Mindscan

"The teeth are exact copies of your own layout — we've even embedded a denser ceramic composite at the right points to match the two fillings you have: dental biometrics would identify this head as being yours. Now, you can see there's a tongue, but, of course, we don't actually use the tongue for speech; that's all done with voice-synthesizer chips. But it should do a pretty good job of faking it. The opening and closing of the jaw will match the sounds being produced perfectly — kind of like Supermarionation."

"Like what?" I said.

"Thunderbirds? Captain Scarlet?"

I shook my head.

Porter sighed. "Well, anyway, the tongue is very complex — the most complex part of the recreation, actually. It doesn't have taste buds, since you won't need to eat, but it is pressure sensitive and, as I said, it will make the appropriate movements to match what your voice chip is saying."

"It's really … uncanny," I said, and then I smiled. "I think that's the first time I've ever actually used that word."

Porter laughed, but then pointed at me. "Now, sadly we haven't been able to replicate that: when you smile, you've got a great dimple in your left cheek. The artificial head doesn't do that. We've noted it in your file, though — I'm sure we'll be able to add it in a future upgrade."

"That's okay," I said. "You've done a terrific job as is."

"Thanks. We like people to become familiar with the appearance before we transfer them into an artificial body — it's good that you know what to expect. Are there any particular activities you're looking forward to?"

"Baseball," I said at once.

"That will take a lot of eye-hand coordination, but it will come."

"I want to be as good as Singh-Samagh."

"Who?" asked Porter.

"He's a starting pitcher for the Blue Jays."

"Oh. I don't follow the game. I can't guarantee you'll ever be professional caliber, but you'll definitely be at least as good, if not better, than you were before."

He went on. "You'll find that all the proportions are exactly the same as your current body — the length of each finger segment, of each limb segment, and so on. Your mind has built up a very sophisticated model of what your body is like — how long your arms are, at what point along their length the elbow or knee occurs, et cetera.

That mental model is adaptable while you're still growing, but becomes pretty firmly entrenched in middle age. We've tried making short people tall, and correcting for mismatched limb lengths, but it created more problems than it was worth — people have a lot of trouble adjusting to a body that isn't like their original."

"Urn, does that mean…? I'd thought…"

Porter laughed. "Ah, yes. We do mention that in our literature. Well, you see, the male sex organ is a special case: it varies substantially in size depending on temperature, arousal, and so on. So, yes, as a matter of course, we upsize what nature provided in the original, unless you specifically indicated you didn't want that on the forms you filled out; the mind is already used to the penis having variable form, so it seems to deal well with an extra few centimeters." Porter pulled at the terry-cloth sash holding the robe closed.

"My goodness," I said, feeling awfully silly, but also awfully impressed. "Um, thank you."

"We aim to please," said Porter, with a beatific smile.

Ray Kurzweil had been the most vocal proponent around the time I was born of moving our minds into artificial bodies. His books from that time — the classic is The Age of Spiritual Machines, from 1999 — proposed that within thirty years of then (meaning sixteen years ago from now) — it would be possible to copy "the locations, interconnections, and contents of all the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, neurotransmitter concentrations, and other neural components and levels" of an individual's mind, so that that mind's "entire organization can then be recreated on a neural computer of sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory."

It's fun re-reading that book today, with 20/20 — hell, with 2045 — hindsight. Kurzweil got some things right, but missed out on several other key points. For instance, the technology to scan the brain at the supposedly required level of resolution appeared in the year 2019, but it turned out to do no good because the scanning took hours to complete, and, of course, even a sedated individual's brain undergoes all sorts of transitions during that period. Stitching together data about the brain over such a lengthy period produced a nonfunctional mess; it was impossible to match up visual impulses (or lack thereof) from the back of the head with thoughts about completely different impulses from the front of the head. Consciousness is the synchronized action of the entirety of the brain; scans that take anything more than mere moments to make would always be useless for reconstituting it.