Mind Over Matter

 Mind Over Matter

  by

  Michael D. Britton

  * * * *

  Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books

   

  Ah, I see you finally found me.

  Well, it was bound to happen, I guess. Eventually you were going to open up this eBook on your little e-reader device.

  And here I am.

  Surprise!

  No, no, don’t worry. I’m not spam, or a virus, or – what is it they call them in your time? – ah, yes – a worm. No, I’m none of the above malware. 

  I’m humanware. 

  Just a man – if you can call me that in my present condition – on the run from ­them.

  Tell the truth, I’m glad you found me – it was getting kinda cramped inside this ebook file with all those ones and zeroes.

  I suppose none of this will make any sense to you unless I start at the beginning – which, ironically, is about two-hundred years in your future.

  Wait! Don’t close this ebook! I’m serious. Let me explain.

  Long story short: in 2231, a confluence of nanotechnology and inspired conceptualization on the part of neuroscientists led to the inevitable breakthrough of the mind scan – the ability to fully identify, catalogue and map every human thought.

  Wait – it gets better.

  It was only a short hop, skip, and a jump to the next phase: the mind transfer. 

  A Michigan-based corporation named PortaMind quickly made the technology available to consumers, based on the idea of creating a “backup” of your brain - you know, just in case you were in an accident, developed Alzheimer’s, or wanted to live beyond your time.

  Under this scenario, your mind would be stored on a secure server, awaiting the day that man had perfected the construction of new bodies and brains into which you could be downloaded. It was kind of like the cryogenics craze of the late twentieth century – only in reverse. Instead of storing your body, they’d store your mind. 

  Makes a heck of a lot more sense, don’t ya think?

  Well, by 2282, PortaMind merged with Humanix, the all-purpose bio-android company out of San Jose, to offer a groundbreaking product: the ability to shed your original body and take up a new and improved one - like a hermit crab trading up his old seashell residence for a bigger, shinier one. 

  It took some serious lobbying to get the idea past the government regulators, but the right money in the right pockets, and –boom- all of a sudden half of the Congress were walking around in virtually indestructible superbods and talking up the advantages of body-hopping.

  The extreme-sports types even got into it, transferring their minds into custom-made superbods – insect-like structures designed for rock-climbing and even winged creatures for ‘chuteless skydiving. 

  By the turn of the twenty-fourth century, mind transferring was as common as cell phones were in your day. The wealthiest people actually had wardrobes full of alternate bodies – the right body for the right occasion. And Hollywood? Forget about it – let’s just say casting became a whole new game.

  The mind scan technology that made it all possible also kept everyone in check by assigning scannable ID codes to all mind units, assuring individual identities could be tracked for security purposes. Yeah, those guys thought of everything.

  So, how does that relate to me, and my presence in your computer system, you ask? 

  Well, it didn’t take long for the bright light bulbs in Washington to realize that with mind transfer available to the average consumer, there would be unintended consequences. 

  Yeah, there were some traditionalists who opted out of the whole thing, saying mind transfer was “of the devil,” that man was meant to live and die, not trade out their bodies and live forever. But most saw it as a natural extension of the kidney transplant or the heart transplant – only better and longer lasting.

  Anyway, the political side of things reared its ugly head (as it always does). The problem arose of how to deal with all those thug dictators for whom the free world was awaiting their eventual demise. When the waiting game became moot, since the demise of the dictators was no longer an eventuality, certain mechanisms kicked in to deal with it.

  Namely, people like me were covertly hired to, well, help nature run its course.

  Assassin? That’s such an ugly word. I prefer nature-imposer. Or, maybe, anonymous reaper. 

  Either way, the pay was good and the job was relatively easy for the creative mind. The down side was that eventually, someone was going to get mad at you or tire of you or come to fear you, and make you the next in line to rediscover “nature.”

  For me, the trouble started when I got a call from the guy who would call me when it was time for a job. I don’t know his name, and he didn’t even go by an alias or a code name. But I knew his distinctive gruff voice, and his signature greeting.

  “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” his gravelly voice would intone as I acknowledged his inbound call. I just sighed heavily into my receiver’s mic, located in my supernumerary molar. The sat-link had incredible fidelity, and I could hear from the background sounds that he was somewhere near a river.

  “There’s a silver 2260 FloStar hovervan parked near Dan’s Garage in Kaysville. The key’s in the tail pipe, cash and instructions are in the glove box. Tonight, midnight. If you’re late, the van disintegrates.”

  The usual instructions. And the usual silence when he was done giving them, indicating he’d terminated the link and was surely getting back to whatever fun and frolicking he’d been up to at the river.

  That night, as usual, I headed to the tiny mechanic’s shop in the old business district of Kaysville and found exactly what I’d been told I’d find. I headed out through a residential neighborhood, got on the express route, and set the van to auto, then counted the cash and started reading the instructions.

  The job looked simple enough at first, but the more I read, the more challenging it revealed itself to be. In fact, I’d be lucky to pull this one off. First thing I’d need was a new body, plus at least two spares. And that would cost me.

  Or, rather, it would cost them.

  I sent a coded message to my contact, demanding higher pay. I could never reach him directly, but I knew he’d pick up the message, and I knew he’d authorize the extra money – he always did.

  By the time I’d reached the flashing lights and limousine-infested streets of Vegas, the extra credits were in my account, and I used one of my local connections to pick up a couple of spare bods – one that looked like a pro wrestler, and one that looked like one of those buxom ladies who hold up the signs with the round number at the pro wrestling matches. “Ring Girls” – yeah, that’s what they’re called.

