An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  The most oversaturated advertisement of all has lots of confused shots of surfers and hang-gliders and glasses of some bubbly black liquid, as if they were all somehow connected. The link to connect them is not obvious. It does not exist.

  Then there is a short film about fishing in the Netherlands.

  It is extremely boring.

  Then there is a short film about mountain-climbing in New Zealand.

  It is extremely boring.

  Then there are trailers for ET and Revenge of the Jedi. These are fascinating but it is sad to see so much money and effort all going in almost the same direction. Altered States is the only film I can think of which did something different and intelligent with state-of-the-art effects technology. Everybody else plays it safe.

  That’s just the way it is.

  Then, just before the interval, is something more obscene than all the advertisements, something truly gut-wrenching. A brightly coloured mouth (done in the ‘new’ style of animation where line drawings are photographed on high-contrast sheet film, which is then backlit and filmed through coloured filters and diffusion filters) proceeds to devour ice-creams, popcorn, chocolates, and potato crisps, then a wide variety of garishly coloured drinks. Mumbled noises of pleasure and lip-licking ooze through the speakers. A sequence of inane, offensive captions interact with the revolting mouth, terminating with ‘Got the munchies?’ and then ‘Head for the snack bar!’. I can’t help myself: I vomit at high velocity right into the smug, bright red mouth.

  Only kidding. I’ve eaten too little recently.

  Seventy per cent of the audience rush out at once to buy unhealthy pseudofood at a hundred and forty per cent of the normal retail price.

  Then there is wallpaper music and scratched slides again (exactly the same slides), and then some (different) film advertisements.

  Certainly builds up the suspense.

  Huh.

  And finally the feature. The audience has waited so long that they clap idiotically although there is nobody to hear them except the projectionist and surely his booth is too soundproofed.

  Just as the MGM lion appears on the screen, there is a power failure: projector, air-conditioning, everything.

  With the air-conditioning off, the heat rises as rapidly as the jeering of the audience. Some hysterical twelve-year-old boys begin to chase each other around the front of the cinema; the usherettes hurriedly run up and bonk them with their torches.

  After fifteen minutes or so, most of the audience has left, and the manager comes in and stands in front of the screen with a battery-powered megaphone (instant involuntary national guard images quickly dismissed) and yells:

  —Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid today’s program has been cancelled. Your money will be refunded. There is a city-wide power failure due to a fire, and the SEC tell us they can’t guarantee restoration for about two hours. The eight o’clock session should be running as usual.

  So we all leave. Where would my computer-optimised bus service be now? Grounded. Me and my bright ideas. Of course, the concept really at fault is power distribution. Power should be generated on the spot by either solar energy or hydrogen-oxygen recombination (electrolysed originally by solar energy).

  Not in a million years.

  The pavement stinks as I walk back to the terminus. The air stinks. The shop windows are covered with sweat. The plastic mannikins are melting slowly. The motorists are all irritably honking at the policemen directing the traffic because the lights are not working. No red, green, or amber.

  The bus driver looks at me with barely veiled disgust. I realise that my aluminium-foil mummy-type clothing is reflecting the sun straight into his eyes. I hastily turn to change the angle.

  After five minutes, the bus groans into motion. I lift my head as close to the window as possible, but it is too high.

  I have seen the scenery on this bus route a few dozen dozen times before, so I pan around the posters inside the bus.

  IF YOU NEED A DRINK TO BE SOCIAL, THEN YOU’RE NOT A SOCIAL DRINKER proclaims one.

  And there is an anti-vivisection one and a building society one and an irrigation equipment one.

  I gradually fall asleep, and dream of a computer-optimised bus service powered by solar energy with ten back-ups of everything in case of malfunction.

  Then I dream of lying in a pool of warm blood in the middle of a desert. I have been separated from the others. I have been speared through the skull and all the films have been ruined. Yet I am still alive. A big, friendly Chesapeake Bay Retriever is licking up the pool of blood and wagging his tail.

  I wake to find that I’m lying in a pool of warm sweat and that the bus has stopped at the far end of the route. No matter; my house is only a few blocks away.

  I walk slowly. Luckily the sun, now low in the sky, is behind not in front of me.

  Tautology!

  But that’s half the fun.

  Isn’t it?

  When I get home I drink five glasses of water, each glass tasting worse than the one before. Anything I drink must be inferior to the perfect (etc.) and my stomach is swollen and heavy and it splashes when I walk.

  For amusement, I walk out into the back yard and say, very softly:

  —Nobody can say I’m cold!

  Just to see if he’s given up.

  This time I’m honoured with a personal appearance. The first since he vanished in the elevator. But no, it’s just a holographic projection, which stands before me and says:

  —You sir are cold! Absolutely frigid!

  I take a swipe at the image and it vanishes. He has become vvvvery impudent lately. There is nothing I can do. Perhaps the elevator is in a geosynchronous orbit. The hemisphere has never reappeared, and he only contacts me when I think or say a sentence of the right form. I now rarely do it by accident.

  Then I try something which has never before occurred to me:

  —Nobody can say you’re an imbecile!

