Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. ‘How? How can you try to like something less?’

  ‘You don’t. Just try to move the button to the left. Visualise the movement. The software’s monitoring your visual cortex, tracking any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button moving – and the image will oblige.’

  It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was sticking, but I managed to manoeuvre it down to 10 before stopping to assess the effect. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I take it it’s working?’

  I nodded stupidly. The music was still … pleasant, but the spell was broken completely. It was like listening to an electrifying piece of rhetoric, then realising halfway through that the speaker didn’t believe a word of it – leaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it of all its real force.

  I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained it, the whole scheme had sounded too bizarre to be real. And since I’d already failed to assert myself over the prosthesis – despite billions of direct neural connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to interact with the thing and shape it in my own image – I’d feared that when the time came to make a choice, I’d be paralysed by indecision.

  But I knew, beyond doubt, that I should not have been in a state of rapture over a piece of classical music that I’d either never heard before, or – since apparently it was famous, and ubiquitous – sat through once or twice by accident, entirely unmoved.

  And now, in a matter of seconds, I’d hacked that false response away.

  There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I’d just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

  De Vries, tinkering with his keyboard, said cheerfully, ‘I’ll colour-code virtual gadgets for all the major systems in the prosthesis. With a few days’ practice it’ll all be second nature. Just remember that some experiences will engage two or three systems at once … so if you’re making love to music that you’d prefer not to find so distracting, make sure you turn down the red control, not the blue.’ He looked up and saw my face. ‘Hey, don’t worry. You can always turn it up again later if you make a mistake. Or if you change your mind.’

  3

  It was nine p.m. in Sydney when the plane touched down. Nine o’clock on a Saturday night. I took a train into the city centre, intending to catch the connecting one home, but when I saw the crowds alighting at Town Hall station I put my suitcase in a locker and followed them up to the street.

  I’d been in the city a few times since the virus, but never at night. I felt as if I’d come home after half a lifetime in another country, after solitary confinement in a foreign gaol. Everything was disorienting, one way or another. I felt a kind of giddy déjà vu at the sight of buildings that seemed to have been faithfully preserved, but still weren’t quite as I remembered them, and a sense of hollowness each time I turned a corner to find that some private landmark, some shop or sign I remembered from childhood, had vanished.

  I stood outside a pub, close enough to feel my eardrums throb to the beat of the music. I could see people inside, laughing and dancing, sloshing armfuls of drinks around, faces glowing with alcohol and companionship. Some alive with the possibility of violence, others with the promise of sex.

  I could step right into this picture myself, now. The ash that had buried the world was gone; I was free to walk wherever I pleased. And I could almost feel the dead cousins of these revellers – reborn now as harmonics of the network, resonating to the music and the sight of their soul-mates – clamouring in my skull, begging me to carry them all the way to the land of the living.

  I took a few steps forward, then something in the corner of my vision distracted me. In the alley beside the pub, a boy of ten or twelve sat crouched against the wall, lowering his face into a plastic bag. After a few inhalations he looked up, dead eyes shining, smiling as blissfully as any orchestra conductor.

  I backed away.

  Someone touched my shoulder. I spun around and saw a man beaming at me. ‘Jesus loves you, brother! Your search is over!’ He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. I gazed into his face, and his condition was transparent to me: he’d stumbled on a way to produce Leu-enkephalin at will, but he didn’t know it, so he’d reasoned that some divine wellspring of happiness was responsible. I felt my chest tighten with horror and pity. At least I’d known about my tumour. And even the fucked-up kid in the alley understood that he was just sniffing glue.

  And the people in the pub? Did they know what they were doing? Music, companionship, alcohol, sex … where did the border lie? When did justifiable happiness turn into something as empty, as pathological, as it was for this man?

  I stumbled away, and headed back towards the station. All around me, people were laughing and shouting, holding hands, kissing, and I watched them as if they were flayed anatomical figures, revealing a thousand interlocking muscles working together with effortless precision. Buried inside me, the machinery of happiness recognised itself, again and again.

  I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every last shred of the human capacity for joy into my skull. But to claim any part of it, I’d have to swallow the fact – more deeply than the tumour had ever forced me to swallow it – that happiness itself meant nothing. Life without it was unbearable, but as an end in itself it was not enough. I was free to choose its causes, and to be happy with my choices, but whatever I felt once I’d bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all my choices had been wrong.

  * * *

  Global Assurance had given me until the end of the year to get my act together. If my annual psychological assessment showed that Durrani’s treatment had been successful – whether or not I actually had a job – I’d be thrown to the even less tender mercies of the privatised remnants of Social Security. So I stumbled around in the light, trying to find my bearings.

