Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

Or so I’d kidded myself into believing. But, the next morning, still in Karen’s hotel suite, as I looked again at her plastiskin face, at her camera eyes, I found myself desperate to know what she was thinking. And if I couldn’t tell what was going on inside her head, surely others couldn’t tell what was going on inside mine. And so I resorted to the time-honored technique. I asked: “What are you thinking?”

We were still lying in bed. Karen turned her head, looking away. “I’m thinking that I’m old enough to be your mother.”

I felt something I couldn’t quite quantify—it wasn’t like anything else. After a second, though, I recognized what it was an analog of: my stomach tightening into knots. At least she hadn’t said she was old enough to be my grandmother—although that was technically true, as well.

“I’m thinking,” she continued, “I have a son two years older than you.”

I nodded slowly. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“A woman my age with a man your age? People would look askance. They’d say…”

I told my voice box to laugh, and it did—rather unconvincingly, I thought. “They’d say I was after your money.”

“But that’s crazy, of course. You’ve got lots of money of your own … um, don’t you? I mean, after the transfer procedure, you still have lots left, no?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Honestly?”

I told her how much was in my stock portfolio; I also told her how much real estate I owned.

She rolled her head again, facing me, smiling. “Not bad for a young fellow like you.”

“It’s not that much,” I said. “I’m not stinking rich.”

“No,” she said, with a laugh. “Just a bit redolent.”

“Still…” I said, and let the word hang in the air.

“I know,” said Karen. “This is crazy. I’m almost twice as old as you are. What can we have in common? We grew up in different centuries. Different millennia, even.”

It was true beyond the need to comment.

“But,” said Karen, still looking away from me, “I guess life isn’t about the part of the journey that’s already done; it’s about the road ahead.” She paused. “Besides, I may be 200% of your age now, but a thousand years from now, I’ll be less than 105% of your age. And we both expect to be around a thousand years from now, don’t we?”

I paused, considering that. “I still have a hard time wrapping my head around what the word ‘immortality’ really means. But I guess you’re right. I guess the age difference isn’t so big a deal, when you put it that way.”

“You really think?” she said.

I took a moment. If I wanted out, this was the perfect opportunity, the perfect excuse. But if I didn’t want out, then we needed to put this issue behind us, once and for all. “Yeah,” I said. “I really do think.”

Karen rolled over, facing me. She was smiling. “I’m surprised you know Alanis Morissette.”

“Who?”

“Oh,” said Karen, and I could see her plastic features go slack. “She was a singer, very popular. Canadian, now that I think about it. And”—she imitated a husky voice that I’d never heard before—“ ‘Yeah, I really do think’ was a line from a song of hers called ‘Ironic.’ ”

“Ah,” I said.

Karen sighed. “But you don’t know that. You don’t know half the stuff I know—because you’ve only lived half as long.”

“Then teach me,” I said simply.

“What?”

“Teach me about the part of your life I missed. Bring me up to speed.”

She looked away. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Start with the highlights,” I said.

“There’s so much.”

I stroked her arm gently. “Try.”

“Wellllll,” said Karen, her drawl attenuating the word. “We went into space. We fought a stupid war in Vietnam. We turfed out a corrupt president. The Soviet Union fell. The European Union was born. Microwave ovens, personal computers, cell phones, and the World Wide Web appeared.” She shrugged a bit. “That’s the Reader’s Digest version.”

“The what?” But then I smiled. “No, just pulling your leg. My mom subscribed when I was a kid.”

But the joke had bothered her, I could tell. “It’s not history that separates us; it’s c ulture . We grew up reading different magazines, different books. We watched different TV shows. We listened to different music.”

“So what?” I said. “Everything’s online.” I smiled, remembering our earlier discussion. “Even copyrighted stuff—and the owners get micropayments automatically when we access it, right? So we can download your favorite books and all that, and you can introduce me to them. After all, you said we’ve got all the time in the world.”

Karen looked intrigued. “Yes, but, well, where would we start?”

“I’d love to know what TV shows you watched growing up.”

“You wouldn’t want to see old stuff like that. Two-dimensional, low-res … some of it even in black-and-white.”

“Sure, I would,” I said. “It’d be fun. In fact”—I gestured at the bedroom’s giant wall screen—“why don’t you pick something right now? Let’s get started.”

“You think?” said Karen.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to copy her imitation of this Alanis person’s voice, “I really do think.”

Karen’s lips moved strangely—perhaps she was trying to purse them as she considered. Then she spoke to the suite’s computer, accessing some online repository of old TV shows. And, a few moments later, white letters were appearing on the wall screen, one at a time, spelling out words, while a drum was beating in the background: THE…

Karen seemed quite excited as she sat up in the bed. “Okay, I’ve jumped ahead to the opening credits just so you’ll get the background—then we’ll go back and watch the teaser.”

…SIX MILLION…

“Okay,” she said. “See that guy in the cockpit? That’s Lee Majors.”

… DOLLAR MAN.

Karen went on. “He’s playing Steve Austin, an astronaut and test pilot.”

“How old is this show?” I asked, sitting up as well.

“This episode is from 1974.”

That was … Christ, that was as many years before I was born as … as Dad’s collapse was before today. “Was six million a lot then?”

“It was a fortune.”

“Hunh.”

There was crosstalk between pilots and ground control overtop of the images on the screen. “ It looks good at NASA One.”

“Okay, Victor.”

“Landing rocket arm switch is on. Here comes the throttle…”

“See,” said Karen, “he’s testing an experimental aircraft, but it’s about to crash. He’s going to lose an arm, both legs, and an eye.”

“I know some restaurants he couldn’t eat at,” I said. I waited the perfect comic beat.

“They cost an arm and a leg.”

Karen whapped me lightly on the forearm as the little test aircraft dropped from the wing of a giant airplane. The craft looked like a bathtub—no wonder it was going to crash. “Anyway,” she said, “they replace his missing limbs with super-strong nuclear-powered duplicates, and they give him a new eye with a twenty-to-one zoom and the ability to see infrared.”

More crosstalk: “ I’ve got a blowout, damper three…”

“Get your pitch to zero.”

“Pitch is out! I can’t hold altitude!”

“Correction: Alpha hold is off. Trim selectors, emergency!”

“Flight Com, I can’t hold it. She’s breaking up! She’s brea — ”

The bathtub somersaulted across the screen, in very grainy footage. “That’s actual archival film,” said Karen. “This crash really happened.”