Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much the same—which was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris were simply wired into my jewel as if they’d come from my penis. Even being penetrated made less difference than I’d expected; unless I made a special effort to remain aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care who was doing what to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

  At work, no one raised an eyebrow when I turned up as Sian, since many of my colleagues had already been through exactly the same thing. The legal definition of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA fingerprint of the body, according to a standard set of markers, to the serial number of the jewel. When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can’t be doing anything very radical or profound.

  After three months, Sian had had enough. ‘I never realised how clumsy you were,’ she said. ‘Or that ejaculation was so dull.’

  Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be women. Brain-damaged replacement bodies—Extras—had once been incredibly expensive, when they’d needed to be grown at virtually the normal rate, and kept constantly active so they’d be healthy enough to use. However, the physiological effects of the passage of time, and of exercise, don’t happen by magic; at a deep enough level, there’s always a biochemical signal produced, which can ultimately be faked. Mature Extras, with sturdy bones and perfect muscle tone, could now be produced from scratch in a year—four months’ gestation and eight months’ coma—which also allowed them to be more thoroughly brain-dead than before, soothing the ethical qualms of those who’d always wondered just how much was going on inside the heads of the old, active versions.

  In our first experiment, the hardest part for me had always been, not looking in the mirror and seeing Sian, but looking at Sian and seeing myself. I’d missed her, far more than I’d missed being myself. Now, I was almost happy for my body to be absent (in storage, kept alive by a jewel based on the minimal brain of an Extra). The symmetry of being her twin appealed to me; surely now we were closer than ever. Before, we’d merely swapped our physical differences. Now, we’d abolished them.

  The symmetry was an illusion. I’d changed gender, and she hadn’t. I was with the woman I loved; she lived with a walking parody of herself.

  One morning she woke me, pummelling my breasts so hard that she left bruises. When I opened my eyes and shielded myself, she peered at me suspiciously. ‘Are you in there? Michael? I’m going crazy. I want you back.’

  For the sake of getting the whole bizarre episode over and done with for good—and perhaps also to discover for myself what Sian had just been through—I agreed to the third permutation. There was no need to wait a year; my Extra had been grown at the same time as hers.

  Somehow, it was far more disorienting to be confronted by ‘myself’ without the camouflage of Sian’s body. I found my own face unreadable; when we’d both been in disguise, that hadn’t bothered me, but now it made me feel edgy, and at times almost paranoid, for no rational reason at all.

  Sex took some getting used to. Eventually, I found it pleasurable, in a confusing and vaguely narcissistic way. The compelling sense of equality I’d felt, when we’d made love as women, never quite returned to me as we sucked each other’s cocks—but then, when we’d both been women, Sian had never claimed to feel any such thing. It had all been my own invention.

  The day after we returned to the way we’d begun (well, almost—in fact, we put our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up residence in our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we hadn’t yet tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical twins. Our new bodies could be our biological children (give or take the genetic tinkering required to ensure hermaphroditism), with an equal share of characteristics from both of us. We would both have changed gender, both have lost partners. We’d be equal in every way.

  I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully, then said, ‘Slugs are hermaphrodites, aren’t they? They hang in mid-air together on a thread of slime. I’m sure there’s even something in Shakespeare, remarking on the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and me, making slug love.’

  I fell on the floor, laughing.

  I stopped, suddenly. ‘Where, in Shakespeare? I didn’t think you’d even read Shakespeare.’

  Eventually, I came to believe that with each passing year, I knew Sian a little better—in the traditional sense, the sense that most couples seemed to find sufficient. I knew what she expected from me, I knew how not to hurt her. We had arguments, we had fights, but there must have been some kind of underlying stability, because in the end we always chose to stay together. Her happiness mattered to me, very much, and at times I could hardly believe that I’d ever thought it possible that all of her subjective experience might be fundamentally alien to me. It was true that every brain, and hence every jewel, was unique—but there was something extravagant in supposing that the nature of consciousness could be radically different between individuals, when the same basic hardware, and the same basic principles of neural topology, were involved.

