Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  ‘Do you think I tell my friends everything? Is that what you think? Don’t you trust me at all?’

  She sits on Klein’s bed. ‘Close the door.’ I do it.

  ‘His father was a pioneering neurosurgeon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you say a word—’

  ‘I won’t, I promise. But what did he do? Why?’

  ‘His primary research interest was redundancy and functional crossover; the extent to which people with lost or damaged portions of the brain manage to transfer the functions of the impaired regions into healthy tissue.

  ‘His wife died giving birth to a son, their only child. He must have been psychotic already, but that put him right off the planet. He blamed the child for his wife’s death, but he was too cold-blooded to do something simple like kill it.’

  I’m about ready to tell her to shut up, that I really do not wish to know any more, but John O’Leary is a big, tough man with a strong stomach, and I mustn’t disgrace him in front of his lover.

  ‘He raised the child “normally”, talking to it, playing with it, and so on, and making extensive notes on how it was developing; vision, coordination, the rudiments of speech, you name it. When it was a few months old, he implanted a network of cannulae, a web of very fine tubes, spanning almost the entire brain, but narrow enough not to cause any problems themselves. And then he kept on as before, stimulating the child, and recording its progress. And every week, via the cannulae, he destroyed a little more of its brain.’

  I let out a long string of obscenities. Klein, of course, just sits there, but suddenly I’m ashamed of violating his privacy, however meaningless that concept might be in his case. My face is flushed with blood, I feel slightly dizzy, slightly less than real. ‘How come he ever survived? How come there’s anything left at all?’

  ‘The extent of his father’s insanity saved him, if that’s the word to use. You see, for months during which he was regularly losing brain tissue, the child actually continued to develop neurologically—more slowly than normal, of course, but moving perceptibly forwards nonetheless. Professor Klein was too much the scientist to bury a result like that; he wrote up all his observations and tried to get them published. The journal thought it was some kind of sick hoax, but they told the police, who eventually got around to investigating. But by the time the child was rescued, well—’ She nods towards the impassive Klein.

  ‘How much of his brain is left? Isn’t there a chance—?’

  ‘Less than ten per cent. There are cases of microcephalics who live almost normal lives with a similar brain mass, but being born that way, having gone through foetal brain development that way, isn’t a comparable situation. There was a young girl a few years ago, who had a hemispherectomy to cure severe epilepsy, and emerged from it with very little impairment, but she’d had years for her brain to gradually switch functions out of the damaged hemisphere. She was extremely lucky; in most cases that operation has been utterly disastrous. As for Mr Klein, well, I’d say he wasn’t lucky at all.’

  * * *

  I seem to spend most of the rest of the morning mopping corridors. When an ambulance arrives to take Klein away for his tests, I feel mildly offended that no one asks for my assistance; the two ambulancemen, watched by Helen, plonk him into a wheelchair and wheel him away, like couriers collecting a heavy parcel. But I have even less right than John O’Leary to feel possessive or protective about ‘my’ patients, so I push Klein out of my thoughts.

  I eat lunch with the other orderlies in the staff room. We play cards, and make jokes that even I find stale by now, but I enjoy the company nonetheless. I am teasingly accused several times of having lingering ‘east-coast tendencies’, which makes sense; if O’Leary lived over east for a while, that would explain why I don’t remember him. The afternoon passes slowly, but sleepily. Dr. Pearlman has flown somewhere, suddenly, to do whatever eminent psychiatrists or neurologists (I’m not even sure which he is) are called to do with great urgency in faraway cities—and this seems to let everyone, the patients included, relax. When my shift ends at three o’clock, and I walk out of the building saying ‘See you tomorrow’ to everyone I pass, I feel (as usual) a certain sense of loss. It will pass.

  Because it’s Friday, I detour to the city centre to update the records in my safe-deposit box. In the pre-rush traffic I begin to feel mild elation, as all the minor tribulations of coping with the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute recede, banished for months, or years, or maybe even decades.

