Robert Silverberg - To Live Again

She stretched out, shoeless. Leonards grasped a bronze knob and a mass of equipment swung free of the wall. He drew it toward her. “This is a diagnostat,” he told her. “We simply wish to check your physical condition before we proceed with the transplant. It’s important that your health and body tone be at the top of their cycle. This part just takes a minute — there.” The diagnostat hummed and clicked and was silent. Leonards pressed an eject stud. A copper-colored capsule dropped out, and he flipped it into a transfer hatch that would take it to some scanning instrument within the building’s computer bank. He looked more nervous than she was. After a moment a light went on in the access room, and through a slot in the wall came a yellow slip. Risa craned her neck but could not see what it said.

“You’re in fine shape,” Leonards reported. “Where did you get those skin abrasions, though?”

“In the West Indies on Saturday. A man was in trouble on a coral reef and I pulled him free and got cut up a little. They’re healing fast.”

“In any case, there’s no effect on your receptivity to the transplant. Now, I suppose you’re familiar with the Scheffing process, but I know you want to keep up with me on each phase of the transplant, so I’m likely to tell you a few things you already know. For example, the first step is the drug treatment, to enhance your memory receptivity. We inject a nucleic acid booster, coupled with one of the mnemonic drugs. A mnemonic drug—”

“Am I getting picrotoxin or one of the pentylenctetrazol derivatives?” Risa asked. Leonards looked shaken. “You’ve been doing some homework!”

“Which do I get?”

“It’ll be the pentylene,” he said. “We get better response curves on it with women under thirty. Picrotoxin blocks presynaptic inhibition, and some of the others block postsynaptic inhibition, but pentylenetetrazol doesn’t interfere with either. It excites the nervous system by decreasing neuronal recovery time, without reference to inhibitory pathways. Thus it prevents memory decay and significantly increases the response latencies. Still following me?”

“Yes,” Risa lied. She was damned if she’d let his deliberately accelerated flow of gibberish upset her. “The result is to make me more receptive to the imprint from the recording. All right. I’m ready whenever you are.”

He produced a thick, stubby, phallic-looking ultrasonic injector. While he fumbled with the dial settings Risa casually disengaged her tunic, baring the lower part of her body to the groin. Leonards was slow to notice, but when he finally looked at her he was so rattled he nearly dropped the injector.

Staring rigidly at her chin, he said, “Why did you uncover yourself?”

“I understood that the injection was given in the upper part of the thigh.”

“No.”

“In the backside, then?” She grinned kittenishly and rolled over. “The arm will do.” She pouted. “Well, all right.” He was sweating and flushed. She figured she had paid him back well enough for that burst of postsynaptic inhibitions and response latencies. Chastely she covered herself again, not wanting him to jab the injector into the wrong place while he was so shaken. He took a deep breath and put the snout to her arm. There was an ultrasonic whirr.

“We allow one hour for the nucleic acid booster to reach the brain. By then the mnemonic drug will have already taken effect. I’ll leave you to relax until the next phase can begin. Perhaps you’d like to look through this information leaflet.”

He made his escape from the transplant room, looking visibly relieved.

Risa sprawled on the couch and examined the booklet. SOME FACTS ABOUT THE SCHEFFING PROCESS, it was headed. She glanced through it without interest. It told her things she already knew: how her brain was prepared for the persona to come, how the recordings were made, how transplants were effected. Toward the back was some material of more direct importance: tips on making the transition after your first transplant.

You will have complete access to the memories and life experiences of your imprinted persona, the booklet told her. As with your own memories, some of the experiences you receive will be blurred or distorted and not immediately retrievable. During the period of adjustment you may feel occasional confusions of identity, particularly if the new persona was noted for strength of character in its previous carnate existence. THIS SHOULD NOT BE CAUSE FOR ALARM. After a few days you will establish a satisfactory working relationship with the persona. Your new companion will enhance and support your responses to your environment. You will have the advantage of extra perspective and an additional set of life experiences on which to base your judgments. Think of the persona as a guest, a friend, a partner. It is the most intimate possible human relationship, and represents the finest accomplishment of our era.

A few pages on, Risa found information on how to communicate directly with the persona. At any time, she could simply reach into the pool of experience and memory that was being transplanted to her brain, and haul out whatever was useful to her immediate situation. But if she-wanted to speak to the persona, to address her as an individual, she would have to talk out loud. At least at first, though the booklet said it was possible after a while to talk to the persona via the interior neural channels. Meanwhile the persona, having no other communication access, was able to key herself right into the brain and make her thoughts known.

Did a persona have thoughts, Risa wondered? A persona was nothing but a set of memories. It didn’t have real existence. You couldn’t see a persona, any more than you could see an abstract concept. And the persona was dead, a closed account with all totals drawn. How could a transplanted persona think and react and have things to say?

Judging by the behavior of adults she had observed, a persona was not dead at all — merely suspended from the time of recording to the time of transplant. Then, jacked into the nervous system of its host, it could perceive and respond as if literally reincarnated. That was the whole point of the Scheffing process. It assured the participants everlasting life, with occasional interruptions between transplants. At the same time it provided the living with the benefit of the experiences of the dead. Nothing was lost, except the souls of the poor fish like Leonards who never took part in the rebirth game at all. That was ninety percent of mankind, at present. But did they matter?

As her final hour of independence ticked away, Risa inevitably began to wonder if she really wanted to go through with this enterprise.

No doubt everyone wonders about that, waiting for it to begin, she told herself. At least the first time.

And of course it would be eerie, carting about someone else’s soul in her head. Risa was accustomed to privacy when she wanted it. An only child, wealthy enough to isolate herself from the world, never called upon to share anything with anyone-and now she’d have to make room in her head for Tandy Cushing. Strange, strange, strange! Yet appealing, too. She had been alone so long. In a world where everyone she knew carried two or three personae, Risa felt pallid and childlike in her solitude. Now she would be like the others. In one bound she’d shed the last vestiges of immaturity. Merely sleeping around hadn’t brought her far enough into the adult world, but this transplant would, especially with worldly, sophisticated Tandy Cushing like an older sister inside her mind.

As the booklet pointed out, it was irrational to fear or mistrust the persona. The persona wasn’t going to get any charge out of snooping on you, any more than you could snoop on yourself The persona would be you, and herself as well, a joined identity. Risa’s mind whirled a little at that concept. She thought she understood it, but of course she knew she did not, could not. No one who did not have a persona already transplanted could really comprehend what it was like. This was a new thing in the world, a fundamental break with the human condition. No longer were people walled up alone in their own skulls. They could have company.