  * * *

  Still. Sometimes, if I woke in the night, I’d turn to her and whisper, inaudibly, compulsively, ‘I don’t know you. I have no idea who, or what, you are.’ I’d lie there, and think about packing and leaving. I was alone, and it was farcical to go through the charade of pretending otherwise.

  Then again, sometimes I woke in the night, absolutely convinced that I was dying, or something else equally absurd. In the sway of some half-forgotten dream, all manner of confusion is possible. It never meant a thing, and by morning I was always myself again. When I saw the story on Craig Bentley’s service—he called it ‘research,’ but his ‘volunteers’ paid for the privilege of taking part in his experiments—I almost couldn’t bring myself to include it in the bulletin, although all my professional judgement told me it was everything our viewers wanted in a thirty second techno-shock piece: bizarre, even mildly disconcerting, but not too hard to grasp.

  Bentley was a cyberneurologist; he studied the Ndoli Device, in the way that neurologists had once studied the brain. Mimicking the brain with a neural-net computer had not required a profound understanding of its higher-level structures; research into these structures continued, in their new incarnation. The jewel, compared to the brain, was of course both easier to observe, and easier to manipulate.

  In his latest project, Bentley was offering couples something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs. He was offering them eight hours with identical minds.

  I made a copy of the original, ten-minute piece that had come through on the fibre, then let my editing console select the most titillating thirty seconds possible, for broadcast. It did a good job; it had learnt from me.

  I couldn’t lie to Sian. I couldn’t hide the story, I couldn’t pretend to be disinterested. The only honest thing to do was to show her the file, tell her exactly how I felt, and ask her what she wanted.

  I did just that. When the HV image faded out, she turned to me, shrugged, and said mildly, ‘Okay. It sounds like fun. Let’s try it.’

  * * *

  Bentley wore a T-shirt with nine computer-drawn portraits on it, in a three-by-three grid. Top left was Elvis Presley. Bottom right was Marilyn Monroe. The rest were various stages in between.

  ‘This is how it will work. The transition will take twenty minutes, during which time you’ll be disembodied. Over the first ten minutes, you’ll gain equal access to each other’s memories. Over the second ten minutes, you’ll both be moved, gradually, towards the compromise personality.

  ‘Once that’s done, your Ndoli Devices will be identical—in the sense that both will have all the same neural connections with all the same weighting factors—but they’ll almost certainly be in different states. I’ll have to black you out, to correct that. Then you’ll wake—‘

  Who�
��ll wake?

  ‘—in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones can’t be made sufficiently alike.

  ‘You’ll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched rooms. Rather like hotel suites, really. You’ll have HV to keep you amused if you need it—without the videophone module, of course. You might think you’d both get an engaged signal, if you tried to call the same number simultaneously—but in fact, in such cases the switching equipment arbitrarily lets one call through, which would make your environments different.’

  Sian asked, ‘Why can’t we phone each other? Or better still, meet each other? If we’re exactly the same, we’d say the same things, do the same things—we’d be one more identical part of each other’s environment.’

  Bentley pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Perhaps I’ll allow something of the kind in a future experiment, but for now I believe it would be too… potentially traumatic.’

  Sian gave me a sideways glance, which meant: This man is a killjoy.

  ‘The end will be like the beginning, in reverse. First, your personalities will be restored. Then, you’ll lose access to each other’s memories. Of course, your memories of the experience itself will be left untouched. Untouched by me, that is; I can’t predict how your separate personalities, once restored, will act—filtering, suppressing, reinterpreting those memories. Within minutes, you may end up with very different ideas about what you’ve been through. All I can guarantee is this: For the eight hours in question, the two of you will be identical.’

  * * *

  We talked it over. Sian was enthusiastic, as always. She didn’t much care what it would be like; all that really mattered to her was collecting one more novel experience.

  ‘Whatever happens, we’ll be ourselves again at the end of it,’ she said. ‘What’s there to be afraid of? You know the old Ndoli joke.’

  ‘What old Ndoli joke?’

  ‘Anything’s bearable—so long as it’s finite.’

  I couldn’t decide how I felt. The sharing of memories notwithstanding, we’d both end up knowing, not each other, but merely a transient, artificial third person. Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view—even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.

