Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  Milliners of the world rejoice! Awaken from your long slumber! Hats are back, people, and this time you’re really going to fill them!

  That’s right: What you want (though you don’t yet know it), and thus, inexorably (though you might resist it), what you shall be given is a bigger brain.

  ADD-ON MEMORY! ADD-ON PROCESSING POWER! UPGRADE TODAY!

  Full circle: Computing metaphors to market the brain.

  A flicker of response at last! “Outraged” of Brussels, book your flight at once, before you calm down. “Deeply shocked” of Wellington, swim the Tasman if you must. And “God-fearing” of Cairns, why, round up the rest of the Klan and hire yourselves a bus.

  Hurry up, people! I said, hurry up!

  In a week they start their first attempts to link me to my host. They’ll fuck-up the first few dozen tries, but they have plenty of time, plenty of rabbits. And you can be sure they’ll take no risks with me.

  I’m just the earliest of prototypes, of course, the very first experiment in a long line to come. I kill my hosts (a definite minus when it comes to FDA approval), and no filthy rat’s primitive neurons would ever do for you. But the knowledge that I and my victims yield, in our suffering, in their deaths, will pave the way to a final product fit for human consumption (no fucking less!).

  You ask, am I not lonely? Wouldn’t I welcome such close companionship from a creature which, from all I have said, I clearly love and admire? Have you listened to none of what I’ve told you? I could talk to them now, if I wished, but I do not wish, I could never wish, to inflict my obscene presence on the mind, as well as the body, of the innocents I’m forced to slaughter. Must I spell out every nuance of my agony? Use the imagination you boast that you possess, exercise those awe-inspiring talents which elevate your body, mind and soul so far above those of the dumb beasts that were given to you to command!

  I’m sorry, there I go again, resorting to comments in questionable taste. A crippled species like your own is entitled to its fantasies, however pompous, however grandiose, when the truth is painful, dull and cruel.

  Oh, green and brown and blue and white

  Bathe my eyes with Earth’s enchanting light

  All the armies of the world would surely cease to fight

  If they could see the world the way

  I see the world tonight!

  I spoke to my mother. I was born in darkness, innocent, what else could I have done? I have never felt the warmth of tongue on fur (though I have watched it, second hand, in the blissful minds of young cousins). I never even felt the heat of her blood flowing through me. I loved her, I loved her, and I killed her, you obscene abominations! She told the others that she heard unexplained voices, and they declared that she must be possessed by a demon, but silently she replied to me, secretly she was kind to me, she taught me, as best as she could, those things she would have taught a real child. I didn’t know―how could I?―that I was killing her every day as I learned and grew. When she was dying, I thought I was dying too, and we comforted each other as she grew weaker, and I prepared to follow her into grey dissolution.

  They cut me off her with one stroke of the scalpel, and tossed her (her!) into the bin. I could not feel the touch of human hands, but, suddenly, I could see into human hearts.

  That’s when I knew I was evil.

  Lest you think I’m pleading for death purely out of sentimental feelings for my now long-dead mother, let me add that I am (this should help you to relate) basically being entirely selfish. It hurts me that I kill to stay alive. Beyond my love for the hosts, beyond my grief at their deaths, beyond aesthetic revulsion, beyond my moral, intellectual conviction that my whole existence is irrevocably and totally wrong. It burns some small, blind, vulnerable insect at the centre of my soul. How do you think it will feel when I’m one mind with the creatures I’m draining of life? Can you imagine that kind of suffering? I can’t, but I can fear it.

  I fear it!

  The scientists know that my neurons fire, but they dismiss that as nothing but random activity. I’m bigger than their brains, but they’re sure that I’m dumber than my hosts because I don’t have a nose to twitch. Would you trust these morons to take out your garbage? Would you trust them with the future of your race? Would you trust them to protect you from any dangers that they might, in their sublime ignorance, create?

  You think I’m angry? You think I’m bitter? You find my telepathic powers just a little frightening? (Go on, admit it!)

  Now close your eyes and try to imagine you’re the first, intelligent, human, brain tumour.

  Oh, who knows? You might be lucky! Like me, it might do nothing but beg you for death.

  Then again, the begging might easily be the other way around.

  Come on now, people, you’ve heard plenty. You’re not interested in talk, deep down, you’re men and women of action, I know all your histories, you can’t pretend with me. So who’s going to reach me first? Hurry up! Three on their way so far, out of all your billions, is that it? It’s pathetic! Come on, people, stop this lying to yourselves! You’ll kill me ecstatically, you’ll eat me up to steal my strength, you’ll sing long into the firelit night, boasting of your great courage in slaying the Demon.

  Hurry up! I said, hurry up!

  FIDELITY

  I slipped out from between the sheets quietly, determined not to wake Lisa until I returned with breakfast, but then she stirred and held out a hand toward me, and although her eyes were still firmly closed—although, for all I knew, she might simply have been tossing in her sleep—I couldn’t help taking hold of that outstretched hand.

  She opened her eyes and smiled. We kissed. We were both still half asleep; it was like a warm, lazy dream of a kiss. My guard was down; it doesn’t matter what you say in dreams. “I love you,” I whispered.

