I am a Mindscan, an uploaded consciousness, a transferred personality, and yet, despite having fewer external indicators of my internal mental state, I am still very much corporeal.

For centuries, humans have claimed to have out-of-body experiences. But what is the mind divorced from the body? What would a recording of my brain patterns be without a body to give them form?

I've always pooh-poohed the notion of out-of-body experiences, of the idea that you can look down upon your own body from above. After all, what are you looking with? Surely not your eyes * they're part of your body. Could an incorporeal entity sense anything? Photons need to be arrested to be detected; they have to hit something * the back of the eye to be seen as light, the skin to be felt as heat. A disembodied spirit could not see.

And, even if it did somehow detect things, no one ever claimed to have anything but normal vision when out of their body. They see the world around them as they always have before, just from a different angle. They don't see infrared; they don't see ultraviolet * vision without eyes seems exactly the same as vision with eyes. And yet if eyes are not really necessary for sight, why does plucking them out * or even just covering them * always, without fail, result in a loss of vision? And if it's just a coincidence that out-of-body perceptions happen to resemble what eyes see, why do color-blind people, like I was, never report a world of hues previously unknown to them when they have out-of-body experiences?

No, vision can't exist without a body. "The mind's eye" is metaphor, nothing more.

You can't have a disembodied intellect * at least, not a human one. Our brains are parts of our bodies, not something separate.

And that monad that was me * that inseparable combination of brain and body * was mostly glad to be home, although, I/we/it had to admit that it was all very strange. Everything looked different now that I had color vision. I wasn't quite sure about such matters yet, but it was arguable that things I'd thought had gone nicely together were actually clashing.

More than that, things didn't feel the same. My favorite chair was no longer as comfortable; the carpet had almost no texture beneath my bare feet; the banister's rich woodgrain, ever so slightly raised on some swirls, just as delicately indented on others, had become a uniform smoothness; the comforter I kept slung over the back of the couch no longer had its agreeable scritchiness.

And Clamhead still hadn't recognized me, although, after a lot of wary sniffing, she had consented to eat the food I put out for her. But when she wasn't eating, she spent hours staring out the living-room window, waiting for her master to come home.

Tomorrow * Monday * I would go see my mother. As usual, it was a duty I was not looking forward to. But tonight, a beautiful autumn Sunday night, should be fun: tonight was a little party at Rebecca Chong's penthouse. That would be great; I could use some cheering up.

I took the subway to Rebecca's. Although it wasn't a weekday, there were still lots of people on the train, and many of them stared openly at me. Canadians are supposed to be known for their politeness, but that trait seemed entirely absent just then.

Even though there were plenty of seats, I decided to stand for the trip with my back to everyone, making a show of consulting a map of the subway system. It had grown slowly but surely since I was a kid, with, most recently, a new line out to the airport, and an extension of another all the way up to York University.

Once the train got to Eglinton, I exited and found the corridor that led to the entrance to Rebecca's building. There, I presented myself to the concierge, who, to his credit, didn't bat an eye as he called up to Rebecca's apartment to confirm that I should be admitted.

I took the elevator up to the top floor, and walked along the short hallway to Rebecca's door. I stood there for a few moments, steeling my courage a literally, I suppose a and then knocked on the apartment door. A few moments later, the door opened, and I was face to face with the lovely Rebecca Chong. "Hey, Becks," I said. I was about to lean in for our usual kiss on the lips when she actually stepped back a half pace.

"Oh, my God," said Rebecca. "You * my God, you really did it. You said you were going to, buta" Rebecca stood there, mouth agape. For once, I was happy that there was no outward sign of my inner feelings. Finally, I said, "May I come in?"

"Um, sure," said Rebecca. I stepped into her penthouse apartment; fabulous views both real and virtual filled her walls.

"Hello, everyone," I said, moving out of the marbled entry way and onto the berber carpet.

Sabrina Bondarchuk, tall, thin, with hair that I now saw as the yellow I supposed it always had been, was standing by the fireplace, a glass of white wine in her hand.

She gasped in surprise.

I smiled * fully aware that it wasn't quite the dimpled smile they were used to. "Hi, Sabrina," I said.

Sabrina always hugged me when she saw me; she made no move to do so this time, though, and without some signal from her, I wasn't going to initiate it.

