Luminous

by Greg Egan

  He smiles, as if I’d spoken the name of a mutual friend. ‘No. Not then. But later, I heard. You know, the Copies used to flow from machine to machine. As the demand for computing power went up and down, and exchange rates shifted, the management software used to take us apart and move us. From Japan, to California, to Texas, to Switzerland. It would break us down into a billion data packets and send us through the network by a thousand different routes, and then put us back together again. Ten times a day, some days.’

  My skin crawls. ‘And … the same thing happened? Transition dreams?’

  ‘That’s what I heard. We couldn’t even tell that we’d been shipped across the planet; it felt to us like no time had passed at all. But I heard rumours that the mathematicians had proved that there were dreams in the data at every stage. In the Copy left behind, as they erased it. In the Copy being pieced together at the new destination. Those Copies had no way of knowing that they were only intermediate steps in the process of moving a frozen snapshot from one place to another – and the changes being made to their digitised brains weren’t supposed to mean anything at all.’

  ‘So did you stop it happening? Once you found out?’

  He chuckles. ‘No. There would have been no point. Because even in the one computer, Copies were moved all the time: relocated, shuffled from place to place, to allow memory to be reclaimed and consolidated. Hundreds of times a second.’

  My blood turns to ice. No wonder the old companies never raised the subject of transition dreams. I was wiser than I ever knew to wait for the Gleisner robots. Merely shifting a Copy around in memory could hardly be comparable to mapping every synapse in a human brain – the dreams it generated would have to be far shorter, far simpler – but just knowing that my life was peppered with tiny mental detours, eddies of consciousness in the wake of every move, would still have been too much to bear.

  I head home, clutching the milk carton awkwardly with cold arthritic fingers.

  As I come over the hill, I see the light on above our front door, although I’m certain that I left the house in darkness. Alice must have woken and found me missing. I wince at my thoughtlessness; I should have stayed in, or written her a note. I quicken my step.

  Fifty metres from home, a tendril of pain flickers across my chest. I look down stupidly to see if I’ve walked into a protruding branch; there’s nothing, but the pain returns – solid as an arrow through the flesh, now – and I sink to my knees.

  The bracelet on my left wrist chimes softly, to tell me that it’s calling for help. I’m so close to my own front door, though, that I can’t resist the urge to rise to my feet and see if I can make the distance.

  After two steps, the blood rushes from my head, and I fall again. I crush the milk carton against my chest, spilling the cold liquid, freezing my fingers. I can hear the ambulance in the distance. I know I should relax and keep still, but something compels me to move.

  I crawl towards the light.

  * * *

  The orderly pushing me looks like he’s just decided that this is the last place on Earth he’d choose to be. I silently concur, and tip my head back to escape his fixed grimace, but then the sight of the ceiling going by above me is even more disconcerting. The corridor’s lighting panels are so similar, and their spacing so regular, that it feels as though I’m being wheeled around in a circle.

  I say, ‘Where’s Alice? My wife?’

  ‘No visitors now. There’ll be time for that later.’

  ‘I’ve paid for a scan. With the Gleisner people. If I’m in any danger, they should be told.’ All of this is encoded in my bracelet, though; the computers will have read it, there’s nothing to fret about. The prospect of having to confront the transition in a matter of hours or minutes fills me with claustrophobic dread, but better that than having left the arrangements too late.

  The orderly says, ‘I think you’re wrong about that.’

  ‘What?’ I struggle to get him in sight again. He’s grinning nastily, like a nightclub bouncer who’s just spotted someone with the wrong kind of shoes.

  ‘I said, I think you’re mistaken. Our records don’t mention any payment for a scan.’

  I break into a sweat of indignation. ‘I signed the contracts! Today!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a handful of long cotton bandages, then proceeds to stuff them into my mouth. My arms are strapped to my sides; all I can do is grunt in protest, and gag on cotton and saliva.

  Someone steps in front of the trolley and keeps pace with us, whispering in Latin.

  The orderly says, ‘Don’t feel bad. The top level’s just the tip of the iceberg. The crest of the wave. How many of us can belong to an elite like that?’

  I cough and choke, fighting for breath, shuddering with panic; then I calm myself, and force myself to breathe slowly and evenly through my nose.

  ‘The tip of the iceberg! Do you think the organic brain moves by some kind of magic? From place to place? From moment to moment? Do you think an empty patch of space-time can be rebuilt into something as complex as a human brain, without transition dreams? The physical world has as much trouble shuffling data as any computer. Do you know how much effort it goes to, just to keep one atom persisting in the very same spot? Do you think there could ever be one coherent, conscious self, enduring through time – without a billion fragmentary minds forming and dying all around it? Transition dreams blossoming, and vanishing into oblivion? The air’s thick with them. Look!’

  I twist my head around and stare down at the floor. The trolley is surrounded by convoluted vortices of light, rainbow sheets like cranial folds, flowing, undulating, spinning off smaller versions of themselves.

  ‘What did you think? You were Mr Big? The one in a billion? The one on top?’

  Another spasm of revulsion and panic sweeps through me. I choke on saliva, shivering with fear and cold. Whoever is walking ahead of the trolley lays an icy hand on my forehead; I jerk free.

