Red Planet Blues

FORTY-FIVE





Transfers weren’t supposed to die. I’d never heard of a funeral for one, and, anyway, there couldn’t be much of a funeral for Rory Pickover here on Mars. Whatever family he had was back on Earth, and he had few friends here. In fact, I think he had only one.

Dougal McCrae had released the dead transfer bodies, including that of the legitimate Rory Pickover, to NewYou. After the bootleg had come to see me at my office, as promised, he and I headed over there. We came through the front door, and that must have triggered a signal, because Horatio Fernandez immediately appeared from the workroom. His eyes went wide the moment he saw the bootleg Pickover. “Joshua!”

I scratched my ear. “Ah, yes. Um, this is going to take a little explaining. This isn’t actually Joshua Wilkins. It’s a bootleg copy of Dr. Rory Pickover.”

“Good God,” said Horatio. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then—then where’s Joshua?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “He was mixed up in some bad stuff, and the police fried him with their disruptor.”

“My . . . God. Really?”

“Yes,” I said. Then: “Is Reiko in?”

“No,” replied Horatio. “No, and she won’t be coming back. I had to let her go. She was performing unauthorized transfers after hours.”

“Transfers, plural?”

“Well, at least one.”

“Are you going to bring charges?”

Horatio lifted his massive shoulders. “No cameras upstairs, remember. Hard to make an airtight case against her. And, besides, I’ve got a business to run. Going after the granddaughter of Denny O’Reilly isn’t going to make me popular.”

“Ah.”

Horatio was looking at the bootleg. “I guess lots of things were going on here that I didn’t know about.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I understand the body of the legitimate Pickover is here?”

“In the back room. Along with three bodies that look like Dazzling Don Hutchison, and one that looks like Krikor Ajemian.” Horatio shook his head. “I honestly don’t know what to do with them all.”

Rory spoke for the first time since we’d come into the shop. “May I—can I—have a moment with . . . with the other me?”

Horatio nodded, and he led us into the workroom. Uno, Dos, and Tres—not necessarily in that order—were on their backs on the floor by the far wall. Stuart Berling was up on one worktable, his chest open; fiber-optic cables were running from the cavity to some equipment. And on the other table, the body of Professor Rory Pickover, Ph.D., was lying on his back, face up. His mouth was slightly ajar, revealing a strip of artificial dentition, and his acrylic eyes were open. They weren’t staring straight ahead, though. Rather, they were looking to the right, frozen in a sideways glance.

As I’ve said, it’s hard to read a transfer’s expression, and so all I could do was guess at what the bootleg Pickover was thinking as he regarded his dead brother. It couldn’t have made things any easier that the legitimate Pickover had opted to keep his original face. Oh, he’d had it cleaned up a bit, and he’d taken a lot of the gray out of his hair and had most of the wrinkles erased, but it was still recognizably Rory Pickover, mousy paleontologist.

The bootleg Pickover stood over him, unblinking. I’d have thought blinks were autonomic even for a transfer. Maybe he was trying not to cry—not that he could—and that was keeping his eyelids from moving.

“Give us a minute, won’t you, Horatio?” I said.

Fernandez nodded and returned to the showroom. When he was gone, the bootleg lifted his head and looked at me, while indicating the dead transfer. “He knew about me, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t know you were still around, but, yes, he knew you’d been created.”

“What did he say about me?”

What the legit Pickover had said was, “If you find another me, erase it. Destroy it. I never want to see the damned thing.” Looking now at the bootleg, I found it hard to give voice to those words. “What would you have said in the same position?”

More silence, then the slightest of nods. “I don’t blame him.”

We stood quietly for a while, then the bootleg Rory said, “Okay. I’m ready.”

We went back into the showroom. Horatio was at his cash station. We approached him and when he looked up, I said, “I ask for fal-tor-pan, the refusion.”

If it had been my fellow old-movie-buff Lakshmi, I might have gotten the response, “What you seek has not been done since ages past—and then, only in legend.” But all Horatio managed was, “Excuse me?”

“Let’s go upstairs.”

At least that generated a smile from Horatio. “I thought you’d never ask.” He headed for the staircase, and I followed, with the bootleg Pickover making up the rear. Once upstairs, I pointed at the scanning room, Horatio opened the door, and we all went in. “You said there were no security cameras up here,” I said. “Was that the truth?”

Horatio nodded.

“Good,” I said. “We want you to open up this bootleg’s skull, take out the artificial brain, and transplant it into the legitimate Rory’s body.”

Horatio looked stunned for a moment, but then he slowly nodded. “Yes, I guess—yes, I can do that. Of course, there are a bunch of systems in the body that will have to be recalibrated, but—”

“Whatever it takes,” I said. “Do it.”

“But . . . but Pickover is officially dead now.”

“Only the cops know that—the cops and you. It does your business no good to have word getting spread around that transfers aren’t in fact immortal, so I know you’ll keep your trap shut. And the cops are in Ernie Gargalian’s back pocket—or, at least the top cop is. Ernie owes me a favor; he’ll get the report about Pickover to disappear.”

