Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  ‘Several months, at least.’

  ‘I’ll want a second opinion.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She pats my hand sympathetically—but leaves without so much as a glance in my direction.

  Several months. At least. The room begins to rotate slowly—so slowly that it never actually moves at all. I close my eyes and wait for the feeling to pass. My vision lingers, refusing to fade. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. There I am, on the bed below, eyes closed… but that doesn’t render me invisible, does it? It doesn’t make the world disappear. That’s half the trouble with this whole delusion: it’s so fucking reasonable.

  I put the heels of my palms against my eyes, and press, hard. A mosaic of glowing triangles spreads out rapidly from the centre of my field of view, a shimmering pattern in grey and white; soon it eclipses the whole room.

  When I take my hands away, the afterimage slowly fades to darkness.

  * * *

  I dream that I look down upon my sleeping body—and then drift away, rising up calmly, effortlessly, high into the air. I float above Manhattan—then London, Zurich, Moscow, Nairobi, Cairo, Beijing. Wherever the Zeitgeist Network reaches, I’m there. I wrap the planet in my being. I have no need of a body; I orbit with the satellites, I flow through the optical fibres. From the slums of Calcutta to the mansions of Beverly Hills, I am the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age—

  I wake suddenly, and hear myself swearing, before I even know why.

  Then I realise I’ve wet the bed.

  * * *

  James flies in dozens of the top neurologists from around the world, and arranges remote consultations with another ten. They argue about the precise interpretation of my symptoms—but their recommendations for treatment are all essentially the same.

  So, a small number of my own neurons, collected during the original surgery, are genetically regressed to a foetal state, stimulated to multiply in vivo, then injected back into the lesion. Local anaesthetic only; at least this time I get to ‘see’ more or less what really happens.

  In the days that follow—far too early for any effects from the treatment—I find myself adapting to the status quo with disarming speed. My coordination improves, until I can perform most simple tasks with confidence, unaided: eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, washing and shaving—all the lifelong familiar routines start to seem ordinary again, in spite of the exotic perspective. At first, I keep catching glimpses of Randolph Murchison (played by the persona of Anthony Perkins) sneaking into the steam-clouded bathroom every time I take a shower—but that passes.

  Alex visits, finally able to tear himself away from the busy Moscow bureau of Zeitgeist News. I watch the scene, oddly touched by the ineloquence of both father and son—but puzzled, too, that the awkward relationship ever caused me so much pain and confusion. These two men are not close—but that’s not the end of the world. They’re not close to a few billion other people, either. It doesn’t matter.

  By the end of the fourth week, I’m desperately bored—and losing patience with the infantile tests with concealed wooden blocks that Dr. Young, my psychologist, insists I perform twice daily. Five red and four blue blocks can turn into three red and one green, when the partition hiding them from my eyes is lifted—and so on, a thousand times… but it no more demolishes my world-view than pictures of vases that turn into pairs of human profiles, or patterns with gaps that magically fill themselves in when aligned with the retinal blind spot.

  Dr. Tyler admits, under duress, that there’s no reason I can’t be discharged, but—

  ‘I’d still prefer to keep you under observation.’

  I say, ‘I think I can do that myself.’

  * * *

  A two-metre-wide auxiliary screen attached to the videophone lies on the floor of my study; a crutch, perhaps, but at least it takes the clairvoyance factor out of knowing what’s happening on the smaller screen in front of my face.

  Andrea says, ‘Remember that team of Creative Consultants we hired last spring? They’ve come up with a brilliant new concept: “Celluloid Classics That Might Have Been”—ground-breaking movies that were almost made, but didn’t quite survive the development process. They plan to start the series with Three Burglars—a Hollywood remake of Tenue de Soirée, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Depardieu role, and either Leonard Nimoy or Ivan Reitman directing. Marketing have run a simulation which shows twenty-three per cent of subscribers taking the pilot. The costings aren’t too bad, either; we already own emulation rights for most of the personas we need.’

  I nod my puppet head. ‘That all sounds… fine. Is there anything else we need to discuss?’

  ‘Just one more thing. The Randolph Murchison Story.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Audience Psychology won’t approve the latest version of the screenplay. We can’t leave out Murchison’s attack on you, it’s far too well known—’

  ‘I never asked for it to be left out. I just want my post-operative condition left unspecified. Lowe gets shot. Lowe survives. There’s no need to clutter up a perfectly good story about mutilated hitchhikers with details of a minor character’s neurological condition.’

  ‘No, of course not—and that’s not the problem. The problem is, if we cover the attack at all, we’ll have to mention the reason for it, the miniseries itself… and AP says viewers won’t be comfortable with that degree of reflexivity. For current affairs, all right—the programme is its own main subject, the presenters’ actions are the news—that’s taken for granted, people are used to it. But docudrama is different. You can’t use a fictional narrative style—telling the audience it’s safe to get emotionally involved, it’s all just entertainment, it can’t really touch them—and then throw in a reference to the very programme they’re watching.’

  I shrug. ‘All right. Fine. If there’s no way around it, axe the project. We can live with that; we can write it off.’

  She nods, unhappily. It was the decision she wanted, I’m sure—but not so casually given.