  I struggle to find some solid ground. So this is my transition dream. All right. I should be grateful: at least I understand what’s happening. Bausch’s warning has helped me, after all. And I’m not in any danger; the Gleisner robot is still going to wake. Soon I’ll forget this nightmare, and carry on with my life as if nothing had happened. Invulnerable. Immortal.

  Carry on with my life. With Alice, in the house with the giant vegetable garden? Sweat flows into my eyes; I blink it away. The vegetable garden was at my parents’ house. In the back yard, not the front. And that house was torn down long ago.

  So was the supermarket opposite the railway station.

  Where did I live, then?

  What did I do?

  Who did I marry?

  The orderly says cheerfully, ‘So-called Alice taught you in primary school. Ms Something-or-other. A crush on the teacher, who’d have guessed?’

  Then, do I have anything straight? The interview with Bausch—?

  ‘Ha ha. Do you think our clever friends at Gleisner would have come right out and told you all that? Pull the other one.’

  Then how could I know about transition dreams?

  ‘You must have worked it all out for yourself. From the inside. Congratulations.’

  The icy hand touches my forehead again; the murmured chant grows louder. I screw my eyes shut, racked with fear.

  The orderly says thoughtfully, ‘Then again, I could be wrong about that teacher. You could be wrong about that house. There might not even be a Gleisner Corporation. Computerised Copies of human brains? Sounds pretty dodgy to me.’

  Strong hands seize me by the shoulders and legs, lift me from the trolley and spin me around. When the blur of motion stops, I’m flat on my back, staring up at a distant rectangle of pale-blue sky.

  ‘Alice’ leans into view, and tosses a clod of soil. I ache to comfort her, but I can’t move or speak. How can I care so much about her if I didn’t love her, if she was never real? Other mourners throw in dirt; none of it seem
s to touch me, but the sky vanishes in pieces.

  Who am I? What do I know for sure about the man who’ll wake inside the robot? I struggle to pin down a single certain fact about him, but under scrutiny everything dissolves into confusion and doubt.

  Someone chants, ‘Ashes to ashes, coma to coma.’

  I wait in the darkness, colder than ever.

  There’s a flickering of light and motion around me. The rainbow vortices, the eddies of transition dreams, weave through the soil like luminous worms – as if even parts of my decomposing brain might be confusing their decay with the chemistry of thought, reinterpreting their disintegration from within, undistracted by the senses, or memory, or truth.

  Spinning themselves beautiful delusions, and mistaking death for something else entirely.

  SILVER FIRE

  I was in my office at home, grading papers for Epidemiology 410, when the call came through from John Brecht in Maryland. Realtime, not a polite message to be dealt with whenever I chose. I’d grown into the habit of thinking of Colonel Brecht as ‘my old boss’. Apparently that had been premature.

  He said, ‘We’ve found a little Silver Fire anomaly which I think might interest you, Claire. A little blip on the autocorrelation transform which just won’t go away. And seeing as you’re on vacation—’

  ‘My students are on vacation. I still have work to do.’

  ‘Oh, I think Columbia can find someone to take over those menial tasks for a week or two.’

  I regarded him in silence for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to tell him to find someone else to take over his own menial tasks.

  I said, ‘What exactly are we talking about?’

  Brecht smiled. ‘A faint trail. Hovering on the verge of significance. Your specialty.’ A map appeared on the screen; his face shrank to an inset. ‘It seems to start in North Carolina, around Greensboro, heading west.’ The map was peppered with dots marking the locations of recent Silver Fire cases – colour-coded by the time elapsed since a notional ‘day of infection’, the dots themselves positioned wherever the patient had been at the time. Having been told exactly what to look for, I could just make out a vague spectral progression cutting through the scattered blossoms of localised outbreaks: a kind of smudged rainbow trail from red to violet, dissolving into uncertainty just west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Then again … if I squinted, I could discern another structure, about as convincing, sweeping down in an amazingly perfect arc from Kentucky. A few more minutes, and I’d see the hidden face of Groucho Marx. The human brain is far too good at finding patterns; without rigorous statistical tools we’re helpless, animists grasping at meaning in every random puff of air.

  I said, ‘So how do the numbers look?’

  ‘The P value’s borderline,’ Brecht conceded. ‘But I still think it’s worth checking out.’

  The visible part of this hypothetical trail spanned at least ten days. Three days after exposure to the virus, the average person was either dead or in intensive care – not driving blithely across the countryside. Maps tracing the precise routes of infection generally looked like random walks with mean free paths five or ten kilometres long; even air travel, at worst, tended to spawn a multitude of scattered small outbreaks. If we’d stumbled on someone who was infectious but asymptomatic, then that was definitely worth checking out.

  Brecht said, ‘As of now, you have full access to the notifications database. I’d offer you our provisional analysis, but I’m sure you can do better with the raw data yourself.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Good. Then you can leave tomorrow.’

  * * *

  I woke before dawn and packed in ten minutes, while Alex lay cursing me in his sleep. Then I realised I had three hours to kill, and absolutely nothing left to do, so I crawled back into bed. When I woke for the second time, Alex and Laura were both up, and eating breakfast.

