Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  I swam a few metres away, then surfaced cautiously. The life raft was decaying, the plastic peeling away into the water like skin in acid. The polymer was meant to be cross-linked beyond any chance of biodegradation, but obviously some strain of El Nido bacteria had found a way.

  I floated on my back, breathing deeply to purge myself of carbon dioxide, contemplating the prospect of completing the mission on foot. The canopy above seemed to waver, as if in a heat haze, which made no sense. My limbs grew curiously warm and heavy. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what I might be smelling if I hadn’t shut down ninety per cent of my olfactory range. I thought: If I’d bred bacteria able to digest a substance foreign to El Nido, what else would I want them to do when they chanced upon such a meal? Incapacitate whoever had brought it in? Broadcast news of the event with a biochemical signal?

  I could smell the sharp odours of half a dozen sweat-drenched people when they arrived, but all I could do was lie in the water and let them fish me out.

  * * *

  After we left the river, I was carried on a stretcher, blindfolded and bound. No one talked within earshot. I might have judged the pace we set by the rhythm of my bearers’ footsteps, or guessed the direction in which we travelled by hints of sunlight on the side of my face … but in the waking dream induced by the bacterial toxins, the harder I struggled to interpret those cues, the more lost and confused I became.

  At one point, when the party rested, someone squatted beside me – and waved a scanning device over my body? That guess was confirmed by the pinpricks of heat where the polymer transponders had been implanted. Passive devices – but their resonant echo in a satellite microwave burst would have been distinctive. The scanner found, and fried, them all.

  Late in the afternoon, they removed the blindfold. Certain that I was totally disoriented? Certain that I’d never escape? Or maybe just to flaunt El Nido’s triumphant architecture.

  The approach was a hidden path through swampland; I kept looking down to see my captors’ boots not quite vanishing into the mud, while a dry, apparently secure stretch of high ground nearby was avoided.

  Closer in, the dense thorned bushes blocking the way seemed to yield for us; the chewing gum had worn off enough for me to tell that we moved in a cloud of a sweet, ester-like compound. I couldn’t see whether it was being sprayed into the air from a cylinder, or emitted bodily by a member of the party with symbionts in his skin, or lungs, or intestines.

  The village emerged almost imperceptibly out of the impostor jungle. The ground – I could feel it – became, step by step, unnaturally firm and level. The arrangement of trees grew subtly ordered – defining no linear avenues, but increasingly wrong none the less. Then I started glimpsing, to the left and right, ‘fortuitous’ clearings containing ‘natural’ wooden buildings, or shiny biopolymer sheds.

  I was lowered to the ground outside one of the sheds. A man I hadn’t seen before leaned over me, wiry and unshaven, holding up a gleaming hunting knife. He looked to me like the archetype of human as animal, human as predator, human as unselfconscious killer.

  He said, ‘Friend, this is where we drain out all of your blood.’ He grinned and squatted down. I almost passed out from the stench of my own fear, as the glut overwhelmed the symbionts. He cut my hands free, adding, ‘And then put it all back in again.’ He slid one arm under me, around my ribs, raised me up from the stretcher, and carried me into the building.

  * * *

  Guillermo Largo said, ‘Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. I think we’ve almost cleaned you out, but I don’t want to risk physical contact in case there’s enough of a residue of the virus to make your own hyped-up immune system turn on you.’

  He was an unprepossessing, sad-eyed man; thin, short, slightly balding. I stepped up to the wooden bars between us and stretched my hand out towards him. ‘Make contact any time you like. I never carried a virus. Do you think I believe your propaganda?’

  He shrugged, unconcerned. ‘It would have killed you, not me – although I’m sure it was meant for both of us. It may have been keyed to my genotype, but you carried far too much of it not to have been caught up in the response to my presence. That’s history, though; not worth arguing about.’

  I didn’t actually believe that he was lying; a virus to dispose of both of us made perfect sense. I even felt a begrudging respect for the Company, for the way I’d been used – there was a savage, unsentimental honesty to it – but it didn’t seem politic to reveal that to Largo.

  I said, ‘If you believe that I pose no risk to you now, though, why don’t you come back with me? You’re still considered valuable. One moment of weakness, one bad decision, doesn’t have to mean the end of your career. Your employers are very pragmatic people; they won’t want to punish you. They’ll just need to watch you a little more closely in future. Their problem, not yours; you won’t even notice the difference.’

  Largo didn’t seem to be listening, but then he looked straight at me and smiled. ‘Do you know what Victor Hugo said about Colombia’s first constitution? He said it was written for a country of angels. It only lasted twenty-three years – and on the next attempt, the politicians lowered their sights. Considerably.’ He turned away, and started pacing back and forth in front of the bars. Two Mestizo peasants with automatic weapons stood by the door, looking on impassively. Both incessantly chewed what looked to me like ordinary coca leaves; there was something almost reassuring about their loyalty to tradition.

