Egan, Greg - Closer

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Closer

Greg Egan

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

("Intimacy," I once told Sian, after we'd made love, "is the only cure for

solipsism." She laughed and said, "Don't get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it

hasn't even cured me of masturbation.")

True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I

considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the

reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds - but I

also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing

with everyday life.

The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed,

how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I

ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person - any more

than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

If not, I was alone.

I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow knowable, but it

wasn't something I could bring myself to take for granted. I knew there could be

no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed to be compelled.

No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it,

could ever quite convince me that I'd glimpsed the author's soul. Language had

evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to

describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief - all were

defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.

When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with

the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word

associations. After all, many publishers used computer programs - highly

specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of

self-awareness - to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism,

indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either;

on several occasions, I'd been deeply affected by works which I'd later

discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software. This didn't prove that

human literature communicated nothing of the author's inner life, but it

certainly made clear how much room there was for doubt.

Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of

eighteen, the time came for me to "switch." My organic brain was removed and

discarded, and control of my body handed over to my "jewel" - the Ndoli Device,

a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to

imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not

because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced

consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I'd identified myself

solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap device, nothing more,

and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as mourning my emergence from

some primitive stage of embryological neural development. Switching was simply

what humans did now, an established part of the life cycle, even if it was

mediated by our culture, and not by our genes.

Seeing each other die, and observing the gradual failure of their own bodies,

may have helped convince pre-Ndoli humans of their common humanity; certainly,

there were countless references in their literature to the equalising power of

death. Perhaps concluding that the universe would go on without them produced a

shared sense of hopelessness, or insignificance, which they viewed as their

defining attribute.

Now that it's become an article of faith that, sometime in the next few billion

years, physicists will find a way for us to go on without the universe, rather

than vice versa, that route to spiritual equality has lost whatever dubious

logic it might ever have possessed.

Sian was a communications engineer. I was a holovision news editor. We met

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during a live broadcast of the seeding of Venus with terraforming nanomachines -

a matter of great public interest, since most of the planet's

as-yet-uninhabitable surface had already been sold. There were several technical

glitches with the broadcast which might have been disastrous, but together we

managed to work around them, and even to hide the seams. It was nothing special,

we were simply doing our jobs, but afterwards I was elated out of all

proportion. It took me twenty-four hours to realise (or decide) that I'd fallen

in love.

However, when I approached her the next day, she made it clear that she felt

nothing for me; the chemistry I'd imagined "between us" had all been in my head.

I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didn't bring us together again, but I

called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was rewarded. I took

her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots, and I enjoyed

myself immensely, but I didn't see her again for more than a month.

I'd almost given up hope, when she appeared at my door without warning one

night and dragged me along to a "concert" of interactive computerised

improvisation. The "audience" was assembled in what looked like a mock-up of a

Berlin nightclub of the 2050s. A computer program, originally designed for

creating movie scores, was fed with the image from a hover-camera which wandered

about the set. People danced and sang, screamed and brawled, and engaged in all

kinds of histrionics in the hope of attracting the camera and shaping the music.

At first, I felt cowed and inhibited, but Sian gave me no choice but to join in.

It was chaotic, insane, at times even terrifying. One woman stabbed another to

"death" at the table beside us, which struck me as a sickening (and expensive)

indulgence, but when a riot broke out at the end, and people started smashing

the deliberately flimsy furniture, I followed Sian into the melee, cheering.

The music - the excuse for the whole event - was garbage, but I didn't really

care. When we limped out into the night, bruised and aching and laughing, I knew

that at least we'd shared something that had made us feel closer. She took me

home and we went to bed together, too sore and tired to do more than sleep, but

when we made love in the morning I already felt so at ease with her that I could

hardly believe it was our first time.

Soon we were inseparable. My tastes in entertainment were very different from

hers, but I survived most of her favourite "artforms", more or less intact. She

moved into my apartment, at my suggestion, and casually destroyed the orderly

rhythms of my carefully arranged domestic life.

I had to piece together details of her past from throwaway lines; she found it

far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account. Her life had been as

unremarkable as mine: she'd grown up in a suburban, middle-class family, studied

her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone, she'd switched at eighteen.

She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her work, but put ten

times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent, but hated anything

overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.

And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.

For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking - in the sense of

knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her

thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer

time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her

concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude

sense that a novelist pretends to "explain" a character, I could not have

explained Sian.

And if she'd provided me with a running commentary on her mental state, and a

weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the latest psychodynamic

jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of useless words. If I

could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined myself with her

beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her every word, her

every decision, then I still would not have understood so much as a single

moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing, and simply

was.

Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered less. We were happy

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enough together, whether or not we were strangers - and whether or not my

"happiness" and Sian's "happiness" were in any real sense the same.

Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open. She had no great

dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to recount, but she let me

in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did the same, and even,

clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasn't at all offended. Just

puzzled.

"What could it actually mean, though? To know what it's like to be someone

else? You'd have to have their memories, their personality, their body -

everything. And then you'd just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn't know

anything. It's nonsense."

I shrugged. "Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge would be impossible,

but you can always get closer. Don't you think that the more things we do

together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?"

She scowled. "Yes, but that's not what you were talking about five seconds ago.

Two years, or two thousand years, of 'shared experiences' seen through different

eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent together, how could you

know that there was even the briefest instant when they both experienced what

they were going through 'together' in the same way?"

"I know, but . . ."

"If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe you'll stop fretting

about it."

I laughed. "Whatever makes you think I'm as rational as that?"

When the technology became available it was Sian's idea, not mine, for us to try

out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was always impatient to

experience something new. "If we really are going to live forever," she said,

"we'd better stay curious if we want to stay sane."

I was reluctant, but any resistance I put up seemed hypocritical. Clearly, this

game wouldn't lead to the perfect knowledge I longed for (and knew I would never

achieve), but I couldn't deny the possibility that it might be one crude step in

the right direction.

First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to have breasts and a

vagina - what it was like for me, that is, not what it had been like for Sian.

True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even the novelty, to wear

off, but I never felt that I'd gained much insight into her experience of the

body she'd been born with. My jewel was modified only as much as was necessary

to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was scarcely more than

would have been required to work another male body. The menstrual cycle had been

abandoned decades before, and although I could have taken the necessary hormones

to allow myself to have periods, and even to become pregnant (although the

financial disincentives for reproduction had been drastically increased in

recent years), that would have told me absolutely nothing about Sian, who had

done neither.

As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much the same - which

was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris were simply

wired into my jewel as if they'd come from my penis. Even being penetrated made

less difference than I'd expected; unless I made a special effort to remain

aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care who was doing what

to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

At work, no one raised an eyebrow when I turned up as Sian, since many of my

colleagues had already been through exactly the same thing. The legal definition

of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA fingerprint of the body,

according to a standard set of markers, to the serial number of the jewel. When

even the law can keep up with you, you know you can't be doing anything very

radical or profound.

After three months, Sian had had enough. "I never realised how clumsy you

were," she said. "Or that ejaculation was so dull."

Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be women. Brain-damaged

replacement bodies - Extras - had once been incredibly expensive, when they'd

needed to be grown at virtually the normal rate, and kept constantly active so

they'd be healthy enough to use. However, the physiological effects of the

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Egan, Greg - Closer

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