Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  With Lock, I could endure.

  Gradually, my initial misgivings began to seem childish and irrational. We wouldn’t be “emotionally paralyzed,” we wouldn’t be numb; we’d be precisely as loving and responsive as we were right now—no more, no less. As for being “enslaved” by my feelings, wasn’t that already the case? The truth was, I was a happy slave, I didn’t want to break free, and the whole idea of being “able” or “unable” to feel differently was a hazy concept at best. Suppose I felt the same way about Lisa, all my life, without using Lock; in what practical sense would I have ever been “able” to stop loving her? You only live one life; it’s not just futile to think about what “might have been”—it’s meaningless. And if all Lock did was rule out choices that I never would have made in any case, then how could that entail a loss of freedom?

  Anyway, screw the philosophy; we both took steps to protect other influences on our happiness: our health, our property, our jobs. Our feelings for each other were far more important, of course, but wasn’t that all the more reason to want to guard them against any threat?

  I still believed that using Lock was unnecessary, and I couldn’t deny that it hurt that Lisa had so little faith in me—but if I loved her, I could put that aside and see things from her point of view. She’d been scarred, she’d been wounded, she’d been betrayed, time after time—she had a right to be plagued by doubts. What did I expect her to do—go out and buy herself an implant that would transform her, arbitrarily, into a moronic, grinning optimist?

  I could swallow my pride, for her sake.

  I made up my mind to agree.

  However, having raised the subject, Lisa hadn’t mentioned it again. I wondered if merely confessing her thoughts about Lock had been cathartic, if she’d never intended to do more than shock me into taking her fears more seriously.

  In the hope that this was so, I resisted all temptation to talk about our relationship; instead of wasting time proclaiming my love, I tried to be more demonstrative. I cooked the meals she liked the most. We had sex when and how she wanted it. I sold my video synthesizer to pay for the baby-sitting, and we went out every Saturday night for months. I even listened to her talk about her work, and never once let my eyes glaze over.

  It’s true, I’d done much the same for Alison, and for Maria, when things had been going badly. That had been different, though; I’d been young, naïve, pathetically over-confident. It was clear to me, in hindsight, that I’d never been able to give either of them what they wanted. Alison had been looking for an amusing companion who knew his place and minded his own business: a discreet gigolo, nothing more. I believe she eventually found one. Maria had wanted someone who’d treat her like a child—everyone’s favorite, gifted, promising twelve-year-old—for the rest of her life. Someone else might have been able to shake her out of it, but I certainly couldn’t.

  And Lisa? Lisa wanted permanence, stability, fidelity. Which was exactly what I was willing to give.

  The wedding of Lisa’s younger sister was the turning point. Her mother and father both attended, along with their current lovers. Lisa and I had been married in a registry office, in secret; now I understood why. I cringed as the two progressed from muttered insults to a fully fledged screaming match, and the bride spent most of the day in tears.

  Lisa appeared nonchalant, almost amused, at first, but half-way through the reception, I overheard her confronting the bridegroom, telling him he was a worthless bastard who’d last about a week.

  That night, we lay in bed in each other’s arms, too depressed for either sex or sleep. I kept glancing over at our “wedding photograph” on the bedside table, a cheap two-dimensional Polaroid snapped by an obliging passerby outside the registry office. It was scarcely six months old, but in the moonlight it looked strangely archaic. Lisa’s expression was placid, but I wore a foolish grin. It was the grin, I decided, that somehow made the picture seem so dated.

  Personally, I didn’t think Lisa’s parents’ behavior had the slightest bearing on the fate of our own marriage. Screw heredity and upbringing; we could make our own lives. Lisa saw things differently, though, and it seemed that nothing I’d done in the past few months had changed her outlook. The happier we were now, the further we could sink, that’s all.

  I put up some token resistance.

  “We could never end up like that,” I insisted. “We’d never let it happen.”

  “What do you think? That they sat down one morning and decided to hate each other?”

