Robert Sawyer: Red Planet Blues

I ordered a Scotch on the rocks; they normally did that with carbon dioxide ice here. Juan asked for whiskey. I watched him watching Diana’s swinging hips as she headed off to get our drinks. “Well, well, well,” I said, as he finally slid into the booth opposite me. “I didn’t know you had a thing for her.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Who wouldn’t?” I said nothing, which Juan took as an invitation to go on. “She hasn’t said yes to a date yet, but she promised to let me read some of her poetry.”

I kept my tone even. “Lucky you.” It seemed kind not to mention that Diana and I were going out this weekend, so I didn’t. But I did say, “So, how does a poet sneeze?”

“I don’t know, how does a poet sneeze?”

“Haiku!”

“Don’t quit your day job, Alex.”

“Hey,” I said, placing a hand over my heart, “you wound me. Down deep, I’m a stand-up comic.”

“Well,” said Juan, “I always say people should be true to their innermost selves, but…”

“Yeah? What’s your innermost self?”

“Me?” Juan’s eyebrows moved up. “I’m pure genius, right to the very core.”

I snorted and Diana reappeared to give us our drinks. We thanked her, and she departed, Juan again watching her longingly as she did so.

When she’d disappeared, he turned back to look at me, and said, “What’s up?” His face consisted of a wide forehead, long nose, and receding chin; it made him look like he was leaning forward even when he wasn’t.

I took a swig of my drink. “What do you know about transferring?”

“Fascinating stuff,” said Juan. “Thinking of doing it?”

“Maybe someday.”

“You know, it’s supposed to pay for itself now within three mears, because you no longer have to pay life-support tax after you’ve transferred.”

I was in arrears on that, and didn’t like to think about what would happen if I fell much further behind. “That’d be a plus,” I said. “What about you? You going to do it?”

“Sure, someday—and I’ll go the whole nine yards: enhanced senses, super strength, the works. Plus I want to live forever; who doesn’t? ’Course, my dad won’t like it.”

“Your dad? What’s he got against it?”

Juan snorted. “He’s a minister.”

“In whose government?”

“No, no. A minister. Clergy.”

“I didn’t know there were any of those left, even on Earth,” I said.

“He is on Earth; back in Santiago. But, yeah, you’re right. Poor old guy still believes in souls.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yup. And because he believes in souls, he has a hard time with this idea of transferring consciousness. He would say the new version isn’t the same person.”

I thought about what the supposed suicide note said. “Well, is it?”

Juan rolled his eyes. “You, too? Of course it is! Look, sure, people used to get all worked up about this when the process first appeared, decades ago, but now just about everyone is blasé about it. NewYou should take a lot of credit for that; they’ve done a great job of keeping the issue uncluttered—I’m sure they knew if they’d done otherwise, there’d have been all sorts of ethical debates, red tape, and laws constraining their business. But they’ve avoided most of that by providing one, and only one, service: moving—not copying, not duplicating, but simply moving—a person’s mind to a more durable container. Makes the legal transfer of personhood and property a simple matter, ensures that no one gets more than one vote, and so on.”

“And is that what they really do?” I asked. “Move your mind?”

“Well, that’s what they say they do. ‘Move’ is a nice, safe, comforting word. But the mind is just software, and since the dawn of computing, software has been moved from one computing platform to another by copying it over, then immediately erasing the original.”

“But the new brain is artificial, right? How come we can make super-smart transfers, but not super-smart robots or computers?”

Juan took a sip of his drink. “It’s not a contradiction at all. No one ever figured out how to program anything equivalent to a human mind—they used to talk about the coming ‘singularity,’ when artificial intelligence would exceed human abilities, but that never happened. But when you’re scanning and digitizing the entire structure of a brain in minute detail, you obviously get the intelligence as part of that scan, even if no one can point to where that intelligence is in the scan.”

“Huh,” I said, and took a sip of my own. “So, if you were to transfer, what would you have fixed in your new body?”

Juan spread his praying-mantis arms. “Hey, man, you don’t tamper with perfection.”

“Hah,” I said. “Still, how much could you change things? I mean, say you’re only 150 centimeters, and you want to play basketball. Could you opt to be two meters tall?”

“Sure, of course.”

I frowned. “But wouldn’t the copied mind have trouble with your new size?”

“Nah,” said Juan. “See, when Howard Slapcoff first started copying consciousness, he let the old software from the old mind actually try to directly control the new body. It took months to learn how to walk again, and so on.”

“Yeah, I read something about that, years ago.”

Juan nodded. “Right. But now they don’t let the copied mind do anything but give orders. The thoughts are intercepted by the new body’s main computer. That unit runs the body. All the transferred mind has to do is think that it wants to pick up this glass, say.” He acted out his example, and took a sip, then winced in response to the booze’s kick. “The computer takes care of working out which pulleys to contract, how far to reach, and so on.”

“So you could order up a body radically different from your original?”

“Absolutely.” He looked at me through hooded eyes. “Which, in your case, is probably the route to go.”

“Damn.”

“Hey, don’t take it seriously,” he said, taking another sip and allowing himself another pleased wince.

“It’s just that I was hoping it wasn’t that way. See, this case I’m on: the guy I’m supposed to find owns the NewYou franchise here.”

“Yeah?” said Juan.

“Yeah, and I think he deliberately transferred his scanned mind into some body other than the one that he’d ordered up for himself.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He faked the death of the body that looked like him—and I think he’d planned to do that all along, because he never bothered to order up any improvements to his face. I think he wanted to get away, but make it look like he was dead, so no one would be looking for him anymore.”

“And why would he do that?”

I frowned then drank some more. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he wanted to escape his spouse.”

“Maybe—but she’s a hot little number.”

“Hmm,” said Juan. “Whose body do you think he took?”

“I don’t know that, either. I was hoping the new body would have to be roughly similar to his old one; that would cut down on the possible suspects. But I guess that’s not the case.”

“It isn’t, no.”

I looked down at my drink. The dry-ice cubes were sublimating into white vapor that filled the top part of the glass.

“Something else is bothering you,” said Juan. I lifted my head and saw him taking a swig of his drink. A little amber liquid spilled out of his mouth and formed a shiny bead on his recessed chin. “What is it?”

I shifted a bit. “I visited NewYou yesterday. You know what happens to your original body after they move your mind?”