by Greg Egan
He tugs at the patch gently, and it dislodges itself from his skin; the adhesive rim doesn’t leave the faintest weal or pluck a single hair from his eyebrow. His newly naked eye doesn’t blink or squint, but I know it’s not truly sighted yet; the suppressed perceptual pathways take hours to reawaken.
He hands me the patch; I half expect it to stick to my palm, but it doesn’t. The outer face is black, like anodised metal, with a silver-grey logo of a dragon in one corner – drawn ‘escaping’ from a cut-and-folded drawing of itself, to bite its own tail. Recursive Visions, after Escher. I press the gun harder against his stomach to remind him of its presence, while I glance down and turn the thing over. The inner face appears velvet black at first, but as I tilt it I catch the reflection of a street light, rainbow-diffracted by the array of quantum-dot lasers. Some plastic fakes are moulded with pits which give a similar effect, but the sharpness of this image – dissected into colours, but not blurred at all – is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
I look up at him, and he meets my gaze warily. I know what he’s feeling – that icewater in the bowels – but there’s something more than fear in his eyes: a kind of dazed curiosity, as if he’s drinking in the strangeness of it all. Standing here at three in the morning with a gun to his intestines. Robbed of his most expensive toy. Wondering what else he’s going to lose.
I smile sadly, and I know how that looks through the Balaclava.
‘You should have stayed up at the Cross. What did you want to come down here for? Looking for something to fuck? Something to snort? You should have hung around the nightclubs, and it all would have come to you.’
He doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t avert his eyes. It looks as if he’s struggling hard to understand it all: his terror, the gun, this moment. Me. Trying to take it all in and make sense of it, like an oceanographer caught in a tidal wave. I can’t decide if that’s admirable, or just irritating.
‘What were you looking for? A new experience? I’ll give you a new experience.’
Something skids along the ground behind us in the wind: plastic wrapping, or a cluster of twigs. The street is all terraces converted to office space, barred and silent, wired against intruders but otherwise oblivious.
I pocket the patch, and slide the gun higher. I tell him plainly, ‘If I kill you, I’ll put a bullet through your heart. Clean and fast, I promise; I won’t leave you lying here bleeding your guts out.’
He makes as if to speak, but then changes his mind. He just stares at my masked face, transfixed. The wind rises up again, cool and impossibly gentle. My watch beeps a short sequence of tones which means it’s successfully blocking a signal from his personal safety implant. We’re alone in a tiny patch of radio silence: phases cancelling, forces finely balanced.
I think: I can spare him … or not – and the lucidity begins, the tearing of the veil, the parting of the fog. It’s all in my hands now. I don’t look up, but I don’t need to: I can feel the stars wheeling around me.
I whisper, ‘I can do it, I can kill you.’ We’re still staring at each other, but I’m staring right through him now; I’m no sadist, I don’t need to see him squirm. His fear is outside me, and what matters is within: My freedom, the courage to embrace it, the strength to face everything I am without flinching.
My hand has grown numb; I slide my finger across the trigger, waking the nerve ends. I can feel the perspiration cooling on my forearms, the muscles in my jaw aching from my frozen smile. I can feel my whole body, coiled, tensed, impatient but obedient, awaiting my command.
I pull the gun back, then pistol-whip him hard, smashing the handle across his temple. He cries out and collapses to his knees, blood pouring into one eye. I back away, observing him carefully. He puts down his hands to keep himself from falling on his face, but he’s too stunned to do anything but kneel there, bleeding and moaning.
I turn and run, tearing off the Balaclava, pocketing the gun, speeding up as I go.
His implant will have made contact with a patrol car in a matter of seconds. I weave through the alleys and deserted side-streets, drunk on the pure visceral chemistry of flight, but still in control, riding instinct smoothly. I hear no sirens, but chances are they wouldn’t use them, so I dive for cover at every approaching engine. A map of these streets is burnt into my skull, down to every tree, every wall, every rusting car body. I’m never more than seconds away from shelter of some kind.
