He's with Immortex. The head psychologist, I think.

"Oh, right. Him. If he hasn't uploaded, he must be dead by now; I'll see if I can find out."

Thanks. I'm supposed to try to send a radio signal back; I'll have to ask the natives about that. Proof of concept: Akiko and Smythe wanted to show that human consciousness could be transmitted, that … that ambassadors could be sent to other worlds at the speed of light.

"Are you going to send the radio signal?"

If the natives here — whoever they are — let me, sure. But it'll be ninety years before it'll get back to… what the heck do you call it? Sol system, no?

"I guess. So, tell me: what else can you see?"

Man, this is weird…

"Jake?"

Sorry. It's a lot to absorb at once. Connecting with you; full-color vision; where I am; the passage of time.

"What else can you see?"

Vegetation — I guess that's what it is. Like umbrellas turned inside out.

"Yes. And?"

Some vehicle going by, shaped like a pumpkin seed. There's something alive inside, under a transparent canopy…

"My God! An alien! What's it look like?"

"Dark, bulky, and — damn, it's gone."

"Wow. An actual alien…"

Are you going to tell people? Tell humanity that you're in contact with a distant world?

"I — I don't know. Who would believe me? They'd say it was a hallucination. I've got nothing to show them, and any confirming signal you send won't get here for the better part of a century."

I suppose. Too bad. I've a feeling this is going to get interesting.

"There is one person I can share it all with."

One's better than none. Who?

"Karen Bessarian. You actually met her. She was the old woman we spoke to at the Immortex sales pitch."

That was Karen Bessarian, the writer?

"Yes. And she's still writing. In fact, she's back to writing DinoWorld novels — the characters went public domain thirty years ago, but readers recognize that Karen is their creator, and the books she's doing about them now are selling better than the originals."

Good for her. But what's happening with us? How's the family business?

"Fine. They even brew Old Sully's here on Mars now."

Great! What else? Are we married?

"I am, yes."

Oooh, I know! To Rebecca Chong, right? I knew that eventually—

I smiled. "No, not to Rebecca. She's been dead for over fifty years, and, um, she didn't think much of uploads."

Ah, well, then I guess I don't know who we—

"It's Karen," I said simply. "Karen Bessarian and I are married. The first Mindscans ever to tie the knot."

"Her? But she's so old! I never would have thought…

"Yes, her. But we can talk about that later. Tell me more of what you're seeing."

I must be under some sort of observation; I can't imagine they'd activate me otherwise. But so far, there's no sign of the natives here, except that vehicle that went speeding by the window. The room is big, and it has something that must be a door, but it's almost twice as high as I am.

"Any other clues about the aliens?"

Well, there are markings on the walls. Spirals, circles. Writing, I suppose. God knows what it says. There's an elevated work surface in the room, but nothing that looks like a chair.

"Sitting is overrated."

Yeah, perhaps. I'm standing myself. It's all very — the door! The door is opening, crumpling aside like an accordion, and—

"Yes? Yes? What do you see?"

Hello? Hello! Um, my name is Jake. Jake Sullivan.

"What do you see? What do they look like?"

I guess we'll have to learn each other's language, eh? That's okay…

"Jake! What do they look like?"

We're going to have some interesting times together, I can see that…

"Jake? Jake?"

Like I said, my name is Jake, and I guess I'm here to tell you a little bit about what it means to be human.

There was a pause, presumably while the other me thought things that weren't articulated in words, then:

But, you know, I'm in contact with somebody else, and I think he knows even more about being human than I do. Let's see what he has to say…

Consciousness is back, baby! For most of the twentieth century, brain studies avoided any discussion of consciousness — the feeling of subjective experience, the apprehension of qualia, the sense that it is like something to be you or me. But in the last decade, the issue of consciousness has very much moved to center stage in the exploration of the human brain.

Although I touched on the nature of consciousness in my 1995 novel The Terminal Experiment, and again in 1998's Factoring Humanity, I find myself drawn back to this fertile ground once more, in large part because consciousness studies are so multidisciplinary — and I firmly believe it's the interplay of disparate elements that makes for good science fiction. Whereas twenty years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find any academic talking seriously about consciousness, these days quantum physicists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists, artificial-intelligence researchers, philosophers, and even lowly novelists are engaged in the debate.

(Indeed, one could argue that novelists were the only ones who took consciousness seriously for much of the last century: we strove, however ineffectually, to capture the stream of consciousness in our narratives, and to explore the limitations and richness of constrained points-of-view and subjective experience … all while the Skinnerian behaviorists were telling the world that such things were meaningless.)

The resurgent interest in consciousness is perhaps best summed up by the existence of the essential Journal of Consciousness Studies, published by Imprint Academic.

JCS is subtitled "Controversies in Science and the Humanities," and refers to itself as "an international multidisciplinary journal." You can learn more about it at www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.

I own a complete set of this journal, which is now in its twelfth year, and consulted it extensively while writing Mindscan. However, the papers in it are often very technical; for those interested in popular discussions of consciousness, I recommend the following books, which also influenced me while I was working on this novel.

Carter, Rita. Exploring Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. An excellent introduction.

Carter, Rita. Mapping the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A good overview of how the brain works.

Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. Crick — the co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA — believed that consciousness didn't really exist.

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown, 1991. Often referred to by those who think there's something special about human self-awareness as "Consciousness Explained Away."

Freeman, Anthony. Consciousness: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2003. A fascinating look at the various controversies.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990 [reissue; originally published in 1976]. An enchanting, if ultimately unprovable, hypothesis that true human consciousness didn't emerge until Classical times; utterly fascinating.