Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  There is no mirror. I’m watching all this from the ceiling, the way I watched the bullet being extracted. I’m still up here. I haven’t come down.

  I close my eyes—and the room fades out, taking two or three seconds to vanish completely.

  I open my eyes. The view returns, unchanged.

  I say, ‘Am I dreaming? Are my eyes really open? Jessica? Tell me what’s going on. Is my face bandaged? Am I blind?’

  James says, ‘Your wife isn’t here, Mr Lowe. We haven’t been able to reach her yet.’ He hesitates, then adds, ‘Your face isn’t bandaged—’

  I laugh indignantly. ‘What are you talking about? Who’s that standing next to you?’

  ‘Nobody’s standing next to me. Ms Stuart and I are the only people with you, right now.’

  Andrea clears her throat, and says, ‘That’s right, Philip. Please, try to calm down. You’ve just had major surgery—you’re going to be fine, but you have to take it easy.’ How did she get there—near the foot of the bed? The figure below turns to look at her, sweeping his gaze across the intervening space, and—as easily as the implausible one changed into a seven, as easily as the whole ludicrous sticker ceased to exist—my wife and son are banished from my vision of the room.

  I say, ‘I’m going mad.’ That’s not true, though: I’m dazed, and distinctly queasy, but a long way from coming unhinged. I notice that my voice—very reasonably—seems to come out of my one-and-only mouth, the mouth of the figure below me—as opposed to the point in empty space where my mouth would be, were I literally, bodily, hovering near the ceiling. I felt my larynx vibrate, my lips and tongue move, down there… and yet the sense that I am above, looking down, remains as convincing as ever. It’s as if… my entire body has become as peripheral as a foot or a fingertip—connected and controlled, still a part of me, but certainly not encompassing the centre of my being. I move my tongue in my mouth, touch the tip to the point of my left incisor, swallow some saliva; the sensations are all intelligible, consistent, familiar. But I don’t find myself rushing down to ‘occupy’ the place where these things are happening—any more than I’ve ever felt my sense of self pouring into my big toe, upon curling it against the sole of my shoe.

  James says, ‘I’ll fetch the doctors.’ I hunt for any trace of inconsistency in the direction of his voice… but I’m not up to the task of dissecting the memory of his speech into relative intensities in my left and right ears, and then confronting myself with the paradox that anyone truly up here, facing down, would hear it all differently. All I know is that the words seem to have emerged from his lips, in the customary manner.

  Andrea clears her throat again, and says, ‘Philip? Do you mind if I make a call? Tokyo opens in less than an hour, and when they hear that you’ve been shot—’

  I cut her off. ‘Don’t call—go there, in person. Take the next suborbital—you know that always impresses the market. Look, I’m glad you were here when I woke’—glad your presence, at least, turned out to be more than wishful thinking—‘but the biggest favour you can do for me now is to make damned sure that Zeitgeist comes through this unscathed.’ I try to make eye contact as I say this, but I can’t tell whether I succeed or not. It’s twenty years since we were lovers, but she’s still my closest friend. I’m not even sure why I’m so desperate to get rid of her—but I can’t help feeling exposed up here… as if she might suddenly glance up and see me—see some part of me that my flesh always concealed.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m positive. James can baby-sit me, that’s what he’s paid for. And if I know you’re looking after Zeitgeist, I won’t have to lie here sweating about it; I’ll know it’s all under control.’

  In fact, as soon as she’s gone, the idea of worrying about anything as remote and inconsequential as my company’s share price begins to seem utterly bizarre. I turn my head so that the figure on the bed looks straight up at ‘me’ once more. I slide my hand across my chest, and most of the cables and tubes that were ‘covering me’ disappear, leaving behind nothing but a slightly wrinkled sheet. I laugh weakly—an odd sight. It looks like a memory of the last time I laughed into a mirror.

  James returns, followed by four generic white-coated figures—whose number shrinks to two, a young man and a middle-aged woman, when I turn my head towards them.

