“I don’t think there’d be much risk once it’s offered commercially—no more than you accept with the spacelines, anyway. And since this is the first experiment of its kind ever, they’re taking insurance,” June said. “The original is being kept in a state they call stasis suspension in a vault in the basement until the tests are complete. I gather he could still be resuscitated if the copy failed to work.”
Kieran stopped, his fork poised in midair, just as he had been about to bite into a piece of flounder. “What? . . . Wait a minute. Run that by me again,” he invited.
“They’re keeping the original in a suspended state until everyone’s satisfied that the experiment has succeeded.”
Kieran’s brow creased. “But that isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. In everything you see everywhere, the original dematerializes as fast as the sent version is being assembled. There isn’t any original left to have any choice about. Its gone—poof!—from here to there.”
“Yes, and that’s how it’ll be once it’s proved and working. But right now, with this being the first time ever—”
“Whoa, whoa! Slow down a minute.” Kieran shook his head. “What you’ve just told me makes a big difference. Never mind how it’s usually depicted to the world. What you’re saying is that dematerializing the original isn’t necessary—it’s not an inherent part of the process. Speeding things up with some sleight of hand doesn’t change it. It means there’s an overlap, when both of them coexist.”
“That’s not the way they see it,” June replied. “According to the official description, the other one isn’t a functioning person any longer. All the processes that define a person have been extracted and reside in the re-creation. It has become Sarda.”
“But you just told me it can be resuscitated,” Kieran pointed out. “If that’s so, then nothing was extracted. It was duplicated. You’ve got two of them. What do they do with the other one?”
“Well . . . I suppose that once they’re satisfied they have a fully functioning copy, indistinguishable in any way . . .”
“There. You just said it,” Kieran threw in. “Copy.”
June looked mildly perplexed, “. . . they just don’t reactivate it.”
“You mean they pull the plug?” Kieran looked at her in a way that invited her to think it through again. “I picked the wrong Sarda when I asked how he felt, earlier,” he commented. “I should have asked what the other one thinks about it—the one in the basement.”
“I guess the whole point is that he won’t be thinking anything anymore,” June said. Kieran’s face remained skeptical. “Anyway, Sarda accepts it totally. If it’s good enough for him . . .”
“Yes, the one you’re talking to now,” Kieran reminded her dryly. “But he’s come through it okay.”
“All the same, he must have known before he went in.”
“It’s his baby. A true believer can buy anything once he gets a bug in his head—look at those crazies who used to jump off things like the Eiffel Tower, flapping feathers and thought they’d fly.” Kieran toyed with his glass while he eyed June across the table. “Is he crazy, do you think?”
“That’s not for me to say. But he can be pretty intense when it comes to his work, sure.” June waved a hand to lay the subject to rest, just for the moment. “Sarda could probably explain it all better,” she said. “Why don’t we let him do that himself tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes. A little surprise for you, Kieran. I knew that with your curiosity about everything, you’d have liked to be there yesterday—but I don’t think Herbert and Max would have been keen on having an outsider present then, even if Triplanetary’s schedule had been different. So I did the next best thing and arranged for you to come there tomorrow—I told them I had this very special friend visiting, that I’d worked with for years. They agreed it would be okay. So you can see the TX Project, meet Sarda, and ask him all your awkward questions yourself. And that’s all I’m going to allow said about it for the rest of the evening, Kieran. I’d hoped that our first dinner together for a long time would at least have a chance of getting romantic.”