  After making diary entries for the week, and adding a new page headed JOHN FRANCIS O’LEARY to my thick ring-binder full of host details, the itch to do something with all this information grows in me, as it does now and then. But what? The prospect of renting a computer and arranging a place to use it is too daunting on a sleepy Friday afternoon. I could update, with the help of a calculator, my average host-repeat rate. That would be pretty bloody thrilling.

  Then I recall the PET scan that Helen Lidcombe waved in front of me. Although I don’t know a thing about interpreting such pictures myself, I can imagine how exciting it must be for a trained specialist to actually see brain processes displayed that way. If I could turn all my hundreds of pages of data into one coloured picture—well, it might not tell me a damn thing, but the prospect is somehow infinitely more attractive than messing about to produce a few statistics that don’t tell me a damn thing either.

  I buy a street directory, the brand I am familiar with from childhood, with the key map inside the front cover. I buy a packet of five felt-tipped pens. I sit on a bench in a shopping arcade, covering the map with coloured dots; a red dot for a host who’s had from one to three visits, an orange dot for a host who’s had four to six, and so on up to blue. It takes me an hour to complete, and when I’m finished the result does not look like a glossy, computer-generated brain scan at all. It looks like a mess.

  And yet. Although the colours don’t form isolated bands, and intermingle extensively, there’s a definite concentration of blue in the city’s north-east. As soon as I see this, it rings true; the north-east is more familiar to me than anywhere else. And, a geographical bias would explain the fact that I repeat hosts more frequently than I ought to. For each colour, I sketch a shaky pencil line that joins up all of its outermost points, and then another for all its innermost points. None of these lines intersects another. It’s no perfect set of concentric circles by any means, but each curve is roughly centred on that patch of blue in the north-east. A region which contains, amongst many other things, the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute.

  I pack everything back into the safe-deposit box. I need to give this a lot more thought. Driving home, a very vague hypothesis begins to form, but the traffic fumes, the noise, the glare of the setting sun, all make it hard to pin the idea down.

  Linda is furious. ‘Where have you been? Our daughter had to ring me, in tears, from a public phone box, with money borrowed from a complete stranger, and I had to pretend to be sick and leave work and drive halfway across town to pick her up. Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘I—I got caught up, with Ralph, he was celebrating—’

  ‘I rang Ralph. You weren’t with Ralph.’

  I stand there in silence. She stares at me for a full minute, then turns and stomps away.

  I apologise to Laura (I see the name on her school books), who is no longer crying but looks like she has been for hours. She is eight years old, and adorable, and I feel like dirt. I offer to help with her homework, but she assures me she doesn’t need anything at all from me, so I leave her in peace.

  Linda, not surprisingly, barely says a word to me for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow this problem will be John O’Leary’s, not mine, which makes me feel twice as bad about it. We watch TV in silence. When she goes to bed, I wait an hour before following her, and if she isn’t asleep when I climb in, she’s doing a good imitation.

  I lie in the dark with my eyes open, thinking about Klein and his long-term memorie
s, his father’s unspeakable ‘experiment’, my brain scan of the city.

  I never asked Helen how old Klein was, and now it’s too late for that, but there’ll surely be something in the newspapers from the time of his father’s trial. First thing tomorrow—screw my host’s obligations—I’ll go to the central library and check that out.

  Whatever consciousness is, it must be resourceful, it must be resilient. Surviving for so long in that tiny child, pushed into ever smaller corners of his mutilated, shrinking brain. But when the number of living neurons fell so low that no resourcefulness, no ingenuity, could make them suffice, what then? Did consciousness vanish in an instant? Did it slowly fade away, as function after function was discarded, until nothing remained but a few reflexes, and a parody of human dignity? Or did it—how could it?—reach out in desperation to the brains of a thousand other children, those young enough, flexible enough, to donate a fraction of their own capacity to save this one child from oblivion? Each one donating one day in a thousand from their own lives, to rescue me from that ruined shell, fit now for nothing but eating, defecating, and storing my long-term memories?