  The woman says, ‘Mr Lowe, I’m Dr. Tyler, your neurologist. How are you feeling?’

  ‘How am I feeling? I feel like I’m up on the ceiling.’

  ‘You’re still giddy from the anaesthetic?’

  ‘No!’ I very nearly shout: Can’t you look at me when I’m speaking to you? But I calm myself, and say evenly, ‘I’m not “giddy”—I’m hallucinating. I see everything as if I’m up on the ceiling, looking down. Do you understand me? I’m watching my own lips move as I say these words. I’m staring down at the top of your head. I’m having an out-of-body experience—right now, right in front of you.’ Or right above you. ‘It started in the operating theatre. I saw the robot take out the bullet. I know, it was just a delusion, a kind of lucid dream—I didn’t really see anything… but it’s still happening. I’m awake, and it’s still happening. I can’t come down.’

  Dr. Tyler says firmly, ‘The surgeon didn’t remove the bullet. It was never embedded; it only grazed your skull. The impact caused a fracture, and forced some bone fragments into the underlying tissue—but the damaged region is very small.’

  I smile with relief to hear this—and then stop myself; it looks too strange, too self-conscious. I say,

  ‘That’s wonderful news. But I’m still up here.’

  Dr. Tyler frowns. How do I know that? She’s bent over me, her face seems to be hidden—yet the knowledge reaches me somehow, as if conveyed through an extra sense. This is insane: the things I must be ‘seeing’ with my own eyes—the things I’m entitled to know—are taking on an air of unreliable clairvoyance, while my ‘vision’ of the room—a patchwork of wild guesses and wishful thinking—masquerades as the artless truth.

  ‘Do you think you can sit up?’

  I can—slowly. I’m very weak, but certainly not paralysed, and with an ungainly scrabbling of feet and elbows, I manage to raise myself into a sitting position. The exertion makes me sharply aware of every limb, every joint, every muscle… but aware most of all that their relationships with each other remain unchanged. The hip bone is still connected to the thigh bone, and that’s still what counts—however far away from both I feel ‘myself’ to be.

  My view stays fixed as my body moves—but I don’t find that especially disconcerting; at some level, it seems no stranger than the simple understanding that turning your head doesn’t send the world spinning in the opposite direction.

  Dr. Tyler holds out her right hand. ‘How many fingers?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Four.’

  She shields her hand from aerial scrutiny with a clipboard. ‘Now?’

  ‘One. I can’t see it, though. I just guessed.’

  ‘You guessed right. Now?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Right again. And now?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Correct.’

  She hides her hand from the figure on the bed, ‘exposing’ it to me-above. I make three wrong guesses in a row, one right, one wrong, then wrong again.

  All of which makes perfect sense, of course: I know only what my eyes can see; the rest is pure guesswork. I am, demonstrably, not observing the world from a point three metres above my head. Having the truth rendered obvious makes no difference, though: I fail to descend.

  Dr. Tyler suddenly jabs two fingers towards my eyes, stopping just short of contact. I’m not even startled; from this distance, it’s no more threatening than watching The Three Stooges. ‘Blink reflex working,’ she says—but I know I should have done more than blink.

  She looks around the room, finds a chair, places it beside the bed. Then she tells her colleague, ‘Get me a broom.’

/>   She stands on the chair. ‘I think we should try to pin down exactly where you think you are.’ The young man returns with a two-metre-long white plastic tube. ‘Vaccum cleaner extension,’ he explains. ‘There are no brooms in the private wards.’

  James stands clear, glancing upwards self-consciously every now and then. He’s beginning to look alarmed, in a diplomatic sort of way.

  Dr. Tyler takes the tube, raises it up with one hand, and starts scraping the end across the ceiling. ‘Tell me when I’m getting warm, Mr Lowe.’ The thing looms towards me, moving in from the left, then slides across the bottom of my field of view, missing me by a few centimetres.

  ‘Am I close yet?’

  ‘I—’ The scraping sound is intimidating; it takes some effort to bring myself to cooperate, to guide the implement home.

