Robert Sawyer: Shed Skin

Rathburn visibly relaxed. Lucerne could see him back the scalpel off a bit from Ng’s neck. “That’s more like it,” he said. “All right. All right. I don’t want to kill Dr. Ng—but I will unless you bring the robot version of me here within three hours.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth to Ng. “Break the connection.”

A terrified-looking Ng reached her arm forward, her pale hand and simple gold wedding ring filling the field of view.

And the screen went dead.

George Rathburn—the silicon version—was sitting in the dark, wood-paneled living room of his large Victorian-style country house. Not that he had to sit; he never grew tired anymore. Nor did he really need his chairs to be padded. But folding his metal body into the seat still felt like the natural thing to do.

Knowing that, barring accidents, he was now going to live virtually forever, Rathburn figured he should tackle something big and ambitious, like War and Peace or Ulysses . But, well, there would always be time for that later. Instead, he downloaded the latest Buck Doheney mystery novel into his datapad, and began to read.

He’d only gotten halfway through the second screenful of text when the datapad bleeped, signaling an incoming call.

Rathburn thought about just letting the pad record a message. Already, after only a few weeks of immortality, nothing seemed particularly urgent. Still, it might be Kathryn. He’d met her at the training center, while they were both getting used to their robot bodies, and to their immortality. Ironically, she’d been eighty-two before she’d uploaded; in his now-discarded flesh-and-blood shell, George Rathburn would never have had a relationship with a woman so much older than he was. But now that they were both in artificial bodies—his gold, hers a lustrous bronze—they were well on the way to a full-fledged romance.

The pad bleeped again, and Rathburn touched the ANSWER icon—no need to use a stylus anymore; his synthetic fingers didn’t secrete oils that would leave a mark on the screen.

Rathburn had that strange feeling he’d experienced once or twice since uploading—the feeling of deep surprise that would have been accompanied by his old heart skipping a beat. “Mr. Shiozaki?” he said. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”

“I’m sorry to have to bother you, George, but we’ve—well, we’ve got an emergency. Your old body has taken a hostage here in Paradise Valley.”

“What? My God…”

“He’s saying he will kill the woman if we don’t let him talk to you.”

George wanted to do the right thing, but…

But he’d spent weeks now trying to forget that another version of him still existed. “I—um—I guess it’d be okay if you put him on.”

Shiozaki shook his head. “No. He won’t take a phone call. He says you have to come here in person.”

“But… but you said…”

“I know what we told you during counseling, but, dammit, George, a woman’s life is at stake. You might be immortal now, but she isn’t.”

Rathburn thought for another few seconds, then: “All right. All right. I can be there in a couple of hours.”

The robot-bodied George Rathburn was shocked by what he was seeing on the vidphone in Shiozaki’s office. It was him—just as he remembered himself. His soft, fragile body; his graying temples; his receding hairline; his nose that he’d always thought was too large.

But it was him doing something he never could have imagined doing—holding a surgical blade to a woman’s throat.

Detective Lucerne spoke toward the phone’s pickups. “Okay,” he said. “He’s here. The other you is here.”

On the screen, Rathburn could see his shed skin’s eyes go wide as they beheld what he’d become. Of course, that version of him had selected the golden body—but it had only been an empty shell then, with no inner workings. “Well, well, well,” said G.R. “Welcome, brother.”

Rathburn didn’t trust his synthesized voice, so he simply nodded.

“Come on down to the hospital,” said G.R. “Go to the observation gallery above the operating theater; I’ll go to the operating theater itself. We’ll be able to see each other—and we’ll be able to talk, man to man.”

“Hello,” said Rathburn. He was standing on his golden legs, staring through the angled sheet of glass that overlooked the operating room.

“Hello,” said GR-7, looking up. “Before we go any further, I need you to prove that you are who you say you are. Sorry about this, but, well, it could be anyone inside that robot.”

“It’s me,” said Rathburn.

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

“So ask me a question.”

GR-7 was clearly prepared for this. “The first girl to ever give us a blowjob.”

“Carrie,” said Rathburn, at once. “At the soccer field.”

GR-7 smiled. “Good to see you, brother.”

Rathburn was silent for a few moments. He swiveled his head on noiseless, frictionless bearings, looking briefly at Lucerne ’s face, visible on a vidphone out of view of the observation window. Then he turned back to his shed skin. “I, ah, I understand you want to be called George.”

“That’s right.”

But Rathburn shook his head. “We—you and I, when we were one—shared exactly the same opinion about this matter. We wanted to live forever. And that can’t be done in a biological body. You know that.”

“It can’t be done yet in a biological body. But I’m only 45. Who knows what technology will be available in the rest of our—of my —lifetime?”

Rathburn no longer breathed—so he could no longer sigh. But he moved his steel shoulders while feeling the emotion that used to produce a sigh. “You know why we chose to transfer early. You have a genetic predisposition to fatal strokes. But I don’t have that—George Rathburn doesn’t have that anymore. You might check out any day now, and if we hadn’t transferred our consciousness into this body, there would have been no immortality for us.”

“But we didn’t transfer consciousness,” said GR-7. “We copied consciousness—bit for bit, synapse for synapse. You’re a copy. I’m the original.”

“Not as a matter of law,” said Rathburn. “You—the biological you—signed the contract that authorized the transfer of personhood. You signed it with the same hand you’re using to hold that scalpel to Dr. Ng’s throat.”

“But I’ve changed my mind.”

“You don’t have a mind to change. The software we called the mind of George Rathburn—the only legal version of it—has been transferred from the hardware of your biological brain to the hardware of our new body’s nano-gel CPU.” The robotic Rathburn paused. “By rights, as in any transfer of software, the original should have been destroyed.”

GR-7 frowned. “Except that society wouldn’t allow for that, any more than it would allow for physician-assisted suicide. It’s illegal to terminate a source body, even after the brain has been transferred.”

“Exactly,” said Rathburn, nodding his robotic head. “And you have to activate the replacement

before the source dies, or else the court will determine that there’s been no continuity of personhood and dispose of the assets. Death may not be certain anymore, but taxes certainly are.”

Rathburn had hoped GR-7 would laugh at that, hoped that a bridge could be built between them. But GR-7 simply said, “So I’m stuck here.”

“I’d hardly call it ‘stuck,’” said Rathburn. “ Paradise Valley is a little piece of heaven here on Earth. Why not just enjoy it, until you really do go to heaven?”