"It's a it's amazing," said bald-headed Rudy Ackerman, another old friend * we'd hiked around Eastern Canada and New England the summer after our first year at Uof T. The "it" Rudy was referring to was my new body.

I tried to make my tone light. "The current state of the art," I said. "It'll get more lifelike as time goes on, I'm sure."

"It's pretty funky as is, I must say," said Rudy. "So a so do you have super strength?"

Rebecca was still looking mortified, but Sabrina imitated a TV announcer. "He's an upload. She's a vegetarian rabbi. They fight crime."

I laughed. "No, I've got normal strength. Super strength is an extra-cost option. But you know me: I'm a lover not a fighter."

"It's so a weird," said Rebecca, at last.

I looked at her, and smiled as warmly * as humanly * as I could. " 'Weird' is just an anagram of 'wired,' " I said, but she didn't laugh at the joke.

"What's it like?" asked Sabrina.

Had I still been biological, I would, of course, have taken a deep breath as part of collecting my thoughts. "It's different," I said. "I'm getting used to it, though. Some of it is very nice. I don't get headaches anymore * at least, I haven't so far. And that damn pain in my left ankle is gone. Buta"

"What?" asked Rudy.

"Well, I feel a little low-res, I guess. There isn't as much sensory input as there used to be. My vision is fine * and I'm no longer color-blind, although I do have a slight awareness of the pixels making up the images. But there's no sense of smell to speak of."

"With Rudy around, that's not such a bad thing," said Sabrina.

Rudy stuck his tongue out at her.

I kept trying to catch Rebecca's eye, but every time I looked at her, she looked away. I lived for her little touches, her hand on my forearm, a leg pressing against mine as we sat on the couch. But the whole evening, she didn't touch me once. She hardly even looked at me.

"Becks," I said at last, when Rudy had gone to the wash-room, and Sabrina was off freshening her drink. "It is still me, you know."

"What?" she said, as if she had no idea what I was talking about.

"It's me."

"Yeah," she said. "Sure."

In day-to-day life, we hardly ever speak names, either our own or those of others.

"It's me," we say when identifying ourselves on the phone. And, "Look at you!" when greeting someone. So maybe I was being paranoid. But by the end of the evening, I couldn't recall anyone, least of all my darling, darling Rebecca, having called me Jake.

I went home in a pissy mood. Clamhead growled at me as I came through the front door, and I growled back.

"Hello, Hannah," I said to the housekeeper as I came through my mother's front door the next afternoon.

Hannah's small eyes went wide, but she quickly recovered. "Hello, Mr. Sullivan," she said.

Suddenly, I found myself saying what I'd never said before. "Call me Jake."

Hannah looked startled, but she complied. "Hello, Jake." I practically kissed her.

"How is she?"

"Not so well, I'm afraid. She's in one of her moods."

My mother and her moods. I nodded, and headed upstairs * taking them effortlessly, of course. That much was a pleasant change.

I paused to look into the room that had been mine, in part to see what it looked like with my new vision, and in part to stall, so I could work up my nerve. The walls that I'd always seen as gray were in fact a pale green. So much was being revealed to me now, about so many things. I continued down the corridor.

"Hello, Mom," I said. "How are you doing?"

She was in her room, brushing her hair. "What do you care?"

How I missed being able to sigh. "I care. Mom, you know I care."

"You think I don't know a robot when I see it?"

"I'm not a robot."

"You're not my Jake. What's happened to Jake?"

"I am Jake," I said.

"The original. What's happened to the original?"

Funny. I hadn't thought about the other me for days. "He must be on the moon, by now," I said. "It's only a three-day journey there, and he left last Tuesday. He should be getting out of lunar decontamination today."

"The moon," said my mother, shaking her head. "The moon, indeed."

"We should be heading out," I said.

"What kind of son leaves a disabled father behind to go to the moon?"

"I didn't leave him. I'm here."

She was looking at me indirectly: she was facing the mirror above the bureau, and conversing with my reflection in it "This is just like what you * the real you * do with Clamhead when you're out of town. You have the damned robokitchen feed her.

And now, here you come, a walking, talking robokitchen, here in place of the real you, doing the duties the real you should be doing."

