Egan, Greg - The Extra

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The Extra

Greg Egan

Daniel Gray didn't merely arrange for his Extras to live in a building within

the grounds of his main residence - although that in itself would have been

shocking enough. At the height of his midsummer garden party, he had their

trainer march them along a winding path which took them within metres of

virtually every one of his wealthy and powerful guests.

There were five batches, each batch a decade younger than the preceding one,

each comprising twenty-five Extras (less one or two here and there; naturally,

some depletion had occurred, and Gray made no effort to hide the fact). Batch A

were forty-four years old, the same age as Gray himself. Batch E, the

four-year-olds, could not have kept up with the others on foot, so they followed

behind, riding an electric float.

The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair -

and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in

styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far

as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against

it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was

acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and

causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like

naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were

not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures'

totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than

human.

The parade was a great success. Everyone applauded demurely as it passed by -

in the context, an extravagant gesture of approval. They weren't applauding the

Extras themselves, however impressive they were to behold; they were applauding

Daniel Gray for his audacity in breaking the taboo.

Gray could only guess how many people in the world had Extras; perhaps the

wealthiest ten thousand, perhaps the wealthiest hundred thousand. Most owners

chose to be discreet. Keeping a stock of congenitally brain-damaged clones of

oneself - in the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the

techniques were perfected), as the recipients of brain transplants - was not

illegal, but nor was it widely accepted. Any owner who went public could expect

a barrage of anonymous hate mail, intense media scrutiny, property damage,

threats of violence - all the usual behaviour associated with the public debate

of a subtle point of ethics. There had been legal challenges, of course, but

time and again the highest courts had ruled that Extras were not human beings.

Too much cortex was missing; if Extras deserved human rights, so did half the

mammalian species on the planet. With a patient, skilled trainer, Extras could

learn to run in circles, and to perform the simple, repetitive exercises that

kept their muscles in good tone, but that was about the limit. A dog or a cat

would have needed brain tissue removed to persuade it to live such a boring

life.

Even those few owners who braved the wrath of the fanatics, and bragged about

their Extras, generally had them kept in commercial stables - in the same city,

of course, so as not to undermine their usefulness in a medical emergency, but

certainly not within the electrified boundaries of their own homes. What ageing,

dissipated man or woman would wish to be surrounded by reminders of how healthy

and vigorous they might have been, if only they'd lived their lives differently?

Daniel Gray, however, found the contrasting appearance of his Extras entirely

pleasing to behold, given that he, and not they, would be the ultimate

beneficiary of their good health. In fact, his athletic, clean-living brothers

had already supplied him with two livers, one kidney, one lung, and quantities

of coronary artery and mucous membrane. In each case, he'd had the donor put

down, whether or not it had remained strictly viable; the idea of having

imperfect Extras in his collection offended his aesthetic sensibilities.

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After the appearance of the Extras, nobody at the party could talk about

anything else. Perhaps, one stereovision luminary suggested, now that their host

had shown such courage, it would at last became fashionable to flaunt one's

Extras, allowing full value to be extracted from them; after all, considering

the cost, it was a crime to make use of them only in emergencies, when their

pretty bodies went beneath the surgeon's knife.

Gray wandered from group to group, listening contentedly, pausing now and then

to pluck and eat a delicate spice-rose or a juicy claret-apple (the entire

garden had been designed specifically to provide the refreshments for this

annual occasion, so everything was edible, and everything was in season). The

early afternoon sky was a dazzling, uplifting blue, and he stood for a moment

with his face raised to the warmth of the sun. The party was a complete success.

Everyone was talking about him. He hadn't felt so happy in years.

"I wonder if you're smiling for the same reason I am."

He turned. Sarah Brash, the owner of Continental Bio-Logic, and a recent former

lover, stood beside him, beaming in a faintly unnatural way. She wore one of the

patterned scarfs which Gray had made available to his guests; a variety of

gene-tailored insects roamed the garden, and her particular choice of scarf

attracted a bee whose painless sting contained a combination of a mild stimulant

and an aphrodisiac.

He shrugged. "I doubt it."

She laughed and took his arm, then came still closer and whispered, "I've been

thinking a very wicked thought."

He made no reply. He'd lost interest in Sarah a month ago, and the sight of her

in this state did nothing to rekindle his desire. He had just broken off with

her successor, but he had no wish to repeat himself. He was trying to think of

something to say that would be offensive enough to drive her away, when she

reached out and tenderly cupped his face in her small, warm hands.

Then she playfully seized hold of his sagging jowls, and said, in tones of mock

aggrievement, "Don't you think it was terribly selfish of you, Daniel? You gave

me your body . . . but you didn't give me your best one."

