Robert Sawyer: Shed Skin

“You’ve left us no other choice. Standard procedure is to give the hostage-taker everything he wants, get the hostage back, then go after the criminal. But the only thing he wants is for you to be dead—and you’re not willing to cooperate. So we’re going to take him out.”

“You’ll use a tranquilizer, won’t you?”

Lucerne snorted. “On a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat? We need something that will turn him off like a light, before he’s got time to react. And the best way to do that is a bullet to the head or chest.”

“But… but I don’t want you to kill him.”

Lucerne made an even louder snort. “By your logic, he’s not alive anyway.”

“Yes, but…”

“But what? You willing to give him what he wants?”

“I can’t. Surely you can see that.”

Lucerne shrugged. “Too bad. I was looking forward to being able to quip ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips.’”

“Damn you,” said Rathburn. “Don’t you see that it’s because of that sort of attitude that I can’t allow this precedent?”

Lucerne made no reply, and after a time Rathburn continued. “Can’t we fake my death somehow? Just enough for you to get Ng back to safety?”

Lucerne shook his head. “GR-7 demanded proof that it was really you inside that tin can. I don’t think he can be easily fooled. But you know him better than anyone else. Could you be fooled?”

Rathburn tipped his mechanical head down. “No. No, I’m sure he’ll demand positive proof.”

“Then we’re back to the sharpshooter.”

Rathburn walked into the observation gallery, his golden feet making soft metallic clangs as they touched the hard, tiled floor. He looked through the angled glass, down at the operating room below. The slab-of-flab version of himself had Dr. Ng tied up now, her hands and feet bound with surgical tape. She couldn’t get away, but he no longer had to constantly hold the scalpel to her throat. GR-7 was standing up, and she was next to him, leaning against the operating table.

The angled window continued down to within a half-meter of the floor. Crouching below its sill was Conrad Burloak, the sharpshooter, in a gray uniform, holding a black rifle. A small transmitter had been inserted in Rathburn’s camera hardware, copying everything his glass eyes were seeing onto a datapad Burloak had with him.

In ideal circumstances, Burloak had said, he liked to shoot for the head, but here he was going to have to fire through the plate-glass window, and that might deflect the bullet slightly. So he was going to aim for the center of the torso, a bigger target. As soon as the datapad showed a clean line-of-fire at G.R., Burloak would pop up and blow him away.

“Hello, George,” said the robotic Rathburn. There was an open intercom between the observation gallery and the operating theater below.

“All right,” said the fleshy one. “Let’s get this over with. Open the access panel to your nano-gel braincase, and…”

But GR-7 trailed off, seeing that the robotic Rathburn was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, George. I’m not going to deactivate myself.”

“You prefer to see Dr. Ng die?”

Rathburn could shut off his visual input, the equivalent of closing his eyes. He did that just now for a moment, presumably much to the chagrin of the sharpshooter studying the datapad. “Believe me, George, the last thing I want to do is see anyone die.”

He reactivated his eyes. He’d thought he’d been suitably ironic but, of course, the other him had the same mind. GR-7, perhaps suspecting that something was up, had moved Dr. Ng so that she was now standing between himself and the glass.

“Don’t try anything funny,” said the skin. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Rathburn looked down on his former self—but only in the literal sense. He didn’t want to see this… this man, this being, this thing, this entity, this whatever it was, hurt.

After all, even if the shed skin wasn’t a person in the cold eyes of the law, he surely still remembered that time he’d— they’d —almost drowned swimming at the cottage, and mom pulling him to shore while his arms flailed in panic. And he remembered his first day at junior-high school, when a gang of grade nines had beaten him up as initiation. And he remembered the incredible shock and sadness when he’d come home from his weekend job at the hardware store and found dad slumped over in his easy chair, dead from a stroke.

And that biological him must remember all the good things, too: hitting that home run clear over the fence in grade eight, after all the members of the opposing team had moved in close; his first kiss, at a party, playing spin the bottle; and his first romantic kiss, with Dana, her studded tongue sliding into his mouth; that perfect day in the Bahamas, with the most gorgeous sunset he’d ever seen.

Yes, this other him wasn’t just a backup, wasn’t just a repository of data. He knew all the same things, felt all the same things, and—

The sharpshooter had crawled several meters along the floor of the observation gallery, trying to get a clean angle at GR-7. Out of the corner of his robotic vision—which was as sharp at the peripheries as it was in the center—Rathburn saw the sharpshooter tense his muscles, and then—

And then Burloak leaped up, swinging his rifle, and—

And to his astonishment, Rathburn found the words “Look out, George!” emitting from his robotic mouth at a greatly amplified volume.

And just as the words came out, Burloak fired, and the window exploded into a thousand shards, and GR-7 spun around, grabbing Dr. Ng, swinging her in between himself and the sharpshooter, and the bullet hit, drilling a hole through the woman’s heart, and through the chest of the man behind her, and they both crumpled to the operating-room floor, and human blood flowed out of them, and the glass shards rained down upon them like robot tears.

And so, at last, there was no more ambiguity. There was only one George Rathburn—a single iteration of the consciousness that had first bloomed some forty-five years ago, now executing as code in the nano-gel inside a robotic form.

George suspected that Shiozaki would try to cover up what had occurred back in Paradise Valley—at least the details. He’d have to admit that Dr. Ng had been killed by a skin, but doubtless Shiozaki would want to gloss over Rathburn’s warning shout. After all, it would be bad for business if those about to shed got wind of the fact that the new versions still had empathy for the old ones.

But Detective Lucerne and his sharpshooter would want just the opposite: only by citing the robotic Rathburn’s interference could they exonerate the sharpshooter from accidentally shooting the hostage.

But nothing could exonerate GR-7 from what he’d done, swinging that poor, frightened woman in front of himself as a shield…

Rathburn sat down in his country house’s living room. Despite his robotic body, he did feel weary—bone-weary—and needed the support of the chair.

He’d done the right thing, even if GR-7 hadn’t; he knew that. Any other choice by him would have been devastating not just for himself, but also for Kathryn and every other uploaded consciousness. There really had been no alternative.

Immortality is grand. Immortality is great. As long as you have a clear conscience, that is. As long as you’re not tortured by doubt, racked by depression, overcome with guilt.

That poor woman, Dr. Ng. She’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all.

And now she was dead.

And he—a version of him—had caused her to be killed.

GR-7’s words replayed in Rathburn’s memory. We’d just never been in such desperate circumstances before .