  My cell was clean and well furnished, right down to the kind of bioreactor toilet that was all the rage in Beverly Hills. My captors had treated me impeccably, so far, but I had a feeling that Largo was planning something unpleasant. Handing me over to the Mother barons? I still didn’t know what deal he’d done, what he’d sold them in exchange for a piece of El Nido and a few dozen bodyguards. Let alone why he thought this was better than an apartment in Bethesda and a hundred grand a year.

  I said, ‘What do you think you’re going to do if you stay here? Build your own country for angels? Grow your own bioengineered utopia?’

  ‘Utopia?’ Largo stopped pacing, and flashed his crooked smile again. ‘No. How can there ever be a utopia? There is no right way to live which we’ve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules, there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the existence of a creator – and a perverse one, at that – why should there be some blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?’

  I said, ‘You’re right. In the end, all we can do is be true to our nature. See through the veneer of civilisation and hypocritical morality, and accept the real forces that shape us.’

  Largo burst out laughing. I actually felt my face burn at his response – if only because I’d misread him, and failed to get him on side; not because he was laughing at the one thing I believed in.

  He said, ‘Do you know what I was working on, back in the States?’

  ‘No. Does it matter?’ The less I knew, the better my chances of living.

  Largo told me anyway. ‘I was looking for a way to render mature neurons embryonic. To switch them back into a less differentiated state, enabling them to behave the way they do in the foetal brain: migrating from site to site, forming new connections. Supposedly as a treatment for dementia and stroke … although the work was being funded by people who saw it as the first step towards viral weapons able to rewire parts of the brain. I doubt that the results could ever have been very sophisticated – no viruses for imposing political ideologies – but all kinds of disabling or docile behaviour might have been coded into a relatively small package.’

  ‘And you sold that to the cartels? So they can hold whole cities to ransom with it next time one of their leaders is arrested? To save them the trouble of assassinating judges and politicians?’

  Largo said mildly, ‘I sold it to the cartels, but not as a weapon. No infectious military version exists. Even the prototypes – which merely regress selected neurons
, but make no programmed changes – are far too cumbersome and fragile to survive at large. And there are other technical problems. There’s not much reproductive advantage for a virus in carrying out elaborate, highly specific modifications to its host’s brain; unleashed on a real human population, mutants that simply ditched all of that irrelevant shit would soon predominate.’

  ‘Then … ?’

  ‘I sold it to the cartels as a product. Or, rather, I combined it with their own biggest seller, and handed over the finished hybrid. A new kind of Mother.’

  ‘Which does what?’ He had me hooked, even if I was digging my own grave.

  ‘Which turns a subset of the neurons in the brain into something like White Knights. Just as mobile, just as flexible. Far better at establishing tight new synapses, though, rather than just flooding the interneural space with a chosen substance. And not controlled by dietary additives; controlled by molecules they secrete themselves. Controlled by each other.’

  That made no sense to me. ‘Existing neurons become mobile? Existing brain structures … melt? You’ve made a version of Mother that turns people’s brains to mush – and you expect them to pay for that?’

  ‘Not mush. Everything’s part of a tight feedback loop: the firing of these altered neurons influences the range of molecules they secrete – which, in turn, controls the rewiring of nearby synapses. Vital regulatory centres and motor neurons are left untouched, of course. And it takes a strong signal to shift the Grey Knights; they don’t respond to every random whim. You need at least an hour or two without distractions before you can have a significant effect on any brain structure.

  ‘It’s not altogether different from the way ordinary neurons end up encoding learned behaviour and memories – only faster, more flexible … and much more widespread. There are parts of the brain that haven’t changed in a hundred thousand years, which can be remodelled completely in half a day.’

  He paused, and regarded me amiably.

  The sweat on the back of my neck went cold. ‘You’ve used the virus—?’

  ‘Of course. That’s why I created it. For myself. That’s why I came here in the first place.’

  ‘For do-it-yourself neurosurgery? Why not just slip a screwdriver under one eyeball and poke it around until the urge went away?’ I felt physically sick. ‘At least … cocaine and heroin, and even White Knights, exploited natural receptors, natural pathways. You’ve taken a structure that evolution has honed over millions of years, and—’

  Largo was greatly amused, but this time he refrained from laughing in my face. He said gently, ‘For most people, navigating their own psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. That’s what evolution has bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs like cocaine or heroin or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead ends – or, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. And all that White Knights ever did was package the same effects differently.

  ‘Grey Knights allow you to reshape the entire maze, at will. They don’t confine you to some shrunken emotional repertoire; they empower you completely. They let you control exactly who you are.’

