Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  He explained, in the simplest language he could manage, the four stages of the virus, the concept of a stored host fingerprint, the fatal consequences if a third person’s SVM ever entered her blood. She sat through it all in silence.

  ‘Do you understand what I’ve said?’

  ‘Sure I do. That doesn’t mean I believe it.’

  He leapt to his feet and shook her. ‘I’m deadly serious! I’m telling you the absolute truth! God is punishing adulterers! AIDS was just a warning; this time no sinner will escape! No one!’

  She removed his hands. ‘Your God and my God don’t have a lot in common.’

  ‘Your God!’ he spat.

  ‘Oh, and aren’t I entitled to one? Excuse me. I thought they’d put it in some United Nations Charter: everyone’s issued with their own God at birth, though if you break Him or lose Him along the way there’s no free replacement.’

  ‘Now who’s blaspheming?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, my God’s still functioning, but yours sounds a bit of a disaster. Mine might not cure all the problems in the world, but at least he doesn’t bend over backwards to make them worse.’

  Shawcross was indignant. ‘A few people will die. A few sinners, it can’t be helped. But think of what the world will be like when the message finally gets through! No unfaithfulness, no rape; every marriage lasting until death—’

  She grimaced with distaste. ‘For all the wrong reasons.’

  ‘No! It might start out that way. People are weak, they need a reason, a selfish reason, to be good. But given time it will grow to be more than that; a habit, then a tradition, then part of human nature. The virus won’t matter any more. People will have changed.’

  ‘Well, maybe; if monogamy is inheritable, I suppose natural selection would eventually—’

  Shawcross stared at her, wondering if he was losing his mind, then screamed, ‘Stop it! There is no such thing as “natural selection”!’ He’d never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? He calmed down slightly, and added, ‘I meant a change in the spiritual values of the world culture.’

  The woman shrugged, unmoved by the outburst. ‘I know you don’t give a damn what I think, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You are the saddest, most screwed-up man I’ve set eyes on all week. So, you’ve chosen a particular moral code to live by; that’s your right, and good luck to you. But you have no real faith in what you’re doing; you’re so uncertain of your choice that you need God to pour down fire and brimstone on everyone who’s chosen differently, just to prove to you that you’re right. God fails to oblige, so you hunt through the natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemics—winnowing out examples of the “punishment of sinners”. You think you’re proving that God’s on your side? All you’re proving is your own insecurity.’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Well, your five minutes are long gone, and I never talk theology for free. I’ve got one last question though, if you don’t mind, since you’re likely to be the last “expert virologist” I run into for a while.’

  ‘Ask.’ She was going to die. He’d done his best to save her, and he’d failed. Well, hundreds of thousands would die with her. He had no choice but to accept that; his faith would keep him sane.

  ‘This virus that your God’s designed is only supposed to harm adulterers and gays? Right?’

  ‘Yes. Haven’t you listened? That’s the whole point! The mechanism is ingenious, the DNA fingerprint—’

  She spoke very slowly, opening her mouth extra wide, as if addressing a deaf or demented person.

  ‘Suppose some sweet, monogamous, married couple have sex. Suppose the woman becomes pregnant. The child won’t have exactly the same set of genes as either parent. So what happens to it? What happens to the baby?’

  Shawcross just stared at her. What happens to the baby? His mind was blank. He was tired, he was homesick… all the pressure, all the worries… he’d been through an ordeal—how could she expect him to think straight, how could she expect him to explain every tiny detail? What happens to the baby?

  What happens to the innocent, newly made child? He struggled to concentrate, to organise his thoughts, but the absolute horror of what she was suggesting tugged at his attention, like a tiny, cold, insistent hand, dragging him, inch by inch, towards madness.

  Suddenly, he burst into laughter; he almost wept with relief. He shook his head at the stupid whore, and said, ‘You can’t trick me like that! I thought of babies back in ninety-four! At little Joel’s christening—he’s my cousin’s boy.’ He grinned and shook his head again, giddy with happiness. ‘I fixed the problem: I added genes to SVC and SVM, for surface receptors to half a dozen foetal blood proteins; if any of the receptors are activated, the next generation of the virus is pure SVA. It’s even safe to breast-feed, for about a month, because the foetal proteins take a while to be replaced.’

