Luminous

by Greg Egan

  I had to force myself to speak; every question I asked – however politely phrased, however lucid and relevant – felt as painful and degrading as if I was standing before her naked asking her to wipe shit out of my hair. ‘How did you find a network to use? Did you scan a volunteer?’ Was I going to start my new life as a clone of Luke De Vries – inheriting his tastes, his ambitions, his emotions?

  ‘No, no. There’s an international database of healthy neural structures – 20,000 cadavers who died without brain injury. More detailed than tomography; they froze the brains in liquid nitrogen, sliced them up with a diamond-tipped microtome, then stained and electron-micrographed the slices.’

  My mind baulked at the number of exabytes she was casually invoking; I’d lost touch with computing completely. ‘So you’ll use some kind of composite from the database? You’ll give me a selection of typical structures, taken from different people?’

  Durrani seemed about to let that pass as near enough, but she was clearly a stickler for detail, and she hadn’t insulted my intelligence yet. ‘Not quite. It will be more like a multiple exposure than a composite. We’ve used about 4,000 records from the database – all the males in their twenties or thirties – and wherever someone has neuron A wired to neuron B, and someone else has neuron A wired to neuron C, you’ll have connections to both B and C. So you’ll start out with a network that in theory could be pared down to any one of the 4,000 individual versions used to construct it, but in fact you’ll pare it down to your own unique version instead.’

  That sounded better than being an emotional clone or a Frankenstein collage; I’d be a roughly hewn sculpture, with features yet to be refined. But—

  ‘Pare it down how? How will I go from being potentially anyone to being … ?’ What? My twelve-year-old self, resurrected? Or the thirty-year-old I should have been, conjured into existence as a remix of these 4,000 dead strangers? I trailed off; I’d lost what little faith I’d had that I was talking sense.

  Durrani seemed to grow slightly uneasy herself, whatever my judgement was worth on that. She said, ‘There should be parts of your brain, still intact, which bear some record of what’s been lost. Memories of formative experiences, memories of the things that used to give you pleasure, fragments of innate structures that survived the virus. The prosthesis will be driven automatically towards a state that’s compatible with everything else in your brain; it will find itself interacting with all these other systems, and the connections that work best in that context will be reinforced.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Imagine a kind of artificial limb, imperfectly formed to start with, that adjusts itself as you use it: stretching when it fails to grasp what you reach for, shrinking when it bumps something unexpectedly, until it takes on precisely the size and shape of the phantom limb implied by your movements. Which itself is nothing but an image of the lost flesh and blood.’

  That was an appealing metaphor, though it was hard to believe that my faded memories contained enough information to reconstruct their phantom author in every detail – that the whole jigsaw of who I’d been, and might have become, could be filled in from a few hints along the edges and the jumbled-up pieces of 4,000 other portraits of happiness. But the subject was making at least one of us uncomfortable, so I didn’t press the point.

  I managed to ask a final question. ‘What will it be like, before any of this happens? When I wake up from the anaesthetic and all the connections are still intact?’

  Durrani confessed, ‘That’s one thing I’ll have no way of knowing, until you tell me yourself.’

  * * *

  Someone repeated my name, reassuringly but insistently. I woke a little more. My neck, my legs, my back were all aching, and my stomach was tense with nausea.

  But the bed was warm, and the sheets were soft. It was good just to be lying there.

  ‘It’s Wednesday afternoon. The operation went well.’

  I opened my eyes. Durrani and four of her students were gathered at the foot of the bed. I stared at her, astonished: the face I’d once thought of as ‘severe’ and ‘forbidding’ was … riveting, magnetic. I could have watched her for hours. But then I glanced at Luke De Vries, who was standing beside her. He was just as extraordinary. I turned one by one to the other three students. Everyone was equally mesmerising; I didn’t know where to look.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I was lost for words. These people’s faces were loaded with so much significance, so many sources of fascination, that I had no way of singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful, reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant … a white noise of qualities, all positive, but ultimately incoherent.

  But as I shifted my gaze compulsively from face to face, struggling to make sense of them, their meanings finally began to crystallise, like words coming into focus, though my sight had never been blurred.

  I asked Durrani, ‘Are you smiling?’

  ‘Slightly.’ She hesitated. ‘There are standard tests, standard images for this, but, please, describe my expression. Tell me what I’m thinking.’

  I answered unselfconsciously, as if she’d asked me to read an eye chart. ‘You’re … curious? You’re listening carefully. You’re interested, and you’re hoping that something good will happen. And you’re smiling because you think it will. Or because you can’t quite believe that it already has.’

  She nodded, smiling more decisively. ‘Good.’

  I didn’t add that I now found her stunningly, almost painfully, beautiful. But it was the same for everyone in the room, male and female: the haze of contradictory moods that I’d read into their faces had cleared, but it had left behind a heart-stopping radiance. I found this slightly alarming – it was too indiscriminate, too intense – though in a way it seemed almost as natural a response as the dazzling of a dark-adapted eye. And after eighteen years of seeing nothing but ugliness in every human face, I wasn’t ready to complain about the presence of five people who looked like angels.

