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occasional sounds — he'd have been making little gurgles if she wasn't speaking, too.
    My own personal sword of Damocles. I was now five years older than my dad had been when the blood vessels in his brain had ruptured, washing away his intelligence and personality, his joy and his anger, in a tide of red. There was a digital clock on the wall of his room, showing the time in bright numerals. Thank God clocks didn't tick anymore.
    When my mother was done talking at my father, she rose from the chair and said, "All right."
    Normally, I just dropped her off at her house on my way back into the city, but I didn't want to do this in the car. "Sit down, Mom," I said. "There's something I have to tell you." She looked surprised, but did so. There was only one chair in my father's room here at the Institute, and, as I'd asked, she took it. I propped myself against a bureau on the opposite side of the room and looked at her.
    "Yes?" she said. There was a hint of defiance in her voice, and I flashed back. Once before, I'd broached the topic of how futile it was to come here each week, how my father didn't even really know we were here. She'd been furious, and had verbally slapped me down in a way she hadn't since I was a kid. Clearly, she was expecting a repeat of that argument.
    I took in air, let it out slowly, and spoke. "I'm — I don't know if you've heard of it or not, but there's this process they've got now. It's been covered on all the news shows…" I trailed off, as if I'd given her enough clues to guess what I was talking about. "It's by a company called Immortex. They transfer a person's consciousness into an artificial body."
    She looked at me silently.
    I continued. "And, well, I'm going to do it."
    Mom spoke slowly, as if digesting the idea a word at a time. "You're going to … transfer your … your consciousness…"
    "That's right."
    "Into a … an … artificial body."
    "Yes."
    She said nothing more, and, just like when I was a little kid, I felt a need to fill the void, to explain myself. "My body's no good — you know that. It's almost certainly going to kill me" — if I'm lucky, I thought — "or I'll end up like Dad. I'm doomed if I stay in this…" I laid a splayed hand over my chest, sought a word "…this
shell
."
    "Does it work?" she asked. "This process — does it really work?"
    I smiled my best reassuring smile. "Yes."
    She looked over at her husband, and the anxious expression on her face was heartbreaking. "Could they … could Cliff…"
    Oh, Christ, what a moron I am. It hadn't even occurred to me that she would connect this to Dad. "No," I said. "No, they copy the mind as it is. They can't … they can't undo…"
    She took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm herself.
    "I'm sorry," I said. "I wish there was some way, but…"
    She nodded.
    "But they
can
do something for me — before it's too late."
    "So, they move … they move your soul?"
    I looked at my mother, totally surprised. Maybe that's why she still came to visit Dad — she thought, somewhere under all the damage, his soul was still there.
    I'd read so much about this, and wanted to tell it all to her, make her see. Before the twentieth century, people had believed there was an
elan vital
— a life force, some special ingredient that distinguished living matter from regular stuff. But as biologists and chemists found mundane natural explanations for every aspect of life, the notion of an
elan vital
had been discarded as superfluous.
    But the idea that there was an ineffable something that composes
mind
— a soul, a spirit, a divine spark, call it what you will — still persisted in the popular imagination in some places, even though science could now explain almost every aspect of brain activity without recourse to anything but fully understood physics and chemistry; my mother's invocation of a soul was as silly as trying to cling to the notion of an
elan
v
ital
.
    But to tell her that was to tell her that her husband was totally,