Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

I wasn’t sure I bought this, but I continued to listen.

“I don’t mean to sound harsh,” said Sugiyama, “but I know you are all realists—you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. You each know that your natural lives are almost over. If you elect to undergo our procedure, it’s the new you that will get to live on, in your house, your community, with your family. But that version of you will remember this moment right now when we discussed this, just as it will remember everything else you ever did; it will be you.”

He stopped. I thought it must be awkward to be a synthetic lecturer; a real person could choreograph his pauses with sips of water. But after a moment, Sugiyama went on. “But what happens to the original you?” he asked.

Karen leaned close to me, and whispered in a mock-menacing tone, “Soylent Green is people!” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“The answer, of course, is something wonderful ,” said Sugiyama. “The old you will be provided for, in unsurpassed luxury, at High Eden, our retirement village on the far side of the moon.” Pictures of what looked like a five-star resort community began floating behind Sugiyama. “Yes, ours is the first-ever civilian residence on the moon, but we’ve spared no expense, and we’ll take care of the original you there in the highest possible style, until that sad but inevitable day when the flesh gives up.” I’d read that Immortex cremated the dead up there, and, of course, there were no funerals or grave markers—after all, they contended the person still lived on…

“It’s a cruel irony,” said Sugiyama. “The moon is the perfect place for the elderly. With a surface gravity only one-sixth of Earth’s, falls that would break a hip or leg here are trivial there. And, again, in that gentle gravity, even weakened muscles have plenty of strength. Hoisting oneself in and out of bed or the bath, or walking up stairs, is no longer a struggle—not that there are many stairs on the moon; people are so light on their feet there that ramps are better.

“Yes, being on the moon is wonderful, if you’re elderly; the original version of me is, right this very instant, having a grand time at High Eden, believe you me. But getting to the moon—that used to be quite another story. The high acceleration experienced during rocket liftoff from Earth is brutal, although after that, admittedly the rest of the journey, spent in effectively zero g, is a piece of cake. Well, of course, we don’t use rockets. That is, we don’t go straight up. Rather, we use spaceplanes that take off horizontally and gradually climb to Low Earth Orbit. At no time during the flight do you experience more than 1.4 g, and with our ergo-padded chairs and so forth, we can get even the frailest person to the moon safe and sound. And once there—” he paused dramatically—“ paradise .”

Sugiyama looked around the room, meeting eyes. “What scares you? Getting sick? Not likely on the moon; everything is decontaminated as it enters one of the lunar habitats, and germs would have to travel through vacuum and endure harsh radiation to move from one habitat to another. Being mugged? There’s never been a mugging—or any other violent crime—on the moon. Those cold Canadian winters?” He chuckled. “We maintain a constant temperature of twenty-three degrees Celsius. Water, of course, is precious on the moon, so the humidity is kept low—no more hot muggy summers. You’ll feel like you’re enjoying a beautiful spring morning in the American Southwest all year round. Trust me: High Eden is the best possible retirement home, a wonderful resort with gravity so gentle that it makes you feel young again. It’s a win-win scenario, for the new you down here on Earth and the old one up there on the moon.” He smiled broadly. “So, any takers?”

My mother was now sixty-six. In the almost three decades since Dad had been institutionalized, she had never remarried. Of course, it wasn’t as though Dad was dead.

Or maybe it was.

I saw my mother once a week, on Monday afternoons. Occasionally, I’d see her more often: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. But our regular get-togethers were Mondays at 2:00 p.m.

They were not joyous occasions.

My fingerprint let me into the house I’d grown up in, right on the lake. It had been worth a lot when I was a teenager; now, it was worth a fortune. Toronto was like a black hole, gobbling up everything that fell into its event horizon. It had grown hugely three years before I was born, when five surrounding municipalities had become part of it. Now it had grown even more, swallowing all the other adjoining cities and towns, becoming a behemoth of eight million people. My parents’ house wasn’t in a suburb anymore; it was in the heart of the continuous downtown that started with the CN Tower and continued along the lakeshore for fifty kilometers in either direction.

It was hard coming through the house’s entryway into the marble foyer. The door to my father’s den was on the right and my mother, even after all these years, had left it untouched. I always tried not to look through the open door; I always failed. The teak desk was still there; so was the black leather swivel chair.

It wasn’t just sadness I felt; it was guilt. I’d never told my mother that Dad and I were arguing when he collapsed. I hadn’t actually lied to her—I’m a terrible liar—but she’d assumed I must have heard him fall and come running, and, well, it was not as if he could contradict me. I could have dealt with her anger over the fake ID; I couldn’t deal with her looking at me and thinking I’d been responsible for what had happened to the man she was devoted to.

“Hello, Mr. Sullivan,” said Hannah, emerging from the kitchen. Hannah, about my own age, was my mother’s live-in housekeeper.

“Hi, Hannah,” I said. Normally, I told everyone to call me by my first name, but I’d never taken that step with Hannah—because of our similarities in age, she seemed too much like the dutiful sister doing what I should be doing, looking after my mother. “How is she?”

Hannah had soft features and small eyes; she looked like the kind of person who’d have been pleasantly plump in the days before drugs had eliminated obesity—at least there had been some real cures for things in the last twenty-seven years. “Not too bad, Mr. Sullivan. I served her lunch about an hour ago, and she ate most of it.”

I nodded and continued along the corridor. The house was elegant; I hadn’t understood that when I was a kid, but I did now: the hallway was paneled in dark wood, and little marble statues were set into recessed niches, with fancy brass lights pointing at them.

“Hey, Mom,” I called out, as I reached the bottom of the curving oak staircase.

“I’ll be down in a second,” she replied from upstairs. I nodded. I headed into the living room, which was sunken and had bay windows overlooking the lake.

A few minutes later, my mother appeared. She was dressed, as she always was for these trips, in one of the blouses she used to wear back in 2018. She knew her face had changed, and even with a nip here and a tuck mere, she still wasn’t immediately recognizable as the woman she’d been in her late thirties; I guess she felt the old clothes might help.

We got into my car, a green Toshiba Deela, and drove the twenty kilometers north to Brampton, where the Institute was located. It was, of course, the best care that money could buy: a large, treed lot, with a modern, central structure that looked more like a resort hotel than a hospital; maybe they’d used the same architect Immortex had for High Eden. It was a fine summer’s afternoon, and several—patients? residents?—were outdoors in wheelchairs, each accompanied by an attendant.