"Mom, pleasea"

She shook her head at the reflection of me. "You don't have to come here again."

"For Christ's sake, Mom, aren't you happy for me? I'm no longer at risk * don't you see? What happened to Dad isn't going to happen to me."

"Nothing has changed," said my mother. "Nothing has changed for the real you. My boy still has that thing in his head, that AVM; my son is still at risk."

"I*"

"Go away," she said.

"What about visiting Dad?"

"Hannah will take me."

"But*"

"Go away," my mother said. "And don't come back."

13.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said a voice over the moonbus intercom, "as you can see on the monitors, we're about to pass around onto the far side of the moon. So, please do take a moment to look out the windows and enjoy your last sight of the Earth; it won't be visible at all from your new home."

I turned and stared at the crescent planet, beautiful and blue. It had been an image I'd known all my life, but when Karen and the rest of these old folks had been children, no one had yet seen the Earth like this.

Karen was sitting next to me at the moment; Quentin Ashburn, my old seatmate from back on the spaceplane, was off chatting with the moonbus pilot about their shared pride and joy. Karen had been born in 1960, and it wasn't until December 1968 that Apollo VIII got far enough away from the home world to take a photograph of the whole thing. Of course, I wouldn't normally remember a date like December 1968, but everyone knew that humans first landed on the moon in 1969, and I knew that Apollo VIII * the first manned spaceship to leave Earth orbit * had gone there over Christmas the year before; my Sunday School teacher had once played a staticky audio of one of those astronauts reading from Genesis to commemorate that fact.

Now, though, both Karen and I were seeing for the last time the planet that gave birth to us, and to every one of our ancestors. Well, no, of course, that wasn't quite true.

Life had originated only once in the solar system * but on Mars, not Earth; it had been seeded on the third planet from the fourth some four billion years ago, transferred on meteorites. And although Earth, less than 400,000 kilometers away, would be forever invisible from Lunar Farside, Mars * easy to spot, brilliant with the color of blood, of life * would frequently be visible in the night sky from High Eden, even though it was often a thousand times farther away than was Earth.

I watched as the nightside part of Earth * lenticular in this perspective, like a cat's black pupil abutting the blue crescent of the dayside * kissed the gray lunar horizon.

Ah, well. One thing I wouldn't be missing was Earth's gravity, the little stab of pain each time I put weight on my left foot.

But what people would I miss? My mother, certainly * although, of course, she'd have the new him, the durable him, for company. And I'd miss some of my friends * though, now that I thought about it, not as many as I would have supposed; I'd apparently already come to terms with never having any contact with most of them again, even though, with so many of them, the last words I'd said to them or they'd said to me had doubtless been, "See you." Christ, I wondered what my friends would make of the new me. I wondered whata Yes, yes, there was one friend I'd miss. One very special friend.

I looked at the Earth, looked at Rebecca.

More of the planet was below the horizon than above it now, and the moonbus continued to speed along.

I tried to make out what part of the globe was facing me * but it was impossible to tell with all those clouds. So much hidden, even before one got to the surface of things.

I looked over at Karen Bessarian, who was staring out the little window next to our row of seats. Her deeply lined cheek was wet. "You're going to miss it," I said to her.

She nodded. "Aren't you?"

"Not the planet, no," I said. Mostly one person there.

All of the unilluminated part of the globe was below the horizon now; only a small blue segment was visible. For a second, I thought I was seeing the brilliant whiteness of the north pole * it had certainly stood out from Low Earth Orbit, even if, as Karen had said, it was much reduced in size from when she had been a girl. But, of course, the orientation was all wrong: we were flying parallel to, and not far south of, the lunar equator, so Earth was lying on its side, with its north-south axis running horizontally. Both poles were now well below the horizon.

"Goinga" It was Karen, next to me, speaking softly.

Earth was fiercely bright against the black sky; if the moon had an atmosphere, Earthsets * only visible from a moving vehicle, since at all locations on nearside, the Earth hung motionless in the sky * would have been spectacular. Even though I was color-blind, and understood that I'd been missing out on some aspects of the spectacle others saw, I'd still always enjoyed sunsets.

"Goinga" said Karen again. There was only a tiny bead of blue still visible.

"Gone."

And it was, totally and completely. Everyone I'd ever known, every place I'd ever been.