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