Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  The elevator was broken; a sticker from Building Maintenance read: OUT OF ORDER UNTIL 11:06 A.M., 3/2/78. I followed Lisa up twelve flights of stairs, inventing excuses all the way: I was proving my freedom, my spontaneity—proving that my life was more than a fossilised pattern of events in time. But the truth was, I’d never felt trapped by my knowledge of the future, never felt any need to delude myself that I had the power to live any life but one. The whole idea of an unknown liaison filled me with panic and vertigo. The bland white lies that I’d already written were unsettling enough—but if anything at all could happen in the spaces between the words, then I no longer knew who I was, or who I might become. My whole life would dissolve into quicksand.

  I was shaking as we undressed each other.

  ‘Why are we doing this?’

  ‘Because we can.’

  ‘Do you know me? Will you write about me? About us?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘But… how long will this last? I have to know. One night? A month? A year? How will it end?’ I was losing my mind: how could I start something like this, when I didn’t even know how it would end?

  She laughed. ‘Don’t ask me. Look it up in your own diary, if it’s so important to you.’

  I couldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t shut up. ‘You must have written something. You knew we’d share that taxi.’

  ‘No. I just said that.’

  ‘You—’ I stared at her.

  ‘It came true, though, didn’t it? How about that?’ She sighed, slid her hands down my spine, pulled me on to the bed. Down into the quicksand.

  ‘Will we—’

  She clamped her hand over my mouth.

  ‘No more questions. I don’t keep a diary. I don’t know anything at all.’

  * * *

  Lying to Alison was easy; I was almost certain that I’d get away with it. Lying to myself was easier still. Filling out my diary became a formality, a meaningless ritual; I scarcely glanced at the words I wrote. When I did pay attention, I could barely keep a straight face: amidst the merely lazy and deceitful elision and euphemism were passages of deliberate irony which had been invisible to me for years, but which I could finally appreciate for what they were. Some of my paeans to marital bliss seemed ‘dangerously’ heavy-handed; I could scarcely believe that I’d never picked up the subtext before. But I hadn’t. There was no ‘risk’ of tipping myself off—I was ‘free’ to be every bit as sarcastic as I ‘chose’ to be.

  No more, no less.

  The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our souls; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat puppets, zombies. The somnambulists believe much the same thing, but—rather than seeing this as a tragedy of apocalyptic dimensions—embrace the idea with dreamy enthusiasm. They see a merciful end to responsibility, guilt and anxiety, striving and failing: a descent into inanimacy, the leaching of our souls into a great cosmic spiritual blancmange, while our bodies hang around, going through the motions.

  For me, though, knowing the future—or believing that I did—never made me feel like a sleepwalker, a zombie in a senseless, amoral trance. It made me feel I was in control of my life. One person held sway across the decades, tying the disparate threads together, making sense of it all. How could that unity make me less than human? Everything I did grew out of who I was: who I had been, and who I would be.

  I only started feeling like a soulless automaton when I tore it all apart with lies.

  * * *

  After school, few people pay much attention to history, past or future—let alone that grey zone between the two which used to be known as ‘current affairs’. Journalists continue to collect information and scatter it across time, but there’s no doubt that they now do a very different job than they did in pre-Hazzard days, when the live broadcast, the latest dispatch, had a real, if fleeting, significance. The profession hasn’t died out completely; it’s as if a kind of equilibrium has been reached between apathy and curiosity, and if we had any less news flowing from the future, there ‘would be’ a greater effort made to gather it and send it back. How valid such arguments can be—with their implications of dynamism, of hypothetical alternative worlds cancelled out by their own inconsistencies—I don’t know, but the balance is undeniable. We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.

  On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to ‘stabilise the region’—by wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within their own borders—I hardly gave it a second thought. I knew the UN would sort out the whole mess with remarkable dexterity; historians had praised the Secretary-General’s diplomatic resolution of the crisis for decades, and, in a rare move for the conservative Academy, she’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years in advance of the efforts which would earn it. My memory of the details was sketchy, so I called up The Global Yearbook. The troops would be out by 3 August; casualties would be few. Duly comforted, I got on with my life.

  I heard the first rumours from Pria, who’d taken to sampling the countless underground communications nets. Gossip and slander for computer freaks; a harmless enough pastime, but I’d always been amused by the participants’ conceit that they were ‘plugged in’ to the global village, that they had their fingers on the pulse of the planet. Who needed to be wired to the moment, when the past and the future could be examined at leisure? Who needed the latest unsubstantiated static, when a sober, considered version of events which had stood the test of time could be had just as soon—or sooner?

  So when Pria told me solemnly that a full-scale war had broken out in Kashmir, and that people were being slaughtered in the thousands, I said, ‘Sure. And Maura got the Nobel Prize for genocide.’

  He shrugged. ‘You ever heard of a man called Henry Kissinger?’

  I had to admit that I hadn’t.

  * * *

  I mentioned the story to Lisa, disparagingly, confident that she’d laugh along with me. She rolled over to face me and said, ‘He’s right.’

