by Greg Egan
So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off.
When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have blinked―not one his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation, had he cancelled their laborious preparations a thousand times.
But he didn’t say no.
As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that, given time, might change the course of civilisation.
He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to provide an image he could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he’d bought last year. But he couldn’t recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and drifted helplessly into darkness.
When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or might have been days―punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating, dreamless sleep―he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn’t move his head, or his eyes, he couldn’t even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony. After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his memory.
Later he could hear, too, although there wasn’t much to be heard; people came and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people, or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige.
When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control, no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head just lolled there, he couldn’t watch what they were doing to him, and they made no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind, perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told himself to be patient.
When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort, into his field of view.
It was his arm, his old arm―not the Extra’s.
He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.
Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra’s life-support machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn’t impossible―as his parents’ deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they would have if the transplant had gone ahead.
For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace―he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t even gesture―and they paid no attention. How could his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly where he’d started?
But when he’d calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren’t incompetent at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still, eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of a triumph―personally, he could have done without the set-back, but the media would lap it up.
The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control, was restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could he put this foolishness aside.
Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as such, seemed to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they’d start soon; he was sick of this isolation.
One day, he had a visitor―the first person he’d seen since the operation who was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man, dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair.
By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching, surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the doctors; every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to appear; until now, he’d presumed that they were waiting until he was able to fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised how absurd that was―how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?
Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter.
The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds staring into Gray’s face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or hallucinating. The Extra’s expression hovered between boredom and mild amusement, just as it had in the dream he’d had all those years ago.
The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?
Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.
Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain function studies that had loca
lised identity had been correct, but incomplete―unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.
In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.
One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.
And the other? He had one thing only.
The knowledge of his helplessness.
It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry.
He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He knew he would never master speech, and he couldn’t even manage to convey meaning in his gestures―the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he had simply thrown tantrums―refusing to eat, refusing to cooperate. Then he had recalled his own plans for his old body, in the event of such recalcitrance. Cremation. And realised that, in spite of everything, he didn’t want to die.
He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasn’t Daniel Gray, but a new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12―but this was no comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told him he was Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic confirmation of his long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should he be happy that he’d also proved―if there’d ever been any doubt―that human consciousness was the most physical of things, a spongy grey mess that could be cut up like a starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy that the other Daniel Gray―without a doubt, the more complete Daniel Gray―had achieved his lifelong ambition?
The trainer yanked on his collar.
Meekly, he stepped onto the path.
The lush garden was crowded like never before―this was indeed the party of the decade―and as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud, and even to cheer.
He might have raised his arms in acknowledgement, but the thought did not occur to him.
THE VAT
A Romantic Comedy
Harold’s in love.
There’s no hiding it. You can see it in his eyes, in the heat distribution on his skin, in the twists and whorls of his brain’s magnetic field.
Mary knows he exists, all right. When she looks his way, she doesn’t look through him―not quite. She notices him with a mild frown. She notices him like a splinter in her thumb, or a crease in her lab coat. She notices him like a faint odour; nothing utterly repulsive, but nothing too pleasant either.
Poor Harold was once a promising neurochemist. He discovered a brand new neurotransmitter-antagonist which could make rats lethargic and depressed. However, while proving that injections of this substance, during or immediately after feeding, could produce an aversive association strong enough to make the creatures starve themselves to death, he accidentally jabbed himself with the needle, and soon found he was no longer able even to contemplate experiments with rats. So these days, he works on The Vat.
Harold is in charge of spermatogenesis. In truth, he doesn’t have a lot to do. The computer monitors the temperature, the pH, the concentrations of nutrients, growth factors, and waste products. Four hundred square metres of glass plate are coated with a gelatinous matrix in which spermatogonia, the stem cells, are embedded. When these cells divide, some of their daughter cells are more of the same, the others are primary spermatocytes. Each primary spermatocyte gives rise by meiosis to two secondary spermatocytes, each of which in turn divides into two spermatids. Under the influence of Sertoli cells, also embedded in the matrix, spermatids mature and shed cytoplasm to become spermatozoa.
Harold has seen all of these stages hundreds of times under the microscope, in samples taken for quality control. He ought to find the whole business utterly mundane. Sometimes, though―transfixed for a moment by the image on the screen―he says in dreamy tones of sudden recognition (to no one in particular, often to no one at all), “Yes! This is it. This is life.” Staring at these specks of unthinking biochemical machinery, he grows dizzy with wonder, then numb with awe.
Then he gets on with the job.
