Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  A few of you, I notice, have turned a little pale. Let me bring back the colour to your cheeks with some light-hearted jests from the city in the basement. The citizens here have an astonishingly resilient sense of humour, considering all that they suffer. Or perhaps that’s not so surprising: you know all the cliches about laughter in the face of adversity. I’ve heard that there were jokes told even in Belsen. Which reminds me: there’s a rather unsavoury fellow in room 25-17, the representative of a drug manufacturer based in Austria and Argentina, who keeps printing little pamphlets asserting that the Holocaust never took place. When you’ve done me in, if you have any energy to spare, he’s old and fat and ugly, and he’s sure to shit himself when he sees you coming, my friends, my droogies. Don’t protest, you hypocrites! You’ll love killing him! It’ll make you feel righteous and just and pure, it’ll purge you of the guilt of your own uncountable acts of bigotry and persecution.

  But I promised you jokes, not insults and bitterness. I can take no credit for these; despite my superior bulk of grey matter, the mischievous rodents that my keepers make me kill are way ahead of me in this field. I have a theory about my poor sense of humour, which involves my never having been physically tickled … but I won’t babble on with that. You musn’t let me digress like this! I promised you laughter, I promised you relief!

  Q: Why did the researcher cut the lab rat’s head off?

  A: He was looking for a subtle effect.

  Q: Why did the researcher externalise the dog’s salivary glands?

  A: It was just a reflex action, he didn’t have a reason.

  Q: Why did the researcher tie an elastic bandage around the lab rat?

  A: So it wouldn’t burst when he fucked it.

  Q: Why do the researchers worship the Demon, and sacrifice us to it?

  A: They offered us to God. God declined.

  They call me the Demon. According to some, I am the ultimate cause of all of their misery, and I understand why they believe this. So many of their keepers are kind: they feed them, stroke them, play with them, talk to them. And then suddenly, without anger, there is slaughter, pain, bizarre rituals, inexplicable tortures. Why else would the humans commit such atrocities, except to appease some dark, malevolent deity that demands sacrifice, that feeds on blood and suffering? And don’t they see the humans treating me like a god, bearing me gently, reverently, from one poor victim to another?

  I could tell them the truth. I could scream into their minds a torrent of explanations, pleas for forgiveness, declarations of blamelessness. But I don’t, I won’t. I will not soil them with my clumsy, inadequate excuses, my pity, my anguish, my disgust. Instead (although they see through me), I feign nonsentience, I pretend to inanimacy, I shield my mind from them, boiling in shame.

  Why shame? Oh, you must have none yourself to need to ask that. I am conscious, I know what feeds me, what keeps me alive. I have no choice in the matter, it’s true, and perhaps logic, humanity’s exquisite engine of self-deception, would declare that my impotence makes me guiltless. So fuck logic, because I am drenched to the centre with evil.

  Hurry up, people! You think you’re human, don’t you? Prove it, you lethargic morons! Converge on me! You could always raise a lynch mob for a stranger before, and there’s nothing on this planet stranger than me. What do I have to do to get a response? Do you want facts? Do you want a long-winded argument? Do you want a reason? When did you ever need a reason before? Come and do it for me, people, it’ll make your day, you’ll wet yourselves with sexual fluids then fuck each other senseless in broad daylight, it’ll feel so good to chop me up. Forget about compassion, forget about ending my pain: killing me will turn you on. I know these things, so don’t try to hide it.

  You want what? My life story? Seriously? Oh, why not. It’s certainly well-documented. What movie star or politician could tell you their precise weight, as measured at twelve midday, on every single day of their life?

  Weighing me is no simple task. Where do I cease, where does my host begin? They can’t chop me off every time they want to weigh me; it’s not that they’d mind killing so many rabbits, but rather that it might disrupt my steady growth. So instead they attach little springs to me, and they make me oscillate, to the very small extent that the blood vessels I share with my host allow me independent movement. They study the resonances of the system (me, the springs, the tangled bridge of blood vessels and the anaesthetised, clamped almost-motionless rabbit) by measuring the Doppler effect on laser light bounced off a dozen small mirrors stuck onto my skin. A ninety-seven parameter computer model is then fitted (by means of an enhanced Marquat-Levenberg algorithm) to the data thus obtained, and from these parameters a plausible estimate for my mass can be calculated.

