Mindscan

"Um, well, I'm sure to most people 'inalienable' means: that it ca

"Really, now? Would you care to try a few other dictionaries? Merriam-Webster's, perhaps? Encarta? The Oxford English Dictionary? All of them are loaded onto that datapad. Ms. Bessarian, and I assure you they all give the same meaning: something that ca

Deshawn spread his arms. "Your honor, objection — relevance. You took me to task on our first day for making picayune semantic distinctions, and—"

"Sorry, Mr. Draper," said Herrington. "Overruled. The point Ms. Lopez is making is bang on target."

Lopez nodded at the bench. "Thank you, your honor." She then turned back to Karen. "So which is it? Or are we in Wonderland now, and a word means whatever you want it to mean?"

"Don't push your luck," said Herrington, gently.

"Of course not, your honor," Lopez replied. "Which is it Ms. Bessarian? Should rights of personhood be transferable, or are they, as you yourself said, inalienable?"

Karen opened her mouth, but then closed it.

"That's all right, Ms. Bessarian," said Lopez. "That's just fine. I'm content to leave it as a rhetorical question. I'm sure the good men and women of the jury will know how to answer it for us." She turned to face the bench. "Your honor, the defendant rests."

33

There were cameras inside the moonbus, of course. In theory, they were off.

Right. As if.

I took a tube of suit-repair goop and squirted it over each of the lenses, watching it harden quickly and turning to a matte finish as it did so. The only one I left uncovered was the unit for the videophone next to the airlock — and it was soon bleeping, signaling an incoming call. I pushed the answer button and Gabriel Smythe's florid face appeared.

"Yes, Gabe," I said. "Have you gotten ahold of the artificial me?"

"Yes, we have, Jake. He's in Toronto, of course, but he's willing to talk to you."

"Put him on," I said.

And there he — I — was. I'd seen the artificial body before I'd uploaded, but never since it had been occupied. It was a slightly simplified version of me, with a slightly younger face that looked a little plastic. "Hello," I said.

He didn't reply for a moment, and I was about to protest that something was wrong, but then he said, "Hello, brother."

Of course. The time lag: one-and-a-third seconds for my words to reach him on Earth; another one-and-a-third seconds for his reply to reach me. Still, I was wary.

"How do I know it's really you?" I asked.

One Mississippi. Two Mis—

"It's me," said the android.

"No," I replied. "At best it's one of us. But I've got to be sure."

Time delay. "So ask me a question."

No one else could possibly know this — at least not through me, although I suppose she could have told someone. But given that she'd been dating my best friend at the time, I rather suspected her lips were sealed — after the fact of course. "The first girl to ever give us a blowjob."

"Carrie," said the other me. "At the hydro field behind our high school. After the cast party for that production of Julius Caesar."

I smiled. "Good. Okay. One more question, just to be sure. We'd decided before undergoing the Mindscan process to keep one little fact secret from the Immortex people Something about, ah, um, traffic lights."

"Traffic lights? Oh — we're color-blind. We can't tell red and green apart. Or, at least, we didn't used to be able to: I can now."

"And?"

"It's … um…"

"Come on, make me see it."

"It's … it's … well, red is warm, you know? Especially the deeper shades, like maroon. And green — it's not quite like anything I can describe. It's not cold, the way blue is. Sharp, maybe. It looks sharp. And … I don't know. I like it, though — it's my favorite new color."

"What's a field of grass look like?"

"It's, ah…"

Smythe's voice, cutting in: "Forgive me, Jake, but surely we have more pressing matters to discuss."

I was still fascinated, but Smythe was right. The last thing I wanted to do was get emotionally involved with this bogus me. "Right, okay. Now, listen, copy-of-me.

You know exactly why we agreed to this copying process. We thought the biological me was going to die soon, or end up a vegetable, and now I'm not; I've got decades left."

Time delay. "Really?"

"Yes. They found a cure for what was wrong with me, and they fixed it. Dad's fate is not going to be my fate."

Time delay. "That's — that's terrific. I'm delighted."

"I'm tickled pink myself — say, what does pink really look like? No, never mind. But, look, we both know that I'm the real person, don't we?"

An interminable couple of seconds. "Oh, come on," said the other me. "You fully accepted the conditions of what we were doing. You understood that I — not you, I — was going to be the real us from now on."

"But you must have been watching the news, too. You nust know that there's a case involving Karen Bessarian going on right now in Michigan, where it's being argued that the upload is not really a person."

Time lag. "No, I didn't know that. And besides—"

"How could you not know that? We never miss the news."

"—it doesn't matter what they're doing in Mich…"

"How are the Blue Jays doing?"

"…igan. This isn't about what lawyers say, it's about what we agreed to."

I waited for the two-plus seconds to pass. But the android me just stood there, looking off camera. Presumably he would be in Toronto, and so there was a good chance the person off-camera was Dr. Andrew Porter. But Porter had said he didn't follow baseball.

"I asked you how the Blue Jays are doing," I said again, and waited.

"Umm, they're doing fine. They just beat the Devil Rays."

"No, they didn't. They're doing terribly. Haven't won a game in two weeks."

"Um, well, I haven't been following…"

"Which past president just died?" I asked.

"Um, you mean an American president?"

"You don't know, do you? Hillary Clinton just passed on."

"Oh, that—"

"It wasn't Clinton, you lying bastard. It was Buchanan." Of course Smythe had stopped him from answering when I'd asked him what a field of grass looked like.

This android had never seen one. "Jesus Christ," I said. "You're not the me that's out in the world. You're a— a backup."

"I—"

"Shut up. Shut the hell up. Smythe!"

The camera changed to show Smythe. "I'm here, Jake."

"Smythe, don't fuck with me like that again. Don't you dare."

"Yes. I'm sorry. It was a dumb thing to do."

"It was damn near fatal thing to do. Get the copy of me that's out and about on Earth. I want to see him, face to face And have him bring a hardcopy of…" What the hell newspaper still had hardcopies? "Of the New York Times, showing the date he left Earth — that would at least prove someone had come up from there. But he's still going to have to prove to me that he's the one with the legal rights of personhood."

"We can't do that," said Smythe.

My head was pounding. I rubbed my temples. "Don't tell me what you can and ca

Smythe spread his arms. "Even if I agreed to ask him, and he agreed to come, it would take three days to get him to the moon, and most of another day to bring him via moonbus from LS One."