  On my first day back I woke at dawn. I sat down at the phone and started digging. My old net workspace had been archived; at current rates it was only costing about ten cents a year in storage fees, and I still had $36.20 credit in my account. The whole bizarre informational fossil had passed intact from company to company through four takeovers and mergers. Working through an assortment of tools to decode the obsolete data formats, I dragged fragments of my past life into the present and examined them, until it became too painful to go on.

  The next day I spent twelve hours cleaning the flat, scrubbing every corner – listening to my old njari downloads, stopping only to eat, ravenously. And though I could have refined my taste in food back to that of a twelve-year-old salt-junky, I made the choice – thoroughly un-masochistic, and more pragmatic than virtuous – to crave nothing more toxic than fruit.

  In the following weeks I put on weight with gratifying speed, though when I stared at myself in the mirror, or used morphing software running on the phone, I realised that I could be happy with almost any kind of body. The database must have included people with a vast range of ideal self-images, or who’d died perfectly content with their actual appearances.

  Again, I chose pragmatism. I had a lot of catching up to do, and I didn’t want to die at fifty-five from a heart attack if I could avoid it. There was no point fixating on the unattainable or the absurd, though, so after morphing myself to obesity, and rating it zero, I did the same for the Schwarzenegger look. I chose a lean, wiry body – well within the realms of possibility, according to the software – and assigned it 16 out of 20. Then I started running.

  I took it slowly at first, and though I clung to the image of myself as a child, darting effortlessly from street to street, I was careful never to crank up the joy of motion high enough to mask injuries. When I limped into a chemist’s, looking for liniment, I found something called prostaglandin modulators, anti-inflammatory compounds that allegedly minimise damage without shutting down any vital repair processes. I was sceptical, but the stuff did s
eem to help; the first month was still painful, but I was neither crippled by natural swelling nor rendered so oblivious to danger signs that I tore a muscle.

  And once my heart and lungs and calves were dragged screaming out of their atrophied state, it was good. I ran for an hour every morning, weaving around the local back streets, and on Sunday afternoons I circumnavigated the city itself. I didn’t push myself to attain ever faster times; I had no athletic ambitions whatsoever. I just wanted to exercise my freedom.

  Soon the act of running melted into a kind of seamless whole. I could revel in the thudding of my heart and the feeling of my limbs in motion, or I could let those details recede into a buzz of satisfaction and just watch the scenery, as if from a train. And having reclaimed my body, I began to reclaim the suburbs, one by one. From the slivers of forest clinging to the Lane Cove river to the eternal ugliness of Parramatta Road, I criss-crossed Sydney like a mad surveyor, wrapping the landscape with invisible geodesics then drawing it into my skull. I pounded across the bridges at Gladesville and Iron Cove, Pyrmont, Meadowbank, and the Harbour itself, daring the planks to give way beneath my feet.

  I suffered moments of doubt. I wasn’t drunk on endorphins – I wasn’t pushing myself that hard – but it still felt too good to be true. Was this glue-sniffing? Maybe ten thousand generations of my ancestors had been rewarded with the same kind of pleasure for pursuing game, fleeing danger, and mapping their territory for the sake of survival, but to me it was all just a glorious pastime.

  Still, I wasn’t deceiving myself, and I wasn’t hurting anyone. I plucked those two rules from the core of the dead child inside me, and kept on running.

  * * *

  Thirty was an interesting age to go through puberty. The virus hadn’t literally castrated me, but having eliminated pleasure from sexual imagery, genital stimulation, and orgasm – and having partly wrecked the hormonal regulatory pathways reaching down from the hypothalamus – it had left me with nothing worth describing as sexual function. My body disposed of semen in sporadic joyless spasms, and without the normal lubricants secreted by the prostate during arousal every unwanted ejaculation tore at the urethral lining.

  When all of this changed, it hit hard, even in my state of relative sexual decrepitude. Compared with wet dreams of broken glass, masturbation was wonderful beyond belief, and I found myself unwilling to intervene with the controls to tone it down. But I needn’t have worried that it would rob me of interest in the real thing; I kept finding myself staring openly at people on the street, in shops and on trains, until by a combination of willpower, sheer terror, and prosthetic adjustment I managed to kick the habit.

  The network had rendered me bisexual, and though I quickly ramped my level of desire down considerably from that of the database’s most priapic contributors, when it came to choosing to be straight or gay everything turned to quicksand. The network was not some kind of population-weighted average; if it had been, Durrani’s original hope that my own surviving neural architecture could hold sway would have been dashed whenever the vote was stacked against it. So I was not just 10 to 15 per cent gay; the two possibilities were present with equal force, and the thought of eliminating either felt as alarming, as disfiguring, as if I’d lived with both for decades.