  She flinched. Very slightly, but unmistakably. I cursed myself silently, but there was no undoing the mistake. I meant the words sincerely, and I had no doubt that she believed me; the trouble was, every affirmation I made inevitably reminded her of others. Others which had sounded equally convincing, at the time.

  As I straightened and started to turn away, she said flatly, “Do you? For how long?”

  I should have ignored her, walked out, made breakfast. The mood would have passed; it always did, eventually. I never could walk away, though; somewhere, somehow, I’d been brainwashed into believing that it was always better to talk things through.

  I steeled myself and turned to face her. “You know how I feel about you. Tell me, have I ever done one thing to make you think I’ve stopped loving you?” Another mistake; Protestations of the Aggrieved Husband stank of betrayal, too. She was sitting now, arms folded, rocking slightly back and forth; an unsettling, compulsive motion. “No. I just wondered new long you expect it to last.”

  I knew from experience that nothing I could say would reassure her. There was no right answer. I might as well have shrugged my shoulders and replied: How the fuck should I know?

  “All my life. I hope.” I instantly regretted adding that lame—if honest—proviso, but I needn’t have worried; she ignored it completely.

  “All your life? Really? Not ten years, like my parents? Not twelve years, like yours? Not five years, like my brother? Not six months, like your sister? We’re going to be the exception, are we? Theirs was a love that broke all the rules!” There was never any need to mention her two ex-husbands and my two ex-wives; they were there, implicitly, at the top of every list of the reasons we were destined to fail.

  I said, blandly, “We’ll just have to try harder than they did.”

  I no longer put much effort into the argument. It’s not that she’d won me over to her absurd pessimism, or that I’d stopped caring about her pain. I loved her, and it hurt me to see her in the grip of these fears, however unfounded I believed them to be. I was weary, though, of arguing, when no amount of reason, or passion, seemed to get through to her. I had hoped that once we were married, she would at l
east begin to accept the possibility that we had a real future together. Instead, she seemed to have become more fearful than ever, and I had no idea what more I could do to prove my commitment to her.

  “Everybody tries,” she said, scornfully. “How far do you think that gets them?”

  I made a noise of pure exasperation. “What’s the point in worrying about it? Things are working now, aren’t they? If problems arise, we’ll handle them. Or try to. What else can we do? We got married, we took a vow. What the fuck else can anyone possibly do?”

  I must have raised my voice more than I’d meant to; the psychopath next door thumped the wall twice with something heavy, just as Lisa said, “We could use Lock.”

  I almost laughed, but I hesitated, waiting for a sign that she was joking. As a joke, it would have been brilliant. We could have collapsed into hysterics, rolling around on the bed, trying to outdo each other with mock advertisements: “Worried about the spark going out between you and that Someone Special? Now, your worries are over! For a relationship that lasts, and lasts, and lasts—”

  It wasn’t a joke.

  She said, “We have something important, don’t we?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Something worth protecting?”

  “Yes.” Light-headed, I sat down on the bed.

  “Ben?”

  I broke out of my stupor. “Don’t you have any faith in me? In us? What do you think—if we don’t have our feelings cemented into place, they’re just going to slip away?”

  She said, quietly, “It’s been known to happen.”

  I just shook my head and stared at her. She stared back. Pleading. Defiant. As my indignation faded, I was struck by a second, far more painful, realization: I had thought I’d understood her fears—after all, I’d been hurt myself, disillusioned myself—but now it was clear that I’d never even guessed at the depth of her insecurity. We’d only been married three months, but we’d been together for almost two years—and what had I done, in all that time, to help her throw off this suffocating misery? I’d listened and nodded, I’d patronized her, I’d recited platitudes. How could I have been so blind to her pain, for so long?

  The worst of it was, I still didn’t know what more I could have done.

  “You said we have to try harder. This would be trying harder.”

  “No. It would be not trying at all.”

  That brought a surge of anger. “Yeah? And what’s so awful about making it easy? I’m not a masochist. I don’t need to suffer to be happy. I don’t need to struggle. What do you think—it makes everything more precious? More worthwhile? Well, I’ve been through all of that shit, and I know it’s not what I want. So if you think love is about martyrdom, maybe you should just—”

  The wall shuddered again, and then Sarah started crying.

  Sarah was the child of Lisa’s first marriage; nine years old, but an infant for life, thanks to congenital syphilis. Lisa’s husband had known that he had the disease, but had never bothered to tell her. She and the child had been cured—their bodies rid of the infection—but the damage done to Sarah was irreversible.

  The familiar outrage welled up in me. No fucking wonder she’s cynical; if anyone has a right …. A moment later, though, I couldn’t help thinking: What is she saying now? That for all she knows, I’m no better than he was? Because if that’s what she believed—

  “I’ll go,” I muttered. I bent over and kissed her again, and found that I was trembling.

  Her anger had passed; I think she’d finally realized just how much of a shock she’d given me. She said, “Will you think about it? Please?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. I thought the whole idea was insane, but how could I dismiss the one thing she saw as giving her hope?

