Mindscan

She said nothing more, and, just like when I was a little kid, I felt a need to fill the void, to explain myself. "My body's no good — you know that. It's almost certainly going to kill me" — if I'm lucky, I thought — "or I'll end up like Dad. I'm doomed if I stay in this…" I laid a splayed hand over my chest, sought a word "…this shell."

"Does it work?" she asked. "This process — does it really work?"

I smiled my best reassuring smile. "Yes."

She looked over at her husband, and the anxious expression on her face was heartbreaking. "Could they … could Cliff…"

Oh, Christ, what a moron I am. It hadn't even occurred to me that she would connect this to Dad. "No," I said. "No, they copy the mind as it is. They can't … they can't undo…"

She took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm herself.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I wish there was some way, but…"

She nodded.

"But they can do something for me — before it's too late."

"So, they move … they move your soul?"

I looked at my mother, totally surprised. Maybe that's why she still came to visit Dad — she thought, somewhere under all the damage, his soul was still there.

I'd read so much about this, and wanted to tell it all to her, make her see. Before the twentieth century, people had believed there was an elan vital — a life force, some special ingredient that distinguished living matter from regular stuff. But as biologists and chemists found mundane natural explanations for every aspect of life, the notion of an elan vital had been discarded as superfluous.

But the idea that there was an ineffable something that composes mind — a soul, a spirit, a divine spark, call it what you will — still persisted in the popular imagination in some places, even though science could now explain almost every aspect of brain activity without recourse to anything but fully understood physics and chemistry; my mother's invocation of a soul was as silly as trying to cling to the notion of an elan vital.

But to tell her that was to tell her that her husband was totally, irretrievably gone. Of course, maybe it would be a kindness to make her understand that. But I didn't have it in my heart to be that kind.

"No," I said, "they don't move your soul. They just copy the patterns that compose your consciousness."

"Copy? Then what happens to the original?"

"They — see, you transfer the legal rights of personhood to the copy. And then, after that, the biological you has to retire from society."

"Retire where?"

"It's called High Eden."

"Where's that?"

I wished there was some other way to say it. "On the moon."

"The moon!"

"The far side of the moon, yes."

She shook her head. "When would you do this?"

"Soon," I said. "Very soon. I just — I just can't take it any longer. Being afraid if I sneeze or bend over or do nothing at all that I might end up brain damaged or a quadriplegic or dead. It's tearing me apart."

She sighed, a long, whispery sound. "Come and say good-bye before you leave for the moon."

"This is good-bye," I said. "I'm going to have the process done tomorrow. But the new me will still come to visit regularly."

My mother looked at her husband, then back at me. "The new you," she said, shaking her head. "I can't take losing—"

She stopped herself, but I knew what she'd been going to say: "I can't take losing the only other person in my life."

"You're not losing me," I said. "I'll still come to visit you." I gestured at Dad, who gurgled, perhaps even in response. "I'll still come to visit Dad."

My mother shook her head slightly, unbelieving.

I drove sadly to my house in North York, thinking.

I hated seeing my mother like that. She'd put her whole life on hold, hoping that somehow my father would come back. Of course, she knew intellectually that the brain damage was permanent. But the intellect and the emotions don't always end up in synch. In some ways, what had happened to my mother affected me more profoundly than what had happened to my father. She loved him the way I'd always hoped someone would love me.

And there was someone special in my life, a woman I cared about deeply, and who, I think, felt the same way about me. Rebecca Chong was forty-one, just a little younger than me. She was a bigwig at IBM Canada, worth a lot of money in her own right. We'd known each other for about five years, and saw each other often socially, although mostly with a few other friends. But there was always something special between just the two of us.

I remember the party last New Year's Eve. Like many of our little group's get-togethers, this one was held at Rebecca's place, a luxury penthouse at Eglinton and Yonge. Rebecca loved to entertain, and her home was central for everyone in our group — and her building had direct access to the subway.