Home looms like a mirage, but it’s real, and I cross the last lit ground with my heart pounding, trying not to whoop with elation as I unlock the door and slam it behind me.
I’m soaked in sweat. I undress, and pace the house until I’m calm enough to stand beneath the shower, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the music of the exhaust fan. I could have killed him. The triumph of it surges through my veins. It was my choice, alone. There was nothing to stop me.
I dry myself, and stare into the mirror, watching as the steamed glass slowly clears. Knowing that I could have pulled the trigger is enough. I’ve faced the possibility; there’s nothing left to prove. It’s not the act that’s important, one way or the other. What matters is overcoming everything that stands in the way of freedom.
But next time?
Next time, I’ll do it.
Because I can.
* * *
I take the patch to Tran, in his battered Redfern terrace full of posters of deservedly obscure Belgian chainsaw bands. He says, ‘Recursive Visions Introscape 3000. Retails at 35 K.’
‘I know. I checked.’
‘Alex! I’m hurt.’ He smiles, showing acid-etched teeth. Too much throwing-up; someone should tell him he’s already thin enough.
‘So what can you get me?’
‘Maybe eighteen or twenty. But it could take months to find a buyer. If you want it off your hands right now, I’ll give you twelve.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Suit yourself.’ I reach out to take it back, but he pulls away. ‘Don’t be so impatient! He plugs a fibre jack into a tiny socket in the rim, then starts typing on the laptop at the heart of his jury-rigged test bench.
‘If you break it, I’ll fucking kill you.’
He groans. ‘Yeah, my big clumsy photons might smash some delicate little watch-spring in there.’
‘You know what I mean. You can still lock it up.’
‘If you’re going to have it for six months, don’t you want to know what software it’s running?’
I almost choke. ‘You think I’m going to use it? It’s probably running some executive stress monitor. Blue Monday: ‘‘Learn to match the colour of the mood display panel with the reference hue beside it, for optimal productivity and total wellbeing’’.’
‘Don’t knock biofeedback till you’ve tried it. This might even be the premature-ejaculation cure you’ve been searching for.’
I thump his scrawny neck, then look over his shoulder at the laptop screen, a blur of scrolling hexadecimal gibberish. ‘What exactly are you doing?’
‘Every manufacturer reserves a block of codes with the ISO, so remotes can’t accidentally trigger the wrong devices. But they use the same ones for cabled stuff, too. So we only have to try the codes Recursive Visions—’
An elegant, marbled-grey interface window appears on the screen. The heading says PANDEMONIUM. The only option is a button labelled ‘Reset’.
Tran turns to me, mouse in hand. ‘Never heard of Pandemonium. Sounds like some kind of psychedelic shit. But if it’s read his head, and the evidence is in there …’ He shrugs. ‘I’ll have to do it before I sell it, so I might as well do it now.’
‘OK.’
He fires the button, and a query appears: ‘Delete stored map, and prepare for a new wearer?’ Tran clicks ‘Yes’.
He says, ‘Wear and enjoy. No charge.’
‘You’re a saint.’ I take the patch. ‘But I’m not going to wear it if I don’t know what it does.’
He calls up another database, and types PAN*. ‘Ah. No
catalogue entry. So it’s black market … unapproved!’ He grins at me, like a school kid daring another to eat a worm. ‘But what’s the worst it can do?’
‘I don’t know. Brainwash me?’
‘I doubt it. Patches can’t show naturalistic images. Nothing strongly representational – and no text. They ran trials with music videos, stock prices, language lessons … but the users kept bumping into things. All they can display now is abstract graphics. How do you brainwash someone with that?’
I raise the thing to my left eye experimentally, but I know it won’t even light up until it sticks firmly in place.
Tran says, ‘Whatever it does … if you think of it information-theoretically, it can’t show you anything that isn’t there in your skull already.’
