Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

My father was not among them.

We entered the lobby. The guard—black, bald, bearded—knew us, and we exchanged pleasantries, and then my mother and I headed up to Dad’s room, on the second floor.

They moved him around, to avoid bedsores and other problems. Sometimes we found him lying down; sometimes he was gently strapped into a wheelchair; sometimes, they even had him strapped to a board that held him vertically.

Today, he was in bed. He rolled his head, looked at Mother, looked at me. He was aware of his surroundings, but that was about it. The doctors said he had the mind of an infant.

He’d changed a lot since that day. His hair was white now, and, of course, he had the wrinkled countenance of a man of sixty-six; no point in cosmetic surgery here. His long limbs were thin and untoned; despite electrical and occasional manual stimulation, there was no way to keep them muscular without real physical activity.

“Hello, Cliff,” my mother said, and she paused. She always paused, and it broke my heart each time. She was waiting for a reply that would never come.

Mom had lots of little rituals for these visits. She told my father what had happened in the last week, and how the Blue Jays were doing—I’d gotten my love of baseball from my dad. She sat in a chair next to his bed, and held his left hand in her right one. His fingers always closed reflexively around my mother’s. No one had removed the gold wedding band from his hand, and my mother still wore hers.

Me, I didn’t say much. I just stared at him—at it , really, a shell, a body without much of a mind, lying there, looking at my mother, his mouth quirking occasionally into what might have been the seed of a smile or frown, or might have just been random movements. As she spoke, he made occasional sounds—he’d have been making little gurgles if she wasn’t speaking, too.

My own personal sword of Damocles. I was now five years older than my dad had been when the blood vessels in his brain had ruptured, washing away his intelligence and personality, his joy and his anger, in a tide of red. There was a digital clock on the wall of his room, showing the time in bright numerals. Thank God clocks didn’t tick anymore.

When my mother was done talking at my father, she rose from the chair and said, “All right.”

Normally, I just dropped her off at her house on my way back into the city, but I didn’t want to do this in the car. “Sit down, Mom,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you.” She looked surprised, but did so. There was only one chair in my father’s room here at the Institute, and, as I’d asked, she took it. I propped myself against a bureau on the opposite side of the room and looked at her.

“Yes?” she said. There was a hint of defiance in her voice, and I flashed back. Once before, I’d broached the topic of how futile it was to come here each week, how my father didn’t even really know we were here. She’d been furious, and had verbally slapped me down in a way she hadn’t since I was a kid. Clearly, she was expecting a repeat of that argument.

I took in air, let it out slowly, and spoke. “I’m—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it or not, but there’s this process they’ve got now. It’s been covered on all the news shows…” I trailed off, as if I’d given her enough clues to guess what I was talking about. “It’s by a company called Immortex. They transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body.”

She looked at me silently.

I continued. “And, well, I’m going to do it.”

Mom spoke slowly, as if digesting the idea a word at a time. “You’re going to … transfer your … your consciousness…”

“That’s right.”

“Into a … an … artificial body.”

“Yes.”

She said nothing more, and, just like when I was a little kid, I felt a need to fill the void, to explain myself. “My body’s no good—you know that. It’s almost certainly going to kill me”—if I’m lucky, I thought—“or I’ll end up like Dad. I’m doomed if I stay in this…” I laid a splayed hand over my chest, sought a word “…this shell .”

“Does it work?” she asked. “This process—does it really work?”

I smiled my best reassuring smile. “Yes.”

She looked over at her husband, and the anxious expression on her face was heartbreaking. “Could they … could Cliff…”

Oh, Christ, what a moron I am. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would connect this to Dad. “No,” I said. “No, they copy the mind as it is. They can’t … they can’t undo…”

She took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm herself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was some way, but…”

She nodded.

“But they can do something for me—before it’s too late.”

“So, they move … they move your soul?”

I looked at my mother, totally surprised. Maybe that’s why she still came to visit Dad—she thought, somewhere under all the damage, his soul was still there.

I’d read so much about this, and wanted to tell it all to her, make her see. Before the twentieth century, people had believed there was an elan vital —a life force, some special ingredient that distinguished living matter from regular stuff. But as biologists and chemists found mundane natural explanations for every aspect of life, the notion of an elan vital had been discarded as superfluous.

But the idea that there was an ineffable something that composes mind —a soul, a spirit, a divine spark, call it what you will—still persisted in the popular imagination in some places, even though science could now explain almost every aspect of brain activity without recourse to anything but fully understood physics and chemistry; my mother’s invocation of a soul was as silly as trying to cling to the notion of an elan v ital .

But to tell her that was to tell her that her husband was totally, irretrievably gone. Of course, maybe it would be a kindness to make her understand that. But I didn’t have it in my heart to be that kind.

“No,” I said, “they don’t move your soul. They just copy the patterns that compose your consciousness.”

“Copy? Then what happens to the original?”

“They—see, you transfer the legal rights of personhood to the copy. And then, after that, the biological you has to retire from society.”

“Retire where?”

“It’s called High Eden.”

“Where’s that?”

I wished there was some other way to say it. “On the moon.”

“The moon!”

“The far side of the moon, yes.”

She shook her head. “When would you do this?”

“Soon,” I said. “Very soon. I just—I just can’t take it any longer. Being afraid if I sneeze or bend over or do nothing at all that I might end up brain damaged or a quadriplegic or dead. It’s tearing me apart.”

She sighed, a long, whispery sound. “Come and say good-bye before you leave for the moon.”

“ This is good-bye,” I said. “I’m going to have the process done tomorrow. But the new me will still come to visit regularly.”

My mother looked at her husband, then back at me. “The new you,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t take losing—”

She stopped herself, but I knew what she’d been going to say: “I can’t take losing the only other person in my life.”

“You’re not losing me,” I said. “I’ll still come to visit you.” I gestured at Dad, who gurgled, perhaps even in response. “I’ll still come to visit Dad.”

My mother shook her head slightly, unbelieving.

I drove sadly to my house in North York, thinking.

I hated seeing my mother like that. She’d put her whole life on hold, hoping that somehow my father would come back. Of course, she knew intellectually that the brain damage was permanent. But the intellect and the emotions don’t always end up in synch. In some ways, what had happened to my mother affected me more profoundly than what had happened to my father. She loved him the way I’d always hoped someone would love me.