We went back down to the workroom. Horatio and I moved Stuart Berling’s dead husk to the floor to clear a worktable, then Horatio set about examining the corpse of the legitimate Pickover.

Soon enough, the top was off the legit Pickover’s head, and Horatio removed the disruptor-fried and slightly squished brain. Apparently a transfer brain was normally spherical, rather than the, well, brain shape of a biological brain. It was about the size of a softball, but was teal in color and seemed completely rigid. At the bottom was a complex connector that I guess plugged into the artificial spinal cord. Horatio put that dead brain on the tabletop, the spine-plug keeping it from rolling away, and then he took a moment to hammer out the dents in the metal skull.

When he was satisfied, he turned to the bootleg Rory and said, “Okay, take your shirt off and have a seat on the edge of this table.”

The bootleg unbuttoned and removed his khaki work shirt, then boosted himself up. I couldn’t see any jack on Pickover’s side, but Horatio managed to attach a fiber-optic cable terminating in a metal plug there, ninety degrees to the right of his plastic belly button; maybe it clamped on magnetically. “All right,” he said. “First things first. I’m going to dial down your pain response.”

“You can do that?” Rory replied. “Where were you when I needed you?”

Horatio, I’m sure, didn’t understand, but he smiled anyway and turned to a control console. “Okay. That should do it; this shouldn’t hurt. Tell me if it does.” He picked up a laser cutter and sliced through the plastiskin above the bootleg’s eyebrows; there was indeed no sign of discomfort from Rory. Horatio continued right around the head. The incision separated, just like a cut in real flesh would, but there was no blood. The metal skull it revealed had a seam around it, not unlike the ones you sometimes saw on anatomy-class skeletons.

It was strange watching surgery with the surgeon using bare hands and not wearing a facemask. The top of the skull came neatly off after Horatio did something to unseat it, and he placed it upside down on the table—a titanium cranium covered with artificial hair; it looked like half of a bionic coconut.

“Wait,” said Pickover. “Give me a second.” He tilted his head down—and I was afraid his teal brain might roll out of his skull as he did so, but it seemed to still be firmly attached. I guess he just wanted one last look at this body. I knew how he felt. Every time I’d left an apartment for the last time, I’d had one final look around, committing the place to memory—and saying my farewell.

“Okay,” Rory said softly. “I’m ready.”

Horatio made a couple more adjustments on his console then he placed his hand on the top of the brain and gave it a quarter twist, which disengaged it. He then pulled it up and out, and moved over to the other worktable, where the corpse of the legitimate Dr. Pickover was still lying on its back. There must have been an orientation mark on the brain that I couldn’t see, because he rotated it until he had it facing a particular way. And then he placed it in the vacant skull, gave it a ninety-degree twist, and—

And the transfer’s eyes, which had been stuck looking askance, shifted left and right a few times, taking in the scene, and then the mouth opened all the way, and the only remaining Dr. Rory Pickover in all the world said, in his inimitable fashion, “Thanks so much, old chap!”

I imagine the first time you transferred from a biological existence to an electronic one there was some disorientation. But Pickover was already used to what it was like to be a transfer, and he seemed comfortable. He sat up with ease, swinging his legs over the edge of the table.

“Your arms are four centimeters longer in this body,” Horatio said, “so pay attention for a day or two while you reach for things. Oh, and you’ll have to relearn how to activate your telescopic and infrared vision. These eyes are from a different manufacturer and operate slightly differently.”

Pickover nodded—effortlessly, it seemed. And then he tipped his head down and looked at the back of his hand; I guess he figured he should get to know it. “The colors are a bit different,” Rory said, looking up. “Your skin, Alex’s hair.”

“Oh?” said Fernandez.

“They’re all a little more . . . golden.”

“We can adjust that easily enough.”

“It’s kind of nice, actually.” He brought his hands up and patted his chest. I thought he was exploring his body, but that wasn’t it. “And it’s so good to be wearing my own clothes again!” When he’d died, the legitimate Pickover had been wearing a dark blue work shirt with a silhouette of a dinosaur on one of the pockets.

Fernandez picked up the top of the skull and set about reattaching it. While he was doing that, I said, “Now, there’s just one more task.” I jerked my thumb at the empty form on the other table. “The world thinks that’s Joshua Wilkins, who, of course, has really been dead for months. We’ve got to dispose of the corpse.”

“I—he—was supposed to be hunting fossils,” offered Pickover, as Horatio used a tool to lay down new plastiskin, sealing the skullcap in place. “You could just dump the body out on the planitia—make it look like he malfunctioned and expired out there.”

“No,” said Horatio, stopping in his work. “Absolutely not.”

I looked at him.

“I’ve got a business to run here,” he said, “and, like you said, it’s based on the notion that I’m selling immortality—or, at the very least, durability. It can’t be that his body just failed—not under anything approaching normal circumstances. You owe me that much.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll find another way.”