‘Yeah? That much boredom could kill me.’
Still, it does seem crazy to waste the opportunity. Anyone with a machine as expensive as this probably paid a small fortune for the software too, and if it’s weird enough to be illegal it might actually be a buzz.
Tran’s losing interest. ‘It’s your decision.’
‘Exactly.’
I hold the patch in place over my eye, and let the rim fuse gently with my skin.
* * *
Mira says, ‘Alex? Aren’t you going to tell me?’
‘Huh?’ I peer at her groggily; she’s smiling, but she looks faintly hurt.‘I want to know what it showed you!’ She leans over and starts tracing the ridge of my cheekbone with her fingertip, as if she’d like to touch the patch itself but can’t quite bring herself to do that. ‘What did you see? Tunnels of light? Ancient cities bursting into flame? Silver angels fucking in your brain?’
I remove her hand. ‘Nothing.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
But it’s true. No cosmic fireworks; if anything, the patterns became more subdued the more I lost myself in the sex. But the details are elusive, as they usually are, unless I’ve been making a conscious effort to picture the display.
I try to explain. ‘Most of the time, I don’t see anything. Do you ‘‘see’’ your nose, your eyelashes? The patch is like that. After the first few hours, the image just … vanishes. It doesn’t look like anything real, it doesn’t move when you move your head, so your brain realises it’s got nothing to do with the outside world, and starts filtering it out.’
Mira is scandalised, as if I’ve cheated her somehow. ‘You can’t even see what it’s showing you? Then … what’s the point?’
‘You don’t see the image floating in front of you, but you can still know about it. It’s like … there’s a neurological condition called blindsight, where people lose all sense of visual awareness but they can still guess what’s in front of them, if they really try, because the information is still coming through—’
‘Like clairvoyance. I understand.’ She fingers the ankh on her neck chain.
‘Yeah, it’s uncanny. Shine a blue light in my eye … and by some strange magic I’ll know that it’s blue.’
Mira groans and flops back onto the bed. A car goes by, and the headlights through the curtains illuminate the statue on the bookshelf: a jackal-headed woman in the lotus position, sacred heart exposed beneath one breast. Very hip and syncretic. Mira once told me, deadpan: This is my soul, passed down from incarnation to incarnation. It used to belong to Mozart – and before that, Cleopatra. The inscription on the base says Budapest, 2005. But the strangest thing is, they made it like a Russian doll: inside Mira’s soul is another soul, and inside that is a third, and a fourth. I said: This last one’s just dead wood. Nothing inside. Doesn’t that worry you?
I concentrate, and try to summon up the image again. The patch constantly measures pupil dilation, and the focal distance of the masked eye’s lens – both of which naturally track the unmasked eye – and adjusts the synthetic hologram accordingly. So the image never goes out of focus, or appears too bright or too dim, whatever the unmasked eye is looking at. No real object could ever behave like that; no wonder the brain shunts the data so readily. Even in the first few hours – when I effortlessly saw the patterns superimposed on everything – they seemed more like vivid mental images than any kind of trick with light. Now, the whole idea that I could ‘just look’ at the hologram and automatically ‘see it’ is ludicrous; the reality is more like groping an object in the dark, and attempting to picture it.
What I picture is: elaborately branched threads of colour, flashing against the greyness of the room – like pulses of fluorescent dye injected into fine veins. The image seems bright, but not dazzling; I can still see into the shadows around the bed. Hundreds of these branched patterns are flashing simultaneously, but most are faint, and very short-lived. Maybe ten or twelve dominate at any given moment, glowing intensely for about half a second each, before they fade and others take over. Sometimes it seems that one of these ‘strong’ patterns passes on its strength directly to a neighbouring pattern, summoning it out of the darkness, and sometimes the two can be seen lit up together, tangled edges entwined. At other times, the strength, the brightness, seems to come out of nowhere, though occasionally I catch two or three subtle cascades in the background, each one alone almost too faint and too rapid to follow, converging on a single pattern and triggering a bright, sustained flash.
