Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“Mr. Sullivan,” he said at once, rising from behind his kidney-shaped desk; there weren’t so many of us skins yet that he couldn’t keep track of us all. “What can I do for you?”

“I have to return to Earth.”

Hades raised his eyebrows. “We can’t allow that. You know the rules.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “They’ve found a cure for my problem.”

“What problem is that?”

“Katerinsky’s syndrome. A kind of arteriovenous malformation in the brain. It’s why I’m here. But there’s a new technique that can cure it.”

“Really?” said Hades. “That’s wonderful news. What’s the cure?”

I had the vocabulary of all this down pat; I’d lived with it so long. “Using nanotechnology, they endovascularly introduce particles into the AVM to clog off its nidus; that shuts the AVM down completely. Because the particles use carbon-based nanofibers, the body doesn’t reject, or even really notice, them.”

“And that means … what? That you’d live a normal lifespan?”

“Yes! Yes! So, you see—”

“That’s terrific. Where do they do the procedure?”

“Johns Hopkins.”

“Ah. Well, you can’t go there, but—”

“What do you mean, I can’t go there? We’re talking about saving my life! I know you’ve got rules, but…”

Hades held up a hand. “And they can’t be broken. But don’t worry. We’ll contact people there on your behalf, and bring an appropriate doctor to our facility here. You’ve got an unlimited medical benefit, although…”

I knew what he was thinking. That my accountant—good old Larry Hancock—would certainly notice the … what? Millions? The million this would cost. But Hades wasn’t getting the point. “No, no, you don’t see. Everything is different now. The conditions under which I agreed to stay here no longer pertain.”

Hades’s voice was infinitely solicitous. “Sir, I’m sorry. We’ll certainly arrange for you to have this cure—and right away, since I understand how precarious your current health is. But you can’t leave here.”

“You have to let me go,” I said, an edge honing my words.

“We can’t. You have no home on the outside, no money, no identity—nothing. This is the only place for you.”

“No, you don’t understand…”

“Oh, but I do. Look—how old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“Think of how lucky you are! I’m fifty-two, and I’ll have to work for many more years, but you’ve gotten to retire a decade or two before most people do, and are enjoying the absolute lap of luxury.”

“But—”

“Aren’t you? Is there anything you lack here? You know we pride ourselves on our service. If there’s something that’s not up to your standards, you just have to ask. You know that.”

“No, no … it’s all very pleasant, but…”

“Well, then, you see, Mr. Sullivan, there’s nothing to worry about. You can have anything here that you can have on the outside.”

“Not anything.”

“Tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever I can to make your stay here happy.”

“I want to go home.” It sounded so plaintive, so like my early days at summer camp, all those years ago. But it was what I wanted now, more than anything else in the world—in all the worlds. I wanted to go home.

“I’m truly, truly sorry, Mr. Sullivan,” said Hades, shaking his head slowly back and forth, the pony tail bouncing as he did so. “There’s just no way I can allow that.”

You have to clear U.S. customs at Pearson Airport in Toronto before you can even get on a plane bound for the States. I’d been afraid we’d have a hard time doing so, but the biometrics of our new bodies matched those of the old ones in key places, and we made it through automated screening without any difficulty. I’d thought Karen would have trouble because her current face was so much more youthful than the one in her passport photo, but whatever facial-recognition software was being used must have relied on underlying bone structure, or something, because it agreed that the person in the photo was indeed her.

I hadn’t flown since I’d been a teenager. My doctors had urged me not to because the pressure changes that accompanied flying could have set off my Katerinsky’s. Now, of course, I felt no pressure changes at all. I wondered whether airline food had improved over the years, but I had no way to find out.

One of the advantages of no longer sweating is that we didn’t have to pack many clothes when we traveled; we had only carry-on luggage. Once we arrived in Atlanta, we headed straight to the Hertz counter and got a car—a blue Toyota Deela. Since there was no need to go by the hotel first to freshen up, we drove straight to the funeral home.

Karen still had a valid driver’s license, although she said she hadn’t driven for years; she was afraid her reflexes had dulled too much. But she was happy to do the driving now. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ridden shotgun, but it did give me a chance to look at the scenery; they really do have a lot of peach trees in Georgia.

As we continued along, Karen told me about Daron. “He was my first love,” she said. “And when it’s your first, you have nothing to compare it to. I had no idea it wasn’t going work out … although I suppose no one ever does in advance.”

“Why’d you break up?” It had been the first question that had occurred to me, and I figured I’d now waited long enough to be entitled to give it voice.

“Oh, any number of reasons,” said Karen. “Fundamentally, we just wanted different things from life. We were still in university when we got married. He wanted to be a printing salesperson, like his father—that’s back when working in printing seemed like a good career choice—and he wanted me to get a job soon, too. But I wanted to stay in university, go to grad school. He wanted the house with the big yard in the suburbs; I wanted to travel and not be tied down. He wanted to start a family right away; I wanted to wait to have kids. In fact…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No. Tell me.”

Karen was quiet for a time as we rolled along. Finally, she said, “I had an abortion. I’d gotten pregnant—stupid, right? I hadn’t been careful about taking my pills. Anyway, I never even told Daron about it, since he would have insisted we keep it.”

I consciously suppressed my natural inclination to blink. They’d been married in the 1980s, and this was the 2040s. If Karen hadn’t aborted the child, he or she would be something like sixty now … and that child, too, would likely be en route to the funeral of the man who had been its father.

I could almost feel the swirling of timelines, the fog of lives that might have gone differently. If Karen hadn’t ended that pregnancy all those decades ago, she might have stayed with Daron for the good of her child … meaning she’d probably never have written DinoWorld and its sequels; it was her second husband who had encouraged her to write. And that would have meant she’d never have been able to afford Immortex’s services. She’d just be an old, old lady, hampered by bad joints.

We pulled into the parking lot of the funeral home. There were lots of empty places; Karen took one of the handicapped spaces.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What? Oh.” She put the car in reverse. “Force of habit. Back when I could drive before, we were entitled to use those spots—my poor Ryan needed a walker.” She found another place to park, and we got out. I thought Toronto was hot in August; here, it was like a blast furnace, and drenchingly humid.

Another couple—ah, that loaded word!—was up ahead of us, entering the building. They clearly heard our footfalls, and the man held the door for us, turning around as he did so.