Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  “No.” Adam hesitated. “But it’s not just the house they could take? The Estonian accounts …?”

  Gina said, “Opening those accounts under your digital residency makes some things easier, but it doesn’t put the money out of reach of the courts.”

  “Right.”

  When they hung up, Adam paced the office. Could it really be so hard to defend the old man’s will? He wasn’t even sure what disincentives were in place to stop the lawyers from drawing out proceedings like this for as long as they wished. Maybe a director of one of the entities he depended on was both empowered, and duty-bound, to rein them in if they were behaving with conspicuous profligacy? But Adam himself couldn’t sack them, or compel them to follow his instructions, just because Estonia had been nice enough to classify him as a person for certain limited purposes.

  The old man had believed he was setting him up in style, but all the machinery that was meant to support him just made him feel trapped. What if he gave up the house and walked away? If he cashed in his dollar and euro accounts for some mixture of blockchain currencies before the courts swept in and froze his funds, that might be easier to protect and enjoy without the benefits of a Social Security number, a birth certificate or a passport. But those currencies were all insanely volatile, and trying to hedge them against each other was like trying to save yourself in a skydiving accident by clutching your own feet.

  He couldn’t leave the country by any lawful means without deactivating his body so it could be sent as freight. Loadstone had promised to facilitate any trips he wished to make to any of the thirty-nine jurisdictions where he could walk the streets unchaperoned, as proud and free as the pizza bots that had blazed the trail, but the idea of returning to the company’s servers, or even being halted and left in limbo for the duration of the flight, filled him with dread.

  For now, it seemed that he was stuck in the Valley. All he could do was find a way to make the best of it.

  4

  Sitting on two upturned wooden crates in an alley behind the nightclub, they could still hear the pounding bass-line of the music escaping through the walls, but at least it was possible to hold a conversation here.

  Carlos sounded like the loneliest person Adam had ever met. Did he tell everyone so much, so soon? Adam wanted to believe that he didn’t, and that something in his own demeanor had inspired this beautiful man to confide in him.

  Carlos had been in the country for twelve years, but he was still struggling to support his sister in El Salvador. She’d raised him after their parents died – his father when he was six months old, his mother when he was five. But now his sister had three children of her own, and the man who’d fathered them was no good to her.

  “I love her,” he said. “I love her like my own life, I don’t want to be rid of her. But the kids are always sick, or something’s broken that needs fixing. It never fucking stops.”

  Adam had no one relying on him, no one expecting him to do anything. His own finances waxed and waned, but at least when the money was scarce no one else suffered, or made him feel that he was letting them down.

  “So what do you do to relieve the stress?” he asked.

  Carlos smiled sadly. “It used to be smoking, but that got too expensive.”

  “So you quit?”

  “Only the smoking.”

  As Adam turned toward him, his mind went roaming down the darkness of the alley, impatiently following the glistening thread, unable to shake off the sense of urgency that told him: take hold of this now, or it will be lost forever. He didn’t need to linger in their beds for long; just a few samples of that annihilating euphoria were enough to stand in for all the rest. Maybe that was the engine powering everything that followed, but what it dragged along behind it was like a newlyweds’ car decorated by a thousand exuberant well-wishers.

  He tried grabbing the rattling cans of their fights, running his fingers over the rough texture of all the small annoyances and slights, mutually wounded pride, frustrated good intentions. Then he felt the jagged edge of a lacerating eruption of doubt.

  But something had happened that blunted the edge, then folded it in on itself again and again, leaving a seam, a ridge, a scar. Afterward, however hard things became, there was no questioning the foundations. They’d earned each other’s trust, and it was unshakeable.

  He pushed on into the darkness, trying to understand. Wherever he walked, light would follow, and his task was to make his way down as many side-streets as possible before he woke.

  This time, though, the darkness remained unbroken. He groped his way forward, unnerved. They’d ended up closer than ever – he knew that with as much certainty as he knew anything. So why did he feel as if he was stumbling blindly through the rooms of Bluebeard’s castle, and the last thing he should want to summon was a lamp?

  5

  Adam spent three weeks in the old man’s home theater, watching every one of the old man’s shows, and an episode or two from each of the biggest hits of the last ten years. There could only be one thing more embarrassing than pitching an idea to a studio and discovering that he was offering them a story that they’d already produced for six seasons, and that would be attempting to recycle, not just any old show, but an actual Adam Morris script.

  Most of the old man’s work felt as familiar as if he’d viewed it a hundred times in the editing suite, but sometimes a whole side plot appeared that seemed to have dropped from the sky. Could the studios have fucked with things afterward, when the old man was too sick and distracted to notice? Adam checked online, but the fan sites that would have trumpeted any such tampering were silent. The only re-cuts had taken place in another medium entirely.