  Durrani asked, ‘Are you hungry?’

  I had to think about that. ‘Yes.’

  One of the students fetched a prepared meal, much the same as the lunch I’d eaten on Monday: salad, a bread roll, cheese. I picked up the roll and took a bite. The texture was perfectly familiar, the flavour unchanged. Two days before, I’d chewed and swallowed the same thing with the usual mild disgust that all food induced in me.

  Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I wasn’t in ecstasy; the experience was as strange and painful as drinking from a fountain with lips so parched that the skin had turned to salt and dried blood.

  As painful, and as compelling. When I’d emptied the plate, I asked for another. Eating was good, eating was right, eating was necessary. After the third plate, Durrani said firmly, ‘That’s enough’. I was shaking with the need for more; she was still supernaturally beautiful, but I screamed at her, outraged.

  She took my arms, held me still. ‘This is going to be hard for you. There’ll be surges like this, swings in all directions, until the network settles down. You have to try to stay calm, try to stay reflective. The prosthesis makes more things possible than you’re used to, but you’re still in control.’

  I gritted my teeth and looked away. At her touch I’d suffered an immediate, agonising erection.

  I said, ‘That’s right. I’m in control.’

  * * *

  In the days that followed, my experiences with the prosthesis became much less raw, much less violent. I could almost picture the sharpest, most ill-fitting edges of the network being – metaphorically – worn smooth by use. To eat, to sleep, to be with people, remained intensely pleasurable, but it was more like an impossibly rosy-hued dream of childhood than the result of someone poking my brain with a high-voltage wire.

  Of course, the prosthesis wasn’t sending signals into my brain in order to make my brain feel pleasure. The prosthesis itself was the part of me that was feeling all the pleasure – however seamlessly that
process was integrated with everything else: perception, language, cognition … the rest of me. Dwelling on this was unsettling at first, but on reflection no more so than the thought experiment of staining blue all the corresponding organic regions in a healthy brain, and declaring, ‘They feel all the pleasure, not you!’

  I was put through a battery of psychological tests – most of which I’d sat through many times before, as part of my annual insurance assessments – as Durrani’s team attempted to quantify their success. Maybe a stroke patient’s fine control of a formerly paralysed hand was easier to measure objectively, but I must have leapt from bottom to top of every numerical scale for positive affect. And far from being a source of irritation, these tests gave me my first opportunity to use the prosthesis in new arenas – to be happy in ways I could barely remember experiencing before. As well as being required to interpret mundanely rendered scenes of domestic situations – what has just happened between this child, this woman, and this man; who is feeling good and who is feeling bad? – I was shown breathtaking images of great works of art, from complex allegorical and narrative paintings to elegant minimalist essays in geometry. As well as listening to snatches of everyday speech, and even unadorned cries of joy and pain, I was played samples of music and song from every tradition, every epoch, every style.

  That was when I finally realised that something was wrong.

  Jacob Tsela was playing the audio files and noting my responses. He’d been deadpan for most of the session, carefully avoiding any risk of corrupting the data by betraying his own opinions. But after he’d played a heavenly fragment of European classical music, and I’d rated it 20 out of 20, I caught a flicker of dismay on his face.

  ‘What? You didn’t like it?’ I said.

  Tsela smiled opaquely. ‘It doesn’t matter what I like. That’s not what we’re measuring.’

  ‘I’ve rated it already; you can’t influence my score.’ I regarded him imploringly; I was desperate for communication of any kind. ‘I’ve been dead to the world for eighteen years. I don’t even know who the composer was.’

  He hesitated. ‘J. S. Bach. And I agree with you: it’s sublime.’ He reached for the touchscreen and continued the experiment.

  So what had he been dismayed about? I knew the answer immediately; I’d been an idiot not to notice before, but I’d been too absorbed in the music itself.

  I hadn’t scored any piece lower than 18. And it had been the same with the visual arts. From my 4,000 virtual donors I’d inherited, not the lowest common denominator, but the widest possible taste – and in ten days, I still hadn’t imposed any constraints, any preferences, of my own.

  All art was sublime to me, and all music. Every kind of food was delicious. Everyone I laid eyes on was a vision of perfection.

  Maybe, after my long drought, I was just soaking up pleasure wherever I could get it, but it was only a matter of time before I grew sated and became as discriminating, as focused, as particular, as everyone else.

  ‘Should I still be like this? Omnivorous?’ I blurted out the question, starting with a tone of mild curiosity, ending with an edge of panic.

  Tsela halted the sample he’d been playing – a chant that might have been Albanian, Moroccan, or Mongolian for all I knew, but which made hair rise on the back of my neck, and sent my spirits soaring. Just like everything else had.

  He was silent for a while, weighing up competing obligations. Then he sighed and said, ‘You’d better talk to Durrani.’

  * * *

  Durrani showed me a bar graph on the wallscreen in her office: the number of artificial synapses that had changed state within the prosthesis – new connections formed, existing ones broken, weakened or strengthened – for each of the past ten days. The embedded microprocessors kept track of such things, and an antenna waved over my skull each morning collected the data.

