Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“Better than normal,” I said.

“Then one stick should be plenty to have going at a time, but here are the others.”

He put them in a webbed storage pouch attached to the inner curving wall, where Karen could easily reach them.

“Oh, and one more thing,” said Jesus. He handed me something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

“A newspaper?” I said.

“Today’s New York Times ,” he replied. “Well, the front section, anyway. They do a thousand hardcopies every day, still on paper, for deposit at the Library of Congress, and for a few eccentric old subscribers who are willing to pay over a thousand bucks for a printed copy.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard about that. But what’s it for?”

“Instructions came through from the folks up on the moon. This’ll help prove that you came from Earth today; there’s no other way, except by express rocket, that a copy of this could get to the moon in the next twelve hours.”

“Ah,” I said.

Jesus wedged the newspaper into another storage pouch. “All set?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Yes,” said Karen.

He smiled. “My advice: don’t talk about politics, religion, or sex. No point having an argument when neither of you can get away from the other.” And with that, he swung the curved door shut, sealing us in.

“Are you okay?” I said to Karen. My artificial eyes adjusted to semi-darkness faster than my biological ones had; another difference, I suppose, between an electronic and a chemical reaction.

“I’m fine,” she said, and she sounded sincere.

“Say, have you been to space before?”

“No, although I always wanted to go. But by the time they started having significant space tourism, I was already in my sixties, and my doctor advised against it.” A pause. “It’s nice not to have to worry about such things anymore.”

“Twelve hours,” I said. “It’s going to seem like forever, not being able to sleep. And I can’t even relax emotionally. I mean, what the hell is going on up there, on the moon?”

“They’ve cured the other you’s condition. If you hadn’t had that condition, that…”

I moved my head slightly. “That birth defect. Might as well call a spade a spade.”

“Well, if you hadn’t had that, you wouldn’t have uploaded this early in life.”

“I—forgive me, Karen, I’m not criticizing your choice but, well, if I hadn’t had that birth defect, I don’t know that I would have ever uploaded. I wasn’t looking to cheat death. I just didn’t want to be cheated out of a normal life.”

“I didn’t much think about living forever when I was your age,” said Karen. And then her body shifted slightly, as if squirming a bit. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t use that phrase, should I? I mean, I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable about our age gap. But it’s true. When you’ve got decades ahead of you, that seems like a long time. It’s all relative. Have you ever read Ray Bradbury?”

“Who?”

“Sigh.” She said the word, rather than made the sound. “He was one of my favorite writers when I was growing up. One of his stories begins with him—or his character; as a writer I should know better than to conflate author and character—reflecting on being a school kid. He says, ‘Imagine a summer that would never end.’ A kid’s summer off school! Just two short months, but it does seem like forever when you’re young. But when you get into your eighties, and the doctor tells you that you’ve got only a few years left, then years, and even decades, don’t seem like enough time to do all the things you want to do.”

“Well, I— Kee-ryst! ”

The engines were firing. Karen and I were pressed down hard, toward the floor of the cargo chamber. The roar of the rocket was too great to speak over, so we simply listened. Our artificial ears had cutoffs built in; the noise wasn’t going to harm us.

Still, the volume of it was incredible, and the shaking of the ship was brutal. After a short time, there was a great clanking as, I presumed, the rocket was released from its restraining bolts and allowed to start its upward journey. Karen and I were now ascending into orbit faster than any human beings ever had before.

I held tightly onto her, and she grasped me equally firmly. I became aware of those parts of my artificial anatomy that were missing sensors. I was sure I should be feeling my teeth rattle, but they weren’t. And doubtless my back should have hurt as the nylon rings separating my titanium vertebrae were compressed, but there was no sensation associated with that, either.

But the roaring noise was inescapable, and there was a sense of great weight and pressure on me from above. It was getting warm, although not unduly so; the chamber was well-insulated. And everything was still bathed in the glowstick’s greenish light.

The roar of the engine continued for a full hour; massive amounts of fuel were being burned to put us on a fast-track to the moon. But finally the engine cut off, and everything was quiet and, for the first time, I understood what was meant by the phrase “deafening silence.” The contrast was absolute—between the loudest sound my ears could register and nothing .

I could see Karen’s face, centimeters from my own. It was in focus; artificial optics have more flexibility than do natural ones. She nodded, as if to indicate that she was okay, and we both enjoyed the silence a while longer.

But there was more to enjoy than just freedom from noise.

Perhaps if I were still biological, I would have been immediately aware of it: food trying to come up my esophagus, an imbalance in my inner ear. I could well imagine that biological people often got sick under such circumstances. But for me, it was simply a matter of no longer registering the downward push from above. There wasn’t much room to move around—but, then, I’m sure it had seemed to Apollo astronauts that they’d had hardly any room until the gravity disappeared. I undid the buckles on the restraining straps, pushed off the floor, and floated slowly the meter toward the ceiling.

Karen laughed with delight, moving effortlessly within the small space. “It’s wonderful!”

“My God, it is!” I said, managing to get an arm up to stop my head from hitting the padded ceiling—although, I quickly realized, the terms ceiling and floor no longer had any meaning.

Karen managed to turn herself around—her synthetic body was shorter than mine, and, after all, she’d once upon a time been a ballet dancer: she knew how to execute complex moves. For my part, I managed to curl around the curving inner wall of the tube, becoming essentially perpendicular to my position at liftoff.

It was exhilarating. I thought about what the launch attendant had said: people with artificial bodies are perfect for space exploration. Perhaps he was right, and—

Something hit me in the face, soft, scrunchy.

“What the—?”

It took me a moment to make things out in the dim green light, especially since the glowstick was now on the far side of Karen, meaning her body was casting weird shadows across my field of view. The thing that had hit me in the face was Karen’s shirt.

I looked down—across—over—up—at her.

“Come on, Jake,” she said. “We may never have another chance like this.”

I thought back to the one previous time we’d done this: with the stress of the trial, we hadn’t tried again. “But—”

“We’ll doubtless return home on a regular transport,” Karen said, “full of other people. But right now, we’ve got an opportunity that may never happen again. Plus, unlike most people, we don’t have to worry about getting bruised.”

Her bra was flapping up toward me now, a seagull in our emerald twilight. It was … s timulating , watching her move as she bent and twisted, taking off her pants.