Some nights, Harold wakes in the early hours and goes out to walk the empty streets. Why? It’s the hottest summer on record, and he can’t get back to sleep. Why? Unrequited love, of course. Why? Studies of the sequence of neurological events which occur when a subject makes a self-motivated choice between hitting a button and not hitting a button have revealed that the conscious decision-making process starts milliseconds after other parts of the brain are already committed to action. “Will” isn’t the cause of anything, it’s an afterthought for the sake of peace of mind. Since reading this, Harold has stopped making an effort to force his intentions to conform to his behaviour; there doesn’t seem much point now in maintaining the illusion. He just walks.
Even the stillest, quietest night comes alive for Harold. He sees gas molecules spinning through the air, and photons pouring down from the stars, the way some insane medieval monk might have imagined angels and demons battling it out behind every corner and beneath every cobblestone. And the frenzy isn’t confined to his surroundings; the real bedlam is inside him. He pictures it all, vividly, in garish, comic-book, computer-graphic colours: DNA being transcribed, proteins being synthesised, carbohydrates being burnt in flameless enzymatic fires. Everybody’s made up of molecules, and plenty of people know it, but nobody feels it like Harold.
Above all, he dizzily marvels at the fact that the molecules in his brain have managed, collectively, to understand themselves: his neurotransmitters are part of a system that knows what a neurotransmitter is. He can sketch the structures of the central nervous system’s one hundred most important substances; he’s synthesised half of them with his own hands. He’s even viewed real-time images of his brain metabolising radioactively-labelled glucose, revealing which regions were most active as he watched himself thinking about watching himself think.
Harold doesn’t know quite what to make of this molecular self-knowledge. He can’t decide if consciousness is miraculous or meaningless; he hovers between mystical ecstasy and the purest nihilism. Sometimes he feels like a robot, raised by human parents, who’s just discovered the awful truth: poring over his own circuit diagrams, horrified but enthralled; scanning a print-out of his own software, following the flow of control from subroutine to subroutine; understanding, at last, the ultimate shallowness of the deepest reasons for everything he’s ever done, everything he’s ever felt―and dissociating into a mist of a quadrillion purposeless, microscopic causes and effects.
This mood always passes, though, eventually.
Mary is responsible for oogenesis. Primary oocytes undergo meiotic division to yield four cells, but only one of the four is a mature ovum; the others are tiny cells known as polar bodies, and the second division is only completed if fertilisation takes place. In a massive cultured substitute for the ovarian cortex, millions of ova mature and burst from their follicles daily―no parsimonious one a month here. The Vat has no time, and no need, to ponderously mimic the stages of the human menstrual cycle; as in any good assembly line, everything is happening at once.
Harold knows exactly where Mary lives, although of course he’s never been inside, and when he walks by at two in the morning, the narrow terrace house is always black and silent. He hurries past, terrified that she might be awake, and might glance out at the sound of his guilty footsteps.
He knows he ought to forget her. Sometimes he swears that he will. He sees women on the street every day whom he finds a thousand times more attractive. Total strangers treat him with far greater kindness and respect. He knows his mere presence annoys her―and her presence evokes in him more shame and confusion than tenderness, or even lust.
His love is ridiculous. His love is a f
arce. Yet the persistence of his obsession doesn’t surprise him at all. Evolution, he reasons, has not had time to trim human consciousness down to the most productive, most essential elements. His brain is capable of many arbitrary, even self-defeating, modes; perhaps that is the price to pay for its flexibility, perhaps there is no easy sequence of mutations which could remove such disadvantages without sacrificing much more.
As for his own wish to be rid of this miserable, pointless love, Harold knows that this has no more power to change his feelings than it does to change the weather on Jupiter or the electron’s charge-to-mass ratio; it’s merely another aspect of the state of his brain. Whatever admirable progress evolution has made towards lining up intentions with behaviour to pander to the vanities of the conscious mind, has―in Harold’s case, at least―been wasted. The neurological facts refuse to stay decently theoretical; the irony is that this shattering of the illusion of will, although entirely reasonable, is not by any means necessary; after all, the human brain is under no deep biochemical edict to be reasonable. The epiphenomenon of logical thought simply happens to have been more resilient, in this case, than the epiphenomenon of will; in a million other people, as familiar with the facts as Harold, the battle happens to have gone the other way.
Harold wonders, with a mixture of unease and fascination, if his reason is strong enough to move on from this conquest to the ultimate triumph of undermining itself.
When Mary’s ova meet Harold’s sperm, a high proportion are fertilised. Most of the sperm go to waste, but not nearly as many as are lost in vivo. The rates of polyspermy, and fertilisation by defective sperm, are consequently higher, but such abnormalities don’t really matter, in The Vat.