Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  By the time I got home, I was shaking uncontrollably. I put the parcel on the kitchen table, and started pacing.

  This wasn’t for Amy. I had to admit that. Just because I still loved her, and still mourned her, didn’t mean I was doing this for her. I wouldn’t soil her memory with that lie.

  In fact, I was doing it to free myself from her. After five years, I wanted my pointless love, my useless grief, to finally stop ruling my life. Nobody could blame me for that.

  * * *

  She had died in an armed hold-up, in a bank. The security cameras had been disabled, and everyone apart from the robbers had spent most of the time face-down on the floor, so I never found out the whole story. She must have moved, fidgeted, looked up, she must have done something; even at the peaks of my hatred, I couldn’t believe that she’d been killed on a whim, for no comprehensible reason at all.

  I knew who had squeezed the trigger, though. It hadn’t come out at the trial; a clerk in the Police Department had sold me the information. The killer’s name was Patrick Anderson, and by turning prosecution witness, he’d put his accomplices away for life, and reduced his own sentence to seven years.

  I went to the media. A loathsome crime-show personality had taken the story and ranted about it on the airwaves for a week, diluting the facts with self-serving rhetoric, then grown bored and moved on to something else.

  Five years later, Anderson had been out on parole for nine months.

  OK. So what? It happens all the time. If someone had come to me with such a story, I would have been sympathetic, but firm. ‘Forget her, she’s dead. Forget him, he’s garbage. Get on with your life.’

  I didn’t forget her, and I didn’t forget her killer. I had loved her, whatever that meant, and while the rational part of me had swallowed the fact of her death, the rest kept twitching like a decapitated snake. Someone else in the same state might have turned the house into a shrine, covered every wall and mantelpiece with photographs and memorabilia, put fresh flowers on her grave every day, and spent every night getting drunk watching old home movies. I didn’t do that, I couldn’t. It would have been grotesque and utterly false; sentimentality had always made both of us violently ill. I kept a single photo. We hadn’t made home movies. I visited her grave once a year.

  Yet for all of this outward restraint, inside my head my obsession with Amy’s death simply kept on growing. I didn’t want it, I didn’t choose it, I didn’t feed it or encourage it in any way. I kept no electronic scrapbook of the trial. If people raised the subject, I walked away. I buried myself in my work; in my spare time I read, or went to the movies, alone. I thought about searching for someone new, but I never did anything about it, always putting it off until that time in the indefinite future when I would be human again.

  Every night, the details of the incident circled in my brain. I thought of a thousand things I ‘might have done’ to have prevented her death, from not marrying her in the first place (we’d moved to Sydney because of my job), to magically arriving at the bank as her killer took aim, tackling him to the ground and beating him senseless, or worse. I knew these fantasies were futile and self-indulgent, but that knowledge was no cure. If I took sleeping pills, the whole thing simply shifted to the daylight hours, and I was literally unable to work. (The computers that help us are slightly less appalling every year, but air-traffic controllers can’t daydream.)

  I had to do something.

  Revenge? Revenge was for the morally retarded. Me, I’d signed petitions to the UN, calling for the worldwide, unconditional abolition of capital punishment. I’d meant it then, and I still meant it. Taking human life was wrong; I’d believed that, passionately, since childhood. Maybe it started out as religious dogma, but when I grew up and shed all the ludicrous claptrap, the sanctity of life was one of the few beliefs I judged to be worth keeping. Aside from any pragmatic reasons, human consciousness had always seemed to me the most astonishing, miraculous, sacred thing in the universe. Blame my upbringing, blame my genes; I could no more devalue it than believe that one plus one equalled zero.

  Tell some people you’re a pacifist, and in ten seconds flat they’ll invent a situation in which millions of people will die in unspeakable agony, and all your loved ones will be raped and tortured, if you don’t blow someone’s brains out. (There’s always a contrived reason why you can’t merely wound the omnipotent, genocidal madman.) The amusing thing is, they seem to hold you in even greater contempt when you admit that, yes, you’d do it, you’d kill under those conditions.

  Anderson, however, clearly was not an omnipotent, genocidal madman. I had no idea whether or not he was likely to kill again. As for his capacity for reform, his abused childhood, or the caring and compassionate alter ego that may have been hiding behind the façade of his brutal exterior, I really didn’t give a shit, but nonetheless I was convinced that it would be wrong for me to kill him.

  I bought the gun first. That was easy, and perfectly legal; perhaps the computers simply failed to correlate my permit application with the release of my wife’s killer, or perhaps the link was detected, but judged irrelevant.

  I joined a ‘sports’ club full of people who spent three hours a week doing nothing but shooting at moving, human-shaped targets. A recreational activity, harmless as fencing; I practised saying that with a straight face.

  Buying the anonymous ammunition from a fellow club member was illegal; bullets that vaporised on impact, leaving no ballistics evidence linking them to a specific weapon. I scanned the court records; the average sentence for possessing such things was a five-hundred-dollar fine. The silencer was illegal, too; the penalties for ownership were similar.