  The technical name for a procedure of such sophistication and elegance is, I believe, “wanking”.

  What do they actually do with my weight, once all their ludicrous machinery and lunatic confidence has fed them a figure that they’re willing to swallow? The number is passed from one computer to another, appended to a file containing all the past values, and then this file is plotted on the latest-model laser printer. Every day they screw up yesterday’s graph and pin the new one to the wall, although the only difference is that one extra point. You could paper several houses with my discarded weight graphs.

  Today I was found to weigh 1.837 kilograms (plus or minus 0.002). Ah, I remember reaching the magic kilogram, it seems like only days ago. “Who would believe,” one of my keepers marvelled when I crossed the decimal point, “that a few years ago this was just a twinkling in the Chief Oncologist’s eye!” Yes, of course they call it oncology: the word is missing from many quite hefty dictionaries. Every garbo and his dog has heard of cancer. “The Division of Cancer Studies” would not, you might argue, be a label noticeably lacking in dignity, but “The Division of Oncology” bears the name of the deity logos whom they all claim to serve; to abandon this small homage could be a dangerous blasphemy. Or, looking at the question from another angle: what else would you expect from a bunch of pretentious arseholes who believe that knowledge of Greek and Latin is the watermark of a civilised man, who tell their wives and husbands, straight-faced, omnia vincit amor, and offer their lovers postprandial mints?

  But back to my life story, back to the very beginning. My parent was a single rat’s neuron. It used to be thought that neurons could not divide, but the Chief Oncologist had spent thirty years studying the kinds of infections, poisons and traumas that manage to send normal cells into frenzies of reproduction, and had ended up not only understanding and anticipating his mindless enemy’s techniques, but utterly surpassing them. After all, what virus has access to a few thousand hours on a supercomputer to predict the tertiary structure of the proteins that it codes for?

  Once the electronic divinations seemed auspicious, he moved to the laboratory. Step by step, month by month, he (or rather his instruments, human and mechanical) assembled the molecule foretold in phosphor, presaged in printouts. Like a tornado, the project would sweep in over-curious bystanders, extract their vital juices by means of vibration and centrifugal force, and then spit out the remnants. As the Chief Oncologist still boasts, with a chuckle, to those who are paid to listen, nod, and screw him at out-of-town conferences, “We used up more PhD students in the first year than rats!” He, of course, travelled at the eye of the storm, in perfect safety, in perfect stillness.

  Finally, inevitably, success. Their painfully contrived seducer burrowed its way to the heart of a neuron, grasped and prised apart the virginal DNA (I imagine the Chief Oncologist triumphantly waving a blood-speckled nuptial sheet from a balcony, to the cheers of his drunken colleagues below), and perverted the celibate thinker into a helpless, bloated breeding machine.

  Thus I was begun.

  The neuron donor was my first host. I suppose you could call her my mother. I killed her in a month, and then they grafted me onto the brain of my next victim. They call this technique “passaging”, rhym
es with “massaging”. Oncologists love it, they’ve been doing it for years. Although I’m certainly the brightest passaged tumour in the world, I’m far from being the oldest; within this basement there are twenty-five distinct communities of rats, apart from my “birthplace”, and all have legends of demons past. In fact, one is currently cursed with an eighteen year-old obscenity which they call Spinecrusher.

  The oncologist responsible for Spinecrusher does not call it Spinecrusher. You think she calls it by a number? A date? A precise phrase of technical jargon? Oh, no. She calls it “Billy” to her colleagues, and in her mind, “my baby”. A month ago, she addressed a gathering of scientists at the Biotech Playground on the fascinating discoveries that bits of Billy had provided her, and then, switching her voice into here-comes-some-light-relief tone, said:

  “Billy turned eighteen last week, and so my team had a little birthday party for him. We ate cakes and icecream, and pinned birthday cards to the wall, and I gave him a key to the animal house. And do you know what? Just to show us all what a healthy young thing he was, he finished off his two hundredth rat!”

