Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

Oh, Jesus God!

And Karen Bessarian stepped into the cabin, her synthetic hair whipping backward in the wind caused by the evacuating atmosphere. As soon as she was fully inside, she let go of the cockpit door, and it slammed violently shut behind her.

Jacob swung to face her, brought up his piton gun, and fired straight into where Karen’s stomach would have been. A metal spike shot into her body, but she kept moving forward, deliberate step after deliberate step.

Jacob fired again, this time aiming higher on her chest. Another spike tore into her breast, ripping plastiflesh, exposing silicone and silicon.

But Karen continued moving forward, and—

And Chloe crouched down like a cat, out of Jacob’s view, then leapt, flying through the air, landing on Jacob’s back, encircling his neck. Jacob fired another projectile, but this one missed—going through the cockpit door like it wasn’t there, creating a two-centimeter hole through which air started pouring out again.

Jacob was undeterred. He aimed at Karen’s head and squeezed off another shot. The spike hit her but ricocheted off her impenetrable skull. I instinctively followed the rebound of the spike, which smashed into the side bulkhead, lodging there without breaching it.

I swung my attention back to Karen—and opened my mouth in shock, instinctively trying to suck in breath. Her left eye socket was shattered, and the eye itself was gone. Blue metal was exposed beneath a ragged hole in her plastiskin, and some sort of yellow lubricant, like amber tears, was trickling down that side of her face.

But her voice, Georgia accent and all, was just fine. “Leave my boyfriend—and everyone else—alone,” she said, still coming forward.

Brian Hades was getting into the act now. He leapt, soaring horizontally, ponytail flying, and tackled Jacob by the legs. Chloe disengaged from Jacob as he tumbled over, and she scurried away.

I was suddenly conscious of blood everywhere. It took me a moment to figure out what was happening: Jacob’s nose had ruptured under the shift in air pressure, and twin geysers of crimson—God, but blood is bright red!—were squirting from his nostrils. Christ, if he hadn’t been cured of Katerinsky’s, the pressure shift probably would have killed him.

Jacob was now sprawled on the hard deck. Karen had closed the distance between him and her and was bending down. She grabbed his right wrist with her left hand, and grabbed the squat gun with her right hand. Jacob clearly didn’t want to let it go, and—

And there was a crack , quite audible above the hiss of escaping atmosphere, and I realized that Karen had broken at least one bone in Jacob’s hand as she yanked the gun from his grip. She looked at the gun with disgust and tossed it aside; it bounced high on the upholstery of one of the chairs, then fell back down in slow motion.

Jacob’s hands came up, grabbing one of Karen’s shins. I could see the excruciating look on his face as he did so; the broken bone in his right hand must be torturing him. But he pushed upward on Karen’s shin with all his might, and, in lunar gravity, that was enough to let him toss her up and backward like a caber.

Suddenly he was scrambling to his feet and running for the gun. Brian crouched low and leapt, sailing down the cabin, colliding with Jacob, and the two of them tumbled down again. I surged forward, trying to help Brian, while Chloe ran past me going the other way. Brian made it to feet, and Jacob got up too, but he was ignoring Brian and instead had turned his attention to Chloe, who—

My nonexistent heart stopped for a second; I really think it did.

—who had picked up the gun and now fired it directly into the center of Jacob’s chest.

Jacob’s mouth went into one of those imperfect “O’s” that biologicals make, and his defective, color-blind eyes went wide, and a new crimson stain joined the others already on his shirt, and he staggered backward, and—

Oh, God…

— and, in an exact repeat of what had happened to Dad, he fell back into one of the swivel chairs, and the chair rotated a half turn, and the Jacob John Sullivan born of man and woman was no more.

“So, how did you do that?” I asked, after we’d left the moon-bus, and all the hubbub had died down.

“Do what?” Karen said.

“Break into the cockpit. And then push the cockpit door open against all that air pressure.”

“You know,” said Karen, staring at me with her one intact eye.

“No, I don’t.”

“Didn’t you select the super-strength option?”

“What? No.”

Karen smiled. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I did.”

I nodded, impressed. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

“ ‘Mr. McGee,’ ” said Karen, “ ‘don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.’ ”

“What?”

“Sorry. Another TV program I have to show you.”

“I’ll look forward to—say! I cut off Deshawn. Do you know the verdict?”

“Oh, God!” said Karen. “I’d forgotten all about that. No, the jury was just coming in when he called; they hadn’t read the verdict yet. Let’s get him on the phone.”

We had Smythe show us to the communications center, and we placed the call to Deshawn’s cellular using a speaker phone so we could all hear. It turned out to be a complex process getting ahold of someone on Earth, involving actual human operators—I didn’t know such things existed anymore. But at last Deshawn’s phone was ringing.

“Deshawn Draper,” he said, by way of greeting, then, after a second, “Hello? Is anybody—”

“Deshawn!” said Karen. “It’s Karen, up on the moon—sorry about the time lag.

What’s the verdict?”

“Oh, so now you’re interested?” said Deshawn, sounding a bit miffed.

“I’m sorry, Deshawn,” I said. “A lot has gone down. The biological me is dead.”

A pause, for more than just the speed of light. “Oh, my,” said Deshawn. “I’m so sorry. You must—”

“The verdict!” exclaimed Karen. “What was the verdict?”

“—feel totally awful. I wish—Oh, the verdict? Guys, I’m sorry. We lost; Tyler won.”

“God,” said Karen. And then, more softly, “God…”

“Of course, we’ll appeal,” said Deshawn. “My dad’s already hard at work on the paperwork. We’ll take this all the way to the Supreme Court. The issues are huge…”

Karen continued to talk to Deshawn. I drifted off toward a window, looking out at the barren lunar landscape, very sorry indeed that you couldn’t see Earth from here.

Brian Hades was ecstatic to no longer be a hostage, and Gabe Smythe seemed glad that it was all over, too.

Except that it wasn’t over. There was still one more issue that had to be resolved.

Karen was off speaking to the biological Malcolm Draper—getting his advice on appealing the ruling against her. Although in theory the biological Malcolm and the Mindscan one should have the same views, in practice their opinions had to have diverged—although, granted, not likely nearly as much as mine and Jacob’s had.

While Karen was doing that, I went over to the High Eden administration building and confronted Hades and Smythe. Hades was behind his kidney-shaped desk, and Smythe was standing behind him, leaning effortlessly, as one could in this gravity, against a credenza.

“I know,” I said simply, standing in front of them, “that you’ve made other instantiations of me. Some down on Earth, and at least one here on the moon.”

Hades turned around, and he and Smythe looked at each other, the tall man with his white beard and ponytail, and the short one with his florid complexion and British accent.