  I didn’t know whether to take the bait; she had a strange sense of humour, she might have been teasing. Finally, I said, ‘He can’t be. I’ve checked. All the histories agree—’

  She looked genuinely surprised before her expression turned to pity; she’d never thought much of me, but I don’t think she’d ever believed I was quite so naive.

  ‘The victors have always written the “history”, James. Why should the future be any different? Believe me. It’s happening.’

  ‘How do you know?’ It was a stupid question; her boss was on all the foreign affairs committees, and would be Minister next time the party was in power. If he didn’t have access to the intelligence in his present job, he would in the long term.

  She said, ‘We’re helping to fund it, of course. Along with Europe, Japan, and the States. Thanks to the embargo after the Hong Kong riots, the Chinese have no war drones; they’re pitting human soldiers with obsolete equipment against the best Vietnamese robots. Four hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand civilians will die—while the Allies sit in Berlin playing their solipsist video games.’

  I stared past her, into the darkness, numb and disbelieving. ‘Why? Why couldn’t things have been worked out, defused in time?’

  She scowled. ‘How? You mean, shunted? Known about, then avoided?’

  ‘No, but… if everyone knew the truth, if this hadn’t been covered up—’

  ‘What? If people had known it would happen, it wouldn’t have? Grow up. It is happening, it will go on happening; there’s nothing else to say.’

  I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no reason to hurry home. Alison knew all about us; apparently, she’d known since childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.

  Half a million people slaughtered. It wasn’t fate, it wasn’t destiny—there was no Will of God, no Force of History to
absolve us. It grew out of who we were: the lies we’d told, and would keep on telling. Half a million people slaughtered in the spaces between the words.

  I vomited on the carpet, then stumbled about dizzily, cleaning it up. Lisa watched me sadly.

  ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’

  I laughed weakly. ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t keep a diary.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  And I finally understood why.

  * * *

  Alison woke when I switched on the terminal, and said sleepily, without rancour, ‘What’s the hurry, James? If you’ve masturbated about tonight since you were twelve years old, surely you’ll still remember it all in the morning.’

  I ignored her. After a while, she got out of bed and came and looked over my shoulder.

  ‘Is this true?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you knew all along? You’re going to send this?’

  I shrugged and hit the check key. A message box popped up on the screen: 95 words; 95 errors.

  I sat and stared at this verdict for a long time. What did I think? I had the power to change history? My puny outrage could shunt the war? Reality would dissolve around me, and another—better—world would take its place?

  No. History, past and future, was determined, and I couldn’t help being part of the equations that shaped it—but I didn’t have to be part of the lies.

  I hit the SAVE key, and burned those 95 words on to the chip, irreversibly.

  (I’m sure I had no choice.)

  That was my last diary entry—and I can only assume that the same computers that will filter it out of my posthumous transmission will also fill in the unwritten remainder, extrapolating an innocuous life for me, fit for a child to read.

  I tap into the nets at random, listening to the whole spectrum of conflicting rumours, hardly knowing what to believe. I’ve left my wife, I’ve left my job, parting ways entirely with my rosy, fictitious future. All my certainties have evaporated: I don’t know when I’ll die; I don’t know who I’ll love; I don’t know if the world is heading for Utopia, or Armageddon.

  But I keep my eyes open, and I feed what little of value I can gather back into the nets. There must be corruption and distortion here, too—but I’d rather swim in this cacophony of a million contradictory voices than drown in the smooth and plausible lies of those genocidal authors of history who control the Hazzard Machines.

  Sometimes I wonder how different my life might have been without their intervention—but the question is meaningless. It couldn’t have been any other way. Everyone is manipulated; everyone is a product of their times. And vice versa.

  Whatever the unchangeable future holds, I’m sure of one thing: who I am is still a part of what always has, and always will, decide it.

  I can ask for no greater freedom than that.

  And no greater responsibility.

  Eugene

  ‘I guarantee it. I can make your child a genius.’

  Sam Cook (MB BS MD FRACP PhD MBA) shifted his supremely confident gaze from Angela to Bill and then back again, as if daring them to contradict him.

  Angela finally cleared her throat and said, ‘How?’

  Cook reached into a drawer and pulled out a small section of a human brain, sandwiched in Perspex.

  ‘Do you know who this belonged to? I’ll give you three guesses.’

  Bill suddenly felt very queasy. He didn’t need three guesses, but he kept his mouth shut. Angela shook her head and said, impatiently, ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Only the greatest scientific mind of the twentieth century.’

  Bill leant forward and asked, appalled but fascinated, ‘H-h-how did y-y-y—?’

  ‘How did I get hold of it? Well, the enterprising fellow who did the autopsy, back in nineteen fifty-five, souvenired the brain prior to cremation. Naturally, he was bombarded with requests from various groups for pieces to study, so over the years it got subdivided and scattered around the world. At some point, the records listing who had what were mislaid, so most of it has effectively vanished, but several samples turned up for auction in Houston a few years ago—along with three Elvis Presley thigh bones; I think someone was liquidating their collection. Naturally, we here at Human Potential put in a bid for a prime slice of cortex. Half a million US dollars—I can’t remember what that came to per gram—but worth every cent. Because we know the secret. Glial cells.’