  ‘For about a month,’ echoed the woman. Then, ‘What do you mean, you added genes…?’

  Shawcross was already bolting from the room.

  He ran, aimlessly, until he was breathless and stumbling, then he limped through the streets, clutching his head, ignoring the stares and insults of passers-by. A month wasn’t long enough, he’d known that all along, but somehow he’d forgotten just what it was he’d intended to do about it. There’d been too many details, too many complications.

  Already, children would be dying.

  He came to a halt in a deserted side street, behind a row of tawdry nightclubs, and slumped to the ground. He sat against a cold brick wall, shivering and hugging himself. Muffled music reached him, thin and distorted.

  Where had he gone wrong? Hadn’t he taken his revelation of God’s purpose in creating AIDS to its logical conclusion? Hadn’t he devoted his whole life to perfecting a biological machine able to discern good from evil? If something so hideously complex, so painstakingly contrived as his virus still couldn’t do the job…

  Waves of blackness moved across his vision.

  What if he’d been wrong, from the start?

  What if none of his work had been God’s will, after all?

  Shawcross contemplated this idea with a shell-shocked kind of tranquillity. It was too late to halt the spread of the virus, but he could go to the authorities and arm them with the details that would otherwise take them years to discover. Once they knew about the foetal protein receptors, a protective drug exploiting that knowledge might be possible in a matter of months.

  Such a drug would enable breast-feeding, blood transfusions and organ transplants. It would also allow adulterers to copulate, and homosexuals to practise their abominations. It would be utterly morally neutral, the negation of everything he’d lived for. He stared up at the blank sky, with a growing sense of panic. Could he do that? Tear himself down and start again? He had to! Children were dying. Somehow, he had to find the courage.

  Then, it happened. Grace was restored. His faith flooded back like a tide of light, banishing his preposterous doubts. How could he have contemplated surrender, when the real solution was so obvious, so simple?

  He staggered to his feet, then broke into a run again, reciting to himself, over and over, to be sure he’d get it right this time:‘ADULTERERS! SODOMITES! MOTHERS BREAST-FEEDING INFANTS OVER THE AGE OF FOUR WEEKS! REPENT AND BE SAVED…’

  Closer

  Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

  (‘Intimacy,’ I once told Sian, after we’d made love, ‘is the only cure for solipsism.’ She laughed and said, ‘Don’t get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it hasn’t even cured me of masturbation.’)

  True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds—but I also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing with everyday life.

  The question which
obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person—any more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

  If not, I was alone.

  I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow knowable, but it wasn’t something I could bring myself to take for granted. I knew there could be no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed to be compelled.

  No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it, could ever quite convince me that I’d glimpsed the author’s soul. Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief—all were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.

  When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word associations. After all, many publishers used computer programs—highly specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of self-awareness—to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism, indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either; on several occasions, I’d been deeply affected by works which I’d later discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software. This didn’t prove that human literature communicated nothing of the author’s inner life, but it certainly made clear how much room there was for doubt.

  Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to ‘switch.’ My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my ‘jewel’—the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I’d identified myself solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap device, nothing more, and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as mourning my emergence from some primitive stage of embryological neural development. Switching was simply what humans did now, an established part of the life cycle, even if it was mediated by our culture, and not by our genes.

  Seeing each other die, and observing the gradual failure of their own bodies, may have helped convince pre-Ndoli humans of their common humanity; certainly, there were countless references in their literature to the equalising power of death. Perhaps concluding that the universe would go on without them produced a shared sense of hopelessness, or insignificance, which they viewed as their defining attribute.

  Now that it’s become an article of faith that, sometime in the next few billion years, physicists will find a way for us to go on without the universe, rather than vice versa, that route to spiritual equality has lost whatever dubious logic it might ever have possessed.

  Sian was a communications engineer. I was a holovision news editor. We met during a live broadcast of the seeding of Venus with terraforming nanomachines—a matter of great public interest, since most of the planet’s as-yet-uninhabitable surface had already been sold. There were several technical glitches with the broadcast which might have been disastrous, but together we managed to work around them, and even to hide the seams. It was nothing special, we were simply doing our jobs, but afterwards I was elated out of all proportion. It took me twenty-four hours to realise (or decide) that I’d fallen in love.

