Mindscan Page 9

“Because it’s not. It just isn’t.”

  I certainly didn’t want to start an argument, so I didn’t say anything further. Looking back at the TV, I saw the anchor was now doing a story on the death of former U.S. President Pat Buchanan, who had passed away yesterday at a hundred and six.

  “Good riddance,” said Karen, looking at the screen.

  “Happy to see him go?” I said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He certainly was no friend of Canada, but, you know, his ‘Soviet Canuckistan’ nickname for us became a rallying cry for my generation. ‘Live up to the name,’ and all that. I think Canada became even more left-wing just to spite him.”

  “So maybe you’re just in favor of multiple marriages because it’ll be another distinction between our two countries,” said Karen.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I told you why I’m in favor of it.”

  “Sony.” She glanced at the screen. The piece about Buchanan’s death was over, but apparently she was still dwelling on it. “I’m happy he’s dead, because I see it as maybe the end of an era. It was the judges he packed the Supreme Court with, after all, who overturned Roe v. Wade, and I can’t forgive him for that. But he was twenty years older than me—his values came from a different generation. And now he’s gone, and I’m thinking maybe there’s some hope for change. But …”

  “Yes?”

  “But I’m not going away, am I? Your friends who want to have their relationship recognized as a group marriage will have to contend with people like me, set in their ways, sticking around forever, standing in the way of progress.” She looked at me. “And it is progress, isn’t it? My parents never understood about gay marriage. Their parents never understood about desegregation”

  I looked at her with new eyes—figuratively, and, of course, literally. “You’re a philosopher at heart,” I said.

  “Maybe so. All good writers are, I imagine.”

  “But I guess you’re right, to some degree, anyway. They call it the retire-or-expire factor in academia …”

  “‘Retire or expire’?” said Karen. “Oooh, I like that! And I certainly saw something similar in Georgia, where I grew up, in relation to civil rights: great strides weren’t made by changing people’s minds—no one slaps himself on the forehead and exclaims, ‘What a fool I’ve been all these years!’ Rather, progress was made because the worst racists—the ones who remembered the good ole days of segregation or even slavery—died off.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “But, you know, people’s beliefs do change over time. There’s the long-established fact that people become more politically conservative as they get older—not that it happened to me, thank God. When I found out what Tom Selleck’s politics were, I was appalled.”

  “Who’s Tom Selleck?”

  “Sigh,” said Karen. Apparently she hadn’t learned to make the sound yet. “He was a gorgeous hunk of an actor; played Magnum P.I. I had posters of him in my bedroom when I was a teenager.”

  “I thought you had posters of … who was it? That Superman guy?”

  Karen grinned. “Him, too.”

  We’d both been ignoring the TV, but now the sports came on. “Oooh!” said Karen. “The Yankees won. Terrific!”

  “You like baseball?” I said, feeling my eyebrows lift this time—there was a definite jerk as they did so; I’d have to get Porter to file down whatever they were catching on.

  “Absolutely!”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I wanted to be a pitcher when I was a kid. It wasn’t in the cards, but …”

  “You a Blue Jays fan?” asked Karen.

  I grinned. “What else?”

  “I remember when they won back-to-back World Series.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “Yup. Daron and I had just gotten married back then. He and I used to watch the World Series together every year. Big bowls of popcorn, lots of soda, the works.”

  “What was it like—those two times Toronto won? How did people react?”

  The sun was rising; light spilled into the room.

  Karen smiled. “Let me tell you …”

  CHAPTER 11

  We transferred from the spaceplane to the moonship, a metallic arachnid designed only for use in vacuum. I had my own small sleeping compartment—like one of those coffin hotels in Tokyo. When I was out of it, I was enjoying being weightless, although Quentin was still nattering on about moonbuses and other things that interested him. If only he were a baseball fan …

  “Now, remember, folks,” said one of the Immortex staff on the third morning of our flight, “the moonbase we’re about to land at is not High Eden. Rather, it’s a multinational private-sector R&D facility. It wasn’t built for tourists, and it wasn’t built for luxury—so don’t be disappointed. I promise you, you’ll be pleased when you get to High Eden.”

  I listened, thinking High Eden indeed better be good. Of course, I’d taken the virtual tour, and read all the literature. But I’d miss—hell, I already was missing—Clamhead, and Rebecca, and my mother, and …

  And, yes, even my father. I’d thought him a burden, I thought I’d feel relief to hand off worrying about him to the other me, but I found myself very sad at the prospect of never seeing him again.

  Tears float in zero-gravity. It’s the most astonishing thing.

  I went to see Dr. Porter about the problem with thoughts I intended to keep private being spoken aloud.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. “I’ve seen that before. I can make some adjustments, but it’s a tricky mind-body interface problem.”

  “You’ve got to fix it. Unless I explicitly decide to do something, it shouldn’t happen.”

  “Ah,” said Porter, his eyebrows working with glee, “but that’s not how humans work—not even biological ones. None of us consciously initiate our actions.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve studied philosophy, doc. I’m not prepared to give up on the notion of free will. I refuse to believe that we live in a deterministic universe.”