  “No. But we’ve been warned. We won’t fall into the same traps.”

  “Do you want to hear about my grandparents?”

  “Not especially.”

  I thought I’d already made the decision, but I found my resolve wavering. For a while, I just held her, trying to think it all through one more time.

  Nobody wants to be objective about love, but I had to force myself; how else could I hope to make a rational choice about Lock? There was no use pretending that love was some kind of spiritual quality or moral force—while, at the very same time, pondering the virtues of suturing it into place with molecular robots. Whether or not we used the implant, the mere fact that we could contemplate doing so had already changed what love was, for us.

  So. All the modern ideology about respect and commitment had been grafted onto ancient instincts governing breeding and child rearing. In some species, sex was everything; in our own, because our young took so long to become independent, we’d evolved feelings for our partners which endured far beyond the act of copulation. People talked of couples “expressing their love,” by means of sex, and by means of raising children, but the truth was exactly the other way around: that abstract, intellectualized love was nothing but each person’s way of rationalizing their instincts, of denying their animal helplessness, of providing motives for their actions which befitted civilized human beings.

  All of which was fine by me. To deny the origins of sexual love in reproductive biology would be farcical and self-deluding. I’d never pretended that my wish to make Lisa happy was the unsullied philanthropy of a saint—if it had been, I’d have been working in Calcutta or São Paulo, loving everyone equally, not living a pampered middle-class life and thinking only of the two of us, and Sarah. Conceding that didn’t make me love her any less—but it did seem to make it all the more absurd to be precious about it. That we loved each other was an accident. It wasn’t written in the stars. What chance had created, chance could undo—unless we chose to make that impossible.

  “Remember what you said about Lock?”

  She didn’t answer straight away, and for a moment I thought: Don’t be a fool, she never meant it.

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Is it still what you want?”

  Her face was in shadow; I had no idea what she was thinking. It suddenly occurred to me that if only I’d kept my mouth shut, she might never have mentioned Lock again.

  “Yes.”

  For a while, I couldn’t speak. A voice in my head shrieked gibberish about a strait-jacket for my soul, a leash for my genitals, a barbed-wire fence around the marriage bed. My grin on the wedding photo looked like the rictus of a frozen corpse. I let the reaction run its course, as if it had nothing to do with me.

  Finally, I said, “Then I want it, too. It scares me, but if it’s really what you want …?”

  She laughed. “Don’t be frightened! There’s nothing to be afraid of. You know exactly what it’s going to be like.”

  I laughed, too. She was right. Of course she was right! What’s more, she was plainly happier than she’d been for a very long time, and wasn’t that the whole point?

  She kissed me, insistently, and I let the ancient instincts take over—but even as I did, I knew that in a way, we’d finally transcended them.

  I bought the implants the next day. They were cheaper than I’d expected, just five hundred dollars each—in total, less than four days’ salary. The illustration on the packaging showed a
tranquil, smiling person of indeterminate gender, inside whose skull was a safe, bejewelled and glowing like some Hollywood Ark of the Covenant, visible through flesh and bone by virtue of its radiance. Above, Harrison Oswald’s endorsement read: “Lock is the only implant I’d ever think of using! Lock is for all of us who already have what it takes!”

  We read the instructions together. Programming Lock was simple; it asked you what you wanted locked, and you told it. There was no risk of the implant failing to interpret the words correctly; it didn’t even try to understand them. Having stored a verbal pattern—such as the phrase “My feelings for Lisa”—the implant examined the user’s brain, determined which neural pathways were triggered by the pattern, and targeted them for preservation. There was no need for the implant itself to have the faintest concept of what the pattern meant; all that mattered was the meaning to the user.