  Klein, F. C. I don’t even know what the initials stand for. Linda mumbles something and turns over. I feel remarkably unperturbed by my speculations, perhaps because I don’t honestly believe that this wild theory could possibly be true. And yet, is it so much stranger than the mere fact of my existence?

  And if I did believe it, how should I feel? Horrified by my own father’s atrocities towards me? Yes. Astonished by such a miracle of human tenacity? Certainly.

  I finally manage to cry—for Klein, F. C, or for myself, I don’t know. Linda doesn’t wake, but moved by some dream or instinct, she turns to me and holds me. Eventually I stop shaking, and the warmth of her body flows into me, peace itself.

  As I feel sleep approaching, I make a resolution: from tomorrow, I start anew. From tomorrow, an end to mimicking my hosts. From tomorrow, whatever the problems, whatever the setbacks, I’m going to carve out a life of my own.

  * * *

  I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

  Seeing

  I gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights suspended from the ceiling of the operating theatre. There’s a neatly hand-lettered sticker on the grey-painted metal—slightly yellowing, the writing a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads:

  IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

  PHONE 137 4597

  I’m puzzled: I’ve never come across a local number starting with a one—and when I look again, it’s clear that the digit in question is actually a seven. I was mistaken about the ‘dust’, too; it’s nothing but a play of light on the slightly uneven surface of the paint. Dust in a sterile, air-filtered room like this—what was I thinking?

  I shift my attention to my body, draped in green save for a tiny square aperture above my right temple, where the macrosurgeon’s probe is following the bullet’s entry wound into my skull. The spindly robot has the operating table to itself, although a couple of gowned-and-masked humans are present, off to one side, watching what I take to be X-ray views of the probe approaching its target; from my vantage point, the screen is foreshortened, the images hard to decipher. Injected microsurgeons must already have staunched the bleeding, repaired hundreds of blood vessels, broken up any dangerous clots. The bullet itself, though, is too physically tough and chemically inert to be fragmented and removed, like a kidney stone, by a swarm of tiny robots; there’s no alternative to reaching in and plucking it out. I used to read up on this type of operation—and lie awake afterwards, wondering when my time would finally come. I often pictured this very moment—and I’d swear, now, that when I imagined it, it looked exactly like this, down to the last detail. But I can’t tell if that’s just run-of-the-mill déjà vu, or if my obsessively rehearsed visualisation is fuelling this present hallucination.

  I begin to wonder, calmly, about the implications of my exotic point of view. Out-of-body experiences are supposed to suggest proximity to death… but then, all the thousands of people who’ve reported them survived to tell the tale, didn’t they? With no way of balancing that against the unknown number who must have died, it’s absurd to treat the situation as signifying anything at all about my chances of life or death. The effect is certainly linked to severe physical trauma, but it’s only the ludicrous notion that the ‘soul’ has parted from the body—and is perilously close to floating off down a tunnel of light into the afterlife—that associates the experience with death.

  Memories leading up to the attack start coming back to me, hazily. Arriving to speak at Zeitgeist Entertainment’s AGM. (Physically present for the first time in years—bad move. Just because I sold off HyperConference Systems, why did I have to eschew the technology?) That lunatic Murchison making a scene outside the Hilton, screaming something about me—me!—stiffing him on his miniseries contract. (As if I’d even read it, let alone personally drafted every clause. Why couldn’t he have gone and mowed down the legal department, instead?) The motorised window of the bulletproof Rolls gliding upwards to shut out his ranting, the mirrored glass moving silently, reassuringly—and then jamming…

  I was wrong about one thing: I always thought the bullet would come from some anal-retentive cinephile, outraged by one of Zeitgeist’s ‘Sequels to the Celluloid Classics’. The software avatars we use as directors are always constructed with meticulous care, by psychologists and film historians committed to re-creating the true persona of the original auteur… but some purists are never happy, and there were death threats for more than a year after Hannah and Her Sisters II, in 3-D. What I failed to anticipate was a man who’d just signed a seven-figure deal for the rights to his life story—out on bail only because of Zeitgeist’s generous advance—trying to blow me away over a discounted residual rate for satellite transmissions dubbed into the Inuit language.

