Jon stared at the building he was going to have the procedure performed in, and muttered exactly that worry, whereupon Karyn suggested "Duh. Jon, you have a magic stone. Ask it."
"You know what?" he answered. "I never thought of that. Okay, I wish I knew if I would lose any important memories in the transfer...." Jon nodded. "Karyn, it's okay. I won't lose anything. But there are still a few things that bother me."
"Last minute jitters?" she wondered.
"No. Okay, I understand how this works. The synthetic brain is cross-linked to mine, then everything is copied, then my natural brain dies."
"Right, they have to do it that way to avoid ethical problems. If they were to just read your brain, then copy it, then kill the original, it wouldn't be transferring you--it would be duplicating you and then killing the original. They can't do that--it'd be murder. If they cross-link the synthetic brain to yours, then copy the information and kill the human brain while it's cross-linked, they've just killed a part of a combined entity, so there's no duplication and no murder."
"Sort of like what Star Trek doesn't do with its transporters," said Jon. "But okay, suppose they do that and now I'm a synthetic metahuman. What's to keep them from copying me again?"
"Really? Jon, you've just hit on one of the things the Synthetic People's Alliance fights for! First of all, it's illegal to copy an intelligent synthetic against its will. Second, any copy would have the intelligence of the original, so it would get rated 12 and be a person legally. Why would anyone want to do that when they could just get their own obedient full AI with a level of 3 or 4?"
"Do they save a copy of me? It's not as if making a backup would be hard to do."
"As a matter of fact, yes, but you get to keep it. Don't worry."
"Okay, now about that sex programming...."
"What sex programming?"
"The sex programming in...." Jon realized that at no point was he actually told the robot would have sex programming. "Never mind."
"The physical act should be pleasurable. Just like certain physical acts are pleasurable for you now, but you still don't do them unless you want to. Unless you want to be reprogrammed to change your orientation."
"They can reprogram me?"
"It takes a lot of equipment but yes. But the kinds of programming that can be done are limited. You notice it still takes years to get a degree in humanoid tech? If it was possible to program you with anything, nobody would take years to get their degree--they'd just get programmed with the knowledge instantly."
"Nobody among the synthetics, anyway." Jon clutched his stone. If he really had any doubts, he could wish to solve them. "Well, here we go. I just wonder what this world's Jon will think when he gets back."
"But he can't get back," said Karyn.
Jon smiled. "I figured out something you couldn't with that brain. He wished for a world without a looming robot war. If the war happens, it's here--it's not looming. If peace happens, and we expect the peace will last a while, war isn't looming either. The only thing that forces him to stay away is a state of uncertainty, and that can't last forever. I'd be surprised if it even lasts before the five years are up."
