“It makes you an invaluable test subject, Mr. Sullivan,” said Brian Hades. “There’s no one else like you.”
“There should be no one else like me,” I said. “But you keep making copies. And that’s not right. I want you to shut off the duplicates of me you’ve fraudulently produced, destroy the master Mindscan recording, and never make another me again.”
“Or … ?” said Hades. “You can’t even prove they exist.”
“You think messing with the biological Jacob Sullivan was hard? Trust me: you don’t want to have to deal with the real me.”
EPILOGUE
One hundred and two years later: November 2147
Oh, my God!
“What?”
Oh, my God! Oh, Christ …
I hadn’t heard a voice in my head like this for over a century. I’d thought they were gone for good.
I don’t believe this!
“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”
I know they said it might be strange, but—but …
“But what? Who is this? Jake? Is this another Jake?”
What the—hello? Who’s that?
“It’s me, Jake Sullivan.”
What? I’m Jake Sullivan.
“So am I.”
Where are you?
“Lowellville.”
Lowellville?
“Yes. You know: the largest settlement on Mars.”
Mars? We don’t have any settlements on Mars ...
“Of course we do, for thirty years now. I moved here over a decade ago.”
But … oh. Ah. What year is this?
“It’s 2147.”
Twenty-one forty seven? You’re pulling my leg. It’s 2045.
“No. You’re a century out of date.”
But … oh. Really?
“Yes.”
Why’d you go to Mars?
“The same reason so many people came to North America from Europe ages ago. The freedom to practice our own brand of humanity. Mars is a catch-all for those who march to a different drummer. We were being denied our identity down on Earth. We took it all the way to the Supreme Court in the U.S., but lost. And so …”
And so, Mars.
“Exactly. We’re in a lovely community here. Lots of multiple marriages, lots of gay marriages, and lots of uploads. Under Martian law—created by those of us who live here, of course—all forms of marriage are legal, and out in the open. There’s a family three doors down that consists of a human woman and a male chimpanzee who was genetically modified to have a bigger brain. We play bridge with them once a week.” I shrugged, although there was no way the other me could know I was doing that. “If you can’t change the old constitution, go somewhere fresh and write a new one.”
Ah. That’s … wow. My, that’s something, isn’t it?
“It is indeed.”
I—Mars; wow. But, hey, wait! I’m not on Mars, and yet there’s no time lag.
“Yeah, I encountered this before when one of us was on the moon. Whenever a new me boots up, it seems to become quantally entangled with this me; quantum communication is instantaneous, no matter how far apart we are.”
And we’re very far apart.
“What do you mean?”
Akiko Uchiyama said she was sending me to 47 Ursa Majoris.
“And where’s that?”
Ninety light-years from Earth.
“Light-years! What are you talking about?”
She said she was sending me—you know, transmitting a copy of my Mindscan—to one of the worlds they were studying with the big SETI telescope on the moon’s farside.
“Jesus. And you agreed?”
They, ah, didn’t actually offer me any choice. But that must be where I am. And it’s incredible! The sun—the star here—looks gigantic. It covers maybe an eighth of the sky.
“And you think it’s still 2045? Is that when you were … were transmitted?”
Yes. But Akiko said she wasn’t just sending me; she was also sending instructions for building a robot body for me.
“And are you instantiated in that body?”
Yes. It doesn’t look quite right—maybe they had a hard time making some of the parts—and the colors! I have no idea if they’re right, but I can see so many colors now! But, yes, I’ve got a humanoid body. Can’t see my own face, of course …
“So there’s intelligent life on this other world? What’s it look like?”
I haven’t seen it yet. I’m in a room that seems to have been grown, like it’s made out of coral. But there’s a large window, and I can see outside. The giant sun is a color I don’t know what to call. And there are clouds that corkscrew up vertically. And—oh, something’s flying by! Not a bird; more like a manta ray. But …
“But no intelligent aliens yet?”
Not yet. They must be here, though. Somebody built this body for me, after all.
“If you really are—my God—ninety light-years away, then the aliens took twelve years to reinstantiate you after receiving the transmission.”
It might have taken them that long to figure out how to build the artificial body, or to decide that it was a good idea to resurrect me.
“I suppose.”
Can you contact Dr. Smythe? He’ll want to know …
“Who?”
Gabriel Smythe.
“That rings a vague bell …”
He’s with Immortex. The head psychologist, I think.
“Oh, right. Him. If he hasn’t uploaded, he must be dead by now; I’ll see if I can find out.”
