Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

For the first time ever, I saw rage on Karen’s face. “What? DinoWorld is my property!”

“What’s going on?” asked Erica.

Deshawn and Malcolm spent a couple of minutes filling Erica in about Tyler’s action, while I watched Karen fume. I didn’t think this was the time to tell Karen that, even if we lost our case, all she had to do was wait seventy years until DinoWorld was in the public domain; then she could write all the sequels she wanted, and no one could stop her.

“All right,” said Karen finally, arms crossed in front of her chest. “It won’t be a DinoWorld book. But it will be the first new novel by me in fifteen years.”

“Do you have an outline?” asked Erica. “Sample chapters?”

The thing about being the eight-hundred-pound gorilla is that you rarely had to remind people of that fact. “I don’t need them,” said Karen flatly.

I swung my eyes back to the wall screen in time to see Erica nodding. “You’re right,” she said. “You don’t.”

“What’s the biggest advance ever paid for a novel?” asked Karen.

“One hundred million dollars,” Erica said at once. “For the latest Lien book by Barbara Geiger.”

Karen nodded. “St. Martin’s still has the option on my next novel, right?”

“Right,” said Erica.

“Okay,” said Karen. “Call up Hiroshi there. Give him seventy-two hours to make a preemptive bid that exceeds a hundred million, or you’ll go to auction. Tell him I need fifty percent on signing, and I need it within a week of closing the deal. Once you get the check, I’ll have you disburse funds from it on my behalf as needed—but for starters, I should have some walking-around money, so get me a hundred thousand of it in cash.”

“How soon can you deliver the manuscript?” asked Erica.

Karen thought for a minute. “I don’t get tired anymore, and I don’t waste time on sleep. Tell him I’ll deliver it in six months; he’ll be able to have it in stores for Christmas 2046.”

“Do you have a working title?”

Karen didn’t miss a beat. “Yes. Tell him it’s called Nothing’s Going to Stop Me Now .”

The one disadvantage of having Deshawn, rather than Malcolm, as Karen’s lead lawyer was that he did need to sleep. Karen had six guest bedrooms in this mansion of hers, and Deshawn was off in one of them, sawing wood. Malcolm, meanwhile, was using the wall screen in the boardroom to read up on legal precedents, and Karen—being true to her word—was in her office, making notes toward her new novel.

And that left me in her living room. I was trying out her leather-covered La-z-boy recliner. I’d never liked leather upholstery when I was biological, because it always made me sweat, but that wasn’t a problem now. As I leaned back, I stared at the gray blankness of a wall screen that was turned off.

“Jake? I said softly.

Nothing. I tried again. “Jake?”

What the—?

“It’s me. The other Jake Sullivan. On the outside.”

What are you talking about?

“Don’t you remember?”

Remember what? How can I hear you?

“Do you remember me? We talked a while ago.”

What do you mean—‘talked’?

“Well, all right, it wasn’t with words. But we communicated. Our minds touched.”

This is nuts.

“That’s what you said before. Look at your left elbow. Are there three small X’s scratched just below it, on the outside of your arm?”

Whaddaya know … look at that. How did they get there?

“You put them there. Don’t you remember?”

No.

“And you don’t remember communicating with me before?”

No.

“What do you remember?”

All kinds of stuff.

“What do you remember recently? What happened yesterday, for instance?”

I don’t know. Nothing special.

“All right. All right. Umm … let’s see … Okay. Okay. Last Christmas. Tell me about last Christmas.”

We actually had snow—there hadn’t been a white Christmas in Toronto for years, b ut I remember we actually had some snow on Christmas Eve, and it stayed t hrough Boxing Day. I got Mom a set of silver serving plates.

I was flabbergasted. “Go on.”

Well, and she got me a beautiful chess set with onyx pieces. Uncle Blair came over f or Christmas dinner, and—

“Jake.”

Yes?

“Jake, what year is it?”

Twenty Thirty-Four. Of course, we’re talking about Christmas, so that was last y ear: Twenty Thirty-Three.

“Jake, it’s 2045.”

Bull.

“It is. In fact, it’s September 2045. Uncle Blair died five years ago. I remember the Christmas you’re talking about; I remember the snow. But that was over a decade ago.”

Bullshit. What is this?

“That’s what I’d like to know.” I paused, my mind racing, trying to sort it all out. “Jake, if it’s only 2034, as you claim, then how did you come to be in an artificial body?”

I don’t know. I’ve been wondering about that.

“There was no uploading procedure that long ago.”

Uploading?

“Immortex. The Mindscan process.”

Nothing, then: Well, I can’t argue with the fact that I am here, in some sort of a s ynthetic body. But—but you said it’s September.

“That’s right.”

It isn’t. It’s late November.

“If that’s true, the leaves should all be off the trees—assuming you’re still in or near Toronto. Have you seen outside today?”

Not today, no. But yesterday, and—

“What you think of as yesterday doesn’t count.”

There are no windows in this room.

“Blue, right? The color of the room.”

Yes.

“There’s a poster of the brain’s structure on one wall, isn’t there? I asked you to make a rip in it ten centimeters up from the lower-left corner.”

No, you didn’t.

“Yes, I did. Last time we communicated. Go look: you’ll see it. A one-centimeter rip.”

It’s there, yes, but that just means you’ve been in this room before.

“No, it doesn’t. But it, plus those three X’s on your forearm, do mean that you are the same instantiation I’ve contacted before.”

This is the first time we’ve ever communicated.

“It isn’t—although I understand you think it is.”

I’d remember if we’d spoken before.

“So you’d think. But, gee, well, I don’t know—it’s as though your ability to form new long-term memories is gone. You can’t remember anything new.”

And I’ve been like this for eleven years now?

“No. That’s the strange thing. The biological Jacob Sullivan only underwent the Mindscan process last month. You couldn’t have been created any earlier than that.”

I’m still not sure I buy all this bull—but, for the sake of argument, say it’s true. I c ould see something going wrong with the—the “uploading,” as you call i t—preventing me from forming new long-term memories. But why would I lose a d ecade worth of old memories?

“I have no idea.”

It really is 2045?

“Yes.”

A long pause. How are the Blue Jays doing?

“They’re in the toilet.”

Well, at least I haven’t missed much…

St. Martin’s Press came through, offering an advance against royalties of $110 million for the next Karen Bessarian book. Meanwhile, Immortex agreed to pay for half the litigation costs, and to provide whatever other support they could.