Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don’t know what Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn’t begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there’d be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs – and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohn’s arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.

  Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.

  I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinise Mendelsohn’s entire electronic history since birth. She’d been arrested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an – unprivatised – policeman in the shin, during a protest he’d probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. She’d had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former lover from coming within a kilometre of her home. (The woman was a musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.) There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she’d organised it carefully.

  Mendelsohn wasn’t going to put a foot wrong while I was watching. However careful she’d been, though, she could not have carried out the bombing alone. What I needed was someone venal, nervous, or conscience-stricken enough to turn informant. I put out word on the usual channels: I’d be willing to pay, I’d be willing to bargain.

  Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message by e-mail: Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. I’ll find you. 29. 17. 5. 31. 23. 11.

  I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to make sense of them, before I finally showed them to Elaine.

  She said, ‘Be careful, James.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘These are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in the residue from the explosion.’

  * * *

  Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends who’d also be in the parade. I sat in my air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV channel which showed the final preparations, interspersed with talking heads describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has been transformed from a series of ugly confrontations with police and local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist brochures around the world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by politicians and business identities – and the police, like most professions, now had their own float.

  Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound leather-fetishist, or any other walking cliché); dressing up in a flamboyant costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial for him as it would have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He felt guilty that he could ‘pass for straight’ in the clothes he usually wore, with the speech and manner and bearing which came naturally to him. He’d never concealed his sexuality from anyone, but it wasn’t instantly apparent to total strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi Gras was a gesture of solidarity with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round, and who’d borne the brunt of intolerance because of it.

  As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route. Helicopters from every news service appeared overhead, turning their cameras on one another to prove to their viewers that this was An Event. Mounted crowd-control personnel – in something very much like the old blue uniform which had vanished when I was a child – parked their horses by the fast-food stands, and stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.

  I didn’t see how the bomber could seriously expect to find me once I was mingling with a hundred thousand other people, so after leaving the Nexus building I drove my car around the block slowly, three times, just in case.

  * * *

  By the time I’d made my way to a vantage point, I’d missed the start of the parade; the first thing I saw was a long line of people wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of famous and infamous queers. (Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially declared non-pejorative once more, after several years out of favour.) It was all so Disney I could have gagged – and yes, there was even Bernadette, the world’s first lesbian cartoon mouse. I only recognised three of the humans portrayed: Patrick White, looking haggard and suitably bemused, Joe Orton leering sardonically, and J. Edgar Hoover with a Mephistophelian sneer. Everyone wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man beside me asked his girlfriend, ‘Who the hell was Walt Whitman?’

  She shook her head. ‘No idea. Alan Turing?’

  ‘Search me.’

  They photographed both of them, anyway.

  I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were famous. Some famous people were queer. What a surprise! Do you think that means you own them?

  I kept silent, of course – while everyone around me cheered and clapped. I wondered how close the bomber was, how long he or she would leave me sweating. Panopticon – the surveillance contractors – were still following Mendelsohn and all of her known associates, most of whom were somewhere along the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets. None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The bomber was almost certainly someone outside the network of friends we’d uncovered.

  An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone – or a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? Surrounded by cheering spectators – half of them mixed-sex couples with children in tow – it was almost possible to laugh off Mendelsohn’s fears. Who, here, would admit that they’d buy a version of the cocoon which would help wipe out the source of their entertainment? But applauding the freak show didn’t mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.

  An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out of the densest part of the crowd. If the bomber couldn’t reach me through the crush of people, there wasn’t much point being here. A hundred or so leather-clad women on – noise-enhanced – electric motorbikes went riding past in a crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS. I recalled the small group of fundamentalists I’d passed earlier, their backs to the parade route lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and praying for rain.

  I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold hot dog and a warm orange juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The place seemed to attract law-enforcement types;J. Edgar Hoover himself came wandering by while I was eating, looking like a malevolent Humpty-Dumpty.

  As he passed me, he said, ‘Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five.’

  I finished my hot dog and followed him.

  He stopped in a deserted side-street, behind a supermarket parking lot. As I caught up with him, he took out a magnetic scanner.