  “Oh, indeed,” said Porter. “That’s not what I meant. Say you walk into a room, see someone you know, and decide to extend your hand in greeting. Of course, your hand doesn’t instantly shoot out; first, stuff has to happen in your brain, right? And that stuff—the electrical change in the brain that precedes voluntary action—is called the readiness potential. Well, in a biological brain the readiness potential begins 550 milliseconds—just over half a second—prior to your hand beginning to move. It really doesn’t matter what the voluntary act is: the readiness potential occurs in the brain 550 milliseconds before the motor act begins. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Ah, but it’s not okay! See, if you ask people to indicate exactly when they decided to do something, they report that the idea occurred to them about 350 milliseconds before the motor act begins. A guy named Benjamin Libet proved that ages ago.”

  “But—but that must be a measurement error,” I said. “I mean, you’re talking about milliseconds.”

  “No, not really. The difference between 550 milliseconds and 350 milliseconds is a fifth of a second: that’s quite a significant amount of time, and easy enough to measure accurately. This basic test has been replicated over and over again since the 1980s, and the data are rock solid.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying that what our intuition tells us the sequence of events should be, and what the sequence actually is, don’t agree. Intuitively, we think the sequence must be: first, you decide to shake hands with your old friend Bob; second, your brain, in response to that decision, begins sending signals to your arm that it wants to shake hands; and third, your arm starts to swing up for the handshake. Right? But what really happens is this: first, your brain starts sending signals to shake hands; second, you consciously decide to shake hands with your old friend; and third, your arm starts to swing up. The brain has started down the road to shaking hands befor
e you have consciously made any decision. Your conscious brain takes ownership of the action, and fools itself into thinking it started the action, but really it’s just a spectator, watching what your body is doing.”

  “So you are saying there’s no free will.”

  “Not quite. Our conscious minds have the free will to veto the action. See? The action begins 550 milliseconds prior to the first physical movement. Two hundred milliseconds later, the action that’s already been started comes to the attention of your conscious self—and your conscious self has 350 milliseconds to put on the brakes before anything happens. The conscious brain doesn’t initiate so-called voluntary acts, although it can step in and stop them.”

  “Really?” I said.

  Porter nodded his long face vigorously. “Absolutely. Everybody’s experienced this, if you stop and think about it: you’re lying in bed, quite mellow, and you look over at the clock, and you think to yourself, I really should get up, it’s time to get up, I’ve got to go to work. You may think this a half-dozen times or more, and then, suddenly, you are getting up—the action has begun, without you being consciously aware that you’ve finally, really made the decision to get out of bed. And that’s because you haven’t consciously made that decision; your unconscious has made it for you. It—not the conscious you—has concluded once and for all that it really is time to get out of bed.”

  “But I didn’t have this problem when I was biological.”

  “No, that’s right. And that was because of the slow speed of chemical reactions. But your new body and your new brain operate at electrical, not chemical, speeds, and the veto mechanism sometimes comes into play too late to do what it’s supposed to do. But, as I said, I can make a few adjustments. Forgive me, but I’m going to have to pull back the skin on your head, and open up your skull …”

  Finally, it was time to go back home. And when I got to the house in North York, I couldn’t wait to see my lovable old Irish setter. “Clamhead!” I called out, as I came through the front door. “Here, girl! I’m home!”

  Clamhead came bounding down the stairs, but stopped short when she saw me. I’d expected her to leap up and kiss my face, but that didn’t happen. Indeed, she lowered her forelegs, lay her ears flat, reared up her hind legs, and barked menacingly at me.

  “Clamhead, it’s me!” I said. “It’s just me.”

  The dog barked again, and then growled.

  “Clammy, it’s just me, honest!”

  The growl became a snarl. The front door was still open and I thought about making a run for it. But no, damn it, no. This was my house.

  “Come on, girl, it’s just me. It’s just Jake.”

  Clamhead leapt. I managed a half-step backward, but she slapped her paws against my chest, and barked loudly, over and over and over again.

  “Clammy, Clammy!” I said. “Sit, girl! Sit!”

  I’d never known Clamhead to bite anyone, but she bit me. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt; she closed her jaws on my naked forearm and yanked backward, tearing out a ragged piece of plastiskin, revealing fiber-optic nerves, bungee-cord muscles, and a blue metal armature within. She fell back on her haunches, and sniffed at the piece of plastic, then turned tail, and bounded away up the stairs, whimpering.

  My heart wasn’t beating fast—because I had no heart. My breathing wasn’t ragged—because I did not breathe. My eyes weren’t stinging—because I could not cry. I just stood there, letting time pass, shaking my head slowly left and right, feeling rejected and alone.

  The spider-shaped moonship landed next to a small cluster of mirrored domes, near the crater Aristarchus. After three days of zero-g, having any weight at all felt oppressive. But, really, it was a gentle tug, only one-sixth of what was normal on Earth.

  The Immortex staffer had been wise to warn us: the moonbase here was utilitarian at best—it felt like the inside of a submarine. Sadly, we had to spend three days here, going through decontamination procedures. With hundreds of potential points of departure from Earth, and only one possible lunar arrival point, it made sense that the elaborate decontamination facilities were up here, not down there.

