Identity Theft Read Free Page B

nodded. “Sure. Why not?”
    “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just stand over here.” I moved to the far wall and leaned back against it.
    The chair Hansen was sitting in looked a lot like a barber’s chair. The female transfer who wasn’t Cassandra reached up above the chair and pulled down a translucent hemisphere that was attached by an articulated arm to the ceiling. She kept lowering it until all of Hansen’s head was covered, and then she turned to a control console.
    The hemisphere shimmered slightly, as though a film of oil was washing over its surface; the scanning field, I supposed.
    Cassandra was standing next to me, arms crossed in front of her chest. It was an unnatural-looking pose, given her large bosom. “How long does the scanning take?” I asked.
    “It’s a quantum-mechanical process,” she replied. “So the scanning is rapid. But it’ll take about ten minutes to move the data into the artificial brain. And then…”
    “And then?” I said.
    She lifted her shoulders, as if the rest didn’t need to be spelled out. “Why, and then Mr. Hansen will be able to live forever.”
    “Ah,” I said.
    “Come along,” said Cassandra. “Let’s go see the other side.” We left that room, closing its door behind us, and entered the one next door. This room was a mirror image of the previous one, which I guess was appropriate. Standing erect in the middle of the room, supported by a metal armature, was Hansen’s new body, dressed in a fashionable blue suit; its eyes were closed. Also in the room was a male NewYou technician, who was biological.
    I walked around, looking at the artificial body from all angles. The replacement Hansen still had a bald spot, although its diameter had been reduced by half. And, interestingly, Hansen had opted for a sort of permanent designer-stubble look; the biological him was clean-shaven at the moment.
    Suddenly the simulacrum’s eyes opened. “Wow,” said a voice that was the same as the one I’d heard from the man next door. “That’s incredible.”
    “How do you feel, Mr. Hansen?” asked the male technician.
    “Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”
    “Good,” the technician said. “There’ll be some settling-in adjustments, of course. Let’s just check to make sure all your parts are working…”
    “And there it is,” said Cassandra, to me. “Simple as that.” She led me out of the room, back into the corridor.
    “Fascinating,” I said. I pointed at the left-hand door. “When do you take care of the original?”
    “That’s already been done. We do it in the chair.”
    I stared at the closed door, and I like to think I suppressed my shudder enough so that Cassandra was unaware of it. “All right,” I said. “I guess I’ve seen enough.”
    Cassandra looked disappointed. “Are you sure don’t want to look around some more?”
    “Why?” I said. “Is there anything else worth seeing?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “It’s a big place. Everything on this floor, everything downstairs… everything in the basement.”
    I blinked. “You’ve got a basement?” Almost no Martian buildings had basements; the permafrost layer was very hard to dig through.
    “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.” She paused, then looked away. “Of course, no one ever goes down there; it’s just storage.”
    “I’ll have a look,” I said.
    And that’s where I found him.
    He was lying behind some large storage crates, face down, a sticky pool of machine oil surrounding his head. Next to him was a fusion-powered jackhammer, the kind many of the fossil hunters had for removing surface rocks. And next to the jackhammer was a piece of good old-fashioned paper. On it, in block letters, was written, “I’m so sorry, Cassie. It’s just not the same.”
    It’s hard to commit suicide, I guess, when you’re a transfer. Slitting your wrists does nothing significant. Poison doesn’t work, and neither does drowning. But