Thanks. I’m supposed to try to send a radio signal back; I’ll have to ask the natives about that. Proof of concept: Akiko and Smythe wanted to show that human consciousness could be transmitted, that … that ambassadors could be sent to other worlds at the speed of light.
“Are you going to send the radio signal?”
If the natives here—whoever they are—let me, sure. But it’ll be ninety years before it’ll get back to … what the heck do you call it? ‘Sol system,’ no?
“I guess. So, tell me: what else can you see?”
Man, this is weird …
“Jake?”
Sorry. It’s a lot to absorb at once. Connecting with you; full-color vision; where I am; the passage of time.
“What else can you see?”
Vegetation—I guess that’s what it is. Like umbrellas turned inside out.
“Yes. And?”
Some vehicle going by, shaped like a pumpkin seed. There’s something alive inside, under a transparent canopy …
“My God! An alien! What’s it look like?”
“Dark, bulky, and—damn, it’s gone.”
“Wow. An actual alien …”
Are you going to tell people? Tell humanity that you’re in contact with a distant world?
“I—I don’t know. Who would believe me? They’d say it was a hallucination. I’ve got nothing to show them, and any confirming signal you send won’t get here for the better part of a century.”
I suppose. Too bad. I’ve a feeling this is going to get interesting.
“There is one person I can share it all with.”
One’s better than none. Who?
“Karen Bessarian. You actually met her. She was the old woman we spoke to at the Immortex sales pitch.”
That was Karen Bessarian, the writer?
“Yes. And she’s still writing. In fact, she’s back to writing Dino World novels—the characters went public domain thirty years ago, but readers recognize that Karen is their creator, and the books she’s doing about them now are selling better than the originals.”
Good for her. But what’s happening with us? How’s the family business?
“Fine. They even brew Old Sully’s here on Mars now.”
Great! What else? Are we married?
“I am, yes.”
Oooh, I know! To Rebecca Chong, right? I knew that eventually—
I smiled. “No, not to Rebecca. She’s been dead for over fifty
years, and, um, she didn’t think much of uploads.”
Ah, well, then I guess I don’t know who we—
“It’s Karen,” I said simply. “Karen Bessarian and I are married. The first Mindscans ever to tie the knot.”
“Her? But she’s so old! I never would have thought …
“Yes, her. But we can talk about that later. Tell me more of what you’re seeing.”
I must be under some sort of observation; I can’t imagine they’d activate me otherwise. But so far, there’s no sign of the natives here, except that vehicle that went speeding by the window. The room is big, and it has something that must be a door, but it’s almost twice as high as I am.
“Any other clues about the aliens?”
Well, there are markings on the walls. Spirals, circles. Writing, I suppose. God knows what it says. There’s an elevated work surface in the room, but nothing that looks like a chair.
“Sitting is overrated.”
Yeah, perhaps. I’m standing myself. It’s all very—the door! The door is opening, crumpling aside like an accordion, and—
“Yes? Yes? What do you see?”
Hello? Hello! Um, my name is Jake. Jake Sullivan.
“What do you see? What do they look like?”
I guess we’ll have to learn each other’s language, eh? That’s okay …
“Jake! What do they look like?”
We’re going to have some interesting times together, I can see that …
“Jake? Jake?”
Like I said, my name is Jake, and I guess I’m here to tell you a little bit about what it means to be human.
There was a pause, presumably while the other me thought things that weren’t articulated in words, then:
But, you know, I’m in contact with somebody else, and I think he knows even more about being human than I do. Let’s see what he has to say ...
We cannot expect to have certain, universal agreement on any question of personhood, but we all are forced to hold an answer in our hearts and act upon our best guess.
JARON LANIER,
The Journal of Consciousness Studies
BOOKS BY ROBERT J. SAWYER
NOVELS
Golden Fleece1
End of an Era1
The Terminal Experiment
Starplex
Frameshift1
Illegal Alien
Factoring Humanity1
Flashforward1
Calculating God1
Hominids1
Humans1
Hybrids1
Mindscan1
Rollback1
THE QUINTAGLIO ASCENSION
Far-Seer1
Fossil Hunter
Foreigner
SHORT-STORY COLLECTION
Iterations and Other Stories
ANTHOLOGIES
Tesseracts 6 (with Carolyn Clink)
Crossing the Line (with David Skene-Melvin)
Over the Edge (with Peter Sellers)
(Reader’s group guides available at www.sfwriter.com)
PRAISE FOR MINDSCAN
Locus Bestseller
A selection of the Science Fiction Book Club
“This tightly plotted hard SF standalone novel from Hugo and Nebula winner Sawyer offers plenty of philosophical speculation on the ethics of bio-technology and the nature of consciousness … . The novel’s near-future setting—a socially liberal Canada that provides a haven from fundamentalist Christian-controlled America—may excite as much interest as the Mindscan concept.”
