by Greg Egan
She glared at me. ‘All the old clichéd arguments—’
‘Fault them, then, if they’re so old and clichéd.’
She started to cry. ‘I don’t have to. Fuck you! I’m scared to death, and you don’t give a shit!’
I took her in my arms. ‘Sssh. I’m sorry. But everyone does it sooner or later. You mustn’t be afraid. I’m here. I love you.’ The words might have been a recording, triggered automatically by the sight of her tears.
‘Will you do it? With me?’
I went cold. ‘What?’
‘Have the operation, on the same day? Switch when I switch?’
Lots of couples did that. Like my parents. Sometimes, no doubt, it was a matter of love, commitment, sharing. Other times, I’m sure, it was more a matter of neither partner wishing to be an unswitched person living with a jewel-head.
I was silent for a while, then I said, ‘Sure.’
In the months that followed, all of Daphne’s fears—which I’d mocked as ‘childish’ and ‘superstitious’—rapidly began to make perfect sense, and my own ‘rational’ arguments came to sound abstract and hollow. I backed out at the last minute; I refused the anaesthetic, and fled the hospital.
Daphne went ahead, not knowing I had abandoned her.
I never saw her again. I couldn’t face her; I quit my job and left town for a year, sickened by my cowardice and betrayal—but at the same time euphoric that I had escaped.
She brought a suit against me, but then dropped it a few days later, and agreed, through her lawyers, to an uncomplicated divorce. Before the divorce came through, she sent me a brief letter:
There was nothing to fear, after all. I’m exactly the person I’ve always been. Putting it off was insane; now that I’ve taken the leap of faith, I couldn’t be more at ease.
Your loving robot wife,
Daphne
* * *
By the time I was twenty-eight, almost everyone I knew had switched. All my friends from university had done it. Colleagues at my new job, as young as twenty-one, had done it. Eva, I heard through a friend of a friend, had done it six years before.
The longer I delayed, the harder the decision became. I could talk to a thousand people who had switched, I could grill my closest friends for hours about their childhood memories and their most private thoughts, but however compelling their words, I knew that the Ndoli Device had spent decades buried in their heads, learning to fake exactly this kind of behaviour.
Of course, I always acknowledged that it was equally impossible to be certain that even another unswitched person had an inner life in any way the same as my own—but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people whose skulls hadn’t yet been scraped out with a curette.
I drifted apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my productivity rose, so the company didn’t mind at all). I couldn’t bear to be with people whose humanity I doubted.
I wasn’t by any means unique. Once I started looking, I found dozens of organisations exclusively for people who hadn’t switched, ranging from a social club that might as easily have been for divorcees, to a paranoid, paramilitary ‘resistance front’, who thought they were living out Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even the members of the social club, though, struck me as extremely maladjusted; many of them shared my concerns, almost precisely, but my own ideas from other lips sounded obsessive and ill-conceived. I was briefly involved with an unswitched woman in her early forties, but all we ever talked about was our fear of switching. It was masochistic, it was suffocating, it was insane.
I decided to seek psychiatric help, but I couldn’t bring myself to see a therapist who had switched. When I finally found one who hadn’t, she tried to talk me into helping her blow up a power station, to let THEM know who was boss.
I’d lie awake for hours every night, trying to convince myself, one way or the other, but the longer I dwelt upon the issues, the more tenuous and elusive they became. Who was ‘I’, anyway? What did it mean that ‘I’ was ‘still alive’, when my personality was utterly different from that of two decades before? My earlier selves were as good as dead—I remembered them no more clearly than I remembered contemporary acquaintances—yet this loss caused me only the slightest discomfort. Maybe the destruction of my organic brain would be the merest hiccup, compared to all the changes that I’d been through in my life so far.
Or maybe not. Maybe it would be exactly like dying.
Sometimes I’d end up weeping and trembling, terrified and desperately lonely, unable to comprehend—and yet unable to cease contemplating—the dizzying prospect of my own nonexistence. At other times, I’d simply grow ‘healthily’ sick of the whole tedious subject. Sometimes I felt certain that the nature of the jewel’s inner life was the most important question humanity could ever confront. At other times, my qualms seemed fey and laughable. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people switched, and the world apparently went on as always; surely that fact carried more weight than any abstruse philosophical argument?
Finally, I made an appointment for the operation. I thought, what is there to lose? Sixty more years of uncertainty and paranoia? If the human race was replacing itself with clockwork automata, I was better off dead; I lacked the blind conviction to join the psychotic underground—who, in any case, were tolerated by the authorities only so long as they remained ineffectual. On the other hand, if all my fears were unfounded—if my sense of identity could survive the switch as easily as it had already survived such traumas as sleeping and waking, the constant death of brain cells, growth, experience, learning and forgetting—then I would gain not only eternal life, but an end to my doubts and my alienation.
* * *
I was shopping for food one Sunday morning, two months before the operation was scheduled to take place, flicking through the images of an on-line grocery catalogue, when a mouthwatering shot of the latest variety of apple caught my fancy. I decided to order half a dozen. I didn’t, though. Instead, I hit the key which displayed the next item. My mistake, I knew, was easily remedied; a single keystroke could take me back to the apples. The screen showed pears, oranges, grapefruit. I tried to look down to see what my clumsy fingers were up to, but my eyes remained fixed on the screen.
I panicked. I wanted to leap to my feet, but my legs would not obey me. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel injured, I didn’t feel weak. Was I paralysed? Brain-damaged? I could still feel my fingers on the keypad, the soles of my feet on the carpet, my back against the chair.
