Duplicate Minds

Seven

Rajeev sat on the bed in his dorm, fuming.

"Dev is a good boy," he said to Daniel. "I can't believe they'd make him out to be some kind of greedy corporate fat cat."

"He's not a boy anymore," Daniel pointed out.

Rajeev scowled inwardly at the correction, but Daniel was right: Dev wasn't a boy anymore and men, even good ones, often did bad things in pursuit of the greater good. Rajeev doubted Brian's account of his son was completely accurate, but he wondered if there wasn't at least a kernel of truth to it.

"Daniel . . . can you bring up some newspaper articles about Dev?"

"Absolutely. I've gathered the top ten results. Would you like me to read them aloud, starting with the first?"

"Is there any way I could read them myself?"

"Absolutely." As soon as Daniel uttered the words, a newspaper appeared floating in front of Rajeev's face. He reached out to touch it, and it spun in the air.

"It's an augmented reality representation of a newspaper," Daniel said. "You can interact with it. Try holding it."

He reached out a hand and grasped the left edge of it. As he pulled his arm back to his body, the newspaper came with it.

The first article was a profile about Dev in the Chicago Tribune. For the most part, it wasn't anything Rajeev didn't already know. There was some new information about the history of the company, and some of the investment companies that had provided much of the capital needed to grow it into a billion-dollar company. But the rest of the article was the same story Dev had told him when he'd awakened: How a devastating car accident had put his father in a coma when he was just a boy, motivating him to find a way to bring his father back. The article cautioned that such technology was still a ways off, but that Next Level Technologies had made huge strides in the development of robotics and artificial intelligence technologies in the process.

The next article was trash. It appeared to be from some kind of tabloidy blog site and it was all speculation about Dev's sex life—something Rajeev didn't want to think about at all.

He moved on to the next one and unlike the other two, it seemed to contain some useful information.

Next Level Versus Fresh Meat: The Race to Upgrade the Human Body

William Stillwell, The Wall Street Journal

Almost as long as humanity has existed, it has sought to cheat death. Conquistador Juan Ponce de León sought the Fountain of Youth. Cleopatra attempted to stave off the ravages of age by bathing in donkey milk. Humankind will stop at nothing to attain immortality.Thanks to recent technological advances, achieving immortality seems less the stuff of mythology or science fiction and more like an accomplishment that is achievable in our lifetimes. A handful of new companies are on the forefront of the race to create immortal humans, not by reversing the aging of existing bodies, but rather by supplying new bodies that could, at least in theory, be repaired and upgraded indefinitely, granting their inhabitants a kind of pseudo-immortality.The two most promising companies are different sides of the same coin. Next Level Technologies, the rising robotics and AI firm founded by fresh-eyed billionaire Dev Sundaram, seeks to copy human consciousnesses and implant them into robotic bodies that can be customized and upgraded according to the occupant's wishes. Fresh Meat, a bioengineering firm headed by irreverent whiz-kid Gregory Maltek, is taking a similar, but decidedly different tact. The company is also working on a way to transfer a human consciousness to a new body. Instead of creating artificial bodies, however, the company aims to create biological ones. Both approaches come with advantages and disadvantages and it's difficult to say at this early juncture which technology will be more widely adopted. It's possible there's room for both technologies; or, the technology could play out similarly to the VHS and Betamax fight, with one technology gaining mainstream acceptance, condemning the other to obsolescence. Either way, analysts agree on one thing: The victor will control a new industry that measures its profits by the billions.

Rajeev hadn't fully understood the ramifications of his son's invention. He'd assumed the primary purpose of these artificial bodies was medical—to help people who had been paralyzed or maimed lead more normal lives. He had been essentially brain-dead himself, which as far as he was concerned was as good as dead. Yet through the technology Dev had developed at Next Level Technologies, he had been given a second chance. Of course, Rajeev saw himself as more of a copy, rather than a continuation, of the original Rajeev Sundaram. But undoubtedly that's not how the general public would view it, especially with the help of some good marketing. But Rajeev's initial impression appeared to be mistaken. Perhaps there was a medical component to Dev's technology, but it was being sold as a form of immortality. That was a different proposition entirely, and one Rajeev wasn't sure he was comfortable with.

In Rajeev's estimation, copying someone's consciousness and then deleting the original was tantamount to murder. No matter how similar the duplicate mind may be to its original, it still cut off the life of the original. It was one thing to use such a method to provide hope to people with no other options—people with fatal illnesses, say, or paraplegics who wished they were dead anyway. But if this technology was being offered to healthy, able-bodied individuals as some kind of anti-aging gimmick, that was an entirely different matter. Would NLT's customers realize the troubling philosophical implications of what they were doing? Probably not—especially if the company managed to get the PR spin just right.

Then there was this company Fresh Meat—apparently NLT's biggest competitor. Their proposed business model seemed to open a whole other can of worms. The thorniest problem Rajeev saw was the matter of supply—where would Fresh Meat get these flesh-and-blood bodies they intended to sell to people? He imagined they'd be grown in a lab with some kind of novel cloning technology he couldn't begin to understand. It reminded him of a Michael Bay movie he'd seen. But the clones in that movie had been fully-realized human beings whose body parts were harvested when the originals needed them. And that raised an important question: Would Fresh Meat's clones have consciousnesses of their own . . . and would the company overwrite them with the minds of its customers? The Wall Street Journal article didn't go into much detail, but Rajeev wanted to learn more.

"Daniel . . . can you do a web search for Fresh Meat and display the results in front of me?"

"Yes . . . just a moment." Almost as soon as he uttered the words, the search results were projected in front of Rajeev's face. He scanned through them, looking for any indication of controversy surrounding the company's methods or even any details on how their technology worked. But he came up empty-handed.

"That's all I need for the night, Daniel. Thank you."

"You're welcome. If you need anything—you know how to reach me." In an instant, he was gone.

Rajeev lay down on the bed and contemplated everything he'd learned in the last half hour. He came away with two main facts. The first was that he was embroiled in a burgeoning industry with troubling moral and ethical issues he wasn't sure he wanted anything to do with.

The second was the disconcerting thought that he might not know his son nearly as well as he'd assumed.