Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“Buy him off. Offer him a cash payout of, say, twenty percent of the amount he’d inherit. He’ll be rich enough.”

“Settle?” said Karen. “We’ve been sued unfairly before, Austin.” She looked at me. “It happens to all successful authors. And my policy is never to settle just to make something go away.”

Steiner drew his eyebrows together. “It’s safer than taking this one to the courts. The whole legal basis of your transferred personhood is a house of cards; it’s a brand-new concept, and there’s no case law yet. If you lose…” Steiner’s eyes again fell on me “…everyone like you loses.” He shook his head. “Take my advice, Karen: nip this in the bud. Buy Tyler off.”

I looked at Karen. She was silent for a time, but then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I am Karen Bessarian. And if I have to prove it, I will.”

“Hello,” I said. “Is Dr. Chandragupta around?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but he’s left High Eden. He’s on his way back to LS Island. Is there something I can help you with?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but realized that maybe I was feeling a little better; perhaps the pot had indeed helped a bit. “No,” I said. “It’s nothing. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

I woke up the day after Karen’s memorial service with an excruciating headache. I say “the day after” even though we were still in the middle of one of the interminable lunar days: the sun took two weeks to crawl from horizon to horizon here. But High Eden kept a diurnal clock based on Earth’s rotation, and Immortex had arbitrarily standardized on the Eastern North American time zone; apparently, we were even going to switch from Daylight Saving Time come October.

But I wasn’t thinking about any of that just then. What I was thinking about was how much my head hurt. I’d occasionally had migraines back on Earth, but this was worse, and seemed to affect the top center of my head, not one side. I got out of bed and walked over to my en suite bathroom, where I splashed cold water on my face. It didn’t help; I still felt as though someone was pounding a chisel through my skullcap, trying to cleave the two hemispheres of my brain—I now understood where the term “splitting headache” came from.

I smoked a joint, hoping that would help—but it didn’t. And so I found a chair, and told the phone to call over to the hospital.

“Good morning, Mr. Sullivan,” said the young black woman who answered.

Karen was down in her office, talking with her other lawyers, her investment counselor, and more—trying to get a handle on what exactly to do about her son’s attempt to probate her will.

Me, I was lying on Karen’s bed, staring up, as was my habit, at the whiteness of the bedroom ceiling. I wasn’t tired, of course—I never was anymore. But lying down like this had long been my thinking posture—it beat that sitting-on-the-toilet position Rodin had tried to pass off as cogitation.

“Hello,” I said, looking up into the blankness above. “Hello? Are you there, Jake?”

Nothing. Nothing at all.

I tried to clear my mind, pushing aside all the thoughts about Tyler and betrayal and Rebecca and betrayal and Clamhead and betrayal and…

“Hello,” I said, trying again. “Hello?”

And, at last, a faint tickling at the very edges of my perception.

What the—?

Contact! I felt relieved and elated. “Hello,” I said again, softly but clearly. “It’s me—the other instantiation of Jacob Sullivan.”

What other instantiation?

“The one on the outside. The one living Jake’s life.”

How are you communicating with me?

“Don’t you—aren’t you the same copy I connected with before? We had this conversation yesterday.”

I don’t recall…

I paused. Could it be a different instantiation? “Where are you?”

In a lab of some sort, I think. No windows.

“Are the walls blue?”

Yes. How did you—?

“And is there a diagram of a brain on one wall?”

Yes.

“Then it’s probably the same room. Or … or one just like it. Look—that diagram. What is it, a poster or something?”

Yes.

“Printed on paper?”

Yes.

“Can you mark it somehow? Do you have a pen?”

No.

“Well, put a little rip in it. Go over to it, and, um, put a little one-centimeter-long rip in it ten centimeters up from the lower-left corner.”

This is nuts. This is crazy. Voices in my head!

“I think it’s quantum entanglement.”

Quant—really? Cool.

“Go ahead, make that rip in the poster. Then I can tell next time I connect if I’m reaching the same room, or another, similar room with yet another copy of us in it.”

All right. Ten centimeters up on the left-hand side. I’ve done it.

“Good. Now here’s the tricky part. You said you are in the body you ordered, right?”

I didn’t say that. How did you know?

“You told me yesterday.”

Did I?

“Yes—or another one of us did. Now, I need you to mark your body somehow. Is there some way you can do that?”

Why?

“So I can be sure I’ve connected with the same you next time.”

All right. There’s a little screwdriver on a shelf here. I’ll scratch something into my p lastiskin in an inconspicuous spot.

“Perfect.”

A long pause, then: Okay. I’ve put three small X’s on the outside of my left forearm, j ust below the elbow.

“Good. Good.” I paused, trying to digest it all.

Oh, wait. Someone’s coming.

“Who is it? Who is it?”

’Morning, Doctor. What can I—Lie down? Sure, I guess. Hey, what are you—are y ou nuts? You can’t—

“Jake!”

I—oh. Hey! Hey, what’s happ…

“Jake! Are you all right? Jake! Jake!”

Austin Steiner, as I discovered, was a very competent family lawyer, but this case was huge, and Karen needed the best. Fortunately, I knew exactly who to call.

Malcolm Draper’s face appeared on the wall screen, in all its youthful Will Smith-in-his-prime glory. “Why, it’s—it’s Jake Sullivan, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” I said. “We met at Immortex, remember?”

“Of course. What can I do for you, Jake?”

“Are you licensed to practice in Michigan?”

“Yes. Michigan, New York, Massachusetts. And I have associates who—”

“Good. Good. I have a case.”

His eyebrows rose. “What sort of case?”

“Well, I suppose technically it’s probate, but—”

Malcolm shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jake, I thought I told you what I do. Civil liberties; civil rights. I’m sure my secretary can dig up a good probate specialist in Michigan for you, but—”

“No, no. I think you’ll be interested. See, the person whose will is being probated is Karen Bessarian.”

“The author? Still…”

He didn’t know. “You met Karen at Immortex, too. The woman with the Georgia accent.”

“That was Karen Bessarian ? My God. But … oh. Oh, my. Who is trying to probate her will?”

“Her son, one Tyler Horowitz.”

“But the biological Karen isn’t dead yet. Surely the Michigan courts—”

“No, she is dead. Or at least that’s what Tyler is asserting.”

“Christ. She transferred just in time.”

“Apparently. As you can imagine, this case goes beyond the usual probate mess.”

“Absolutely,” said Draper. “This is perfect.”

“I beg your pardon?”