  As long as I was in Sin City, I decided to increase my stash by spending a few hours at the smoky poker tables of the Sands, parlaying my fee money into a tidy sum I could use to retire on once this was done. 

  That’s right – this was to be my last job.

  Way I figured it, I was bound to run out of luck at some point and wind up dead.

  So I used my portable BrainBeam (a high-dollar unit, by the way) to transfer myself into the body builder bod, stashed my old bod, packed the spare female bod in a standard hardshell bod case, and caught a flight to the tin pot nation of San Quiroga, home of the last hold-out dictator in the world. 

  Only eight million people on the strategically-located island, and ninety five percent of the wealth tied up in the family-run government. Major exports – drugs and organized crime. Major import – hopelessness. People there step out of line, they wind up in a steel box for ten years, then get moved to a wooden box in the ground.

  When I got off the aircraft, the humid heat hit me like a
wet blanket. Thankfully, the sun was going down behind the palm trees, and the temperature starting to drop a little as the breeze picked up.

  I headed straight to the capital. It was up to me to introduce the country’s dictator, Julio de Candida, to nature. 

  That is, to help end his reign of tyranny by transferring his sick, twisted, one hundred year old mind out of that twenty year old body and into a corpse.

  So I showed up there on the island, ready to try plan A – stomp his butt with my wrestler bod. Step one was to hire on as one of his own body guards. With this bod, it was easy.

  But just when I got close to him, got alone with him in his game room and had my chance to crush his little neck, one of his ladies came in and blew it. She insisted on joining us in a game of billiards, and then never left. Old Julio seemed to have a soft spot for the dames.

  That’s when I decided to change tacks and use my backup bod, the hot chick. So I made the transfer, and tried seducing the old goat into a compromised position. Would’ve worked, too, if one of those stupid burly body guards of his hadn’t busted into his boudoir and whisked him away, saying there had been word of a pending assassination attempt.

  Fools left me sitting there on the waterbed half-naked – didn’t even realize that it was me who was the threat!

  Finally, I went with one of my best strategies, but one that always costs too much. Getting a bod custom made can break the bank, but since I had a little extra from Vegas, I went for it.

  This one was made to be an exact duplicate of de Candida’s brother-in-law, Raul. With the Raul bod, I was able to get up close and personal with the man, and take him aside for a “private chat.” 

  We withdrew from one of his lavish parties into his wood-paneled, bookshelf-lined drawing room. He poured us each a drink, said “What is on your mind, brother?”

  I stepped up close to him, said, “Your mind.”

  Then I placed a digiscanner to his head and put my finger on the dead man’s switch.

  “When I release this,” I told him, “your mind will be mush. No more transfers. Doesn’t matter how many extra bodies you have on hand – your best doctors won’t be able to do anything with your mind – it’ll be like trying to scoop up hair gel with a pitch fork.”

  Then I got right up close to him, whispered in his ear.

  I always do that – it’s my signature, you know. I always get real intimate with my marks and I tell them my one-word signature line: “Gotcha.”

  Then I released the trigger, watched his eyes roll back in his head as he expired, made sure there was no brain activity, and left out the back door.

  Took a boat off the island, then flew back to Vegas and picked up my old bod – no real reason except I kinda liked it, and it had a few good years left on it. Plus, I had to shed that old Raul bod. I canned it and dumped it in a river running between the rocky red outcroppings of southern Utah before making my way to San Francisco.

  But that’s when the trouble started.

  Apparently, taking out the last of the dictators was not only a great time to retire, but it also put me out of work and out of favor with my former employers. With no jobs left, they wanted to get me out of the way.

  The oldest rule in assassinations – kill the assassin.

  Not only that, but apparently there were some people in the extended de Candida clan who were kind of upset at me (go figure). So they sent their thugs, too.

  Thus began one heckuva chase. I ran and I ran. Changed bodies fifteen times over a two month period, but those sons-a-guns still tracked me.

  I knew I was toast.

  Then I remembered what a friend of mine – a real computer geek in Palo Alto – had said. He said that the mind was really just data, and that’s why it could be uploaded and downloaded the way we do. He said if I wanted, he could stick my mind on a data rod, or weave my mind into a music file, or even lay it out in binary and print it out (though he said that would take about eighteen quadrillion reams of paper to print).

  So I got this other friend – works for TimeSpace Corp – one of those cutting edge tech-industrial orgs. He’s working on a deal for them where you can send stuff back through time. Well, not stuff, but data, since data can be stored as light, and light has some weird relationship with time – don’t ask me, I’m not the egghead. But they’re developing this time-traveling informational stream in an attempt to create recursive engineering, and it’s pretty amazing stuff. 

  Anyways, I put two and two together – realized the only way for me to escape is to transfer my mind to a simple data stream, and let my buddy experiment on me by sending me back in time, where my pursuers could not chase me – heck, they wouldn’t even know I was gone or where I’d disappeared to.

  So I transferred my mind into a sentient line of code that could be sent back through time and stored in the background of this ebook. Pretty handy.

  Which brings me to you.

  Literally.

  So, that’s my story – what about you? 

  Actually – you don’t need to tell me. I know the important parts. 

  For one thing, I know that your great great great granddaughter will be the great great great grandmother of a man named Julio de Candida, the last remaining dictator in the Western world, and a man who, to tell the truth, was far too difficult a mark for me. I just couldn’t get near him on that shabby little island. 

  I also know you’re pretty smart, and have already put two and two together by now. 

  My story? Well, most of it was true.

  But really, it was just a way to keep you distracted while my subroutine ran its startup scripts in this ebook file. 

  Don’t worry . . . you won’t feel a thing.

  Gotcha.

   

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