Mindscan

I nodded and continued along the corridor. The house was elegant; I hadn't understood that when I was a kid, but I did now: the hallway was paneled in dark wood, and little marble statues were set into recessed niches, with fancy brass lights pointing at them.

"Hey, Mom," I called out, as I reached the bottom of the curving oak staircase.

"I'll be down in a second," she replied from upstairs. I nodded. I headed into the living room, which was sunken and had bay windows overlooking the lake.

A few minutes later, my mother appeared. She was dressed, as she always was for these trips, in one of the blouses she used to wear back in 2018. She knew her face had changed, and even with a nip here and a tuck mere, she still wasn't immediately recognizable as the woman she'd been in her late thirties; I guess she felt the old clothes might help.

We got into my car, a green Toshiba Deela, and drove the twenty kilometers north to Brampton, where the Institute was located. It was, of course, the best care that money could buy: a large, treed lot, with a modern, central structure that looked more like a resort hotel than a hospital; maybe they'd used the same architect Immortex had for High Eden. It was a fine summer's afternoon, and several — patients? residents? — were outdoors in wheelchairs, each accompanied by an attendant.

My father was not among them.

We entered the lobby. The guard — black, bald, bearded — knew us, and we exchanged pleasantries, and then my mother and I headed up to Dad's room, on the second floor.

They moved him around, to avoid bedsores and other problems. Sometimes we found him lying down; sometimes he was gently strapped into a wheelchair; sometimes, they even had him strapped to a board that held him vertically.

Today, he was in bed. He rolled his head, looked at Mother, looked at me. He was aware of his surroundings, but that was about it. The doctors said he had the mind of an infant.

He'd changed a lot since that day. His hair was white now, and, of course, he had the wrinkled countenance of a man of sixty-six; no point in cosmetic surgery here.

His long limbs were thin and untoned; despite electrical and occasional manual stimulation, there was no way to keep them muscular without real physical activity.

"Hello, Cliff," my mother said, and she paused. She always paused, and it broke my heart each time. She was waiting for a reply that would never come.

Mom had lots of little rituals for these visits. She told my father what had happened in the last week, and how the Blue Jays were doing — I'd gotten my love of baseball from my dad. She sat in a chair next to his bed, and held his left hand in her right one. His fingers always closed reflexively around my mother's. No one had removed the gold wedding band from his hand, and my mother still wore hers.

Me, I didn't say much. I just stared at him — at it, really, a shell, a body without much of a mind, lying there, looking at my mother, his mouth quirking occasionally into what might have been the seed of a smile or frown, or might have just been random movements. As she spoke, he made occasional sounds — he'd have been making little gurgles if she wasn't speaking, too.

My own personal sword of Damocles. I was now five years older than my dad had been when the blood vessels in his brain had ruptured, washing away his intelligence and personality, his joy and his anger, in a tide of red. There was a digital clock on the wall of his room, showing the time in bright numerals. Thank God clocks didn't tick anymore.

When my mother was done talking at my father, she rose from the chair and said, "All right."

Normally, I just dropped her off at her house on my way back into the city, but I didn't want to do this in the car. "Sit down, Mom," I said. "There's something I have to tell you." She looked surprised, but did so. There was only one chair in my father's room here at the Institute, and, as I'd asked, she took it. I propped myself against a bureau on the opposite side of the room and looked at her.

"Yes?" she said. There was a hint of defiance in her voice, and I flashed back. Once before, I'd broached the topic of how futile it was to come here each week, how my father didn't even really know we were here. She'd been furious, and had verbally slapped me down in a way she hadn't since I was a kid. Clearly, she was expecting a repeat of that argument.

I took in air, let it out slowly, and spoke. "I'm — I don't know if you've heard of it or not, but there's this process they've got now. It's been covered on all the news shows…" I trailed off, as if I'd given her enough clues to guess what I was talking about. "It's by a company called Immortex. They transfer a person's consciousness into an artificial body."

She looked at me silently.

I continued. "And, well, I'm going to do it."

Mom spoke slowly, as if digesting the idea a word at a time. "You're going to … transfer your … your consciousness…"

"That's right."

"Into a … an … artificial body."

"Yes."