  When the tube finally closes over me, I fight off a sense of claustrophobia, and stare down the long dark tunnel. At the far end, in a circle of dazzling radiance, is the tip of Dr. Tyler’s white lace-up shoe.

  ‘What do you see now?’

  I describe the view. Keeping the top end fixed, she tilts the tube towards the bed, until it points directly at my bandaged forehead, my startled eyes—a strange, luminous cameo.

  ‘Try… moving towards the light,’ she suggests.

  I try. I screw up my face, I grit my teeth, I urge myself forward, down the tunnel: back to my skull, back to my citadel, back to my private screening room. Back to the throne of my ego, the anchor of my identity. Back home.

  Nothing happens.

  * * *

  I always knew I’d get a bullet in the brain. It had to happen: I’d made far too much money, had far too much good luck. Deep down, I always understood that, sooner or later, my life would be brought into balance. And I always expected my would-be assassin to fail—leaving me crippled, speechless, amnesic; forced to struggle to make myself whole again, forced to rediscover—or reinvent—myself.

  Given a chance to start my life again.

  But this? What kind of redemption is this?

  Eyes closed or open, I have no trouble identifying pinpricks all over my body, from the soles of my feet to the top of my scalp—but the surface of my skin, however clearly delineated, still fails to enclose me.

  Dr. Tyler shows me-below photographs of torture victims, humorous cartoons, pornography. I cringe, I smile, I get an erection—before I even know what I’m ‘looking’ at.

  ‘Like a split-brain patient,’ I muse. ‘Isn’t that what happens? Show them an image in half their visual field, and they respond to it emotionally—without being able to describe what they’ve seen.’

  ‘Your corpus callosum is perfectly intact. You’re not a split-brain patient, Mr Lowe.’

  ‘Not horizontally—but what about vertically?’ There’s a stony silence. I say, ‘I’m only joking. Can’t I make a joke?’ I see her write on her clipboard: inappropriate affect. I ‘read’ the remark effortlessly, in spite of my elevation—but I don’t have the nerve to ask her if it’s really what she wrote.

  A mirror is thrust in front of my face—and when it’s taken away, I see myself as less pale, less wasted than before. The mirror is turned towards me-above, and the place where I ‘am’ is ‘shown’ to be empty—but I knew that all along.

  I ‘look around’ with my eyes every chance I get—and my vision of the room grows more detailed, more stable, more consistent. I experiment with sounds, tapping my fingers on the side of the bed, on my ribs, my jaw, my skull. I have no trouble convincing myself that my hearing is still taking place in my ears—the closer a sound is to those organs down there, the louder it seems, as always—but nor do I have any difficulty interpreting these cues correctly; when I snap my fingers beside my right ear, it’s obvious that the source of the sound is close to my ear, not close to me.

  Finally, Dr. Tyler lets me try to walk. I’m clumsy and unsteady at first, distracted by my unfamiliar perspective, but I soon learn to take what I need from the view—the positions of obstacles—and ignore the rest. As my body crosses the room, I move with it, hovering more or less directly above—sometimes lagging behind or moving ahead, but never by far. Curiously, I feel no conflict between my sense of balance, telling me I’m upright, and my downwards gaze, which ‘should’ (but doesn’t) suggest that my body is facing the floor. That meaning has been stripped away, somehow—and it has nothing to do with the fact that I can ‘see’ myself standing. Perhaps my true orientation is gleaned, subconsciously, from the evidence of my eyes, at some point before the damaged part of my brain corrupts the information—like my ‘clairvoyant’ knowledge of ‘hidden’ objects.

  I could walk a kilometre, I’m sure, but not very quickly. I place my body in a wheelchair, and a taciturn orderly pushes it—and me—out of the room. The smooth, involuntary motion of my point of view is alarming at first, but then gradually starts to make sense: after all, I can feel my hands on the armrests, the chair against my legs, my buttocks, my back—‘part’ of me is in the wheelchair, and, like a roller-skater staring down at his feet, I should be able to swallow the notion that the ‘rest’ of me is attached, and obliged to follow. Down corridors, up ramps, in and out of elevators, through swing doors… I fantasise daringly about wandering off on my own—turning left when the orderly turns right—but the truth is, I can’t begin to imagine how I could make that happen.

