of?

Well, if you say so. But this is very strange…

I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts. Although a cliche, that usually worked for me—but this time the thoughts didn’t go away.

I’m sure I’d remember something like that…

It wasn’t like I was hearing a voice; there was no sound , no timbre, no cadence. Just words, tickling at the periphery of my perception—articulated but unspoken words, identical to everything else I’d ever thought.

Except—

No, I have an excellent memory. Trivia, facts, figures…

Except these didn’t seem to be my thoughts.

Who did you say you are, again?

I shook my head more violently, my vision whipping from the mirrored closet doors on my left to a more ghostly reflection of myself hi the window on my right.

Good, okay. And my name is Jake Sullivan…

Strange. Very strange.

Karen looked over at me. “Is something wrong, dear?”

“No,” I said automatically. “No, I’m fine.”

Heaviside Crater was located at 10.4 degrees south latitude, and 167.1 degrees east longitude—pretty close to the center of the moon’s backside. That meant that Earth was straight down—separated from us by 3,500 kilometers of rock, plus almost a hundred times that much empty space.

Heaviside measured 165 kilometers across. The High Eden habitat was only five hundred meters across, so there was plenty of room to grow. Immortex projected there would be one million people a year uploading by 2060, and all the shed skins would have to be housed somewhere. Of course, it wasn’t expected that skins would stay in High Eden very long: just a year or two, before they died. Despite Immortex’s claims that their Mindscan process copied structures with total fidelity, the technology was always getting better, and nobody wanted to transfer any earlier than they had to.

High Eden consisted of a large assisted-living retirement home, a terminal-care hospital, and a collection of luxury apartments for the handful of us who had checked in here but didn’t require ‘round-the-clock aid. No—not checked in. Moved in. And there was no moving out.

Inside High Eden, all the rooms and corridors had very tall ceilings—it was too easy to send oneself flying up by accident. Even so, the ceilings were cushioned, just to be on the safe side; lighting fixtures were recessed into the padding. And there were plants everywhere—not only were they beautiful, but they also helped scrub carbon dioxide out of the air.

I’d always distrusted corporations, but, so far, Immortex had been true to its word.

My apartment was everything I could have asked for, and just as it had been shown in the Immortex VR tour. The furniture looked like real wood—natural pine, my favorite—but of course wasn’t. Although the motto of the company was that you could have any luxury you could pay for, I couldn’t very well take my old furniture from Toronto—that had to be left behind for my … my replacement —and it would have been outrageously expensive to ship new stuff up from Earth.

So instead, as the household computer politely informed me in response to my queries, the furniture was made of something called whipped regolith—pulverized, aerated rock, reformed into a material like very porous basalt—that had been covered with a microthin plastic veneer printed with an ultra-high-resolution image of real knotty pine. An exterior mimicking the natural over a manufactured interior. Not too disturbing, if you didn’t think about it much.

At first, I thought the overstuffed furniture was a bit miserly in its padding, but after I sat on it, I realized that you don’t need as much padding to feel comfortable on the moon. My eighty-five kilos now felt like fourteen; I was as light as a toddler back on Earth.

One wall was a smart window—and a first-rate one, too. You couldn’t make out the individual pixels, even if you put your face right up against it. The current image was Lake Louise, near Banff, Alberta—back before the glacier had mostly melted and flooded the whole area. I rather suspect it was a computer-generated image; I don’t think anybody could have made a high-enough resolution scan back then to produce this display. Gentle waves were moving across the lake, and blue sky reflected in the waters.

All in all, it was a cross between a five-star hotel suite and a luxury executive condo; very well-appointed, very comfortable.

Nothing to complain about.

Nothing at all.

It’s a modern myth that the majority of human communication isn’t verbal: that much more information is conveyed by facial expression and body language, and even, some would say, by pheromones, than by spoken words. But as every teenager knows, that’s ridiculous: they can spend hours talking on a voice-only phone, hearing nothing but the words the other person is saying, and interact totally. And so, even though my new artificial body was somewhat less expressive in non-verbal ways, I still had no trouble making even my most subtle nuances understood.