  I said, ‘No wires, no weapons.’ He waved the device over me. I was telling the truth. ‘Can you talk through that thing?’

  ‘Yes.’ The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldn’t see any eye holes, but he clearly wasn’t blind.

  ‘OK. Where did the explosives come from? We know they started off in Singapore, but who was your supplier here?’

  Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. ‘I’m not going to tell you that. I’d be dead in a week.’

  ‘So what do you want to tell me?’

  ‘That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsoh
n organised everything.’

  ‘No shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone calls? Financial transactions?’

  He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many people in the parade would know who’d played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he clammed up now, it was possible that I’d be able to track him down later.

  That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoovers coming around the corner. They were all carrying baseball bats.

  I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at my face. He said, ‘Kneel down slowly, with your hands behind your head.’

  I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the trigger, but I heard the others arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.

  Hoover One said, ‘Don’t you know what happens to traitors? Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?’

  I shook my head slowly. I didn’t know what I could say to appease him, so I spoke the truth. ‘How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray? Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The William S. Burroughs Dancers?’

  Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back. Not as hard as they might have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.

  Hoover One said, ‘Don’t you know any history, Mr Pig? Mr Polizei? The Nazis put us in their death camps. The Reaganites tried to have us all die of AIDS. And here you are now, Mr Pig, working for the fuckers who want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sounds like betrayal to me.’

  I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldn’t dredge up the words to justify myself. The truth was too difficult, too grey, too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Nazis. AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved to die.

  I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. ‘Boo hoo, Mr Pig.’ Someone swung their bat into my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too afraid to move my hands to break the fall; I tried to get up, but a boot came down on the back of my neck.

  Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered, ‘Will you close the case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your boyfriend frequents some dangerous places; he needs all the friends he can get.’

  I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well done, Mr Pig.’

  That was when I heard the helicopter.

  I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far brighter than it should have been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing happened. I waited for my assailants to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.

  And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.

  I should have curled up and protected my head, but curiosity got the better of me; I turned and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a news crew, of course, refusing to do anything unethical like spoil a good story just when it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect sense.

  But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking around? Just for the pleasure of beating me for a few seconds longer?

  Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.

  I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it all to be broadcast. They wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage. ATOMIC TERRORISTS! BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!

  They wanted to demonise the enemy they were pretending to be.

  The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running. I lay on the ground drooling blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had driven them away.

  A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the ground beside me and checked my pulse.

  I said, ‘I’m not in pain. I’m happy. I’m delirious.’

  Then I passed out.

  * * *

  On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to the hospital with him. They showed me a recording of LEI’s media conference, the day after the Mardi Gras – two hours before Mendelsohn’s was scheduled to take place.

  Janet Lansing said, ‘In the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go public. We would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for commercial reasons, but innocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on their own kind …’

  I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.

  LEI had bombed their own laboratory. They’d irradiated their own cells. And they’d hoped that I’d cover up for Mendelsohn, once the evidence led me to her, out of sympathy with her cause. Later, with a tip-off to an investigative reporter or two, the cover-up would have been revealed.

  The perfect climate for their product launch.

  Since I’d continued with the investigation, though, they’d had to make the best of it: sending in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.

  Mendelsohn said, ‘Everything LEI leaked about me – the cobalt, my key to the vault – was already spelt out in the pamphlets I’d printed, but that doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the murdochs. I’m the Harbour Bridge Gamma Ray Terrorist now.’

  ‘You’ll never be charged.’

  ‘Of course not. So I’ll never be found innocent.’

  I said, ‘When I’m out of here, I’m going after them.’ They wanted impartiality? An investigation untainted by prejudice? They’d get exactly what they paid for, this time. Minus the tunnel vision.

  Martin said softly, ‘Who’s going to employ you to do that?’

  I smiled, painfully. ‘LEI’s insurance company.’

  When they’d left, I dozed off.

  I woke suddenly, from a dream of suffocation.

  Even if I proved that the whole thing had been a marketing exercise by LEI – even if half their directors were thrown in prison, even if the company itself was liquidated – the technology would still be owned by someone.