  Nothing happens. Ah, well! It’s just that I’d love to film him insulting himself! It looks like he’s only eager to contradict me when I mention myself.

  Why? What the hell is the point of it all? What alien purpose drives him to challenge me every time I say ‘Nobody can say …’?

  Maybe he just loathes the arrogance of generalisations, he just wants to show me that I’m wrong, and that he can in fact say absolutely anything he damn well pleases.

  Chapter 11

  ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

  It is now third year. Like second year, only later.

  —The sine of an angle may thus be defined as the y co-ordinate of the point of intersection of the unit circle with the terminal ray of the angle measured counter-clockwise from the positive arm of the x-axis.

  At the end of the period he hands out our tests.

  —Ninety-five … try harder!

  —Eighty … shocking!

  —Sixty-five … disgusting!

  —Ninety-eight … showing some promise.

  One thing helps me immensely with my studies: I have a photographic memory! Not that that gives me instant understanding, but it does help to film each lesson and go over it later at any pace I choose. I don’t think this is morally wrong—there are surely other people in the world with photographic memories, and mine is just literally a little more photographic than theirs!

  I put just one limit on the use of my cinematographic equipment: I never play back any films during examinations. Only fair, surely.

  I have to force myself to take down notes on paper like everyone else; what’s the point when I can capture the entire blackboard in one twenty-fourth of a second, and effortlessly record every word the teacher says with one hundred per cent accuracy (in four-channel, high-fidelity sound)?

  With every lesson available to me in a matter of seconds (I use a computerised cataloguing system) I appear to have absorbed perfectly every obscure and boring fact ever mentioned, and I soon gain a reputation as a ‘genius’ … a word used very lightly
to describe anyone not completely swamped by the ever-growing list of Things We Must Remember. Unfortunately, total audiovisual recall does nothing for my reasoning, and while it aids me enormously under some circumstances, sometimes it makes almost no difference. Teachers, in their infinite psychological wisdom, decide that I am working to my full capacity when my perfect information-storage system helps me to get good results, and that I am lazy when I am left with only my wits. This makes me angry-but-what-can-I-do? I cannot ascend to an equally high level of memory-irrelevant tasks, and if I stop using my photographic facilities entirely and rely solely on my ‘natural’ memory, they will become very angry, and will decide that I’m now being lazy all the time.

  Out of spite, I expect.

  I try to convince them that I’m trying moderately enthusiastically at everything, and that I simply have a photographic memory (I do not expound upon its nature) which helps me with certain things.

  —Who was Henry the Fourth’s father?

  —I haven’t a clue.

  —Then how can you say you have a photographic memory! You must have read that somewhere! I think you’re just making ridiculous excuses to try and …

  Honestly. I’ve never in my life read who Henry the Fourth’s father was.

  And even if I’d read it, I would never have filmed it.

  To avoid storage problems I throw out all my ‘educational’ films after they’re about two months old, having made sure that I’ve memorised the facts they contain to the extent that an ordinary old memory can memorise anything so dull. I treat the tiny spools with a special enzyme produced by a special gland, and then flush them into my veins, and my kidneys are smart enough to recognise them as something that should not be in my blood (or perhaps I should say that my special glands are smart enough to produce an enzyme which reduces my spools to something which my kidneys recognise as something that should not be in my blood). Anyway, the net result is that there is a sharp line of distinction where lessons cease to be totally recallable in wide-screen colour and quadraphonic sound, and from then on I have to rely on my just-like-everyone-else’s memory.

  I am often tempted to start explaining my unusual facilities to everyone, mentioning every detail as I know it, and then to challenge them to prove me wrong. The detail I can pick up when using an ultra-telephoto lens is indisputably beyond the grasp of the best unaided human eye, and no ‘photographic’ memory could ever capture a scene as faithfully as my low-distortion optics and enzyme-controlled high-speed perfect-colour film. But reasons similar to those which stop me telling kindly old nuns that I think the high-school English course is a lot of pompous bullshit (fact) stop me telling anyone except brain surgeons, who never believe me and won’t even test my story because they think it’s so absurd, that I have a very small, very complex, and very efficient film laboratory built inside my brain (fact).

  And what a lab it is! The camera: all the lenses are aspheric, with no chromatic or spherical aberration (of course) and minute amounts of astigmatism, coma, distortion, and curvature of field. The film: ultrafast, ultraflat, ultrathin, ultrastrong, and it records colours by some incredible interference/diffraction process that I can only begin to make guesses about. The development and printing is done by enzyme-diffusion; again I can barely follow the details. And when I ‘screen’ a film, it is run through a special sense organ which shares my optic nerves with my eyes, and ‘reads’ the film by chemical rather than optical processes. A similar organ handles the sound tracks.

  Of course, it didn’t start off like this. When I first grew the camera, it was barely functional, and not until I started reading a lot of books on organic chemistry and optics and photography did my brain begin to modify everything towards what it is today. It’s hard to explain how I knew my brain changed the film width from 53.42 to 35 millimetres, and began to use the standard wide-screen frame format, and corrected all the optical defects, and replaced the old semi-mechanical shutter with a biochemical one which opens and closes (purely a metaphor: I should say clears and opaques) only a little slower than the speed of light (Well, perhaps I’m exaggerating there … the actual figure is around seven per cent of light speed. But that’s still quite high.). It just seemed to happen, and I knew, quite positively, what was going on.