  ‘G-g-g-g—?’

  ‘They provide a kind of structural matrix in which the neurons are embedded. They also perform several active functions which aren’t yet fully understood, but it is known that the more glial cells there are per neuron, the more connections there are between the neurons. The more connections between neurons, the more complex and powerful the brain. Are you with me so far? Well, this tissue,’ he held up the sample, ‘has almost thirty per cent more glial cells per neuron than you’ll find in the average cretin.’

  Bill’s facial tic suddenly went out of control, and he turned away, making quiet sounds of distress. Angela glanced up at the row of framed qualifications on the wall, and noticed that several were from a private university on the Gold Coast which had gone bankrupt more than a decade before.

  She was still just a little uneasy about putting her future child in this man’s hands. The tour of Human Potential’s Melbourne headquarters had been impressive; from sperm bank to delivery room, the hardware had certainly gleamed, and surely anyone in charge of so many millions of dollars’ worth of supercomputers, X-ray crystallography gear, mass spectrometers, electron microscopes, and so on, had to know what he was doing. But her doubts had begun when Cook had shown them his pet project: three young dolphins whose DNA contained human gene grafts. (‘We ate the failures,’ he had confided, with a sigh of gustatory bliss.) The aim had been to alter their brain physiology in such a way as to enable them to master human speech and ‘human modes of thought’—and although, strictly speaking, this had been achieved, Cook had been unable to explain to her why the creatures were only able to converse in limericks.

  Angela regarded the grey sliver sceptically. ‘How can you be sure it’s as simple as that?’

  ‘We’ve done experiments, of course. We located the gene that codes for a growth factor that determines the ratio of glial cells to neurons. We can control the extent to which this gene is switched on, and hence how much of the growth factor is synthesised, and hence what the ratio becomes. So far, we’ve tried reducing it by five per cent, and on average that causes a drop in IQ of twenty points. So, by simple linear extrapolation, if we up the ratio by two hundred per cent—’

  Angela frowned. ‘You intentionally produced children with reduced intelligence?’

  ‘Relax. Their parents wanted Olympic athletes. Those kids won’t miss twenty points—in fact, it will probably help them cope with the training. Besides, we like to be balanced. We give with one hand and take with the other. It’s only fair. And our bioethics Expert System said it was perfectly okay.’

  ‘What are you going to take from Eugene?’

  Cook looked hurt. He did it well; his big brown eyes, as much as his professional success, had put his face on the glossy sleeves of a dozen magazines. ‘Angela. Your case is special. For you, and Bill—and Eugene—I’m going to break all the rules.’

  * * *

  When Bill Cooper was ten years old, he saved up his pocket money for a month, and bought a lottery ticket. The first prize was fifty thousand dollars. When his mother found out—whatever he did, she always found out—she said calmly, ‘Do you know what gambling is? Gambling is a kind of tax: a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the net cash flow always goes one way—to the Government, to the casino operators, to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever do win, you won’t have won against them. They’ll still be getting their share. You’ll have won against all the penniless losers, that’s a
ll.’

  He hated her. She hadn’t taken away the ticket, she hadn’t punished him, she hadn’t even forbidden him to do it again—she had simply stated her opinion. The only trouble was, as an ordinary ten-year-old child, he didn’t understand half the phrases she’d used, and he didn’t have a hope of properly assessing her argument, let alone rebutting it. By talking over his head, she might just as well have proclaimed with the voice of authority: you are stupid and greedy and wrong—and it frustrated him almost to tears that she’d achieved this effect while remaining so calm and reasonable.

  The ticket didn’t win him a cent, and he didn’t buy another. By the time he left home, eight years later, and found employment as a data-entry clerk in the Department of Social Security, the government lotteries had been all but superseded by a new scheme, in which participants marked numbers on a coupon in the hope that their choice would match the numbers on balls spat out by a machine.

  Bill recognised the change as a cynical ploy, designed to suggest, sotto voce, to a statistically ignorant public that they now had the opportunity to use ‘skill’ and ‘strategy’ to improve their chances of winning. No longer would anyone be stuck with the immutable number on a lottery ticket; they were free to put crosses in boxes, any way they liked! This illusion of having control would bring in more players, and hence more revenue. And that sucked.

  The TV ads for the game were the most crass and emetic things he’d ever seen, with grinning imbeciles going into fits of poorly acted euphoria as money cascaded down on them, cheerleaders waved pom-poms, and tacky special effects lit up the screen. Images of yachts, champagne, and chauffeur-driven limousines were intercut. It made him gag.

  However. There was a third prong. The radio ads were less inane, offering appealing scenarios of revenge for the instantly wealthy: Evict Your Landlord. Retrench Your Boss. Buy the Nightclub Which Denied You Admission. The play on stupidity and the play on greed had failed, but this touched a raw nerve. Bill knew he was being manipulated, but he couldn’t deny that the prospect of spending the next forty-two years typing crap into a VDU (or doing whatever the changing technology demanded of shit-kickers—assuming he wasn’t made completely obsolete) and paying most of his wages in rent, without even an infinitesimal chance of escape, was too much to bear.