  And one way or another, in the end, it would be sold.

  That’s what I’d missed, in my fanatical neutrality: you can’t sell a cure without a disease. So even if I was right to be neutral – even if there was no difference to fight for, no difference to betray, no difference to preserve – the best way to sell the cocoon would always be to invent one. And even if it would be no tragedy at all if there was nothing left but heterosexuality in a century’s time, the only path which could lead there would be one of lies, and wounding, and vilification.

  Would people buy that, or not?

  I was suddenly very much afraid that they would.

  TRANSITION DREAMS

  ‘We can’t tell you what your own transition dreams will be. The only thing that’s certain is that you won’t remember them.’

  Caroline Bausch smiles, reassuringly. Her office, on the sixty-fourth floor of the Gleisner Tower, is so stylish it hurts – her desk is an obsidian ellipse supported by three Perspex circles, and the walls are decorated with the latest in Euclidean Monochrome – but she’s not at all the kind of robot the cool, geometric decor seems to demand. I have no doubt that the contrast is intentional, and that her face has been carefully designed to appear more disarmingly natural than even the most cynical person could believe was due to pure guile on the part of her employers.

  A few forgettable dreams? That sounds innocuous enough. I very nearly let the matter rest, but I’m puzzled.

  ‘I’ll be close to zero degrees when I’m scanned, won’t I?’

  ‘Yes. A little below, in fact. Pumped full of antifreeze disaccharides, all your fluids cooled down into a sugary glass.’ There’s a prickling sensation on my scalp at these words, but the rush I feel is anticipation, not fear; the thought of my body as a kind of ice-confectionary sculpture doesn’t seem threatening at all. Several elegant blown-glass figurines decorate the bookshelf behind Bausch’s desk. ‘Not only does that halt all metabolic processes, it sharpens the NMR spectra. To measure the strength of each synapse accurately, we have to be able to distinguish between subtle variations in neurotransmitter receptor types, among other things. The less thermal noise, the better.’

&nbs
p; ‘I understand. But if my brain has been shut down by hypothermia … why will I dream?’

  ‘Your brain won’t do the dreaming. The software model we’re creating will. But as I said, you won’t remember any of it. In the end, the software will be a perfect Copy of your – deeply comatose – organic brain, and it will wake from that coma remembering exactly what the organic brain experienced before the scan. No more, no less. And since the organic brain certainly won’t have experienced the transition dreams, the software will have no memory of them.’

  The software? I’d expected a simple, biological explanation: a side-effect of the anaesthetic or the antifreeze; neurons firing off a few faint, random signals as they surrendered to the cold.

  ‘Why program the robot’s brain to have dreams it won’t remember?’

  ‘We don’t. Or at least, not explicitly.’ Bausch smiles her too-human smile again, not quite masking an appraising glance, a moment spent deciding, perhaps, how much I really need to be told. Or perhaps the whole routine is more calculated reassurance. Look, even though I’m a robot, you can read me like a book.

  She says, ‘Why are Gleisner robots conscious?’

  ‘For the same reason humans are conscious.’ I’ve been waiting for that question since the interview began; Bausch is a counsellor as much as a salesperson, and it’s part of her job to ensure that I’m at ease with the new mode of existence I’m buying. ‘Don’t ask me which neural structures are involved … but whatever they are, they must be captured in the scan, and re-created in the model, along with everything else. Gleisner robots are conscious because they process information – about the world, and about themselves – in exactly the same way as humans do.’

  ‘So you’re happy with the notion that a computer program which simulates a conscious human brain is, itself, conscious in the very same fashion?’

  ‘Of course. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe that.’ I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I? I see no need to elaborate – to confess that I’ve become a thousand times more comfortable with the whole idea ever since the ten-tonne supercomputers in the basements of Dallas and Tokyo began to give way to the ambulatory Gleisner robots, with their compact processors and lifelike bodies. When Copies were finally liberated from their virtual realities – however grand, however detailed they might have been – and given the chance to inhabit the world in the manner of flesh-and-blood people, I finally stopped thinking of being scanned as a fate akin to being buried alive.