Transference

As Anderson stood outside the lobby of the tower at the intersection of Broadway and Leonard Street, he felt an unaccountable feeling of apprehension settle over him. He had read through all the relevant paperwork dozens of times over the past few months, in order to penetrate scientific jargon which concealed the details of the procedure he was about to undergo. By now he was reasonably confident that he understood it, which is why the feeling came as a surprise.

His common sense told him that it was just nerves. The sort of instinctual anxiety anyone would feel if the course of their life was about to change forever. After all, thousands of people had undergone psychic transference by 2039, including some of the richest and most powerful figures in the nation. Any procedure trusted by such important people must surely be beyond reliable.

He looked both ways. The streets were empty and silent. Dreary alleys of concrete stretching away into the early morning half-light. Aside from a few drowsy-looking pigeons hobbling across sidewalk, he was the only living thing in sight. He had risen hours before dawn, taken the subway to Manhattan and struggled down twelve blocks from the station in the bitter December cold just to make sure there would be nobody would see him when he arrived at his destination. This was a sacred moment. He wouldn’t allow it to be violated by the prying eyes of strangers. This moment existed for him alone.

He gripped the head of his cane with both hands, cast one last look at the bleak face of the building above him, and went into the lobby.

Inside the receptionist told him to wait on a leather-padded bench and gave him a three-inch thick stack of documents to sign. He took the papers and sat down. The lobby was unassuming, with blank marble walls, a few simple pilasters and a black and white tile floor. In one corner of the room the receptionist sat behind a large pane of glass, typing away on a keyboard without so much as a glance at him. Adjacent to her window was a thick steel door, like the door to a bank vault, anchored to the wall by sixteen automatic bolts. A sign above the door read “RESTART Neurotechnology Research Incorporated.”

Once he had signed every line and checked every box in his stack of papers he set them down on the bench next to him and waited. Facing him across the room was a plain and sober wall-mounted clock. He watched its hands softly ticking the seconds away, consigning them neatly to oblivion one by one. The clock was identical to the one that hung behind the desk in his office, where he had squandered fifty years of his life punching numbers into a computer for a corporation that rewarded him with a paycheck scarcely big enough for him to maintain a single-room apartment on the northern fringes of the Bronx.

When he was young he had thought that he could game the system, that his superior imagination, or motivation, or some other unique quality everyone thinks they possess, would allow him to overcome circumstance and reach a life of comfort and opulence. He would start a business, so he thought, or write a novel, or maybe come up with an invention, one simple project and his happiness would be guaranteed.

He had learned soon enough what he was up against. Every step on the stairway to happiness was guarded ceaselessly by money. Everything he wanted always cost more than he had, and every minor windfall he had every experienced was quickly exhausted on basic necessities. After he realized that he had passed the midpoint of his life no better off than he had started, his years had become one sick blur of melancholy. He had considered suicide many times, yet his horror at the idea of nonexistence always proved stronger than his despair.

But then, just before his seventieth birthday, Psychic Transference exploded onto the public stage. It had become the most lucrative industry in America almost overnight. Scientists, politicians, philosophers, priests, doctors and poets raved and debated endlessly about it over the television, the newspapers, and the internet. Eventually news of it reached even his ears. He learned about how, for a price, someone could get a second chance at life. The price was not small, nowhere close to it, but it was just small enough to put it within the realm of possibility.

And so he saved. Every penny, every nickel, every dime. Skipping meals for days on end, working night shifts, weekend shifts, two jobs, three jobs, whatever it took. He had toiled alone in deserted hospital wards, in warehouses on the docks that became ice boxes in winter and furnaces in summer, in filthy, rat-infested courtyards under the looming shadows of glittering skyscrapers. Driven by a wild, frantic hope in a race against the mounting decay of his own body.

And he had won. Now it was time. Now his old life would become nothing more than a bad dream. Now his second chance would begin.

There was a sound, Anderson looked up and saw the bolts around the iron door slide back. The door opened. A man in a white lab coat stepped into the lobby.

“Mr. Anderson? We’re ready for you.” The man said.

With some effort Anderson raised himself from the bench, gathered up his papers and shuffled his way as quickly as he could across the lobby. The man in the lab coat waited patiently by the open door. He was no more than half Anderson’s age, with a reddish beard and a face frozen in an expression of banal cordiality. Anderson reached him and they shook hands.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Anderson. I’m Doctor Benedict.” Said the man after casually flipping through Anderson’s papers.

“I’ll be supervising your transference operation today. Follow me right this way and we’ll get you to the operating room.”

The doctor walked through the open door and Anderson followed him. After he passed through the door shut behind him with a sudden, resonant crash. He heard the cold squeal of the automatic bolts sliding back into place.

