Mindscan

I was slowly getting the hang of walking with my new legs, thanks to Karen Bessarian's help. I'd always been impatient; I suppose thinking you didn't have much time left was part of the cause. Of course, Karen — in her eighties — must have similarly felt that her days had been numbered. But she'd apparently adapted immediately to the notion of being more or less immortal, whereas I was still stuck in the time-is-running-out mindset.

Ah, well. I'm sure I'd make the transition. After all, it's supposed to be old people who are set in their ways, not guys like me. But no — that was unfair. They say you're as young as you feel, and Karen certainly didn't feel old now; maybe she never had.

Four others besides Karen and me had received new bodies today. I'm sure they'd all been at the same sales pitch I'd attended, but I hadn't talked to anyone except Karen there, and these people now had faces so much younger than what I'd presumably seen then that I didn't recognize any of them. We were all to spend the next three days here, undergoing physical and psychological testing ("hardware and software diagnostics," I'd overheard one of the Immortex employees say to Dr. Porter, who had given the younger man a very stern look).

I was pleased to see that I wasn't the only one who'd been having trouble walking. A girl — yes, damn it, she looked like a girl, all of sixteen — was using a wheelchair.

Immortex clients could choose just about any age to look like, of course. This reconstruction must have been based on 2D photos — if this girl were Karen, she'd have been sixteen in the mid-nineteen seventies — where, I think, hairstyles had been all fluffy, and blue eye shadow had been in vogue. But whoever this was wasn't trying to regress: her hair was short and tightly curled, in today's fashion, and she had a band of bright pink from temple to temple, across the bridge of her nose, the kind of makeup kids today liked.

Two of the others were also female, and three of them were white. Like Karen, they had opted to look about thirty — meaning, ironically, that all these minds that were much older than mine were housed in bodies that appeared substantially younger than even my new one did. The other upload was a black male. He'd adopted a serene face of perhaps fifty. Actually, now that I thought about it, he looked a lot like Will Smith; I wondered if that's what his original had looked like, or if he'd opted for a new face.

Karen was chatting with the other women. She apparently knew at least one of them from philanthropic circles. I suppose it was natural that the four old women would spend tune together. And, by default, that meant I ended up talking with the other man.

"Malcolm Draper," the man said, extending a large hand.

"Jake Sullivan," I replied, taking it. Neither of us were inclined to that silly male game of demonstrating how strong we were by squeezing too hard — probably just as well, given our new robotic hands.

"Where are you from, Jake?"

"Here. Toronto."

Malcolm nodded. "I live in New York. Manhattan. But of course you can't get this service down there. So, what do you do, Jake?"

The question I always hated. I didn't actually do anything — not for a living. "I'm into investments," I said. "You?"

"I'm a lawyer — do you call them solicitors up here?"

"Only in formal contexts. Lawyer, attorney."

"Well, that's what I am."

"What kind of law?" I asked.

"Civil liberties."

I gave the mental command that used to reconfigure my features into an impressed expression, but I really had no idea what it did to my face now. "How's business?"

"In the present political climate? Lots of cases, damn few victories. I can see the Statue of Liberty from my office window — but they should rename the old girl the Statue of Do Exactly What the Government Says You Should Do." He shook his head. "That's why I uploaded, see? Not too many of my generation left — people who actually remember what it was like to have civil liberties, before Homeland Security, before Littler v. Carvey, before every dollar bill and retail product had an RFID tracking chip in it. If we let the good old days pass from living memory, we'll never be able to get them back."

"So you're still going to practice law?" I asked.

"Yes, indeed — when interesting-enough cases come along, that is." He reached into a pocket. "Here, let me give you my card … just in case."

Weightlessness was wonderful!