  When she hangs up, and the screen goes blank, the sight of the unchanging room quickly becomes monotonous. I switch to cable input, and flick through a few dozen channels from Zeitgeist and its major competitors. The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament. The whole world—or a model of the world: part truth, part guesswork, part wish-fulfilment.

  I lean back in my chair until I’m staring straight down into my eyes. I say, ‘I’m sick of this place. Let’s get out of here.’

  * * *

  I watch the snow dust my shoulders between the sharp gusts of wind that blow it away. The icy sidewalk is deserted; nobody in this part of Manhattan seems to walk anywhere in the most clement weather any more, let alone on a day like this. I can just make out the four bodyguards, ahead of me and behind me, at the edge of my vision.

  I wanted a bullet in the head. I wanted to be destroyed and reborn. I wanted a magic path to redemption. And what have I ended up with?

  I raise my head, and a ragged, bearded tramp materialises beside me, stamping his feet on the sidewalk, hugging himself, shivering. He says nothing, but I stop walking.

  One man below me is warmly dressed, in an overcoat and overshoes. The other is wearing threadbare jeans, a tattered bomber jacket, and baseball shoes full of holes.

  The disparity is ridiculous. The warmly dressed man takes off his overcoat and hands it to the shivering man, then walks on.

  And I think: What a beautiful scene for The Philip Lowe Story.

  A Kidnapping

  The office’s elaborate software usually fielded my calls, but this one came through unannounced. The seven-metre wallscreen opposite my desk abruptly ceased displaying the work I’d been viewing—Kreyszig’s dazzling abstract animation, Spectral Density—and the face of a nondescript young man appeared in its
place.

  I suspected at once that the face was a mask, a simulation. No single feature was implausible, or even unusual—limp brown hair, pale blue eyes, thin nose, square jaw—but the face as a whole was too symmetrical, too unblemished, too devoid of character to be real. In the background, a pattern of brightly coloured, faux-ceramic hexagonal tiles drifted across the wallpaper—desperately bland retro-geometricism, no doubt intended to make the face look natural in comparison. I made these judgements in an instant; stretching all the way to the gallery’s ceiling, four times my height, the image was open to merciless scrutiny.

  The ‘young man’ said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’ I couldn’t help hearing it that way; the unnatural rhythm of the speech, the crisp enunciation of each word, made the whole thing sound like a terminally hip performance artist reading bad poetry. This piece is entitled, ‘Ransom Demand’. As the mask spoke, a sixteen-digit account number flashed up across the bottom of the screen.

  I said, ‘Go screw yourself. This isn’t funny.’

  The mask vanished, and Loraine appeared. Her hair was dishevelled, her face was flushed, as if she’d just been in a struggle—but she wasn’t distraught, or hysterical; she was grimly in control. I stared at the screen; the room seemed to sway, and I felt sweat break out on my arms and chest, impossible rivulets forming in seconds.

  She said, ‘David, listen: I’m all right, they haven’t hurt me, but—’

  Then the call cut off.

  For a moment, I just sat there, dazed, drenched with sweat, too giddy to trust myself to move a muscle. Then I said to the office, ‘Replay that call.’ I expected a denial—No calls have been put through all day—but I was wrong. The whole thing began again.

  ‘We have your wife…’

  ‘Go screw yourself…’

  ‘David, listen…’

  I told the office, ‘Call my home.’ I don’t know why I did that; I don’t know what I believed, what I was hoping for. It was more a reflex action than anything else—like flailing out to grab something solid when you’re falling, even if you know full well that it’s far beyond your reach.

  I sat and listened to the ringing tone. I thought: I’ll cope with this, somehow. Loraine will be released, unharmed—it’s just a matter of paying the money. Everything will happen, step by step; everything will unwind, inexorably—even if each second along the way seems like an unbreachable chasm.

  After seven chimes, I felt like I’d been sitting at the desk, sleepless, for days: numb, tenuous, less than real.

  Then Loraine answered the phone. I could see the studio behind her, all the familiar charcoal sketches on the wall. I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t make a sound.

  Her expression changed from mild annoyance to alarm. She said, ‘David? What’s wrong? You look like you’re having a heart attack.’

  For several seconds, I couldn’t answer her. On one level, I simply felt relieved—and already slightly foolish, for having been so easily taken in… but at the same time, I found myself holding my breath, bracing myself for another reversal. If the office phone system had been corrupted, how could I be sure that this call had reached home? Why should I trust the sight of Loraine, safe in her studio—when the image of her in the kidnappers’ hands had been every bit as convincing? At any moment, the ‘woman’ on the screen would drop the charade, and begin reciting coolly: ‘We have your wife…’

  It didn’t happen. So I pulled myself together and told the real Loraine what I’d seen.

  * * *

  In retrospect, of course, it all seemed embarrassingly obvious. The contrast between the intentionally unnatural mask, and the meticulously plausible image that followed, was designed to keep me from questioning the evidence of my own eyes. This is what a simulation looks like (smartarsed expert spots it at once)… so this (a thousand times more realistic) must be authentic. A crude trick, but it had worked—not for long, but long enough to shake me up.

