Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation of my two copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the rooms and bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name couldn’t find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have done it, but I didn’t have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded promising—highly sensitive to air currents but the only paper in the room was the Escher, and I couldn’t bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed the mirror, and observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would have had the added bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but as I raised the chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting sets of short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of sensory deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment, it could be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for amusement.

  So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentley’s clients probably ended up doing.

  As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for their privacy—and both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental declarations of frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had something to hide. Their curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; they’d wanted to understand each other, but, of course, not to pry.

  All of these contradictions continued in me, but—staring at the ceiling, trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty seconds—I didn’t really have to make a decision. It was the most natural thing in the world to let my mind wander back over the course of their relationship, from both points of view.

  It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiar—like an extended attack of déjà vu. It’s not that they’d often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.

  It wasn’t in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple personality. Sian and Michael simply weren’t there—to justify, to explain, to deceive each other all over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should have attempted to do all this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of my role, unable to decide on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry, and let their memories flow.

  After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a chance to break the mirror. We tried to stay together.

  We lasted a week.

  Bentley had made—as the law required—snapshots of our jewels prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to them—and then had him explain to us why—but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.

  We couldn’t forgive each other, because there was nothing to forgive. Neither of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to understand, and sympathise with, completely.

  We knew each other too well, that’s all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic detail. It wasn’t that the truth hurt; it didn’t, any longer. It numbed us. It smothered us. We didn’t know each other as we knew ourselves; it was worse than that. In the self, the details blur in the very processes of thought; mental self-dissection is possible, but it takes great effort to sustain. Our mutual dissection took no effort at all; it was the natural state into which we fell in each other’s presence. Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.

  And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.

  I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn’t much want to think about… but then, I’d always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).

  Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.

  Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

  Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies

  I always feel safest sleeping on the freeway—or at least, those stretches of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium between the surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully along the fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatown—not quite drowned out by the influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism from the west, and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism from the north), I can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that Maria and I are not going to wake up believing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing powers of tax reform.

  So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the horizon—and Maria gone—I don’t panic. No faith, no world view, no belief system, no culture, could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The borders of the basins of attraction do fluctuate, advancing and retreating by tens of metres daily—but it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I can’t think why she would have walked off and left me, without a word—but Maria does things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice versa. Even after a year together, we still have that.

  I don’t panic—but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want to get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way she would have headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she departed, that should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.

  The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted—but it’s possible to steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions. The easiest way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant attractor to build up momentum—while taking care to arrange to be deflected at the last minute by a countervailing influence.

  Choosing the first attractor—the belief to which surrender must be feigned—is always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like sniffing the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes it seems like pure introspection, like trying to determine ‘my own’ true beliefs… and sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zen—and that’s how it strikes me now… which in itself just about answers the question. The balance here is delicate, but one influence is marginally stronger: Eastern philosophies are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from where I stand—and knowing the purely geographical reasons for this doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between the freeway and the railway line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my pack, and start walking.

  A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my solitude: without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to make use of them: one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the food. Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors seem to tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just aren’t worth the cost—although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical monoculture have their own unique ‘reasons’ for not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my vegetable gardens when I passed by last night; it makes a pathetic breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think about the bread rolls that I’ll steal when I’m back with Maria again, and my anticipation almost overshadows the bland, woody taste of the present.

  The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section flanked by deserted factories and abandoned hou
ses, and against this background of relative silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger and clearer. That glib label—‘Chinatown’—was always an oversimplification, of course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct cultures besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from Thai to Timorese—and several varieties of every religion from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that finally stabilised would probably seem utterly bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the district. To the present-day citizens, of course, the strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s the definition of stability, the whole reason the attractors exist. If I marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find myself sharing the local values and beliefs, I’d be perfectly happy to stay that way for the rest of my life.

  I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though—any more than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the Sun. It’s been almost four years since Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.

  * * *

  I’ve heard dozens of ‘explanations’ for the events of that day, but I find most of them equally dubious—rooted as they are in the world-views of particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it, on 12 January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen threshold—of global population, perhaps—and suffered a sudden, irreversible change of psychic state.

  Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all, nobody found themself drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed locked inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was so thoroughly breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)

  In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap operas of other people’s inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever… but our skulls became completely permeable to each other’s values and beliefs, each other’s deepest convictions.

  At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are confused and nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think), finding God (or some equivalent) anew every six seconds—seeing no visions, hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of dream logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggering—while ideas moved between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I wanted it to stop, badly—I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other tramps compare these early mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and dumped by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after hour—but looking back, I find myself reminded most of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long, feverish night of interminable vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached, my skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything more from my body, another spasm took hold of me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed positively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some harsh—but ultimately benevolent—deity. At the time, it was the most religious experience I’d ever been through.

  All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance, mutating and hybridising along the way… like those random populations of computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments to demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the historical clashes of the very same beliefs—with the length and timescales drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot less bloodshed, now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or extermination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous…

  The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded by pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religions—and in other places, by pure chance—certain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold, to start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant belief had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors conquered, the faster they grew. Fortunately—in this city, at least—no single attractor was able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by equally powerful neighbours—or confined by sheer lack of population at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-residential land.

  Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into more or less the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the population having moved—or changed—until they were content to be exactly where—and who—they were.

  I happened to end up between attractors—affected by many, but captured by none—and I’ve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have thinned, but a core of us remains free.

  In the early years, the people of the attractors used to send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case for their respective metaphors for what had happened—as if a well-chosen analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while for some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered obsolete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniques—and that still hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged ‘simulation’ of Meltdown as a colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels, obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The commentator spouted jargon about self-organising systems—and lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of darkness (unpopulated except for the barely visible presence of a few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones were meant to be us).

  I don’t know how things would have turned out if there hadn’t been the pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to allow people to live and work without travelling outside their own basins—the regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractor—most of which are only a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been exactly plugged into the global village these last few years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.) Living on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its wealth than those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that most people are content with the status quo—and I’m certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and prosper.

  I’d rather die than join them, that’s all.

  (Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)

  * * *

  The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are no regions of perfect neutrality—or if there are, they’re too small to find, probably too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly drift as the conditions within the basins varied. Near enough is fine for a night, but if I tried to live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever attractor held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway me.

  Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true that we’re spared each other’s inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth, no doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here on the surface, though, where it’s physically impossible to be equidistant from everyone, I’m forced to keep moving to average out the effects as best I can.

  Sometimes I daydream about heading
out into the countryside, and living in glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food. With Maria? If she’ll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Half a dozen times, we’ve told ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey… but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would take us safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually deflected back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, it’s simply a matter of finding it—and if all the rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people who could know for certain how to leave the city are those who’ve stumbled on the right path and actually departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

  Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and ask myself what I ‘really want’:

  To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of my own mute soul?

  To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin civilisation? For the sake of prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one elaborate set of self-affirming lies?

  Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

  The answer, of course, depends on where I’m standing.

  * * *

  More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a second glance. I picture my hunger as an object—another weight to carry, not much heavier than my pack—and it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my mind grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my face, and the pleasure of walking.

  After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a deep tranquillity, together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd part is, I have no idea what it is that I think I understand; I’m experiencing the pleasure of insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope of replying to the question: insight into what? The feeling persists, regardless.