  I notice that the unlikely sticker on top of the lights has vanished. What does that presage? If my delusion is breaking down, am I deteriorating, or recovering? Is an unstable hallucination healthier than a consistent one? Is reality about to come crashing in? What should I be seeing, right now? Pure darkness, if I really am under all that green swaddling, eyes closed, anaesthetised. I try to ‘close my eyes’—but the concept just doesn’t translate. I do my best to lose consciousness (if that’s the right word for what I’m experiencing); I try to relax, as if aiming for sleep—but then a faint whir from the surgeon’s probe as it reverses direction rivets my attention.

  I watch—physically unable to avert my unphysical gaze—as the gleaming silver needle of the probe slowly retracts. It seems to take forever, and I rack my brain for a judgement as to whether this is a piece of masochistic dream-theatricality, or a touch of authenticity, but I can’t decide.

  Finally—and I know it a moment before it happens (but then, I’ve felt that way all along)—the tip of the needle emerges, bonded outrageously by nothing more esoteric than a speck of high-strength glue (or so I once read) to the dull, slightly crumpled bullet.

  I see the green cloth covering my chest rise and fall in an emphatic sigh of relief. I doubt the plausibility of this from an anaesthetised man on a breathing machine—then suddenly, overwhelmingly weary of trying to imagine the world at all, I allow it to disintegrate into psychedelic static, then darkness.

  * * *

  A familiar, but unplaceable, voice says, ‘This one’s from Serial Killers For Social Responsibility. “Deeply shocked… a tragedy for the industry… praying for Mr Lowe’s swift recovery.” Then they go on to disavow any knowledge of Randolph Murchison; they say that whatever he might or might not have done to hitchhikers in the past, celebrity assassination attempts involve an entirely separate pathology, and any irresponsible comments which blur the issue by confusing the two will result in a class action—’

&nbs
p; I open my eyes and say, ‘Can someone please tell me why there’s a mirror on the ceiling over my bed? Is this a hospital, or a fucking bordello?’

  The room falls silent. I squint up at the glass with a fixed gaze, unable to make out its borders, waiting for an explanation for this bizarre piece of decor. Then one possibility dawns on me: Am I paralysed? Is this the only way to show me my surroundings? I fight down a sense of panic: even if it’s true, it need not be permanent. Nerves can be regrown, whatever’s damaged can be repaired. I’ve survived, that’s what counts—the rest is just a matter of rehabilitation. And isn’t this what I always expected? A bullet in the brain? A brush with death? Rebirth in a state of helplessness?

  In the mirror, I can see four people gathered around the bed—and I recognise them easily enough, in spite of the awkward view: James Long, my personal assistant, whose voice woke me. Andrea Stuart, Zeitgeist’s senior vice-president. My estranged wife, Jessica—I knew she’d come. And my son, Alex—he must have dropped everything, and caught the first flight out of Moscow.

  And on the bed, almost buried under a tangle of tubes and cables, linked to a dozen monitors and pumps, an ashen, bandaged, gaunt figure which I suppose must be me.

  James glances up at the ceiling, looks down again, then says gently, ‘Mr Lowe, there is no mirror. Shall I tell the doctors you’re awake?’

  I scowl, try to move my head, fail. ‘Are you blind? I’m staring right at it. And if I’m not plugged into enough machinery to tell whoever’s monitoring it all that I’m awake—’

  James gives an embarrassed cough, a code he uses in meetings when I start to wander too far from the facts. I try again to turn to look him in the eye, and this time—

  This time, I succeed. Or at least, I see the figure on the bed turn its head—

  —and my whole sense of my surroundings inverts, like an all-encompassing optical illusion exposed. Floor becomes ceiling and ceiling floor—without anything moving a millimetre. I feel like bellowing at the top of my lungs, but only manage a startled grunt… and after a second or two, it’s hard to imagine that I’d ever been fooled, the reality is so obvious.