  As I sat down opposite Laura, though, I wondered if I was dreaming: one of those insidiously reassuring no-need-to-wake-because-you-already-have dreams. My fourteen-year-old daughter’s face and arms were covered in alchemical and zodiacal symbols in iridescent reds, greens and blues. She looked like a character in some dire VR-as-psychedelia movie who’d been mauled by the special-effects software.

  She stared back at me defiantly, as if I’d somehow expressed disapproval. In fact, I hadn’t yet worked my way around to such a mundane emotion – and by the time I did, I kept my mouth firmly shut. Knowing Laura, these were definitely not fakes which would wash off, but transdermal enzyme patches could still erase them as bloodlessly as the dye-bearing ones which had implanted them. So I was good, I didn’t say a word: no cheap reverse-psychology (‘Oh, aren’t they sweet?’), no (honest) complaints about the harassment I’d get from her principal if they weren’t gone by the start of term.

  Laura said, ‘Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on the theory of gravity?’

  ‘Yes. Did you know he also died a virgin? Role models are great, aren’t they?’

  Alex gave me a sideways warning look, but didn’t buy in. Laura continued, ‘There’s a whole secret history of science that’s been censored from the official accounts. Hidden knowledge that’s only coming to light now that everyone has access to the original sources.’

  It was hard to know how to respond honestly to this without groaning aloud. I said evenly, ‘I think you’ll find that most of it has actually ‘‘come to light’’ before. It’s just turned out to be of limited interest. But sure, it’s fascinating to see some of the blind alleys people have explored.’

  Laura smiled at me pityingly. ‘Blind alleys!’ She finished picking the toast crumbs off her plate, then she rose and left the room with a spring in her step, as if she’d won some kind of battle.

  I said plaintively, ‘What did I miss? When did all this start?’

  Alex was unfazed. ‘I think it’s mostly just the music. Or, rather, three seventeen-year-old boys with supernaturally perfect skin and big brown contact lenses, called The Alchemists—’

  ‘Yes, I know the band, but New Hermetics is more than the bubblegum music, it’s a major cult—’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, come on! Wasn’t your sister deeply in lust with the lead singer of some quasi-Satanic heavy-metal group? I don’t recall her ending up nailing black cats to upside-down crucifixes.’

  ‘That was never lust. She just wanted to discover his haircare secrets.’

  Alex said firmly, ‘Laura is fine. Just … relax and sit it out. Unless you want to buy her a copy of Foucault’s Pendulum?’

  ‘She’d probably miss the irony.’

  He prodded me on the arm; mock-violence, but genuine anger. ‘That’s unfair. She’ll chew up New Hermetics and spit it out in … six months, at the most. How long did Scientology last? A week?’

  I said, ‘Scientology is crass, transparent gibberish. New Hermetics has five thousand years of cultural adornment to draw on. It’s every bit as insidious as Buddhism or Catholicism: there’s a tradition, there’s a whole aesthetic—’

  Alex cut in, ‘Yes, and in six months’ time she’ll understand: the aesthetic can be appreciated without swallowing any of the bullshit. Just because alchemy was a blind alley, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still elegant and fascinating … but being elegant and fascinating doesn’t render a word of it true.’

  I reflected on that for a while, then I leant over and kissed him. ‘I hate it when you’re right: you always make it sound so obvious. I’m too damn protective, aren’t I? She’ll work it all out for herself.’

  ‘You know she will.’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘Shit. Can you drive me to La Guardia? I’m never going to get a cab now.’

  * * *

  Early in the pandemic, I’d pulled a few strings and arranged for a group of my students to observe a Silver Fire patient close up. It had seemed wrong to bury ourselves in the abstractions of maps and graphs, numerical models and extrapolations – however vital the
y were to the battle – without witnessing the real physical condition of an individual human being.

  We didn’t have to don biohazard suits; the young man lay in a glass-walled, hermetically sealed room. Tubes brought him oxygen, water, electrolytes and nutrients – along with antibiotics, antipyritics, immunosuppressants, and pain killers. No bed, no mattress; the patient was embedded in a transparent polymer gel: a kind of buoyant semi-solid which limited pressure sores and drew away the blood and lymphatic fluid weeping out through what used to be his skin.

  I surprised myself by crying, silently and briefly, hot tears of anger. Rage dissipating into a vacuum; I knew there was no one to blame. Half the students had medical degrees – but if anything, they seemed more shaken than the green statisticians who’d never set foot in a trauma ward or an operating theatre – probably because they could better imagine what the man would have been feeling without a skull full of opiates.

  The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic Viral Scleroderma, but SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently people’s eyes glazed over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like everyone else, but I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by far.

  When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing vast quantities of collagen – in a variant form transcribed from the normal gene but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis above and eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybe – though when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.

  If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen plaques was ‘silver’, the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of being burned alive was ‘fire’. Mercifully, the pain couldn’t last long, either way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep anaesthesia – and if you didn’t get that level of high-tech intervention, you went into shock, fast, and died.