  I’d had fears about the nanomachines somehow running amok, forgetting their programming and rampaging through our brains, wreaking their special damage on every single neuron and leaving us worse than dead: trapped in an eternal present, unable to form long-term memories because the neural systems involved had been rendered incapable of change. The instruction booklet, though, reassured me; each nanomachine destroyed itself in the process of altering just one neuron, and there weren’t enough of the things in the implant to cripple the whole brain. We didn’t rush into it. We both took leave from work. We borrowed the money to put Sarah into the Center for a fortnight; Lisa didn’t like doing that—she found it hard enough to leave her there each day—but we agreed that we needed time to ourselves, without any distractions.

  Lisa insisted that we had to “prepare ourselves” before we used the implants. I wasn’t sure if this made sense, but I went along with her, for the sake of harmony. Our precise state of mind at the moment we applied the implants certainly wasn’t important; Lock was concerned only with neural connections, which changed on a far slower time scale than the transient electrochemical flashes of thought. Among the existing pathways, there always had been, and always would be, the capacity for a broad variety of instantaneous moods. It was that whole set of possibilities (and the likelihood of each one occurring) that we’d be preserving with Lock.

  Over a period of days, though, perhaps we could strengthen the most desirable pathways, by repeated use, and cause the others to atrophy, if only partially.

  The question was: how, in practice, do you optimize your love? Do you sit staring into the eyes of your beloved, whispering sweet inanities? Do you have sex, to feel satisfied, or do you abstain, to feel desire? Do you listen to romantic music? Watch romantic movies? Reminisce about the early days, or plan the endless golden future?

  We ended up going out; to movies, to plays, to exhibitions. After all, we decided, love was about doing the things we enjoyed, together, not moping around the house, hoping for a chance moment of transcendental bliss. The twin luxuries of not having to work, and not having to think about Sarah, filled me with a kind of guilty pleasure, but I would have enjoyed myself far more without constantly having to worry about whether I was, in fact, strengthening the synapses I was meant to be strengthening, and not—accidentally, subconsciously, or through sheer lack of mental discipline—reinforcing negative modes of thought.

  By the end of the fortnight, if Lisa spoke, or smiled, or touched me, and I felt anything less than pure adoration, I’d put myself through absurd contortions, trying to correct my response. All the panic and claustrophobia which I’d thought I’d conquered began to return. Lisa seemed nervous, too, but I didn’t dare suggest a postponement. I didn’t want a postponement; I couldn’t face spending one more day so obsessed with monitoring my emotions that they were constantly at risk of disintegrating into nothing but a series of robotic mental twitches. There were only two possibilities: we proceeded on schedule, or we gave up the whole idea—and backing out was unthinkable. Lisa would never have trusted me again. I would have lost her. I had no choice.

  The night before, I lay awake, feigning sleep. No doubt Lisa was doing the same. No matter; perfect honesty was hardly what we wanted. Implants were available which could provide it—and all the other aspects of fairy-tale love—but we’d decided to make do with the real thing.

  Lying in the dark, breathing with self-conscious tranquility, I thought about the way my life had been, after my second divorce, before I’d met Lisa. Three years of grey stupefaction, hovering between self-pity and numbness. Sitting at home, listening to the radio spewing out songs about dancing all night long, drinking all night long, or fucking all night long. Me, I never seemed to do anything all night long. Least of all sleep.

  I knew one thing: I couldn’t live like that again. I was no longer sure that I really did care enough about Lisa to do what she’d asked of me, purely for her sake, but somehow this had ceased to be the question. The simple truth was: I needed someone, she needed someone. It no longer mattered what we felt for each other. I wasn’t making any kind of sacrifice; I wasn’t doing this to prove my love. It had come down to this: It was better to be in chains than to be alone.

  When I woke, this bleak mood had subsided, a little. Just the sight of Lisa in the morning could still make me almost giddy with joy, and remnants of the old, unselfconscious affection—which I’d once felt so effortlessly—returned for a while. We ate breakfast in silence. I smiled so much that my face ached.