  But if the technique was transparent, the motive remained obscure. Some lunatic’s idea of a joke? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, for no greater reward than the dubious thrill of making me sweat with fear for all of sixty seconds. As a genuine attempt at extortion, though… how could it ever have worked? Were they hoping that I’d transfer the money immediately—before the shock wore off, before it even occurred to me that the image of Loraine, however lifelike, proved nothing? If so, surely they would have kept me on the phone, threatening imminent danger, building up the pressure—leaving me with no time for doubts, and no opportunity to verify anything.

  It didn’t make sense either way.

  I replayed the call for Loraine—but she didn’t seem to take it very seriously.

  ‘A crank caller with fancy technology is still just a crank caller. I remember my brother, when he was ten years old, phoning up random numbers on a dare, putting on a ludicrous high-pitched voice which was meant to sound like a woman… and telling whoever answered that he was about to be gang-raped. Needless to say, I thought it was totally sick—and extremely immature… I was eight—but his friends all sat around laughing their heads off. Thirty years later, this is the equivalent.’

  ‘How can you say that? Ten-year-old boys do not own twenty-thousand-dollar video synthesisers—’

  ‘No? Some might. But I’m sure there are plenty of forty-year-old men with the same sophisticated sense of humour.’

  ‘Yeah: forty-year-old psychopaths who know exactly what you look like, where we live, where I work…’

  We argued the point for almost twenty minutes, but we couldn’t agree upon what the call meant, or what we should do about it. Loraine was obviously growing impatient to get back to work, so, reluctantly, I let her go.

  I was a wreck, though. I knew I’d get nothing done that afternoon, so I decided to close the gallery and head for home.

  Before leaving, I phoned the police—against Loraine’s wishes, but as she’d said: ‘You got the call, not me. If you really want to waste your time and theirs, I can’t stop you.’

  I was put through to a Detective Nicholson in the Communications Crime Division, and I showed him the recording. He was sympathetic, but he made it clear that there wasn’t much he could do. A criminal act had been committed—and a ransom demand was a serious matter, however rapidly the hoax had been debunked—but identifying the perpetrator would be virtually impossible. Even if the account number quoted actually belonged to the caller, it carried the prefix of an Orbital bank, who’d certainly refuse to disclose the name of the owner. I could arrange to have the phone company attempt to trace any future calls—but if the signal was routed through an Orbital nation, as it most likely would be, the trail would stop there. An international agreement to veto exchanges of money and data with the satellites had been drafted a decade ago, but remained unratified; apparently, few countries could afford to forgo the advantages of being plugged into the quasi-legal Orbital economy.

  Nicholson asked me for a list of prospective enemies, but I couldn’t bring myself to name anyone. I’d had business disputes of various degrees of animosity over the years, mostly with disgruntled artists who’d taken their work elsewhere—but I couldn’t honestly imagine any of the people involved wasting their energy on such a venomous—yet ultimately petty—act of revenge.

  He had one final question. ‘Has your wife ever been scanned?’

  I laughed. ‘Hardly. She loathes computers. Even if the cost came down a thousandfold, she’d be the last person in the world to have it done.’

  ‘I see. Well, we appreciate your cooperation. If there are any further incidents, don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

  As he hung up, I belatedly wished I’d asked him: ‘What if she had been scanned? Why would that be a factor? Have hackers started breaking into people’s scan files?’

  That was a disturbing notion… but even if it were true, it had no bearing on the hoax call. No such convenient, c
omputerised description of Loraine existed, so however the hoaxers had reconstructed her appearance, they’d obtained their data by other means entirely.

  * * *

  I drove home on manual override, breaking the speed limit—marginally—on five separate occasions, watching the fines add up on the dashboard display, until the car intoned, ‘One more violation and your licence is suspended.’

  I went straight from the garage to the studio. Loraine was there, of course. I stood in the doorway, watching her silently, as she fussed over a sketch. I couldn’t make out the subject, but she was working in charcoal again. I often teased her about her anachronistic methods: ‘Why do you glorify the faults of traditional materials? Artists in the past had no choice but to make a virtue out of necessity—but why keep up the pretence? If charcoal on paper, or oil paint on canvas, really is so wonderful, then describe whatever it is you find so sublime about them to some virtual art software—and then generate your own virtual materials which are twice as good.’ All she’d ever say in reply was: ‘This is what I do, this is what I like, this is what I’m used to. There’s no harm in that, is there?’

  I didn’t want to disturb her, but I didn’t want to walk away. If she noticed my presence, she gave no sign of it. I stood there and thought: I really do love you. And I really do admire you: the way you kept your head in the middle of—

  I caught myself. The middle of what? Being thrust in front of a camera by her abductors? None of that had actually happened.

  No… but I knew Loraine—and I knew that she wouldn’t have fallen to pieces, she would have stayed in control. I could still admire her courage and her level-headedness—however bizarre the means by which I’d been reminded of those qualities.

  I started to turn away, and she said, ‘Stay if you like. I don’t mind you watching.’

  I took a few steps into the cluttered studio. After the stark, cavernous spaces of the gallery, it looked very homely. ‘What are you working on?’