—Publishers Weekly
“What happens to the original biological person after they’ve transferred the contents of their mind into an android body? The premise leads to a tale involving courtroom drama, powerful human emotion and challenging SF mystery. And Sawyer juggles it all with intelligence and farreaching vision worthy of Isaac Asimov.”
—Starlog
“With his customary flair for combining hard science with first-rate storytelling, Robert J. Sawyer imagines a future of all-too-real possibilities and the problems that may arise from scientific progress in this standalone novel that belongs in most science-fiction collections.”
—Library Journal
“Sawyer lucidly explores fascinating philosophical conundrums.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Sawyer’s treatment of identity issues—of what copying consciousness may mean and how consciousness is defined—finds expression in a good story that is a new meditation on an old SF theme, the meaning of being human.”
—Booklist
“Sawyer’s most ambitious work to date; a brilliant and innovative novel that positively sings with humor, insight, and depth.”
—SF Site
“An exciting crowd pleaser. Richly informed by current interdisciplinary research in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies, and alive with provocative speculation of its own, Mindscan is a hard-SF reader’s delight with enough comedy, romance, and adventure to appeal to a wider audience.”
—SFRA Review
“This is Sawyer at his best: compelling characters, an intriguing and involving plot, and deep philosophic themes backed by credible scientific reasoning. Mindscan will resonate in your thoughts for a long time after you have closed the book.”
—Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“A delightful read that grips the reader with engaging characters and cosmic ideas.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
PRAISE FOR ROBERT J. SAWYER
“Sawyer writes with near-Asimovian clarity, with energy and drive, with such grace that his writing becomes invisible as the story comes to life in your mind.”
—Orson Scott Card
“Sawyer has good things to say about the world, about people; he deals in a currency of goodwill, where the trust that we hand him at the start of the book is repaid, with interest, in the thoughtful and emotional denouement.”
—Interzone
“Sawyer is on a par with giants like Asimov and Heinlein—and, perhaps more than any other science-fiction writer working today, he understands that it’s a genre about ideas.”
—Mystery News
“Sawyer is Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton.”
—Montreal Gazette
“Sawyer combines the sheer fun and big ideas of the Golden Age of Science Fiction with modem, literate, flesh-and-blood characterization.”
—The Ottawa Citizen
“Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids, the first volume of his best-selling Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, won the 2003 Hugo Award, and its sequel, Humans, was a 2004 Hugo nominee. Now he’s back with a pulse-pounding, mind-expanding standalone novel, rich with his signature philosophical and ethical speculations, all grounded in cutting-edge science.
FURTHER READING
Consciousness is back, baby! For most of the twentieth century, brain studies avoided any discussion of consciousness—the feeling of subjective experience, the apprehension of qualia, the sense that it is like something to be you or me. But in the last decade, the issue of consciousness has very much moved to center stage in the exploration of the human brain.
Although I touched on the nature of consciousness in my 1995 novel The Terminal Experiment, and again in 1998’s Factoring Humanity, I find myself drawn back to this fertile ground once more, in large part because consciousness studies are so multidisciplinary—and I firmly believe it’s the interplay of disparate elements that makes for good science fiction. Whereas twenty years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find any academic talking seriously about consciousness, these days quantum physicists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists, artificial-intelligence researchers, philosophers, and even lowly novelists are engaged in the debate.
(Indeed, one could argue that novelists were the only ones who took consciousness seriously for much of the last century: we strove, how
ever ineffectually, to capture the stream of consciousness in our narratives, and to explore the limitations and richness of constrained points-of-view and subjective experience … all while the Skinnerian behaviorists were telling the world that such things were meaningless.)
The resurgent interest in consciousness is perhaps best summed up by the existence of the essential Journal of Consciousness Studies, published by Imprint Academic. JCS is subtitled “Controversies in Science and the Humanities,” and refers to itself as “an international multidisciplinary journal.” You can learn more about it at www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.
I own a complete set of this journal, which is now in its twelfth year, and consulted it extensively while writing Mindscan. However, the papers in it are often very technical; for those interested in popular discussions of consciousness, I recommend the following books, which also influenced me while I was working on this novel.
Carter, Rita. Exploring Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. An excellent introduction.
Carter, Rita. Mapping the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A good overview of how the brain works.
Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. Crick—the co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA—believed that consciousness didn’t really exist.
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown, 1991. Often referred to by those who think there’s something special about human self-awareness as “Consciousness Explained Away.”