  He desperately needed to write a new show. Money aside, how else was he going to pass the time? The old man’s few surviving friends had all made it clear before he died that they wanted nothing to do with his side-load. He could try to make the most of his cybernetic rejuvenation; his skin felt exactly like skin, from inside and out, and his ridiculously plausible dildo of a cock wouldn’t disappoint anyone if he went looking for ways to use it – but the truth was, he’d inherited the old man’s feelings for Carlos far too deeply to brush them aside and pretend that he was twenty again, with no attachments and no baggage. He didn’t even know yet if he wanted to forge an identity entirely his own, or to take the other path and seek to become the old man more fully. He couldn’t “betray” a lover ten years dead who was, in the end, nothing more to him than a character in someone else’s story – whatever he’d felt as he’d dragged the old man’s memories into his own virtual skull. But he wasn’t going to sell himself that version of things before he was absolutely sure it was the right one.

  The only way to know who he was would be to create something new. It didn’t even need to be a story that the old man wouldn’t have written himself, had he lived a few years longer … just so long as it didn’t turn out that he’d already written it, pitched it unsuccessfully, and stuck it in a drawer. Adam pictured himself holding a page from each version up to the light together, bringing the words into alignment, trying to decide if the differences were too many, or too few.

  6

  “Sixty thousand dollars in one week?” Adam was incredulous.

  Gina replied calmly, “The billables are all itemized. I can assure you, what we’re charging is really quite modest for a case of this complexity.”

  “The money was his, he could do what he liked with it. End of story.”

  “That’s not what the case law says.” Gina was beginning to exhibit micro-fidgets, as if she’d found herself trapped at a family occasion being forced to play a childish video game just to humor a nephew she didn’t really like. Whether or not she’d granted Adam personhood in her own mind, he certainly wasn’t anyone in a position to give her instructions, and the only reason she’d taken his call must have been some sop to Adam’s comfort that the old man had managed to get written into his contract with the firm.

  “
All right. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  In the silence after he’d hung up, Adam recalled something that Carlos had said to the old man, back in New York one sweltering July, taking him aside in the middle of the haggling over a second-hand air-conditioner they were attempting to buy. “You’re a good person, cariño, so you don’t see it when people are trying to cheat you.” Maybe he’d been sincere, or maybe “good” had just been a tactful euphemism for “unworldly”, though if the old man really had been so trusting, how had Adam ended up with the opposite trait? Was cynicism some kind of default, wired into the template from which the whole side-loading process had started?

  Adam found an auditor with no connections to the old man’s lawyers, picking a city at random and then choosing the person with the highest reputation score with whom he could afford a ten-minute consultation. Her name was Lillian Adjani.

  “Because these companies have no shareholders,” she explained, “there’s not that much that needs to be disclosed in their public filings. And I can’t just go to them myself and demand to see their financial records. A court could do that, in principle, and you might be able to find a lawyer who’d take your money to try to make that happen. But who would their client be?”

  Adam had to admire the way she could meet his gaze with an expression of sympathy, while reminding him that – shorn of the very constructs he was trying to scrutinize – for administrative purposes he didn’t actually exist.

  “So there’s nothing I can do?” Maybe he was starting to confuse his second-hand memories of the real world with all the shows he’d been watching, where people just followed the money trail. The police never seemed to need to get the courts involved, and even civilians usually had some supernaturally gifted hacker at their disposal. “We couldn’t … hire an investigator … who could persuade someone to leak …?” Mike Ehrmantraut would have found a way to make it happen in three days flat.

  Ms Adjani regarded him censoriously. “I’m not getting involved in anything illegal. But maybe you have something yourself, already in your possession, that could help you more than you realize.”

  “Like what?”

  “How computer-savvy was your … predecessor?”

  “He could use a word processor and a web browser. And Skype.”

  “Do you still have any of his devices?”

  Adam laughed. “I don’t know what happened to his phone, but I’m talking to you from his laptop right now.”

  “OK. Don’t get your hopes too high, but if there were files containing financial records or legal documents that he received and then deleted, then unless he went out of his way to erase them securely, they might still be recoverable.”

  Ms Adjani sent him a link for a piece of software she trusted to do the job. Adam installed it, then stared numbly at the catalog of eighty-three thousand “intelligible fragments” that had shown up on the drive.

  He started playing with the filtering options. When he chose “text”, portions of scripts began emerging from the fog – some instantly recognizable, some probably abandoned dead-ends. Adam averted his gaze, afraid of absorbing them into his subconscious if they weren’t already buried there. He had to draw a line somewhere.

  He found an option called “financial”, and when that yielded a blizzard of utility bills, he added all the relevant keywords he could think of.

  There were bills from the lawyers, and bills from Loadstone. If Gina was screwing him, she’d been screwing the old man as well, because the hourly rate hadn’t changed. Adam was beginning to feel foolish; he was right to be vigilant about his precarious situation, but if he let that devolve into full-blown paranoia he’d just end up kicking all the support structures out from beneath his feet.

