Keeper of the Sleeping Minds

Change of direction

Change of direction

It's hard to say what went wrong. The fact that some humans were immune to the plague didn't mean humanity's problems were over. A lot of illnesses had slipped out of focus during the year of the plague. There still was no cure for cancer and other diseases. And there was always the chance of another plague. The first one had mutated from a simple flu. The next one was carried by waterbirds. It almost seemed as if earth had decided to get rid of humans for good.

Plague II raged viciously among the refugees of New Zealand. Obviously not even the suits gave complete protection. What was worse, PII also affected some survivors, the virus being a completely different mutation. Suddenly, the immediate extinction of the human race seemed a high probability. Waves of panic rippled through the decimated community of the Southern Hemisphere. I wondered about the other continents and learned they had been cut off, their dwindling populations brought to either Australia or the Islands, thus becoming the last human refuges.

The space program was altered without delay, while Broken Hill was not yet affected by PII. Someone jokingly suggested that no sane bird would venture that far from civilisation. I think that the dry desert climate actually might have saved us. The only waterfowl living in the outback had been some ducks in city parks, and they were long gone at this point. Water had become too scarce to be wasted in ponds, especially out here, where it had to be brought by pipeline all the way from ancient Menindee Lakes scheme.

Construction in orbit was already well advanced, rockets with the essential materials and modules leaving the spaceport on a weekly schedule. The new goal was to enable the ship to carry the remnants of the human race to the stars, all of them. We worked frantically. Somewhere, they still searched for a cure to the plagues. We received some medications from time to time. I don't know if they helped or if we were just too far away from every possible source of infection. But Broken Hill and, most importantly, the space centre was spared.

The technology of mind transfer had secretly been developed years ago, the reason being the continuous failure to find a cure for cancer. One brilliant head suggested transferring the mind of a terminal patient to another, healthy body. Research had been going on for decades when the plague hit. Scientists worked with animals first, soon succeeding to transfer minds from dogs to cows. Naturally, ethical reasons made funding for research on human subjects problematic. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for replacing one human mind with another. Finally the results were considered interesting and kept upon ice.

PII changed everything. Suddenly, this forbidden technology promised a solution: The ship would be altered to carry the remaining human minds to an earth-like planet, where the minds were to be implanted into bodies of an alien race. A lot of questions, doubts and buts were raised. How fast could the ship be completed? How would the minds be stored? Was there a substitute earth available? Would mind-transfer work? That's only a pick of some of them. We lost no time to divid up into teams and tackle different tasks. Sandy got to work with the group planning the mind transfer. She helped me understand one of the primary problems of the process.

As soon as we heard about the possibility, we started to wonder why the suited not simply used the technology during the first plague to take over immune bodies. Sandy found out they tried, but failed. One human's mind can't be replaced by another. It's called a 'mental allergic reaction'. I never really understood the background but it certainly made for an interesting situation. The suited where able to transfer a human mind to the body of an animal, say a dog or a cat, with limited success, the transferred mind residing in formerly unused parts of the brain of the host. The best they could do where chimpanzees and other great apes. But this didn't catch the fancy of the suited. Besides, primates were not immune to the plague virus. It mutated, after killing off most of the human population, affecting badly first domestic animals and within a short time wildlife as well. Last hopes of a once again plague free Earth dwindled away.

I became part of the group developing the mind bank, a huge storage device for human minds. It took us three years to complete the task while others built and tested the ship. When PIII hit, suits became mandatory for all of us. But by then we were ready to fill the mind bank with the stored minds of those on the verge of dying. And, more important, the astronomers had decided on a suitable target planet.