  Day one had been dramatic, as the prosthesis adapted to its environment; the 4,000 contributing networks might all have been perfectly stable in their owners’ skulls, but the Everyman version I’d been given had never been wired up to anyone’s brain before.

  Day two had seen about half as much activity, day three about a tenth.

  From day four on, though, there’d been nothing but background noise. My episodic memories, however pleasurable, were apparently being stored elsewhere – since I certainly wasn’t suffering from amnesia – but after the initial burst of activity, the circuitry for defining what pleasure was had undergone no change, no refinement at all.

  ‘If any trends emerge in the next few days, we should be able to amplify them, push them forward – like toppling an unstable building, once it’s showing signs of falling in a certain direction.’ Durrani didn’t sound hopeful. Too much time had passed already, and the network wasn’t even teetering.

  I said, ‘What about genetic factors? Can’t you read my genome, and narrow things down from that?’

  She shook her head. ‘At least 2,000 genes play a role in neural development. It’s not like matching a blood group or a tissue type; everyone in the database would have more or less the same small proportion of those genes in common with you. Of course, some people must have been closer to you in temperament than others, but we have no way of identifying them genetically.’

  ‘I see.’

  Durrani said carefully, ‘We could shut the prosthesis down completely, if that’s what you want. There’d be no need for surgery: we’d just turn it off, and you’d be back where you started.’

  I stared at her luminous face. How could I go back? Whatever the tests and the bar graphs said, how could this be failure? However much useless beauty I was drowning in, I wasn’t as screwed-up as I’d been with a head full of Leu-enkephalin. I was still capable of fear, anxiety, sorrow; the tests had revealed universal shadows, common to all the donors. Hating Bach or Chuck Berry, Chagall or Paul Klee was beyond me, but I’d reacted as sanely as anyone to images of disease, starvation, death.

  And I was not oblivious to my own fate, the way I’d been oblivious to the cancer.

  But what was my fate if I kept using the prosthesis? Universal happiness, universal shadows … half the human race dictating my emotions? In all the years I’d spent in darkness, if I’d held fast to anything, hadn’t it been the possibility that I carried a kind of seed within me: a version of myself that might grow into a living person again, given the chance? And hadn’t that hope now proved false? I’d been offered the stuff of which selves were made – and though I’d tested it all, and admired it all, I’d claimed none of it as my own. All the joy I’d felt in the last ten days had been meaningless. I was just a dead husk, blowing around in other peoples’ sunlight.

  I said, ‘I think you should do that. Switch it off.’

  Durrani held up her hand. ‘Wait. If you’re willing, there is one other thing we could try. I’ve been discussing it with our ethics committee, and Luke has begun preliminary work on the software, but in the end it will be your decision.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘The network can be pushed in any direction. We know how to intervene to do that – to break the symmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others. Just because it hasn’t happened spontaneously, that doesn’t mean it can’t be achieved by other means.’

  I laughed, suddenly light-headed. ‘So, if I say the word, your ethics committee will choose the music I like, and my favourite foods, and my new vocation? They’ll decide who I become?’ Would that be so bad? Having died, myself, long ago, to grant life now to a whole new person? To donate, not just a lung or a kidney, but my entire body, irrelevant memories and all, to an arbitrarily constructed, but fully functioning, de novo human being?

  Durrani was scandalised. ‘No! We’d never dream of doing that! But we could program the microprocessors to let you control the network’s refinement. We could give you the power to choose for yourself, consciously and deliberately, the things that make you happy.’

  * * *

 
De Vries said, ‘Try to picture the control.’ I closed my eyes. He said, ‘Bad idea. If you get into the habit, it will limit your access.’

  ‘Right.’ I stared into space. Something glorious by Beethoven was playing on the lab’s sound system; it was difficult to concentrate. I struggled to visualise the stylised, cherry-red, horizontal slider control that De Vries had constructed, line by line, inside my head five minutes before. Suddenly it was more than a vague memory: it was superimposed over the room again, as clear as any real object, at the bottom of my visual field. ‘I‘ve got it.’ The button was hovering at around 19.

  De Vries glanced at a display, hidden from me. ‘Good. Now try to lower the rating.’

  I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. ‘How? How can you try to like something less?’

  ‘You don’t. Just try to move the button to the left. Visualise the movement. The software’s monitoring your visual cortex, tracking any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button moving – and the image will oblige.’

  It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was sticking, but I managed to manoeuvre it down to 10 before stopping to assess the effect. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I take it it’s working?’

  I nodded stupidly. The music was still … pleasant, but the spell was broken completely. It was like listening to an electrifying piece of rhetoric, then realising halfway through that the speaker didn’t believe a word of it – leaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it of all its real force.

  I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained it, the whole scheme had sounded too bizarre to be real. And since I’d already failed to assert myself over the prosthesis – despite billions of direct neural connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to interact with the thing and shape it in my own image – I’d feared that when the time came to make a choice, I’d be paralysed by indecision.