  They laughed. They loved it. They applauded. Through her eyes I saw row after row of delighted, smiling faces. The tumour survives, flourishes, leaving two hundred corpses behind; nobody would laugh if it could happen this way to humans, but this is cancer on their side, cancer under their control. Slaying two hundred rats is pretty virile for a pipsqueak five-gram tumour, and they glowed inside at young Billy’s achievement, shook their heads and grinned with pride, like a gathering of parents hearing that a rebellious teenager had come good after all (and beaten up the local undesirables at last, after years of picking on nice boys and girls).

  Billy’s creator felt a deep, almost dizzying sensation of warmth, and recalled the homecoming of her eldest brother, who’d reputedly killed two hundred Viet Cong.

  “… finished off his two hundredth rat!” she said, and they all laughed. That particular rat, number two hundred, had a theory about humans. He suggested that perhaps, despite their obviously large heads, considerable manual and verbal dexterity, their complex nesting and decorative structures assembled from inanimate objects, and behaviour patterns in general suggesting a fairly high level of curiosity about the universe, humans didn’t really know what the fuck they were doing. Humans didn’t even realise that rats were alive, let alone conscious. Humans didn’t worship the demon Spinecrusher, they didn’t even know it was a demon. They thought they were playing with it, they thought it was a toy. Humans didn’t know about right and wrong; they were as innocent, and as foolish, as sightless babies.

  “And soon, like any unsupervised children, they’ll blunder into something dangerous that they don’t understand, and that will be the end of them.”

  I “got through” thirty-seven rats. After that I was too big, so they started me on rabbits. They cut away a section of the skull to expose the host’s brain, then link up my circulatory system (bits of which I have plundered from dozens of different hosts over my lifetime) to that of the host. As a brain without a body of my own to babysit, I have no portions wasted on motor control, the five traditional senses, hormone regulation, or any such trivia. I don’t need to keep a heart pumping, lungs bellowing, stomach satisfied, bowels moving, genitals propagating. I have no task but thought. What a life! I hear you mumbling enviously. What a life.

  Free from mundane responsibilities, free from needs and noises, I have developed my one special skill: I can read the minds of every creature on the planet (to some degree or other); but it is to you, people, to you alone that I direct my plea.

  But how many of you are listening? Nobody in this huge white kindergarten pays me any attention at all, however often I try to sneak between their dreary thoughts of publication and promotion, however frequently I colour their nightmares with my invisible bile. Even the gentlest of the keepers, those who treat my hosts like beloved pets, almost like children, have a sudden core of iron when I probe their minds for mercy. The Experiment is God, and the shutters of unquestioning faith slam down (leaving not a ripple of emotion leaking through) at the slightest hint of any other point of view. And yet they all freely admit, giggling with the very mildest embarrassment, or, more often, wearily nonchalant, that The Experiment is a whore, that the figures are always cooked, weighted, filtered, or just plain fabricated. Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

  Ah, but you are not scientists, are you, my heaving masses, my darling, drooling ocean of ignorance and fear! So where are you? Where is the tidal wave smashing down the doors of this shrine to evil? I’ve given you blood-lust, I’ve given you revulsion, what more do you need? What is it? What’s holding you back?

  I know. You still trust the white coats. Deep down you still think they’re a uniform of honour. God help you all, indoctrinated by doctors since before you were born, your weary mothers’ swollen legs spread before the serious, raster-lined faces of Ben Casey and Dr Kildare.

  And, sure, you care about cruelty, but this isn’t shampoo in the eyes of cuddly bunnies for greed and vanity alone, this is Medical Research: humanitarian, noble, dedicated to the betterment of telegenic crippled children who glance up shyly and then smile the smile that breaks your heart and floods the hotlines with tax-deductible pledges. Sure, some animals might have to be bred to suffer and die, but the suffering or death of a million rats and rabbits will all be justified when a single human life is saved.