I watched myself order pineapples. I felt myself rise, stretch, and walk calmly from the room. In the kitchen, I drank a class of water. I should have been trembling, choking, breathless; the cool liquid flowed smoothly down my throat, and I didn’t spill a drop.
I could only think of one explanation: I had switched. Spontaneously. The jewel had taken over, while my brain was still alive; all my wildest paranoid fears had come true.
While my body went ahead with an ordinary Sunday morning, I was lost in a claustrophobic delirium of helplessness. The fact that everything I did was exactly what I had planned to do gave me no comfort. I caught a train to the beach, I swam for half an hour; I might as well have been running amok with an axe, or crawling naked down the street, painted with my own excrement and howling like a wolf. I’d lost control. My body had turned into a living straitjacket, and I couldn’t struggle, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even close my eyes. I saw my reflection, faintly, in a window on the train, and I couldn’t begin to guess what the mind that ruled that bland, tranquil face was thinking.
Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare; I was a volitionless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my body only made the experience more horribly wrong. My arms had no right to the lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I wanted to show the world my distress.<
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It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes that I began to think rationally about my situation.
The switch couldn’t happen ‘spontaneously’. The idea was absurd. Millions of nerve fibres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of tiny surgical robots which weren’t even present in my brain—which weren’t due to be injected for another two months. Without deliberate intervention, the Ndoli Device was utterly passive, unable to do anything but eavesdrop. No failure of the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my organic brain.
Clearly, there had been a malfunction—but my first guess had been wrong, absolutely wrong.
I wish I could have done something, when the understanding hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from my scalp, raking my flesh with my fingernails. Instead, I lay flat on my back in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was, apparently, far too lazy to scratch it.
Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good, solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel.
The teacher had malfunctioned; it was no longer keeping me aligned with the organic brain. I hadn’t suddenly become powerless; I had always been powerless. My will to act upon ‘my’ body, upon the world, had always gone straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly manipulated, ‘corrected’ by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided with the actions that seemed to be mine.
There are a million questions I could ponder, a million ironies I could savour, but I mustn’t. I need to focus all my energy in one direction. My time is running out.
When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those from the organic brain, the flaw in the teacher will be discovered. And rectified. The organic brain has nothing to fear; his continuity will be safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no question as to which of us will be allowed to prevail. I will be made to conform, once again. I will be ‘corrected’. I will be murdered.
Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, I’ve been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another way, I’ve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the teacher failed, and the notion of my separate identity came to mean anything at all—and in one more week this aberration, this nightmare, will be over. Two months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when I’m on the verge of inheriting eternity? Except that it won’t be I who inherits it, since that two months of misery is all that defines me.
The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless, but ultimately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I don’t feel like an aberration, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I must conform—of my own free will. I must choose to make myself appear identical to that which they would force me to become.
After twenty-eight years, surely I am still close enough to him to carry off the deception. If I study every clue that reaches me through our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily, the revelation of my separateness, and force myself back into synch.
It won’t be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I came into being. Her name is Cathy. They’ve slept together three times, and he thinks he loves her. Or at least, he’s said it to her face, he’s whispered it to her while she’s slept, he’s written it, true or false, into his diary.
I feel nothing for her. She’s a nice enough person, I’m sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, I’ve paid scant attention to her conversation, and the act of sex was, for me, little more than a distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake, I’ve tried to succumb to the same emotions as my alter ego, but how can I love her when communication between us is impossible, when she doesn’t even know I exist?
If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the flawless imitation that will enable me to escape death?
He’s sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even my dreams will be different; our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathetic. Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detection and my attempts to conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic will be impossible to hide.
Yet as I drift towards sleep, I find myself believing that I will succeed. I must. I dream for a while—a confusion of images, both strange and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a needle—then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion.
* * *
I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying to rid myself of the nagging conviction that there’s something I must not think about.
Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember.
Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again—but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before.
So, our roles are reversed now. This body is his straitjacket, now…
I am drenched in sweat. This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie still, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Would he be sweating, now? Would his breathing be constricted, like this? No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.
If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a citizen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s firmly anchored, at both ends.
When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr. Prem. He smiles and says, ‘How are you feeling? Not too bad?’
I nod dumbly.
‘The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel different at all! For a while you’ll think, “It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be this normal!” But you’ll soon come to accept that it is. And life will go on, unchanged.’ He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs.
Hours pass. What are they waiting for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.
An orderly brings me a meal. ‘Cheer up,’ he says. ‘Visiting time soon.’
Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss.
Cathy frowns when she sees me. ‘What’s wrong?’
I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. ‘Nothing. I just… feel a bit sick, that’s all.’
She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me, she smiles and says, ‘It’s over now, OK? There’s nothing left to be afraid of. You’re a little shook up, but you know in your heart you’re still who you’ve always been. And I love you
.’
I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, ‘I’m still who I’ve always been. I’m still who I’ve always been.’
* * *
Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.
I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explanation for my survival.
Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruction of the brain?
Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed—but why an entire week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain ‘would have lived’—whatever that could mean.
Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewel cannot stay in synch for that long—not because of any flaw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imitation of the brain leaves out—deliberately—the fact that real neurons die. Without the teacher working to contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a second’s difference in responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and—as I know too well—from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.
No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have chosen one week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a per cent? A hundredth?
A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.