Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“But it’s not a law you agree with, is it?”

“Women fought long and hard for the right to control their own bodies, Ms. Lopez. I grant that things have shifted to the right since I was young, but…”

“No, no, no, Ms. Bessarian. You can’t accuse contemporary society of narrow-mindedness: we’ve expanded the definition of what qualifies as human since your day. We’ve broadened the definition to include fetuses.”

“Yes, but…”

“Oh, granted, the broadening has not been in the direction you seem to wish. We protect innocent newborns; you’d take that away, and instead let people hold on to some ersatz life at the other end, isn’t that so? The first nine months are too much to ask, but nine additional decades, or even centuries, tacked on at the end, in synthetic form, is reasonable. Is that your position, Ms. Bessarian?”

“My position, since you ask, is that once the law has granted the right of personhood to someone, that right is inalienable.”

Lopez apparently had been waiting for Karen to say this. She practically leapt back to her desk and picked up a datapad. “Defendant’s thirteen, your honor,” she declared, holding up the device. She crossed the well and handed it to Karen. “Ms. Bessarian, would you please tap the ‘Book Info’ icon and tell the court what book is currently being displayed?”

Karen did so. ” The American Heritage English Dictionary , Ninth Edition, Unabridged.”

“Very good,” said Lopez. “Now will you please clear that notification, and read the text on the underlying screen?”

Karen touched some controls, then: “It’s the definition of the word ‘inalienable,’ ” she said.

“Indeed. And will you please read the definition?”

“ ‘That cannot be transferred to another or others: inalienable rights.’ ”

“ ‘That cannot be transferred,’ ” repeated Lopez. “Would you agree with that definition?”

“Um, well, I’m sure to most people ‘inalienable’ means: that it cannot be taken away from you.”

“Really, now? Would you care to try a few other dictionaries? Merriam-Webster’s , perhaps? Encarta ? The Oxford English Dictionary ? All of them are loaded onto that datapad. Ms. Bessarian, and I assure you they all give the same meaning: something that cannot be transferred. And yet you’ve just said that your own position is that rights of personhood are inalienable.”

Deshawn spread his arms. “Your honor, objection—relevance. You took me to task on our first day for making picayune semantic distinctions, and—”

“Sorry, Mr. Draper,” said Herrington. “Overruled. The point Ms. Lopez is making is bang on target.”

Lopez nodded at the bench. “Thank you, your honor.” She then turned back to Karen. “So which is it? Or are we in Wonderland now, and a word means whatever you want it to mean?”

“Don’t push your luck,” said Herrington, gently.

“Of course not, your honor,” Lopez replied. “Which is it Ms. Bessarian? Should rights of personhood be transferable, or are they, as you yourself said, inalienable?”

Karen opened her mouth, but then closed it.

“That’s all right, Ms. Bessarian,” said Lopez. “That’s just fine. I’m content to leave it as a rhetorical question. I’m sure the good men and women of the jury will know how to answer it for us.” She turned to face the bench. “Your honor, the defendant rests.”

There were cameras inside the moonbus, of course. In theory, they were off.

Right. As if.

I took a tube of suit-repair goop and squirted it over each of the lenses, watching it harden quickly and turning to a matte finish as it did so. The only one I left uncovered was the unit for the videophone next to the airlock—and it was soon bleeping, signaling an incoming call. I pushed the answer button and Gabriel Smythe’s florid face appeared.

“Yes, Gabe,” I said. “Have you gotten ahold of the artificial me?”

“Yes, we have, Jake. He’s in Toronto, of course, but he’s willing to talk to you.”

“Put him on,” I said.

And there he—I—was. I’d seen the artificial body before I’d uploaded, but never since it had been occupied. It was a slightly simplified version of me, with a slightly younger face that looked a little plastic. “Hello,” I said.

He didn’t reply for a moment, and I was about to protest that something was wrong, but then he said, “Hello, brother.”

Of course. The time lag: one-and-a-third seconds for my words to reach him on Earth; another one-and-a-third seconds for his reply to reach me. Still, I was wary.

“How do I know it’s really you?” I asked.

One Mississippi. Two Mis—

“It’s me,” said the android.

“No,” I replied. “At best it’s one of us. But I’ve got to be sure.”

Time delay. “So ask me a question.”

No one else could possibly know this—at least not through me, although I suppose s he could have told someone. But given that she’d been dating my best friend at the time, I rather suspected her lips were sealed—after the fact of course. “The first girl to ever give us a blowjob.”

“Carrie,” said the other me. “At the hydro field behind our high school. After the cast party for that production of Julius Caesar .”

I smiled. “Good. Okay. One more question, just to be sure. We’d decided before undergoing the Mindscan process to keep one little fact secret from the Immortex people Something about, ah, um, traffic lights.”

“Traffic lights? Oh—we’re color-blind. We can’t tell red and green apart. Or, at least, we didn’t used to be able to: I can now.”

“And?”

“It’s … um…”

“Come on, make me see it.”

“It’s … it’s … well, red is warm , you know? Especially the deeper shades, like maroon. And green—it’s not quite like anything I can describe. It’s not cold, the way blue is. Sharp, maybe. It looks sharp. And … I don’t know. I like it, though—it’s my favorite new color.”

“What’s a field of grass look like?”

“It’s, ah…”

Smythe’s voice, cutting in: “Forgive me, Jake, but surely we have more pressing matters to discuss.”

I was still fascinated, but Smythe was right. The last thing I wanted to do was get emotionally involved with this bogus me. “Right, okay. Now, listen, copy-of-me. You know exactly why we agreed to this copying process. We thought the biological me was going to die soon, or end up a vegetable, and now I’m not; I’ve got decades left.”

Time delay. “Really?”

“Yes. They found a cure for what was wrong with me, and they fixed it. Dad’s fate is not going to be my fate.”

Time delay. “That’s—that’s terrific. I’m delighted.”

“I’m tickled pink myself—say, what does pink really look like? No, never mind. But, look, we both know that I’m the real person, don’t we?”

An interminable couple of seconds. “Oh, come on,” said the other me. “You fully accepted the conditions of what we were doing. You understood that I—not you, I —was going to be the real us from now on.”

“But you must have been watching the news, too. You must know that there’s a case involving Karen Bessarian going on right now in Michigan, where it’s being argued that the upload is not really a person.”

Time lag. “No, I didn’t know that. And besides—”

“How could you not know that? We never miss the news.”

“—it doesn’t matter what they’re doing in Mich…”

“How are the Blue Jays doing?”

“…igan. This isn’t about what lawyers say, it’s about what we agreed to.”