  Every night, I thought it through. Every night, I came to the same conclusion: despite my elaborate preparations, I wasn’t going to kill anyone. Part of me wanted to, part of me didn’t, but I knew perfectly well which was strongest. I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming about it, safe in the knowledge that no amount of hatred or grief or desperation would ever be enough to make me act against my nature.

  * * *

  I unwrapped the parcel. I was expecting a garish cover-sneering body builder toting sub-machine-gun—but the packaging was unadorned, plain grey with no markings except for the product code, and the name of the distributor, Clockwork Orchard.

  I’d ordered the thing through an on-line catalogue, accessed via a coin-driven public terminal, and I’d specified collection by ‘Mark Carver’ at a branch of The Implant Store in Chatswood, far from my home. All of which was paranoid nonsense, since the implant was legal—and all of which was perfectly reasonable, because I felt far more nervous and guilty about buying it than I did about buying the gun and ammunition.

  The description in the catalogue had begun with the statement Life is cheap! then had waffled on for several lines in the same vein: People are meat. They’re nothing, they’re worthless. The exact words weren’t important, though; they weren’t a part of the implant itself. It wouldn’t be a matter of a voice in my head, reciting some badly written spiel which I could choose to ridicule or ignore; nor would it be a kind of mental legislative decree, which I could evade by means of semantic quibbling. Axiomatic implants were derived from analysis of actual neural structures in real people’s brains, they weren’t based on the expression of the axioms in language. The spirit, not the letter, of the law would prevail.

  I opened up the carton. There was an instruction leaflet, in seventeen languages. A programmer. An applicator. A pair of tweezers. Sealed in a plastic bubble labelled sterile if unbroken, the implant itself. It looked like a tiny piece of gravel.

  I had never used one before, but I’d seen it done a thousand times on holovision. You placed the thing in the programmer, ‘woke it up’, and told it how long you wanted it to be active. The applicator was strictly for tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice.

  The implant burrowed into the
brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went into active mode for the predetermined time—anything from an hour to infinity—doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad…

  I packed everything back into the carton, put it in a drawer, took three sleeping pills, and went to bed.

  * * *

  Perhaps it was a matter of laziness. I’ve always been biased towards those options which spare me from facing the very same set of choices again in the future; it seems so inefficient to go through the same agonies of conscience more than once. To not use the implant would have meant having to reaffirm that decision, day after day, for the rest of my life.

  Or perhaps I never really believed that the preposterous toy would work. Perhaps I hoped to prove that my convictions—unlike other people’s—were engraved on some metaphysical tablet that hovered in a spiritual dimension unreachable by any mere machine.

  Or perhaps I just wanted a moral alibi—a way to kill Anderson while still believing it was something that the real me could never have done.

  At least I’m sure of one thing. I didn’t do it for Amy.

  * * *

  I woke around dawn the next day, although I didn’t need to get up at all; I was on annual leave for a month. I dressed, ate breakfast, then unpacked the implant again and carefully read the instructions.

  With no great sense of occasion, I broke open the sterile bubble and, with the tweezers, dropped the speck into its cavity in the programmer.

  The programmer said, ‘Do you speak English?’ The voice reminded me of one of the control towers at work; deep but somehow genderless, businesslike without being crudely robotic—and yet, unmistakably inhuman.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to program this implant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please specify the active period.’

  ‘Three days.’ Three days would be enough, surely; if not, I’d call the whole thing off.

  ‘This implant is to remain active for three days after insertion. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This implant is ready for use. The time is seven forty-three a.m. Please insert the implant before eight forty-three a.m., or it will deactivate itself and reprogramming will be required. Please enjoy this product and dispose of the packaging thoughtfully.’

  I placed the implant in the applicator, then hesitated, but not for long. This wasn’t the time to agonise; I’d agonised for months, and I was sick of it. Any more indecisiveness and I’d need to buy a second implant to convince me to use the first. I wasn’t committing a crime; I wasn’t even coming close to guaranteeing that I would commit one. Millions of people held the belief that human life was nothing special, but how many of them were murderers? The next three days would simply reveal how I reacted to that belief, and although the attitude would be hard-wired, the consequences were far from certain.

  I put the applicator in my left nostril, and pushed the release button. There was a brief stinging sensation, nothing more.

  I thought, Amy would have despised me for this. That shook me, but only for a moment. Amy was dead, which made her hypothetical feelings irrelevant. Nothing I did could hurt her now, and thinking any other way was crazy.

  I tried to monitor the progress of the change, but that was a joke; you can’t check your moral precepts by introspection every thirty seconds. After all, my assessment of myself as being unable to kill had been based on decades of observation (much of it probably out of date). What’s more, that assessment, that self-image, had come to be as much a cause of my actions and attitudes as a reflection of them—and apart from the direct changes the implant was making to my brain, it was breaking that feedback loop by providing a rationalisation for me to act in a way I’d convinced myself was impossible.