  This had been the first permanent base established on the moon. It had originally been built by the Chinese, and a lot of the signage was still in that language, but it was now administered by a multinational consortium. Its official name was LS One—Lunar Settlement One—but in honor of the arriving immigrants, someone had erected a big sign that said “LS Island,” a pun it took me a few moments to get.

  And I was indeed an immigrant: this world, this airless, dusty sphere, was going to be my home for the rest of my life—however long that might be. Of course, here on the moon, the vessels in my brain would be subject to less stress, so perhaps I’d last longer than I would have had I stayed down on Earth.

  Perhaps. In any event, the doctors at High Eden would know precisely what to do if I had an … incident. The advance directive I’d sworn out was a contract, and contracts must be honored.

  “All Immortex passengers,” said a voice over an intercom, “please report to decontamination”

  I headed down the corridor with a bounce that I didn’t feel in my step.

  CHAPTER 12

  I am a Mindscan, an uploaded consciousness, a transferred personality, and yet, despite having fewer external indicators of my internal mental state, I am still very much corporeal.

  For centuries, humans have claimed to have out-of-body experiences. But what is the mind divorced from the body? What would a recording of my brain patterns be without a body to give them form?

  I’ve always pooh-poohed the notion of out-of-body experiences, of the idea that you can look down upon your own body from above. After all, what are you looking with? Surely not your eyes—they’re part of your body. Could an incorporeal entity sense anything? Photons need to be arrested to be detected; they have to hit something—the back of the eye to be seen as light, the skin to be felt as heat. A disembodied spirit could not see.

  And, even if it did somehow detect things, no one ever claimed to have anything but normal vision when out of their body. They see the world around them as they always have before, just from a different angle. They don’t see infrared; they don’t see ultraviolet—vision without eyes seems exactly the same as vision with eyes. And yet if eyes are not really necessary for sight, why does plucking them out—or even just covering them—always, without fail, result in a loss of vision? And if it’s just a coincidence that out-of-body perceptions happen to resemble what eyes see, why do color-blind people, like I was, never report a world of hues previously unknown to them when they have out-of-body experiences?

  No, vision can’t exist without a body. “The mind’s eye” is metaphor, nothing more. You can’t have a disembodied intellect—at least, not a human one. Our brains are parts of our bodies, not something separate.

  And that monad that was me—that inseparable combination of brain and body—was mostly glad to be home, although, I/we/it had to admit that it was all very strange. Everything looked different now that I had color vision. I wasn’t quite sure about such matters yet, but it was arguable that things I’d thought had gone nicely together were actually clashing.

  More than that, things didn’t feel the same. My favorite chair was no longer as comfortable; the carpet had almost no texture beneath my bare feet; the banister’s rich woodgrain, ever so slightly raised on some swirls, just as delicately indented on others, had become a uniform smoothness; the comforter I kept slung over the back of the couch no longer had its agreeable scritchiness.

  And Clamhead still hadn’t recognized me, although, after a lot of wary sniffing, she had consented to eat the food I put out for her. But when she wasn’t eating, she spent hours staring out the living-room window, waiting for her master to come home.

  Tomorrow—Monday—I would go see my mother. As usual, it was a duty I was not looking forward to. But tonight, a beautiful autumn Sunday night, should be fun: tonight was a little party
at Rebecca Chong’s penthouse. That would be great; I could use some cheering up.

  I took the subway to Rebecca’s. Although it wasn’t a weekday, there were still lots of people on the train, and many of them stared openly at me. Canadians are supposed to be known for their politeness, but that trait seemed entirely absent just then.

  Even though there were plenty of seats, I decided to stand for the trip with my back to everyone, making a show of consulting a map of the subway system. It had grown slowly but surely since I was a kid, with, most recently, a new line out to the airport, and an extension of another all the way up to York University.

  Once the train got to Eglinton, I exited and found the corridor that led to the entrance to Rebecca’s building. There, I presented myself to the concierge, who, to his credit, didn’t bat an eye as he called up to Rebecca’s apartment to confirm that I should be admitted.

  I took the elevator up to the top floor, and walked along the short hallway to Rebecca’s door. I stood there for a few moments, steeling my courage … literally, I suppose … and then knocked on the apartment door. A few moments later, the door opened, and I was face to face with the lovely Rebecca Chong. “Hey, Becks,” I said. I was about to lean in for our usual kiss on the lips when she actually stepped back a half pace.

  “Oh, my God,” said Rebecca. “You—my God, you really did it. You said you were going to, but …” Rebecca stood there, mouth agape. For once, I was happy that there was no outward sign of my inner feelings. Finally, I said, “May I come in?”

  “Um, sure,” said Rebecca. I stepped into her penthouse apartment; fabulous views both real and virtual filled her walls.

  “Hello, everyone,” I said, moving out of the marbled entryway and onto the berber carpet.

  Sabrina Bondarchuk, tall, thin, with hair that I now saw as the yellow I supposed it always had been, was standing by the fireplace, a glass of white wine in her hand. She gasped in surprise.