  When I fetched the implants, my palms were slick with sweat. I remembered how light-hearted I’d been on my wedding day, not nervous at all—but the vow, then, had been nothing but words; this felt more like a suicide pact. That was absurd, though. Who were we killing? We wouldn’t change, we wouldn’t feel a thing. We were slaughtering the future, but everybody does that, a thousand times a day.

  “Ben?”

  “What?”

  “Are you ready? Are you sure?”

  I grinned at her. You bitch, don’t tempt me.

  “Of course I’m ready. Are you?”

  She nodded, then looked away. I took her hand across the table, and said as gently as I could, “This is what you wanted. No more doubts, no more fears.”

  The implants themselves were the size of grains of sand. With tweezers, we sat them in their programmers, and spoke the words by which they would map our love. Then we placed them in the applicators, ready to poke up our nostrils. From there, they would burrow straight into the brain, and disperse the virus-sized robots which would damage us more subtly than we’d ever been damaged before.

  I paused, and tried to compose myself, tried to cast aside my misgivings. What was the point in backing out now? What could I gain? I’d already pinned down my love, stripped it of all context, objectified it irreversibly. Could the nanomachines do worse?

  As Lisa raised her applicator, I had a vision of myself leaping to my feet, reaching out, knocking it from her hand. I didn’t though. I followed suit, hurriedly, afraid that if I hesitated I’d lose my nerve.

  After a few tense seconds, she started sobbing from sheer relief, and I joined her. We stumbled into each other’s arms, shuddering and gasping, tears streaming down our faces. Whatever we’d done, it was over, decided. For now, that was more than enough.

  Later, I carried her into the bedroom. We were too drained to make love. We slept for twenty solid hours, and woke just in time to bring Sarah home.

  All of this took place fifteen years ago, but at the risk of stating the obvious, very little has changed since.

  Of course, I still love Lisa. I still slip up, sometimes, and tell her so, and she treats these declarations as skeptically as ever.

  “How long do you think it will last?” she asks.

  There’s still no right answer. She knows the truth as surely as I do, but—as always—it’s powerless to diminish her fears.

  Sarah is twenty-four now. She was hell during puberty, almost unmanageable, but lately she’s become a real source of joy to us. For all that the doctors declared that she’d have a mental age of
eighteen months all her life, there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that she has made progress. Can an infant be considerate, compassionate, selfless? Sarah can. She can still barely talk—but every day, it seems, she finds a new way to express her love for us. Maybe she hasn’t “grown up before our eyes” as an ordinary child would have done—but I realize now that, in her own way, she’s never stopped moving forward.

  As for Lock, I try not to think about it too often. Lisa and I are still in love, we’re still together. None of our friends’ marriages have lasted this long. Surely that’s a tangible sign of success; surely that proves … something.

  Sometimes, though, in the mornings when I stand by the bed, just watching Lisa sleep, I feel what is, unmistakably—perhaps you could even say literally—the very same feeling of tenderness (no more, no less) that I’ve felt a thousand times before, at similar moments stretching back across fifteen years—and which I know I’ll feel a thousand times again, before I die. And I’m caught between the sense that no time has passed at all, and the conflicting impression that I’ve been standing, and watching, for something like eternity.

  And I think—not with any bitterness, but numbed by a sense of loss that I can’t quite delineate, that I can’t quite comprehend:

  Maybe we aren’t on the crest of the wave, but one thing’s certain.

  It can’t—it truly can’t—get better than this.

  BEFORE

  The observation bay of the Hotel Tereshkova faces Earth. The dome consists of two concentric plastic shells, with a metre of heavy water between them, but the optical properties of the plastic have been tailored to render the combination almost invisible, and when my brain ceases stubbornly extrapolating from a few stray reflections, the entire structure seems to vanish. My skin crawls—but this time I manage to keep myself from panicking and turning away. I float “on my back,” “above” the middle of the “floor,” feet pointing east, and try to accept the visible proof that I am outside everything that once enclosed me.