Greg Egan - Worthless

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Worthless

a short story

by Greg Egan

Yes, I'm complacent now, with my well enough paid job, with a wife I can almost

talk to, with a three-year-old son all dark eyes and tousled hair and endearing

clumsiness. We go driving on Sunday afternoons, through suburbs just like our

own, past houses just like our own, an endlessly recurring, mesmerising daydream

under the flawless blue sky. And I whistle an old song of yours, even if I never

dare let the words past my lips:

There's nothing wrong with The Family

That a flame-thrower can't fix

And there's nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth

That couldn't be cured with a well-aimed BRICK

I switch on the radio (when I have a chance), I scan the stations (now and

then), listening for an echo of your voice. Wondering if you've found a new

incarnation. Wondering if I'd recognise it, if you had. Oh, some brain-dead

bitch has stolen one of your best riffs, and chants meaningless drivel over the

top of an endlessly cycling sample -- but my mind shuts her out, and my memory

of you takes over:

Carve my name on your heart, forever

-- with the blunt end of a feather

You said, "I'll stay with you for a lifetime of pain

(just so long as it's over by morning)."

I know what they say, the revisionists, the explainers: you were a glitch, an

aberration; a bug in the software, nothing more. People could never have truly

wanted to hear your "maudlin" voice, your "mealy mouthed whining," your

"smothering self pity."

I did.

I still dream about you, I swear. Do you blame me, if I can't hold on to my

vision of you, lost on these dizzying sunlit plains, numb with contentment, the

way I could when I was desperate, lonely, crippled? When I knew exactly who I

was.

I still want you back. Badly. Sometimes.

But apparently not often, or badly, enough.

When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled

about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than

an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already

assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were

already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock

stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music

they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single,

streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried

in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction

of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and

tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible

for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its

long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.

The system spewed out pap. People paid to hear it. Nothing had changed.

In 2008, I was sixteen years old, working in a fast-food franchise in Sydney's

decaying red light district, scraping the fat off disassembled hamburger

grillers with lukewarm water in the early hours of the morning. I lived alone,

not quite starving on what I had left after paying the rent, too shy and

misanthropic to take in a flatmate. Let alone a lover.

I was woken at four o'clock one Sunday afternoon, when the woman from Azciak

called. I don't know what possessed me to let her in; usually I just waited in

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silence for doorknockers to go away. She didn't look much older than I was, and

her uniform wasn't all that different from mine -- but it fit a great deal

better, and at least they didn't make her wear a fucking baseball cap.

I said, "Why should I let you put your shit inside my head?"

"So you can participate more fully in democracy." She'd been on a training

course on the Gold Coast.

"Democracy is a placebo." I'd read graffiti in Darlinghurst.

"We'll pay you twenty dollars a week."

"Forget it."

"Hard currency: US dollars, yen, euros -- whatever you like."

I signed.

I spent a day in hospital; they didn't need to cut me open, but the scanning

equipment they used, as they threaded the microelectrodes through the blood

vessels of my brain, was bigger than my entire flat. Then, under local

anaesthetic, they slipped the interface chip into a shallow incision at the back

of my neck.

When the engineers arrived to plug their little black box into my phone, they

discovered that I didn't have one, so they ended up paying for that, as well.

Once a day, the black box interrogated the chip ultrasonically, downloading

whatever it had gleaned about my opinions in the preceding twenty-four hours,

then passed the data on to the central computer.

Surprise: my contribution to the Azciak Polls didn't tip any geopolitical

scales. The parliament of whores kept fawning to the Great Powers, cutting

spending and raising prices whenever the IMF said jump, voting as required in

the UN each time another Third World country had to be bombed into submission. I

served Amazonian beef and Idaho potatoes to the cheerful, shaven-headed

psychopaths from the USS Scheisskopf when they flooded Kings Cross on R & R,

dressed in their pigeon-shit-speckled camouflage, looking for something to fuck

that wasn't full of shrapnel, just for a change.

I was one of twenty thousand people whose every desire was accessed and analysed

day by day, cross-tabulated and disseminated to the most powerful decision

makers in the country.

And I knew that it made no difference at all.