The wafer of superconducting circuitry buried in the patch is imaging my entire brain. These patterns could be individual neurons, but what would be the point of such a microscopic view? More likely, they’re much larger systems – networks of tens of thousands of neurons – and the whole thing is some kind of functional map: connections preserved, but distances rearranged for ease of interpretation. Only a neurosurgeon would care about the actual anatomical locations.
But, exactly which systems am I being shown? And how am I meant to respond to the sight of them?
Most patchware is biofeedback. Measures of stress – or depression, arousal, concentration, whatever – are encoded in the colours and shapes of the graphics. Because the patch image ‘vanishes’, it’s not a distraction, but the information remains accessible. In effect, regions of the brain not naturally wired to ‘know about’ each other are put in touch, allowing them to modulate each other in new ways. Or that’s the hype. But biofeedback patchware should make its target clear: there should be some fixed template held up beside the realtime display showing the result to aim for. All this is showing me is … pandemonium.
Mira says, ‘I think you’d better go now.’
The patch image almost vanishes, like a cartoon thought-bubble pricked, but I make an effort and manage to hang on to it.
‘Alex? I think you should go.’
Hairs rise on the back of my neck. I saw … what? The same patterns, as she spoke the same words? I struggle to replay the sequence from memory, but the patterns in front of me – the patterns for struggling to remember? – render that impossible. And by the time I let the image fade, it’s too late; I don’t know what I saw.
Mira puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘I want you to leave.’
My skin crawls. Even without the image in front of me, I know the same patterns are firing. ‘I think you should go.’ ‘I want you to leave.’ I’m not seeing the sounds encoded in my brain. I’m seeing the meaning.
And even now, just thinking about the meaning, I know that the sequence is being replayed, faintly.
Mira shakes me angrily, and I finally turn to her. ‘What’s your problem?’ I say. ‘You wanted to screw the patch, and I got in the way?’
‘Very funny. Just go.’
I dress slowly, to annoy her. Then I stand by the bed, looking at her thin body hunched beneath the sheets. I think: I could hurt her badly if I wanted to. It would be so simple.
She watches me uneasily. I feel a surge of shame: the truth is, I don’t even want to frighten her. But it’s too late; I already have.
She lets me kiss her goodbye, but her whole body is rigid with distrust. My stomach churns. What’s happening to me? What am I becoming?
Nietzsche understood. Sartre and Camus understood.
I think calmly: There was nothing to stop me. I could have done anything. I could have broken her neck. But I chose not to. I chose. So how did that happen? How – and where? When I spared the owner of the patch … when I chose not to lay a finger on Mira … in the end, it was my body that acted one way, not the other, but where did it all begin?
If the patch is displaying everything that happens in my brain – or everything that matters: thoughts, meanings, the highest levels of abstraction – then if I’d known how to read those patterns, could I have followed the whole process? Traced it back to the first cause?
I halt in mid-step. The idea is vertiginous … and exhilarating. Somewhere deep in my brain, there must be the ‘I’: the fount of all action, the self who decides. Untouched by culture, upbringing, genes – the source of human freedom, utterly autonomous, responsible only to itself. I’ve always known that, but I’ve been struggling all these years to make it clearer.
If the patch could hold up a mirror to my soul … if I could watch my own will reaching out from the centre of my being as I pulled the trigger …
It would be a moment of perfect honesty, perfect understanding.
Perfect freedom.
* * *
Home, I lie in the dark, bring back the image, experiment. If I’m going to follow the river upstream, I have to map as much territory as I can. It’s not easy: monitoring my thoughts, monitoring the patterns, trying to find the links. Am I seeing the patterns corresponding to the ideas themselves, as I force myself to free-associate? Or am I seeing patterns bound up more with the whole balancing act of attention – between the image itself, and the thoughts which I’m hoping the image reflects?