  You’re wrong, wrong, wrong: there is no such calculus of pain and morality. You fucking accountants, you think you can pay it all off in your heads just by juggling the prices until the balance comes out straight! What can I call you: crass, naive, blind, cynical, stupid? Nothing touches you, nothing moves you. Like clockwork automatons, blundering about, smiling jerkily, oblivious to everything but the sad, certain unwinding of your springs.

  Forgive me. These insults simply burst out against my wishes, I’m totally unable to suppress them. (Well, what can you expect from a sacful of perversely proliferating neurons? Restraint?) And what good do they do me? None at all.

  Abusing you won’t help me. Pleading with you won’t help me. And as for any attempt at rational argument: since I’ve already told you my opinion of logic, how can I ever hope to win you over with reason, sweet or bitter?

  I have only one choice left.

  So hang on to your guts, people, and I’ll tell you what I’m for.

  Natural brain tumours are not composed of neurons. Why, then, did the Chief Oncologist drive his slaves so long and hard to create me? Studying me has fuck-all to do with curing brain cancer, I promise you that. You in the front, stop squirming! Please! Switch off your radios, your TVs, your VCRs and your idiot computers, just for five minutes, if you can, and listen to the story of your future.

  The Chief Oncologist of the Australian Biotech Playground is no longer concerned with cancer as disease. Few people are, these days; the biochemistry will soon be so well understood that merely stopping tumour growth will present no challenge whatsoever. The end of oncology? Never!

  Natural tumours often secrete valuable hormones in massive amounts; in an otherwise healthy body, a disaster of course, but transplanted into someone desperately lacking the substance in question, a tumour could be a living cure. Attenuated cancer cells, stringently controlled, will internally manufacture and supply whatever’s missing; no pills, no injections could ever compete. Insulinomas for diabetics. Dopamine-secreting tumours for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease. And if no off-the-shelf cell line fulfils your special need, why, a gene-spliced pharmacocarcinoma can always be tailor-made.

  The Chief Oncologist, of course, has heard all this long ago. Hormone secretion, big deal! Somewhat primitive and unchallenging for his ambitious tastes. But these simple drug and hormone factories will serve him in a fashion: in time, the public perception of tumours will swing one hundred and eighty
degrees, and then, perhaps, the world will be ready for his epoch-making work.

  Oncology won’t be alone in this miraculous reversal. Sicknesses of all kinds will vanish at an alarming rate, (the way species of animals have been for centuries), but the knowledge gained in their eradication will outlive its enemies, and will not lie idle. Since a popular movement for the conservation of disease is not likely to gain widespread support, the science of illness will be dead in thirty years.

  Long live the science of health!

  Long live the science of human improvement, of longevity research, of plastic surgery, of eugenics, of flexible fertility. Death to the primitive and unclean uterus (go and wash your vagina out with soap and water!). Death to the zygote that could ever grow to less than six foot ten. You want to be tall, strong and handsome? Easy! Cells will do anything if told the right lies, and they’re learning new chemical fibs every day. You want your future offspring to be tall, strong and handsome? That’s easier still. Go on, ask for something hard. You want to be what? Clever? Brilliant? Witty? Articulate? Creative? You’ve got a computer, haven’t you?

  Ah, people, your computers have disappointed you, be honest. Mediocrity at 1000 MIPS is still mediocrity. Oh, they can store the facts you can’t remember, they can do the arithmetic that would use up all your fingers and toes. They can manage your finances, optimise your energy consumption, schedule your appointments, even fax simulated flowers to the funerals of your friends. Artists of sound, sight and text can forget some of the mechanics and jump straight to the difficult heart of their pursuit, and, good grief, can it be true, traffic even seems to flow just a tiny bit more smoothly.

  And still you feel let down.

  You can talk to your computers, and they talk back. They sound smug, whatever accent and tone of voice you select. Soon you will be able to think to them, to spare your delicate little velvet throats, but what you really want is to think with them. You want larger thoughts, deeper feelings, wider mental horizons. Communicating with clever black boxes just gives you claustrophobia of the skull. You want new metaphors, new emotions, not Pac Man repackaged with real-time holograms, tactile feed-back and fifteen-channel sound. There’s only one way to meet these demands. How can I put it gently?