Gray lay awake until after dawn. Vivid images of the evening's entertainment

kept returning to him, and he found them difficult to banish. The Extra Sarah

had chosen - C7, one of the twenty-four-year-olds - had been muzzled and tightly

bound throughout, but it had made copious noises in its throat, and its eyes had

been remarkably expressive. Gray had learnt, years ago, to keep a mask of mild

amusement and boredom on his face, whatever he was feeling; to see fear,

confusion, distress and ecstasy, nakedly displayed on features that, in spite of

everything, were unmistakably his own, had been rather like a nightmare of

losing control.

Of course, it had also been as inconsequential as a nightmare; he had not lost

control for a moment, however much his animal look-alike had rolled its eyes,

and moaned, and trembled. His appetite for sexual novelty aside, perhaps he had

agreed to Sarah's request for that very reason: to see this primitive aspect of

himself unleashed, without the least risk to his own equilibrium.

He decided to have the creature put down in the morning; he didn't want it

corrupting its clone-brothers, and he couldn't be bothered arranging to have it

kept in isolation. Extras had their sex drives substantially lowered by drugs,

but not completely eliminated - that would have had too many physiological

side-effects - and Gray had heard that it took just one clone who had discovered

the possibilities, to trigger widespread masturbation and homosexual behaviour

throughout the batch. Most owners would not have cared, but Gray wanted his

Extras to be more than merely healthy; he wanted them to be innocent, he wanted

them to be without sin. He was not a religious man, but he could still

appreciate the emotional power of such concepts. When the time came for his

brain to be moved into a younger body, he wanted to begin his new life with a

sense of purification, a sense of rebirth.

However sophisticated his amorality, Gray freely admitted that at a certain

level, inaccessible to reason, his indulgent life sickened him, as surely as it

sickened his body. His family and his peers had always, unequivocally,

encouraged him to seek pleasure, but perhaps he had been influenced -

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subconsciously and unwillingly - by ideas which still prevailed in other social

strata. Since the late twentieth century, when - in affluent countries -

cardiovascular disease and other "diseases of lifestyle" had become the major

causes of death, the notion that health was a reward for virtue had acquired a

level of acceptance unknown since the medieval plagues. A healthy lifestyle was

not just pragmatic, it was righteous. A heart attack or a stroke, lung cancer or

liver disease - not to mention AIDS - was clearly a punishment for some vice

that the sufferer had chosen to pursue. Twenty-first century medicine had

gradually weakened many of the causal links between lifestyle and life

expectancy - and the advent of Extras would, for the very rich, soon sever them

completely - but the outdated moral overtones persisted nonetheless.

In any case, however fervently Gray approved of his gluttonous, sedentary,

drug-hazed, promiscuous life, a part of him felt guilty and unclean. He could

not wipe out his past, nor did he wish to, but to discard his ravaged body and

begin again in blameless flesh would be the perfect way to neutralise this

irrational self-disgust. He would attend his own cremation, and watch his

"sinful" corpse consigned to "hellfire"! Atheists, he decided, are not immune to

religious metaphors; he had no doubt that the experience would be powerfully

moving, liberating beyond belief.

Three months later, Sarah Brash's lawyers informed him that she had conceived a

child (which, naturally, she'd had transferred to an Extra surrogate), and that

she cordially requested that Gray provide her with fifteen billion dollars to

assist with the child's upbringing.

His first reaction was a mixture of irritation and amusement at his own

naivety. He should have suspected that there'd been more to Sarah's request than

sheer perversity. Her wealth was comparable to his own, but the prospect of

living for centuries seemed to have made the rich greedier than ever; a fortune

that sufficed for seven or eight decades was no longer enough.

On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter to court - and

then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of winning. He'd had a

vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility, at least

on every occasion he'd had a sperm count measured. He couldn't prove that he

hadn't had the operation temporarily reversed, since that could now be done with

hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the Extra was the father of the

child, and he could prove that. Although the Extras' brain damage resulted

solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were

genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA

which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What's more,

these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered

by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray's biotechnology advisers

assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice,

virtually impossible.

Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the father, and hoped

to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the upkeep of its human

offspring. Gray's legal experts were substantially less reassuring than his

geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadn't raped her - as she no doubt

knew, he'd taped everything that had happened that night - but that wasn't the

point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have deprived her of the

right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also showed, Gray had known

full well what was happening, and had clearly approved. That the late Extra had

been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant.

After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray finally gave up

worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years, and was unlikely

to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his remaining Extras

vasectomised - to prove to the courts, when the time came, that he was not

irresponsible - and then he pushed the whole business out of his mind.

Almost.

A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while that he was

dreaming, he saw the night's events re-enacted, except that this time it was he

who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarah's hands and tongue, while the Extra

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Egan, Greg - The Extra

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