  I had to struggle to put aside the overwhelming sense of revulsion I felt. Largo had decided to fuck himself in the head; that was his problem. A few users of Mother would do the same, but one more batch of poisonous shit to compete with all the garbage from the basement labs wasn’t exactly a national tragedy.

  Largo said affably, ‘I spent thirty years as someone I despised. I was too weak to change, but I never quite lost sight of what I wanted to become. I used to wonder if it would have been less contemptible, less hypocritical, to resign myself to the fact of my weakness, the fact of my corruption. But I never did.’

  ‘And you think you’ve erased your old personality, as easily as you erased your computer files? What are you now, then? A saint? An angel?’

  ‘No. But I’m exactly what I want to be. With Grey Knights, you can’t really be anything else.’

  I felt giddy for a moment, light-headed with rage; I steadied myself against the bars of my cage.

  I said, ‘So you’ve scrambled your brain, and you feel better. And you’re going to live in this fake jungle for the rest of your life, collaborating with drug pushers, kidding yourself that you’ve achieved redemption?’

  ‘The rest of my life? Perhaps. But I’ll be watching the world. And hoping.’

  I almost choked. ‘Hoping for what? You think your habit will ever spread beyond a few brain-damaged junkies? You think Grey Knights are going to sweep across the planet and transform it beyond recognition? Or were you lying – is the virus really infectious, after all?’

  ‘No. But it gives people what they want. They’ll seek it out, once they understand that.’

  I gazed at him, pityingly. ‘What people want is food, sex, and power. That will never change. Remember the passage you marked in ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’? What do you think that meant? Deep down, we’re just animals with a few simple drives. Everything else is less than chaff in a breeze.’

  Largo frowned, as if trying to recall the quote, then nodded slowly. He said, ‘Do you know how many different ways an ordinary human brain can be wired? Not an arbitrary neural network of the same size, but an actual, working Homo sapiens brain, shaped by real embryology and real experience? There are about ten-to-the-power-of-ten-million possibilities. A huge number: a lot of room for variation in personality and talents, a lot of space to encode the traces of different lives.

  ‘But do you know what Grey Knights do to that number? They multiply it by the same again. They grant the part of us that was fixed, that was tied to ‘‘human nature’’, the chance to be as different from person to person as a lifetime’s worth of memories.

  ‘Of course Conrad was right. Every word of that passage was true – when it was written. But now it doesn’t go far enough. Because now, all of human nature is less than chaff in a breeze. ‘‘The horror’’, the heart of darkness, is less than chaff in a breeze. All the ‘‘eternal verities’’ – all the sad and beautiful insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare – are less than chaff in a breeze.’

  * * *

  I lay awake on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and frogs, wondering what Largo would do with me. If he didn’t see himself as capable of murder, he wouldn’t kill me – if only to reinforce his delusions of self-mastery. Perhaps he’d just dump me outside the research station – where I could explain to Madeleine Smith how the Colombian air-force pilot had come down with an El Nido virus in midair, and I’d valiantly tried to take control.

  I thought back over the incident, trying to get my story straight. The pilot’s body would never be recovered; the forensic details didn’t have to add up.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself breaking his neck. The same twinge of remorse passed over me. I brushed it aside irritably. So I’d killed him – and the girl, a few days earlier – and a dozen others before that. The Company had very nearly disposed of me. Because it was expedient – and because it was possible. That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else was pious self-delusion. A hundred kilometres away, Colombia’s warring factions were proving the truth of that, one more time.

  But if Largo had infected me with his own special brand of Mother? And if everything he’d told me about it was true?

  Grey Knights only moved if you willed them to move. All I had to do in order to remain unscathed was to choose that fate. To wish only to be exactly who I was: a killer who’d always understood that he was facing the deepest of truths. Embracing savagery and corruption because, in the end, there was no other way.

  I kept seeing them before me: the pilot, the girl.

  I had to feel nothing – and wish to feel nothing – and keep on making that choice, again and again.

  Or everything I was would disintegrate like a house of sand, and blow away
.

  One of the guards belched in the darkness, then spat.

  The night stretched out ahead of me, like a river that had lost its way.

  MITOCHONDRIAL EVE

  With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, 2 June 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We’d been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open twenty-four hours.

  ‘Don’t you want to discover your place in the human family?’ she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. ‘Don’t you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?’

  The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We’d only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn’t yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

  ‘It’s very late,’ I said cautiously. ‘And you know I have to work tomorrow.’ I was still fighting my way up through postdoctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer – and at twenty-five, the same age as I was, she’d had real paid jobs for almost four years.

  ‘You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It’ll take fifteen minutes.’

  Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.

  It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement’s wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaux in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various ‘culturally appropriate’ names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele’ele in Samoa) and I’d heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.