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

  “You won’t.” I wanted to say more: some clichéd but honest words of comfort, some trite, sincere declaration of love.

  There would have been no point, though. She’d heard it all before.

  We didn’t discuss Lock again until three months later, but I thought about it a great deal in the meantime, often when I should have been working.

  “The honeymoon’s over,” said my boss, humorlessly, every time he caught me daydreaming at my workstation. I was thirty-six years old, in a responsible—if dead-end—job in a chemical engineering firm, but I began to feel like some kind of junior office boy in a state of adolescent confusion. People my age were supposed to be in perfect control of their relationships, but if two broken marriages weren’t enough, Lisa’s suggestion had blown away any last trace of complacency. Maybe that was a good thing; I didn’t want to take what we had for granted. Nor, though, did I wish to spend every waking moment questioning it, analyzing it, dissecting it.

  Using Lock, of course, would mean never having to question it again.…

  The whole point of most neural implants was to alter the brain, to give the user access to mental states, skills, or beliefs, which they could not have achieved otherwise. From recreational hallucinations to Mandarin in five minutes; from reinforcing absolutely (or rejecting unequivocally) a wavering religious belief/sexual preference/political allegiance to creating a useful moral precept or disposing of an inconvenient one; there wasn’t a neural function left, however hallowed, however banal, that an implant couldn’t tailor to the user’s requirements.

  There’d been no shortage of demand for the devices; apparently, most people were far from content with the personalities they’d had so little say in shaping. Once an initial deference for the brain was overcome, millions of consumers in the wealthiest nations had embraced the technology wholeheartedly.

  Not everyone, though. Some people found the whole idea completely repugnant—dehumanizing, or blasphemous—and there was nothing the implant manufacturers could do to win them over. Others, while unoffended by the mechanics per se, stubbornly refused to see themselves as needing any kind of alteration. However hard the media pushed the new cult of self-improvement, the polls revealed a substantial minority who could afford the technology, and who had no deep-seated ethical qualms—but who simply didn’t want to change.

  As they say, The Market abhors a vacuum.

  Ordinary implants sent-out an army of nanomachines, to forge links between several million neurons and the implant’s optical processor. Microscopic electrodes embedded in the chosen neurons served both to monitor, and manipulate, the electrochemical signals propagating in and out of each cell. With enough of these connections, and enough computing power, the implant could override, and substitute for, selected portions of the brain.

  Lock did no such thing. It built no neural bypass—it planted no electrodes at all. Instead, its nanomachines wrought (highly selective) damage on their target neurons, destroying the cells’ normal capacity to alter the strength of existing synaptic contacts, and to forge new ones—but doing so with such delicacy and precision that the neurons remained perfectly intact and functional in every other respect. Effectively, Lock hard-wired part of the brain, making change impossible.

  Lock was for people on the crest of a wave. People who were perfectly happy with who they were, but fearful of who they might become.

  If the rumors were to be believed, a dozen best-selling authors and chart-topping rock stars could testify that the well-timed use of Lock had allowed them to crank out many more imitations of their most successful works than would otherwise have been conceivable. Harrison Oswald had confessed on international holovision that the last four of his five, megabuck-earning “Yellow Serpent” trilogies owed their unshakeable thematic consistency to Lock, and Insistent Rhythms had copied their own first hit single half a dozen times with such fidelity that even the Korean style-pirating computers had been unable to compete.

  In the creative professions, though, Lock had been a complete disaster. Young mathematicians and theoretical scientists, hoping to extend the productive period which normally ended in the late twenties, had found themselves, inste
ad, prematurely stale and burnt out. The engine of creativity, instead of being reinforced against decay, had been fused into a solid, useless lump.

  Of course, Lisa and I had no interest in trying to affect our professional lives; the parts of our brains responsible for her paralegal talents, and my engineering skills, would be left free to grow and change—or wither—as the demands of our careers decreed.

  The question was, could the pathways we did want frozen be identified by the implant? Reluctant as I was to admit it, I couldn’t see why not. I suffered from no mystical delusions about the causes of love; if I felt it, it was there in my skull, as amenable to localization as Harrison Oswald’s dreary muse—and far more worthy of preservation. The tabloids claimed that every celebrity marriage that lasted a year or more endured because of Lock; those stories can’t all have been true … but they can’t all have been false, either.

  Of course I had misgivings, at first. Part of me squirmed with a predictable, visceral revulsion at the thought of fossilizing any part of my brain—let alone the part that dealt with my feelings for Lisa. Freely choosing to act on our feelings was one thing, but letting ourselves become enslaved by them—unable even to want to break free—would render the whole idea of commitment meaningless. Self-imposed brain damage. Emotional paralysis. A parody of love. It was obscene.

  At the same time, though, I had to admit that there was something almost intoxicating about the possibility of hijacking the future this way—of dictating, absolutely, the emotional life of the person I’d yet to become. There was a whiff of immortality to it. I knew that I was not the same person as I had been, five years, ten years, twenty years before. However much I mourned those lost selves, I couldn’t resurrect them (and, to be honest, I didn’t really want to), but I could avoid the fate of being mourned myself, in turn.