Three Azciak creations were big, that year. I saw them all on the video jukebox

which sat in the corner of the restaurant (and which lapsed into McPromotional

mode when it wasn't playing requests -- a prospect which guaranteed a steady

stream of customers more than willing to feed it their change.) Limboland sang

about the transcendental power of rhythm; in their videos, they strode like

giants over the urban wasteland, dispensing the stuff in the form of handfuls of

rainbow-coloured glitter to the infinitely grateful mortals below, who at once

stopped starving/shooting up/fighting each other, and took up robotic formation

dancing instead. Echolalia sighed and moaned about the healing power of love, as

she slithered across a surreal landscape of oiled naked skin, pausing between

verses to suck, stroke or screw some convenient protuberance. MC Liberty ranted

about a world united by ... unity. And good posture: all we had to do was walk

tall.

One freezing, grey afternoon, woken by screaming in the flat downstairs, I lay

in bed for an hour, staring up at the crumbling white plaster of the ceiling,

convinced (for the thousandth time) that I was finally going insane.

There's only one problem with living alone: every thought rebounds off the walls

of your skull, unanswered -- until the whole process of consciousness begins to

seem like nothing so much as talking to yourself. As a child, I'd believed that

God was constantly reading my mind -- which might sound crazy, but if it wasn't

true, then who was this monologue for? Of course I had imaginary friends and

lovers, of course I invented companions to "share" the endless conversation

running through my head -- but sometimes that delusion broke down, and there was

nothing to do but listen to my own rambling, and wonder how many pills it would

take to shut me up for good.

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I didn't even own a radio, but my neighbours were always more than generous with

their own. And I heard you sing:

Don't you ever wonder

Who fills my empty bed?

Who keeps me cold in the darkest hour?

Who leaves the silence unbroken?

Don't you ever wonder

Whose heartbeat it is I don't hear?

Whose arms won't enfold me?

Who won't be beside me?

When life is unkind and unfair?

Won't you ever ASK ME

"Who's going to make tonight

The loneliest night of the year?"

Well, don't ask

You don't want to hear.

It's you.

My life was not transformed. I still wiped McVomit off the toilet floors every

night, still fished the syringes out of the bowls (too buoyant to flush -- and

if they weren't removed quickly, people reused them). I still stared at the

couples walking hand in hand in front of me; still lingered behind them for a

step or two, in the hope that something radiating out from their bodies would

penetrate my own icy flesh.

But I bought myself a radio, and I waded through all the saccharine lies about

peace and harmony, about strength and empowerment, waiting to hear you sing

about my pathetic, irrelevant life. And I think you know how sweet it was, to

hear just one voice of acceptance, just one voice of affirmation, just one voice

-- at last -- that rang true for me.

And on those sleepless afternoons when I lay alone, creating myself out of

nothing, treading water with words, my thoughts no longer came echoing back to

me, proof of my insanity. I knew exactly who I was speaking to, now, in the

conversation that defined me.

I was speaking to you.

"The Loneliest Night of the Year" came in at number six, with a bullet. Not bad,

my friend. Half a dozen more hits soon followed, knocking your human competitors

right out of the charts. The patronising arseholes now claim that this was all

some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, that people bought whatever the Azciak

computers churned out, simply because they knew it "had to be" what they wanted

-- even if, in fact, it wasn't. That's not what they said at the time, of

course; their sycophantic paeans to your "freshness" and "candour" and "bleak

audacity" ran for pages.

I saw "you" one night, on the jukebox screen -- rendered, plausibly enough, as

four young men with guitars, bass, and drums. If I'd fed a dollar into the

machine, I could have had a printout of their "life stories"; for five, an

autographed portrait of the band, the signatures authentic and unique; for ten,

the same with a dedication. I didn't, though. I watched them for a while; their

expressions ranged from distraction to faint embarrassment -- the way some human

musicians look, when they know that you know they're only miming.

So forgive me if I didn't buy the tacky merchandise -- but I saved up my Azciak

payments and bought a second-hand CD player, and I hunted down a music shop

which stocked your albums on "obsolete" disks, for a quarter of the price of the

fashionable new ROMs.

Of course I thought I'd helped shape you. You sang about my life. I couldn't

have written a bar of the music, a word of the lyrics, myself -- but I knew the

computers could take care of those technical details. The wires in my head

weren't there to extract any kind of talent; they were there to uncover my

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Greg Egan - Worthless

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