  Loadstone hadn’t been shy with their fees either. Adam hadn’t known before just how much his body had cost, but given the generally excellent engineering it was difficult to begrudge the expense. There was an item for the purchase of the template, and then one for every side-loading session, broken down into various components. “Squid operator?” he muttered, bemused. “What the fuck?” But he wasn’t going to start convincing himself that they’d blinded the old man with technobabble. He’d paid what he’d paid, and in the hospital he’d given Adam every indication that he’d been happy with the result.

  “Targeted occlusions?” Meaning blood clots in the brain? The old man had left him login details allowing him post-mortem access to all his medical records; Adam checked, and there had been no clots.

  He searched the web for the phrase in the context of side-loading. The pithiest translation he found was: “The selective non-transferral of a prescribed class of memories or traits.”

  Which meant that the old man had held something back, deliberately. Adam was an imperfect copy of him, not just because the technology was imperfect, but because he’d wanted it that way.

  “You lying piece of shit.” Toward the end, the old man had rambled on about his hope that Adam would outdo his own achievements, but judging from his efforts so far he wasn’t even going to come close. Three attempts at new scripts had ended up dead in the water. It wasn’t Ryan and his family who’d robbed him of the most valuable part of the inheritance.

  Adam sat staring at his hands, contemplating the possibilities for a life worth living without the only skill the old man had ever possessed. He remembered joking to Carlos once that they should both train as doctors and go open a free clinic in San Salvador. “When we’re rich.” But Adam doubted that his original, let alone the diminished version, was smart enough to learn to do much more than empty bed-pans.

  He switched off the laptop and walked into the master bedroom. All of the old man’s clothes were still there, as if he’d fully expected them to be used again. Adam took off his own clothes and began trying on each item in turn, counting the ones he was sure he recognized. Was he Gerald’s Mr Sixty Percent, or was it more like forty, or thirty? Maybe the pep talks had been a kind of sarcastic joke, with the old man secretly hoping that the final verdict would be that there was only one Adam Morris, and like the studios’ laughable “deep-learning” bots, even the best technology in the world couldn’t capture his true spark.

  He sat on the bed, naked, wondering what it would be like to go out in some wild bacchanalia with a few dozen robot fetishists, fucking his brains out and then dismembering him to take the pieces home as souvenirs. It wouldn’t be hard to organize, and he doubted that any part of his corporate infrastructure would be obliged to have him resurrected from Loadstone’s daily backups. The old man might have been using him to make some dementedly pretentious artistic point, but he would never have been cruel enough to render suicide impossible.

  Adam caught sight of a picture of the two men posing hammily beneath the Hollywood sign, and found himself sobbing dryly with, of all things, grief. What he wanted was Carlos beside him – making this bearable, putting it right. He loved the dead man’s dead lover more than he was ever going to love anyone else, but he still couldn’t do anything worthwhile that the dead man could have done.

  He pictured Carlos with his arms around him. “Shh, it’s not as bad as you think – it never is, cariño. We start with what we’ve got, and just fill in the pieces as we go.”

  You’re really not helping, Adam replied. Just shut up and fuck me, that’s all I’ve got left. He lay down on the bed and took his penis in his hand. It had seemed wrong before, but he didn’t care now: he didn’t owe either of them anything. And Carlos, at least, would probably have taken pity on him, and not begrudged him the unpaid guest appearance.

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of stubble against his thighs, but he wasn’t even capable of scripting his own fantasy: Carlos just wanted to talk.

  “You’ve got friends,” he insisted. “You’ve got people looking out for you.”

  Adam had no idea if he was confabulating freely, or if this was a fragment of a real conversation long past, but context was everything. “Not any
more, cariño. Either they’re dead, or I’m dead to them.”

  Carlos just stared back at him skeptically, as if he’d made a ludicrously hyperbolic claim.

  But that skepticism did have some merit. If he knocked on Cynthia’s door she’d probably try to stab him through the heart with a wooden stake, but the amiable stranger who’d sat beside him at the funeral had been far keener to talk than Adam. The fact that he still couldn’t place the man no longer seemed like a good reason to avoid him; if he came from the gaps, he must know something about them.

  Carlos was gone. Adam sat up, still feeling gutted, but no amount of self-pity was going to improve his situation.

  He found his phone, and checked under “Introductions”; he hadn’t erased the contact details. The man was named Patrick Auster. Adam called the number.

  7

  “You go first,” Adam said. “Ask me anything. That’s the only fair trade.” They were sitting in a booth in an old-style diner named Caesar’s, where Auster had suggested they meet. The place wasn’t busy, and the adjacent booths were empty, so there was no need to censor themselves or talk in code.

  Auster gestured at the generous serving of chocolate cream pie that Adam had begun demolishing. “Can you really taste that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it’s the same as before?”

  Adam wasn’t going to start hedging his answers with quibbles about the ultimate incomparability of qualia and memories. “Exactly the same.” He pointed a thumb toward the diners three booths behind him. “I can tell you without peeking that someone’s eating bacon. And I think it’s apparent that there’s nothing wrong with my hearing or vision, even if my memory for faces isn’t so good.”

  “Which leaves …”