They walked down a short, bright hallway and entered an elevator, spotless and marble-paneled like the lobby. The doctor pressed the button for the ninth floor. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise. Each time it passed a floor it made a soft beep and a small red number on a display ticked upwards. One, two, three, four, five, six… Suddenly, Anderson felt the anxiety seize him again. This time it was much stronger than before, like a ball of frozen lead had settled to the bottom of his stomach.

“Excuse me doctor, I’ve read plenty about it by now, but I’m still not sure I understand all the details. If you don’t mind, can you explain to me exactly how transference works.”

The doctor smiled.

“Of course. Theoretically it’s quite simple.” he began. “We will take your consciousness; the pattern of electrical impulses in your brain that give rise to your individual personality, remove it from your body, and implant it into a younger body at the peak of its physical condition. This will have the same practical effect as restoring you to the state you were in during your early twenties.”

“And how will you take my consciousness out of my body and transport it into another one?” Anderson asked.

“We will use an electronic imprinting device to create a map of your entire central nervous system that will be stored on a quantum-computer hard drive. This device will then use intracranial conductors to absorb the neural activity in your brain, converting it into electricity and sending into the computer where it will be reorganized according to the previously generated map. The process will be repeated in reverse to transmit your consciousness from the computer system into its new host body. You will feel nothing during any stage of the procedure, to you it will seem instantaneous.”

“And are there any risks? Any side effects?”

“None at all.”

Anderson knew this very well already, but it still seemed incredibly vague to him. Having never gone to college, much less medical school, there was only so much he could learn before he reached the limits of his comprehension. He tried dimly to recall the lessons from his high school biology class, and found that he couldn’t. Then an apparent inconsistency in the doctor’s logic rose to the front of his mind.

“Wait, but even if I can get a new body. My mind’s nothing like it used to be. Age takes its toll on the mind too, and from what you said you won’t be changing anything about my mind, you’re just moving it somewhere else. Won’t that mean I’ll be a senile old man in a twenty-year old’s body!?” Anderson had not meant to raise his voice but, to his embarrassment, found that he had ended his question with a shout.

“Please calm down, Mr. Anderson. I’m afraid you have the wrong idea.” The doctor said reassuringly. “The loss of mental faculties during old age results from the deterioration of the physical infrastructure of the brain. Once your consciousness adapts to a healthier, younger brain you will find you’ll have regained all of the cognitive abilities you once had, possibly even more, since our company’s brains are the highest quality available. Rest assured that we at RESTART value our customers’ needs above anything else. We would never consider performing psychic transference if there was any ambiguity whatsoever about its rewards.”

All of a sudden Anderson realized that the elevator had stopped. The little screen on the panel was displaying a red number nine. The elevator doors purred and rolled open. Anderson let out a gasp.

In front of him was a long hallway lit by murky, submarine blue light. The hallway reached on and on until it finally stopped at a brightly illuminated white door, so far away it seemed to belong to another world. Between the elevator and the door, along both sides of the hall, stretched an endless procession of bodies. Bodies floating in huge tanks of amber-colored liquid, eyes closed and hair flared out around their heads like jellyfish tendrils. The bodies on the left hand wall were all female. The bodies on the right were male.

The doctor strode down the hallway slowly so that Anderson could keep up with him.

“Now comes your part Mr. Anderson.” He said without turning around. “Your payment entitles you to a selection of any of the bodies currently in our stock. Choose whichever one you like, we have every race, every muscular structure, every physiognomy, all in peak condition. You can even be a woman, if that suits you. But remember that federal law prohibits any individual person from undergoing psychic transference more than once, so whatever you choose will be your permanent identity from this point on. Think carefully about it.”

Anderson surveyed the bodies in the tanks in awe as they walked along. His apprehension was rapidly subsiding, buried beneath his awe at what he saw. On the right, the male bodies, strong, bold, lean, with faces ranging from fierce to angelic. On the left the females, radiant, sensuous, indescribably graceful. He passed by one tank containing a tall blond female body. Then stopped. He walked up to the tank and put his face close to the glass. He hadn’t been seeing things. Her eyes were open. Through the murk of the fluid surrounding her they appeared a greenish-violet. They were looking at him. She was beautiful, more beautiful than any person he had ever seen in his life. For a moment he was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all, and he struggled to hold back an absurd flood of tears that threatened to burst from his eyes.

There was a faint stream of bubbles, like a string of tiny pearls, rising from the corner of her mouth. Suddenly she raised her hand and touched her fingers to the glass. Anderson did the same with his hand. Then he jumped back as her eyes drifted upwards and her mouth spread into an appalling, demented grin.

“Haha, don’t be alarmed” said Dr. Benedict, who had been standing by his side the whole time. “Probably too many electrolytes in the tank for this one. We’ll have to mix a new solution for it later.”

“But she–?”