  We turn into a crowded walkway linking the hospital’s two main blocks, and end up travelling alongside another patient in a wheelchair—a man about my age, his head also bandaged. I wonder what he’s been through, and what’s in store for him now—but this doesn’t seem like the time or place to strike up a conversation about it. From above (at least, as I see it) these two head-wound cases in hospital gowns are almost indistinguishable, and I find myself wondering: Why do I care what happens to one of these bodies, so much more than the other? How can it be so important… when I can barely tell them apart?

  I grip the armrests of the chair tightly—but resist the temptation to raise a hand and signal to myself: This one is me.

  We finally reach Medical Imaging. Strapped to a motorised table, my blood infused with a cocktail of radioactive substances, I’m guided into a helmet comprised of several tonnes of superconducting magnets and particle detectors. My whole head is engulfed by the thing, but the room doesn’t vanish at once. The technicians, cut loose from reality, keep themselves busy fussing with the scanner’s controls—like old celluloid-movie extras pretending, unconvincingly, to know how to operate a nuclear power station or an interstellar spacecraft. Gradually, the scene fades to black.

  When I emerge, with dark-adapted eyes, for a second or two the room is unbearably bright.

  * * *

  ‘We have no previous case histories of a lesion in exactly this location,’ admits Dr. Tyler, thoughtfully holding the brain scan at an angle which allows me to observe, and simultaneously visualise, its contents. She insists on addressing her remarks solely to me-below, though, which makes me feel a bit like a patronised child—ignored by the adults, who, instead, crouch down and say hello to Teddy.

  ‘We do know it’s associative cortex. Higher-level sense-data processing and integration. The place where your brain constructs models of the world, and your relationship to it. From your symptoms, it seems you’ve lost access to the primary model, so you’re making do with a secondary one.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Primary model, secondary model? I’m still looking at everything through the same pair of eyes, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then how can I fail to see it that way? If a camera is damaged, it produces a faulty image—it doesn’t start giving you bird’s-eye views from down on the ground.’

  ‘Forget about cameras. Vision is nothing like photography—it’s an elaborate cognitive act. A pattern of light on your retina doesn’t mean a thing until it’s been analysed: that means everything from detecting edges, detecting motion, extracting features from noise, simp
lifying, extrapolating—all the way up to constructing hypothetical objects, testing them against reality, comparing them to memories and expectations… the end product is not a movie in your head, it’s a set of conclusions about the world.

  ‘The brain assembles those conclusions into models of your surroundings. The primary model includes information about more or less everything that’s directly visible at any given moment—and nothing else. It makes the most efficient use of all your visual data, and it makes the least possible number of assumptions. So it has a lot of advantages—but it doesn’t arise automatically just because the data was gathered through your eyes. And it’s not the only possibility: we all build other models, all the time; most people can imagine their surroundings from almost any angle—’

  I laugh incredulously. ‘Not like this. Nobody could imagine a view as vivid as this. I certainly never could.’

  ‘Then perhaps you’ve managed to redeploy some of the neural pathways responsible for the intensity of the primary model—’

  ‘I don’t want to redeploy them! I want the primary model back!’ I hesitate, put off by the look of apprehension on my face, but I have to know. ‘Can you do that—can you repair the damage? Put in a neural graft?’

  Dr. Tyler tells my Teddy Bear, gently, ‘We can replace the damaged tissue, but the region’s not well enough understood to be repaired, directly, by microsurgeons. We wouldn’t know which neurons to join to which. All we can do is inject some immature neurons into the site of the lesion, and leave them to form their own connections.’

  ‘And… will they form the right ones?’

  ‘There’s a good chance they will, eventually.’

  ‘A good chance. If they do, how long will it take?’