  And then there are my ‘computers’: extensions to my brain which have grown to handle various functions in my miniature film lab. Now the brain is not supposed to be able to grow new parts every now and then. It’s also not supposed to be able to grow strange little glands which produce unheard-of odd secretions to perform such tasks as developing and printing and certain special-effects operations, on film which is itself produced by a gland which has no right to exist. What do the biologists know? I have the proof right here.

  Where?

  Shut up. I am in my English class.

  —Now I want you all to read that part carefully, when the old man has returned, the fish has been reduced to a skeleton, and he is carrying the mast up the beach. And later when he is lying on the bed with his arms stretched out to the sides. I think Hemingway is trying to create a crucifixion analogy.

  There is a frightening gleam in her eyes. She is a connoisseur of crucifixion analogies. For her they are fetishes. Not crucifixes, but crucifixion analogies. Ho hum. Humour her.

  And she’s probably right. You never can tell with Hemingway.

  In English, I soon discover, marks are assigned by a very novel method. At the beginning of the year, the teacher takes the roll and decides upon the mean that each student shall have at the end of the year. Then she makes out a list of marks for each student, the list being as long as the number of pieces of work to be done that year, and the mean of each list being the mean that each student is to end up with.

  And at Fenkirk, to save time, they get the computer at the State University to work out the lists for them. The teacher supplies the program with the desired class average, the number of students in the class, and the number of pieces of work. The program returns the appropriate number of sets of marks, and these always follow a normal distribution quite closely, because the computer assigns the marks according to such a distribution. This provides substantial evidence for researchers into such matters that the normal distribution model is the appropriate one for such situations.

  The teacher allocates sets of marks to students. Then, each time a student hands in a piece of work, the teacher merely takes the next consecutive mark from the appropriate list. Simple!

  I am in my phys ed class.

  —Now I want you all to stand up with your feet together. Put your arms straight up into the air, stretch them out, point your fingers upwards. Now touch your toes. And up again. And two. And three. And four.

  (There must be a reason. There must be a reason!)

  —And five. And six. And seven.

  (To accept that there is no reason, that we are doing this merely to satisfy the perverted urges of some demented phys ed teacher, would be to accept the possibility that the entire educational system is of a similar nature …)

  —And eight. And nine. And ten.

  (What’s so hard about accepting that?)

  —And eleven. And twelve. And thirteen.

  (Now think. Think hard. Call up every ounce of reasoning left in your sweating brain. There must be some logic behind it. Surely.)

  —And fourteen. And fifteen. And sixteen.

  (We are bending over and touching our toes. Fine.

  Now that would stretch all those naughty little muscles in our stomachs … the ones we never use except when touching our toes. It would keep them in terrific shape.)

  —And seventeen. And eighteen. And nineteen.

  (Now what’s the reason for keeping them in terrific shape? All those naughty little muscles we need for touching our toes. What is the reason?)

  —And twenty. And twenty-one. And twenty-two.

  (Of course! I have it, I know it! If we touch our toes twenty-five times twice a week, every week, then nex
t year, all those little muscles we need for touching our toes will be in so much better shape. So next year we’ll be able to touch our toes about fifty times, twice a week! And the next year, oh boy, if we’re lucky, one hundred times twice a week! I can even imagine the mathematical formula! If our age is A, then the number of times we’ll be able to touch our toes twice a week is given by:

  25(2)(A − 15) )

  —And twenty-three. And twenty-four. And twenty-five.

  (Just look at that formula. When we’re twenty, if we keep it up, we’ll be able to touch our toes eight hundred times twice a week! When we’re twenty-five, twenty-five thousand, six hundred times! When we’re thirty, eight hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred times! When we’re thirty-five, twenty-six million, two hundred and fourteen thousand, four hundred times! When we’re forty, eight hundred and thirty-eight million, eight hundred and sixty thousand, eight hundred times!

  Ah, but it takes about a second to touch your toes, and there are only three hundred and two thousand, four hundred seconds in half a week … which means that by the time we are about twenty-eight point five six, we’ll be able to touch our toes continuously!

  Of course, I could be a little optimistic.

  I am awed by the magnitude of the concept. We won’t need to get jobs. We won’t need to eat, sleep, urinate, or defecate. We won’t need houses or cars or TV sets. All we’ll need will be patches of ground big enough to let us touch our toes, hour after hour, day after day. Non-stop. That’s how fit and strong those naughty little muscles in our stomachs will be.

  It is a vision of the perfect future! No hunger. No crime. No pollution. No population increase, and, because we’ll be so fit from touching our toes continuously, we’ll be virtually immortal.

  I can see our lives stretching out in front of us, centuries, perhaps millennia long. Lives of perfect health. Lives of blissful obsession with one, single, pure purpose: stretching those fingertips down to those toes just one more time.

  And when those muscles finally snap, as even bands of steel must finally snap, we’ll all die with the knowledge that our lives were meaningful.)