Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

We went back down to the workroom. Horatio and I moved Stuart Berling’s dead husk to the floor to clear a worktable, then Horatio set about examining the corpse of the legitimate Pickover.

Soon enough, the top was off the legit Pickover’s head, and Horatio removed the disruptor-fried and slightly squished brain. Apparently a transfer brain was normally spherical, rather than the, well, brain shape of a biological brain. It was about the size of a softball, but was teal in color and seemed completely rigid. At the bottom was a complex connector that I guess plugged into the artificial spinal cord. Horatio put that dead brain on the tabletop, the spine-plug keeping it from rolling away, and then he took a moment to hammer out the dents in the metal skull.

When he was satisfied, he turned to the bootleg Rory and said, “Okay, take your shirt off and have a seat on the edge of this table.”

The bootleg unbuttoned and removed his khaki work shirt, then boosted himself up. I couldn’t see any jack on Pickover’s side, but Horatio managed to attach a fiber-optic cable terminating in a metal plug there, ninety degrees to the right of his plastic belly button; maybe it clamped on magnetically. “All right,” he said. “First things first. I’m going to dial down your pain response.”

“You can do that?” Rory replied. “Where were you when I needed you?”

Horatio, I’m sure, didn’t understand, but he smiled anyway and turned to a control console. “Okay. That should do it; this shouldn’t hurt. Tell me if it does.” He picked up a laser cutter and sliced through the plastiskin above the bootleg’s eyebrows; there was indeed no sign of discomfort from Rory. Horatio continued right around the head. The incision separated, just like a cut in real flesh would, but there was no blood. The metal skull it revealed had a seam around it, not unlike the ones you sometimes saw on anatomy-class skeletons.

It was strange watching surgery with the surgeon using bare hands and not wearing a facemask. The top of the skull came neatly off after Horatio did something to unseat it, and he placed it upside down on the table—a titanium cranium covered with artificial hair; it looked like half of a bionic coconut.

“Wait,” said Pickover. “Give me a second.” He tilted his head down—and I was afraid his teal brain might roll out of his skull as he did so, but it seemed to still be firmly attached. I guess he just wanted one last look at this body. I knew how he felt. Every time I’d left an apartment for the last time, I’d had one final look around, committing the place to memory—and saying my farewell.

“Okay,” Rory said softly. “I’m ready.”

Horatio made a couple more adjustments on his console then he placed his hand on the top of the brain and gave it a quarter twist, which disengaged it. He then pulled it up and out, and moved over to the other worktable, where the corpse of the legitimate Dr. Pickover was still lying on its back. There must have been an orientation mark on the brain that I couldn’t see, because he rotated it until he had it facing a particular way. And then he placed it in the vacant skull, gave it a ninety-degree twist, and—

And the transfer’s eyes, which had been stuck looking askance, shifted left and right a few times, taking in the scene, and then the mouth opened all the way, and the only remaining Dr. Rory Pickover in all the world said, in his inimitable fashion, “Thanks so much, old chap!”

I imagine the first time you transferred from a biological existence to an electronic one there was some disorientation. But Pickover was already used to what it was like to be a transfer, and he seemed comfortable. He sat up with ease, swinging his legs over the edge of the table.

“Your arms are four centimeters longer in this body,” Horatio said, “so pay attention for a day or two while you reach for things. Oh, and you’ll have to relearn how to activate your telescopic and infrared vision. These eyes are from a different manufacturer and operate slightly differently.”

Pickover nodded—effortlessly, it seemed. And then he tipped his head down and looked at the back of his hand; I guess he figured he should get to know it. “The colors are a bit different,” Rory said, looking up. “Your skin, Alex’s hair.”

“Oh?” said Fernandez.

“They’re all a little more… golden.”

“We can adjust that easily enough.”

“It’s kind of nice, actually.” He brought his hands up and patted his chest. I thought he was exploring his body, but that wasn’t it. “And it’s so good to be wearing my own clothes again!” When he’d died, the legitimate Pickover had been wearing a dark blue work shirt with a silhouette of a dinosaur on one of the pockets.

Fernandez picked up the top of the skull and set about reattaching it. While he was doing that, I said, “Now, there’s just one more task.” I jerked my thumb at the empty form on the other table. “The world thinks that’s Joshua Wilkins, who, of course, has really been dead for months. We’ve got to dispose of the corpse.”

“I—he—was supposed to be hunting fossils,” offered Pickover, as Horatio used a tool to lay down new plastiskin, sealing the skullcap in place. “You could just dump the body out on the planitia—make it look like he malfunctioned and expired out there.”

“No,” said Horatio, stopping in his work. “Absolutely not.”

I looked at him.

“I’ve got a business to run here,” he said, “and, like you said, it’s based on the notion that I’m selling immortality—or, at the very least, durability. It can’t be that his body just failed—not under anything approaching normal circumstances. You owe me that much.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll find another way.”

Rory wanted to go home, and I could hardly blame him for being anxious to finally get there. After all, this version of him hadn’t been to his own place since he’d been created. He had woken up in a primitive robotic body, had endured torture aboard the Skookum Jim, had upgraded that body to assume the identity of Joshua Wilkins, and had retreated for the past couple of months out onto the planitia to look for fossils, all without ever once seeing his own place. And so we parted company at NewYou. I headed to Gully’s for a workout, then went to my apartment—and slept clear through to 10:00 a.m. the next morning.

When I awoke, there was voice mail from Ernie Gargalian, requesting my presence for a noon meeting at Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.

I got there bang on time; one doesn’t keep Mars’s Mister Big waiting. I was surprised to find two other people already inside: Reiko Takahashi and Dr. Rory Pickover. Reiko was leaning against one of the display tables but looked no worse for wear; Ernie, of course, had gotten her the best medical treatment when his plane had arrived back at the dome—no Windermere Clinic butchery for Denny O’Reilly’s granddaughter.

“Ah, Alex, my dear boy, good to see you!” Ernie said. “Come in, come in!” He gestured expansively. “Can I get you something? I have a hundred-year-old Scotch you might like.”

“Maybe later,” I replied.

“Later,” agreed Ernie. “Yes, yes—propriety, my boy! One doesn’t start business with alcohol; one concludes it. We’ll save it for a toast.”

Ernie’s showroom didn’t have any seats in it, but he led us to his opulent office, a room I’d never been in before. It had three wine red chairs that I imagined were upholstered with real leather. Ernie took the one behind the wide, ornately carved desk. Reiko took another, crossing her lovely legs. I took the final one. Rory, of course, could stand comfortably for hours.