“Nothing to worry about. This body is most certainly not conscious, nor even alive, except in the most mechanistic sense.”

“But she saw me.”

“Even an insect can respond to stimuli. This body’s central nervous system is completely scrambled. It’s brain cells have been induced to fire randomly, making it incapable of anything more than the most primitive kind of reactions. When a mind is eventually transferred to it, then that mind’s electrical signature will be imposed on the chaos.”

“I see.” Anderson cast an uneasy glance and the body and walked on.

Anderson decided on a body from the male row. An Adonis, tall and dark-haired, similar to how he once looked, or how he imagined he did. The doctor pressed a button next to the tank and the body disappeared in a flurry of bubbles, sucked into a tube that would carry it to the operating room.

Before he knew it they were outside of the white door at the end of the hall. But instead of opening it the doctor turned to him.

“Ah, Anderson, I forgot to ask, what would you like us to do with your old body once the transference is complete. If you choose to have it cremated, we can refund ten percent of your original payment. Organic ash is a very useful nutrient for growing new bodies. You can think of it as helping to make sure others like you have the option of psychic transference in the future.”

Anderson looked at the doctor uncertainly, but his face was still an impenetrable mask of politeness, he looked back down the hall between the rows of mindless bodies, looked at the liver-spotted hand gripping the handle of his cane.

“Alright, burn it.” He said.

The doctor smiled and opened the door. Everything followed rapidly from there. Before he knew it he was was lying on a bed beneath a blazing white light, several nurses wearing white gauze masks up to their eyes mingled around him. When he turned his head he could see that the operating room was partitioned into two sections by a glass wall. On the other side was the body he had selected, still glistening with brownish slime. The smooth, featureless bulk of a quantum computer spanned both sections. The doctor was watching him from the other side of the divider. He looked at the ceiling light and attempted to relax, but all at once, out of nowhere, the anxiety he thought was gone returned madly like a rabid beast broken out of its cage. His rational mind couldn’t contain it, it was now no longer simply anxiety, but terror. In that moment he wanted, more than anything, to run away. To escape the operating room and race down the hallway, down the elevator and out through the lobby. But before he could say anything one of the nurses stuck a hypodermic needle into his arm. The last thing he saw before his mind was submerged in the blackness of unconsciousness was a metal helmet attached to the ceiling by nine robotic arms lowering over his head like the jaws of a giant spider.

He awoke to the murmuring of voices. Something cool and hard was pressing against his back. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying not on a bed, but a metal tray. The same harsh white light he had seen before glowed cruelly above him. He tried to sit up, but nothing happened. All his muscles below the neck were paralyzed. Slowly he turned his head from side to side. He was still in the operating room. Was it over? Had it worked? There was nobody around him. Where were those murmured voices coming from? Then his eyes landed on the glass divider.

There, on the other side, the doctor and the nurses were standing around the body he had chosen, which was sitting upright on a bed. The body had an expression of rapturous bliss on its face as it exchanged words and laughter with the doctor. He strained his ears as hard as he could.

“Wonderful Doctor, wonderful, I feel unbelievable, everything you said was true!”

“Naturally.” Said the doctor

The body waved its arms hysterically “It’s back, it’s all back! My mind is back, my life–”

The body broke down into tears of joy.

For a minute Anderson stared across the divider in mute incomprehension. And then, with the clarity of horror, it dawned on him. Now he understood RESTART’s business model. And the reason for the anxiety that had gnawed at him from the moment he stood outside their building. It was so simple, he cursed himself for not being able to see it. Dr. Benedict had said that the imprinting device would absorb his consciousness, but if consciousness was nothing but a pattern electrical signals passed from one neuron to the next, then how could it ever be absorbed? It couldn’t, because it was not a physical thing, it was an activity, an action. And an action can never be separated from the physical entity that performs it, only imitated by another entity. In other words, copied.

And so that is what they did, they copied the mind of a patient into a computer, and again copied it into the empty brain of a new body. Then all they had to do was dispose of the original, still inhabited body. Strictly speaking, the doctor had not lied. Anderson the concept would live on. But Anderson the person would never actually get to experience it. Everyone who had ever undergone psychic transference was dead, but no one would ever know, no one could ever know, since their identical copies were walking around alive and well, speaking with their voices, living in their homes, sleeping next to their loved ones. With infinite bitterness, Anderson thought how he should have remembered that it was the goal of every private enterprise to find the subtlest way to cheat its patrons. He felt the metal tray sliding back into the wall, and looked back to see a mouth of flame yawning behind him.

On the other side of the divider, which was actually a one-way mirror, the new and restored Anderson wiped his eyes, put on a white medical gown, and filled with perfect, unadulterated happiness, followed Dr. Benedict out of the operating room to have his new photo ID registered.