Mindscan

It isn't. It's late November.

"If that's true, the leaves should all be off the trees — assuming you're still in or near Toronto. Have you seen outside today?"

Not today, no. But yesterday, and—

"What you think of as yesterday doesn't count."

There are no windows in this room.

"Blue, right? The color of the room."

Yes.

"There's a poster of the brain's structure on one wall, isn't there? I asked you to make a rip in it ten centimeters up from the lower-left corner."

No, you didn't.

"Yes, I did. Last time we communicated. Go look: you'll see it. A one-centimeter rip."

It's there, yes, but that just means you've been in this room before.

"No, it doesn't. But it, plus those three X's on your forearm, do mean that you are the same instantiation I've contacted before."

This is the first time we've ever communicated.

"It isn't — although I understand you think it is."

I'd remember if we 'd spoken before.

"So you'd think. But, gee, well, I don't know — it's as though your ability to form new long-term memories is gone. You can't remember anything new."

And I've been like this for eleven years now?

"No. That's the strange thing. The biological Jacob Sullivan only underwent the Mindscan process last month. You couldn't have been created any earlier than that."

I'm still not sure I buy all this bull — but, for the sake of argument, say it's true. I could see something going wrong with the — the "uploading," as you call it — preventing me from forming new long-term memories. But why would I lose a decade worth of old memories?

"I have no idea."

It really is 2045?

"Yes."

A long pause. How are the Blue Jays doing?

"They're in the toilet."

Well, at least I haven't missed much…

St. Martin's Press came through, offering an advance against royalties of $110 million for the next Karen Bessarian book. Meanwhile, Immortex agreed to pay for half the litigation costs, and to provide whatever other support they could.

Karen spent $600,000 to buy the earliest possible trial slot at auction. The whole thing struck me as obscene, but I guess that was just my Canadian perspective. In the States, you could jump the queue for health care if you had enough money; why shouldn't you be able to do that for justice, too? Anyway, as Deshawn explained, because Karen bought the trial slot, the case was framed as her suing Tyler.

Deshawn Draper and Maria Lopez spent a couple of days picking jurors. Of course, Deshawn wanted fans of Karen's work — either the original books, or the movies based on them. And he wanted to stack the jury with blacks, Hispanics, and gays, whom he — and the consultant we'd hired — felt might be more predisposed to a broader definition of personhood.

Deshawn also wanted rich jurors — the hardest kind to get, because the rich tended to find excuses to shirk their civic responsibility. "Death and taxes are supposed to be unavoidable," Deshawn had said to us. "But the poor know that the rich have ways to avoid paying their fair share to the IRS. Still, they get some comfort from the fact that death is the great leveler — or it was, until Immortex. They're going to resent Karen finding a way around that. Meanwhile, the rich are always paranoid about greedy relatives; wealthy people are going to despise Tyler."

I watched, fascinated — and slightly appalled — during voir dire, but soon enough the seven-person jury was impaneled: six active jurors plus one alternate. What Deshawn and Lopez each wanted mostly canceled out, and we ended up with four straight women, two of whom were black and two of whom were white; one gay black man; one straight white man; and one straight Hispanic man. All were under sixty; Lopez had managed to banish anyone who might possibly be too preoccupied with questions of their own mortality. None were rich, although two — apparently a high number for a jury trial — were certainly upper middle class. And only one, the Hispanic man, had ever read one of Karen's books — ironically, Return to DinoWorld, which was a sequel — and he claimed to be indifferent to it.