  However, when I approached her the next day, she made it clear that she felt nothing for me; the chemistry I’d imagined ‘between us’ had all been in my head. I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didn’t bring us together again, but I called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was rewarded. I took her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn’t see her again for more than a month.

  I’d almost given up hope, when she appeared at my door without warning one night and dragged me along to a ‘concert’ of interactive computerised improvisation. The ‘audience’ was assembled in what looked like a mock-up of a Berlin nightclub of the 2050s. A computer program, originally designed for creating movie scores, was fed with the image from a hover-camera which wandered about the set. People danced and sang, screamed and brawled, and engaged in all kinds of histrionics in the hope of attracting the camera and shaping the music. At first, I felt cowed and inhibited, but Sian gave me no choice but to join in.

  It was chaotic, insane, at times even terrifying. One woman stabbed another to ‘death’ at the table beside us, which struck me as a sickening (and expensive) indulgence, but when a riot broke out at the end, and people started smashing the deliberately flimsy furniture, I followed Sian into the melee, cheering.

  The music—the excuse for the whole event—was garbage, but I didn’t really care. When we limped out into the night, bruised and aching and laughing, I knew that at least we’d shared something that had made us feel closer. She took me home and we went to bed together, too sore and tired to do more than sleep, but when we made love in the morning I already felt so at ease with her that I could hardly believe it was our first time.

  Soon we were inseparable. My tastes in entertainment were very different from hers, but I survived most of her favourite ‘artforms’, more or less intact. She moved into my apartment, at my suggestion, and casually destroyed the orderly rhythms of my carefully arranged domestic life.

  I had to piece together details of her past from throwaway lines; she found it far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account. Her life had been as unremarkable as mine: she’d grown up in a suburban, middle-class family, studied her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone, she’d switched at eighteen. She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her work, but put ten times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent, but hated anything overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.

  And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.

  For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking—in the sense of knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to ‘explain’ a character, I could not have explained Sian.

  And if she’d provided me with a running commentary on her mental state, and a weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the latest psychodynamic jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of useless words. If I could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined myself with her beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her every word, her every decision, then I still would not have understood so much as a single moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing, and simply was. Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered less. We were happy enough together, whether or not we were strangers—and whether or not my ‘happiness’ and Sian’s ‘happiness’ were in any real sense the same.

  Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open. She had no great dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to recount, but she let me in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did the same, and even, clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasn’t at all offended. Just puzzled.

  ‘What could it actually mean, though? To know what it’s like to be someone else? You’d have to have their memories, their personality, their body—everything. And then you’d just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn’t know anything. It’s nonsense.’

  I shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge would be impossible, but you can always get closer.
Don’t you think that the more things we do together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?’

  She scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s not what you were talking about five seconds ago. Two years, or two thousand years, of ‘shared experiences’ seen through different eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent together, how could you know that there was even the briefest instant when they both experienced what they were going through ‘together’ in the same way?’

  ‘I know, but…’

  ‘If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe you’ll stop fretting about it.’

  I laughed. ‘Whatever makes you think I’m as rational as that?’

  When the technology became available it was Sian’s idea, not mine, for us to try out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was always impatient to experience something new. ‘If we really are going to live forever,’ she said, ‘we’d better stay curious if we want to stay sane.’

  I was reluctant, but any resistance I put up seemed hypocritical. Clearly, this game wouldn’t lead to the perfect knowledge I longed for (and knew I would ever achieve), but I couldn’t deny the possibility that it might be one crude step in the right direction.

  First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to have breasts and a vagina—what it was like for me, that is, not what it had been like for Sian. True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even the novelty, to wear off, but I never felt that I’d gained much insight into her experience of the body she’d been born with. My jewel was modified only as much as was necessary to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was scarcely more than would have been required to work another male body. The menstrual cycle had been abandoned decades before, and although I could have taken the necessary hormones to allow myself to have periods, and even to become pregnant (although the financial disincentives for reproduction had been drastically increased in recent years), that would have told me absolutely nothing about Sian, who had done neither.