“Normally, once the exchange begins it can’t be stopped—you remain comatose, as it were, even if the building’s burning down,” she replied. “However, there are cases—very rare—when this happens. You’re right to bring it up, since it occurs only among people from Outside like yourselves. The odds, I should emphasize, are one in a million, even to you. The transfer is all at once, so to speak, so all of the molecules in your brain start their rearrangement together. If you are jolted awake early in the process, you’ll have a dim remembrance of that other life which will usually fade. If this happens late in the transfer, you’ll have a period of psychological problems, a sort of schizophrenia, but that too will pass and the dominant information will control. But if the process is just about exactly half over, then both of you will be in both bodies. There is a lot of extra space in the cerebrum and the new information will slowly shift to the unused parts, creating either a total split personality—two minds in one body, alternating—or a merger into a new personality that is a combination of both. And, understand, this will be the case for both bodies. But I wouldn’t worry; there have been less than twenty such cases in the history of Cerberus. You almost have to do it deliberately, and nobody wants that.”
I nodded. Those seemed like favorable odds. She returned to her basic briefing once more, with a new question from a woman on the end.
“What happens,” she was asked, “when a switch occurs to someone in a critically skilled field? I mean, suppose your doctor now has the mind of your janitor? How can you tell?”
“That was an early problem,” we were told. “In a non-technological age or setting, like Lilith’s, it probably wouldn’t have been solvable. Fortunately, tiny electrical patterns in the brain set up to handle our specific memories are unique to each individual. The new brain adjusts to the new pattern. We have sensitive devices able to read and record that distinctive electrical ‘signature,’ and you’ll find them all over the place. Before you leave here today we’ll take your imprint and this will open your account in the master planetary computer. Early imprint reading devices were quite bulky, but now it’s a simple device, quickly and easily used, and it is used for everything. There is no money here, for example. You are paid according to job and status directly into your computer account. Any time you wish to make a purchase, your imprint is read and compared to your identity card. As you can see, it is virtually impossible for anyone to masquerade as someone else, since it is a crime not to report a body change within eight hours of its occurrence.” She paused for a moment, then added, “For a society founded by what the Confederacy calls criminals, Cerberus has probably the most crime-free civilization in man’s history.”
I could see that this thought disturbed some of the others, and it disturbed me to an extent, too. In the most literal sense of the word, this was probably the most totalitarian society ever built. Not that crime here was impossible—the society was computer-dependent, and anything computer-dependent could be manipulated. But the system had few weak spots, and the ultimate penalty of death for crimes was even more terrifying here, in a society where it might be possible to move from body to body and stay young—if there was a supply of bodies, and if the government let you.
Were there old people here? I wondered. And if not, where did all the new, fresh bodies come from?
After another meal, they interviewed each of us in turn and had us take some basic placement tests, a few of which were familiar. The interview went smoothly enough, since their file on Qwin Zhang was no better than the one fed me and I could be creative where necessary with little fear of tripping up. But the personality tests, both written and by machine, were much, much more difficult. I had spent many months in classes and exercises learning how to get around such things, how to give the examiners the picture I wanted them to have—it involved knowing everything from the theory of testing to the exact nature of the psych probe machines used, as well as sell-hypnotism and total body control—and I felt reasonably certain that nothing thrown at me was not properly and correctly countered.
Later still we were holographically photographed and fingerprinted, had our retinal patterns taken, that sort of thing, and were also hooked up to a large machine the operative part of which looked like a test pilot’s crash helmet. This, then, was the imprint-taker. A bit later we were taken in and a small headset with three fingerlike probes was lowered on our foreheads and a check made on a computer screen. Apparently the big apparatus was used only for the recording of the imprint; the little device would be the familiar control mechanism for checking it. There was no sensation with either device, and therefore no way to figure put how they operated, something I very much wanted to know. Unless you could fool or defeat that system any authority could trace your life exactly—where you were, whom you were with, what you bought, literally everything.
In the evening they brought in cots for us. Apparently we were to remain there several days—until the Warden organism had “acclimated” itself to us—while they decided what to do with us. A book on the basic organization of the planet was provided, too. Dry but fascinating reading, including a great deal of detail about the social and economic structure.
Politically there were several hundred boroughs, each with a central administration. Some were quite small, others huge, and seemed to be based on economic specialties as much as anything. The Chief Administrator of each borough was elected by the Chairmen of the Syndicate Councils in each borough. The syndicates were also economic units, composed of corporations of similar types, all apparently privately owned stock companies. The economic system was, then, basic corporate syndicalism. It works rather simply, really: all the like companies—steel, say—get together to form a syndicate headed by a government specialist on steel. The needs of the government and the private sectors are spelled out, and each steel company is given a share of all that business based on its size and productivity, guaranteeing it business and a profit, that margin also set by the syndicate and government expert-the Steel Minister, let’s call him. The only competitive factor is that a corporation within the syndicate which markedly increases productivity—does a better job, in other words, perhaps for less and thereby increasing its profits—will get a bigger share of the next quarter’s business.
Extend this to every single raw materials and basic manufacturing business and you have a command economy, thoroughly under government control and management, that nonetheless rewards innovation and is profit-motivated. Only on the retail level would there be independent businesspeople, but even they would be under government control, since with profit margins fixed all wholesale prices would also be fixed. Then, using something as simple as borough zoning and business licenses, the government could apportion retail outlets where the people and need was. Because no money changed hands and the government handled even the simplest purchases electronically, there could be no hidden bank accounts, no stash of cash, nor even much barter—since all commodities would be allocated by and kept track of by the syndicates.
Nice and neat. No wonder there were so few crimes, even without the ultimate punishment angle.
From the individual’s viewpoint, he or she was a free employee. But since the ultimate control was the governments, you’d better not make the syndicate mad or you might find yourself unemployed—and being unemployed for more than three months for reasons other than medical in this society was a crime punishable by forced labor. It seemed that those basis raw materials came mostly from mines and works on several moons of Momrath, and the mining syndicate was always eager for new workers.