  After a while, I decided to get drunk, to distract myself from the vision of microscopic robots crawling around in my skull. It was a big mistake; alcohol makes me paranoid. I don’t recall much of what followed, except for catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, screaming, ‘HAL’s breaking First Law! HAL’s breaking First Law!’ before vomiting copiously.

  I woke just after midnight, on the bathroom floor. I took an anti-hangover pill, and in five minutes my headache and nausea were gone. I showered and put on fresh clothes. I’d bought a jacket especially for the occasion, with an inside pocket for the gun.

  It was still impossible to tell if the thing had done anything to me that went beyond the placebo effect; I asked myself, out loud, ‘Is human life sacred? Is it wrong to kill?’ but I couldn’t concentrate on the question, and I found it hard to believe that I ever had in the past; the whole idea seemed obscure and difficult, like some esoteric mathematical theorem. The prospect of going ahead with my plans made my stomach churn, but that was simple fear, not moral outrage; the implant wasn’t meant to make me brave, or calm, or resolute. I could have bought those qualities too, but that would have been cheating.

  I’d had Anderson checked out by a private investigator. He worked every night but Sunday, as a bouncer in a Surry Hills nightclub; he lived nearby, and usually arrived home, on foot, at around four in the morning. I’d driven past his terrace house several times, I’d have no trouble finding it. He lived alone; he had a lover, but they always met at her place, in the afternoon or early evening.

  I loaded the gun and put it in my jacket, then spent half an hour staring in the mirror, trying to decide if the bulge was visible. I wanted a drink, but I restrained myself. I switched on the radio and wandered through the house, trying to become less agitated. Perhaps taking a life was now no big deal to me, but I could still end up dead, or in prison, and the implant apparently hadn’t rendered me uninterested in my own fate.

  I left too early, and had to drive by a circuitous route to kill time; even then, it was only a quarter past three when I parked, a kilometre from Anderson’s house. A few cars and taxis passed me as I walked the rest of the way, and I’m sure I was trying so hard to look at ease that my body language radiated guilt and paranoia—but no ordinary driver would have noticed or cared, and I didn’t see a single patrol car.

  When I reached the place, there was nowhere to hide—no gardens, no trees, no fences—but I’d known that in advance. I chose a house across the street, not quite opposite Anderson’s, and sat on the front step. If the occupant appeared, I’d feign drunkenness and stagger away.

  I sat and waited. It was a warm, still, ordinary night; the sky was clear, but grey and starless thanks to the lights of the city. I kept reminding myself: You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to go through with it. So why did I stay? The hope of being liberated from my sleepless nights? The idea was laughable; I had no doubt that if I killed Anderson, it would torture me as much as my helplessness over Amy’s death.

  Why did I stay? It was nothing to do with the implant; at most, that was neutralising my qualms; it wasn’t forcing me to do anything.

  Why, then? In the end, I think I saw it as a matter of honesty. I had to accept the unpleasant fact that I honestly wanted to kill Anderson, and however much I had also been repelled by the notion, to be true to myself I had to do it—anything less would have been hypocrisy and self-deception.

  At five to four, I heard footsteps echoing down the street. As I turned, I hoped it would be someone else, or that he would be with a friend, but it was him, and he was alone. I waited until he was as far from his front door as I was, then I started walking. He glanced my way briefly, then ignored me. I felt a shock of pure fear—I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the trial, and I’d forgotten how physically imposing he was.

  I had to force myself to slow down, and even then I passed him sooner than I’d meant to. I was wearing
light, rubber-soled shoes, he was in heavy boots, but when I crossed the street and did a U-turn towards him, I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my heartbeat, or smell the stench of my sweat. Metres from the door, just as I finished pulling out the gun, he looked over his shoulder with an expression of bland curiosity, as if he might have been expecting a dog or a piece of windblown litter. He turned around to face me, frowning. I just stood there, pointing the gun at him, unable to speak. Eventually he said, ‘What the fuck do you want? I’ve got two hundred dollars in my wallet. Back pocket.’

  I shook my head. ‘Unlock the front door, then put your hands on your head and kick it open. Don’t try closing it on me.’

  He hesitated, then complied.

  ‘Now walk in. Keep your hands on your head. Five steps, that’s all. Count them out loud. I’ll be right behind you.’

  I reached the light switch for the hall as he counted four, then I slammed the door behind me, and flinched at the sound. Anderson was right in front of me, and I suddenly felt trapped. The man was a vicious killer; I hadn’t even thrown a punch since I was eight years old. Did I really believe the gun would protect me? With his hands on his head, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bulged against his shirt. I should have shot him right then, in the back of the head. This was an execution, not a duel; if I’d wanted some quaint idea of honour, I would have come without a gun and let him take me to pieces.

  I said, ‘Turn left.’ Left was the living room. I followed him in, switched on the light. ‘Sit.’ I stood in the doorway, he sat in the room’s only chair. For a moment, I felt dizzy and my vision seemed to tilt, but I don’t think I moved, I don’t think I sagged or swayed; if I had, he probably would have rushed me.