  It was a compromise—but I could think of no realistic way in which it could have been improved.

  I called Bentley, and made a reservation.

  * * *

  In perfect sensory deprivation, my thoughts seemed to dissipate into the blackness around me before they were even half-formed. This isolation didn’t last long, though; as our short-term memories merged, we achieved a kind of telepathy: One of us would think a message, and the other would ‘remember’ thinking it, and reply in the same way.

  - I really can’t wait to uncover all your grubby little secrets.

  - I think you’re going to be disappointed. Anything I haven’t already told you, I’ve probably repressed.

  - Ah, but repressed is not erased. Who knows what will turn up?

  - We’ll know, soon enough.

  I tried to think of all the minor sins I must have committed over the years, all the shameful, selfish, unworthy thoughts, but nothing came into my head but a vague white noise of guilt. I tried again, and achieved, of all things, an image of Sian as a child. A young boy slipping his hand between her legs, then squealing with fright and pulling away. But she’d described that incident to me, long ago. Was it her memory, or my reconstruction?

  - My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know, half the time when I’ve told you something that happened before we met, the memory of the telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself. Almost replacing it.

  - It’s the same for me.

  - Then in a way, our memories have already been moving towards a kind of symmetry, for years. We both remember what was said, as if we’d both heard it from someone else.

  Agreement. Silence. A moment of confusion. Then:

  - This neat division of ‘memory’ and ‘personality’ Bentley uses; is it really so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you can’t talk about ‘data’ and ‘program’ in any absolute sense.

  - Not in general, no. His classification must be arbitrary, to some extent. But who cares?

  - It matters. If he restores ‘personality,’ but allows ‘memories’ to persist, a misclassification could leave us…

  - What?

  - It depends, doesn’t it? At one extreme, so thoroughly ‘restored,’ so completely unaffected, that the whole experience might as well not have happened. And at the other extreme…

  - Permanently…

  - …closer.

  - Isn’t that the point?

  - I don’t know anymore.

  Silence. Hesitation.

  Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my turn to reply.

  * * *

  I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a mental hiatus to pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when I’d woken in someone else’s Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my torso and legs, then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex shop-window dummy—but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no great shock. I sat up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little numb and hollow, but my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt located between my eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern transplant, my jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change, avoiding the need for months of physiotherapy.

  I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one bed, one table, one chair, one clock, one HV set. On the wall, a framed reproduction of an Escher lithograph: ‘Bond of Union,’ a portrait of the artist and, presumably, his wife, faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind, joined into a single, linked band. I traced the outer surface from start to finish, and was disappointed to find that it lacked the Möbius twist I was expecting.

  No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside the bed, a full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous form. It suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry games, he might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified the HV set accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange right for left. What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window between the rooms. I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection looked appropriately embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however unlikely it was. Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could reveal the difference. No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucault’s, would twist the same way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to the mirror and thumped it. It didn’t seem to yield at all, but then, either a brick wall, or an equal and opposite thump from behind, could have been the explanation.

  I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anything—for all I knew, the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was irrelevant. The room was irrelevant. The point was…

  I sat on the bed. I recalled someone—Michael, probably—wondering if I’d panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If I’d woken in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was from my past(s), I’d no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I had two long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect of being changed back into Sian or Michael didn’t bother me at all; the wishes of both to regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the desire for personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of their re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories would not be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the other of them would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common denominator than
any kind of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than the sum of my parts. My purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the strangeness for Sian, and to answer a question for Michael, and when the time came I’d be happy to bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and valued.

  So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, I’d undergone no fundamental change—but even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally? Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head just full of second-hand description—intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language? If my mind were radically different, would that difference be something I could even perceive—or would all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?

  The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith—and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.

  I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest they could get, and what had come of me?

  Michael’s hope remained precisely as reasonable—and as unproven—as ever. After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michael’s search was over, even if it had ended in failure. Now he’d have no choice but to accept that, and move on.

  I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and off. I was actually starting to get bored, but I wasn’t going to waste eight hours and several thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.