  But was that just the prosthesis defending itself, or was it partly my own response? I had no idea. I’d been a thoroughly asexual twelve-year-old, even before the virus; I’d always assumed that I was straight, and I’d certainly found some girls attractive, but there’d been no moonstruck stares or furtive groping to back up that purely aesthetic opinion. I looked up the latest research, but all the genetic claims I recalled from various headlines had since been discredited, so even if my sexuality had been determined from birth there was no blood test that could tell me, now, what it would have become. I even tracked down my pre-treatment MRI scans, but they lacked the resolution to provide a direct, neuroanatomical answer.

  I didn’t want to be bisexual. I was too old to experiment like a teenager; I wanted certainty, I wanted solid foundations. I wanted to be monogamous – and even if monogamy was rarely an effortless state for anyone, that was no reason to lumber myself with unnecessary obstacles. So who should I slaughter? I knew which choice would make things easier, but if everything came down to a question of which of the 4,000 donors could carry me along the path of least resistance, whose life would I be living?

  Maybe it was all a moot point. I was a thirty-year-old virgin with a history of mental illness, no money, no prospects, no social skills – and I could always crank up the satisfaction level of my only current option, and let everything else recede into fantasy. I wasn’t deceiving myself, I wasn’t hurting anyone. It was within my power to want nothing more.

  * * *

  I’d noticed the bookshop, tucked away in a back street in Leichhardt, many times before. But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I had to stop and laugh.

  I was drenched in sweat from the winter humidity, so I didn’t go in and buy the book. But I peered in through the display towards the counter, and spotted a HELP WANTED sign.

  Looking for unskilled work had seemed futile; the total unemployment rate was 15 per cent, the youth rate three times higher, so I’d assumed there’d always be a thousand other applicants for every job: younger, cheaper, stronger, and certifiably sane. But though I’d resumed my on-line education, I was getting not so much nowhere, fast, as everywhere, slowly. All the fields of knowledge that had gripped me as a child had expanded a hundredfold, and while the prosthesis granted me limitless energy and enthusiasm there was still too much ground for anyone to cover in a lifetime. I knew I’d have to sacrifice 90 per cent of my interests if I was ever going to choose a career, but I still hadn’t been able to wield the knife.

  I returned to the bookshop on Monday, walking up from Petersham Station. I’d fine-tuned my confidence for the occasion, but it rose spontaneously when I heard that there’d been no other applicants. The owner was in his sixties, and he’d just done his back in; he wanted someone to lug boxes around, and take the counter when he was otherwise occupied. I told him the truth: I’d been neurologically damaged by a childhood illness, and I’d only recently recovered.

  He hired me on the spot, for a month’s trial. The starting wage was exactly what Global Assurance were paying me, but if I was taken on permanently I’d get slightly more.

  The work wasn’t hard, and the owner didn’t mind me reading in the back room when I had nothing to do. In a way, I was in heaven – ten thousand books, and no access fees – but sometimes I felt the terror of dissolution returning. I read voraciously, and on one level I could make clear judgements: I could pick the clumsy writers from the skilled, the honest from the fakers, the platitudinous from the inspired. But the prosthesis still wanted me to enjoy everything, to embrace everything, to diffuse out across the dusty shelves until I was no one at all, a ghost in the Library of Babel.

  * * *

  She walked into the bookshop two minutes after opening time, on the first day of spring. Watching her browse, I tried to think clearly through the consequences of what I was about to do. For weeks I’d been on the counter five hours a day, and with all that human contact I’d been hoping for … something. Not wild, reciprocated love at first sight, just the tiniest flicker of mutual interest, the slightest piece of evidence that I could actually desire one human being more than all the rest.

  It hadn’t happened. Some customers had flirted mildly, but I could see that it was nothing special, just their own kind of politeness, and I’d felt nothing more in response than if they’d been unusually, formally, courteous. And though I might have agreed with any bystander as to who was conventionally good-looking, who was animated or mysterious, witty or charming, who glowed with youth or radiated worldliness, I just didn’t care. The 4,000 had all loved very different people, and the envelope that stretched between their farflung charac
teristics encompassed the entire species. That was never going to change, until I did something to break the symmetry myself.

  So for the past week, I’d dragged all the relevant systems in the prosthesis down to 3 or 4. People had become scarcely more interesting to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with this randomly chosen stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive feedback; the higher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but I’d set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.

  By the time she’d chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. I’d struck a pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman rang true. And if everything I’d done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent, I’d had no other way.

  I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement ring – but I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.

  I said, ‘Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?’

  She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down.

  She said, ‘That would be nice. I’m Julia, by the way.’

  ‘I’m Mark.’ We shook hands.

  ‘When do you finish work?’

  ‘Tonight? Nine o’clock.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I said, ‘How about lunch? When do you have lunch?’