normally did that with carbon dioxide ice here. Juan asked for whiskey. I watched him watching Diana’s swinging hips as she headed off to get our drinks. “Well, well, well,” I said, as he finally slid into the booth opposite me. “I didn’t know you had a thing for her.”
He smiled sheepishly. “Who wouldn’t?” I said nothing, which Juan took as an invitation to go on. “She hasn’t said yes to a date yet, but she promised to let me read some of her poetry.”
I kept my tone even. “Lucky you.” It seemed kind not to mention that Diana and I were going out this weekend, so I didn’t. But I did say, “So, how does a poet sneeze?”
“I don’t know, how does a poet sneeze?”
“Haiku!”
“Don’t quit your day job, Alex.”
“Hey,” I said, placing a hand over my heart, “you wound me. Down deep, I’m a stand-up comic.”
“Well,” said Juan, “I always say people should be true to their innermost selves, but . . .”
“Yeah? What’s your innermost self?”
“Me?” Juan’s eyebrows moved up. “I’m pure genius, right to the very core.”
I snorted and Diana reappeared to give us our drinks. We thanked her, and she departed, Juan again watching her longingly as she did so.
When she’d disappeared, he turned back to look at me, and said, “What’s up?” His face consisted of a wide forehead, long nose, and receding chin; it made him look like he was leaning forward even when he wasn’t.
I took a swig of my drink. “What do you know about transferring?”
“Fascinating stuff,” said Juan. “Thinking of doing it?”
“Maybe someday.”
“You know, it’s supposed to pay for itself now within three mears, because you no longer have to pay life-support tax after you’ve transferred.”
I was in arrears on that, and didn’t like to think about what would happen if I fell much further behind. “That’d be a plus,” I said. “What about you? You going to do it?”
“Sure, someday—and I’ll go the whole nine yards: enhanced senses, super strength, the works. Plus I want to live forever; who doesn’t? ’Course, my dad won’t like it.”
“Your dad? What’s he got against it?”
Juan snorted. “He’s a minister.”
“In whose government?”
“No, no. A minister. Clergy.”
“I didn’t know there were any of those left, even on Earth,” I said.
“He is on Earth; back in Santiago. But, yeah, you’re right. Poor old guy still believes in souls.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Yup. And because he believes in souls, he has a hard time with this idea of transferring consciousness. He would say the new version isn’t the same person.”
I thought about what the supposed suicide note said. “Well, is it?”
Juan rolled his eyes. “You, too? Of course it is! Look, sure, people used to get all worked up about this when the process first appeared, decades ago, but now just about everyone is blasé about it. NewYou should take a lot of credit for that; they’ve done a great job of keeping the issue uncluttered—I’m sure they knew if they’d done otherwise, there’d have been all sorts of ethical debates, red tape, and laws constraining their business. But they’ve avoided most of that by providing one, and only one, service: moving—not copying, not duplicating, but simply moving—a person’s mind to a more durable container. Makes the legal transfer of personhood and property a simple matter, ensures that no one gets more than one vote, and so on.”
“And is that what they really do?” I asked. “Move your mind?”
“Well, that’s what they say they do. ‘Move’ is a nice, safe, comforting word. But the mind is just software, and since the dawn of computing, software has been moved from one computing platform to another by copying it over, then immediately erasing the original.”
“But the new brain is artificial, right? How come we can make super-smart transfers, but not super-smart robots or computers?”
Juan took a sip of his drink. “It’s not a contradiction at all. No one ever figured out how to program anything equivalent to a human mind—they used to talk about the coming ‘singularity,’ when artificial intelligence would exceed human abilities, but that never happened. But when you’re scanning and digitizing the entire structure of a brain in minute detail, you obviously get the intelligence as part of that scan, even if no one can point to where that intelligence is in the scan.”
“Huh,” I said, and took a sip of my own. “So, if you were to transfer, what would you have fixed in your new body?”
Juan spread his praying-mantis arms. “Hey, man, you