Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  “We don’t need that heap of junk,” Adam replied.

  Carlos was silent for a while, then he said, “I just wanted to give you some peace.”

  #

  When he’d taken out the memory stick and closed his wound, Adam went into the old man’s room and lay on his bed in the dark. The mattress beneath him felt utterly familiar, and the gray outlines of the room seemed exactly as they ought to be, as if he’d lain here a thousand times. This was the bed he’d been struggling to wake in from the start.

  What they’d done, they’d done for each other. He didn’t have to excuse it to acknowledge that. To turn Carlos in, to offer him up to death row, would have been unthinkable – and the fact that the law would have found the old man blameless if he’d done so only left Adam less willing to condemn him. At least he’d shown enough courage to put himself at risk if the truth ever came out.

  He gazed into the shadows of the room, unable to decide if he was merely an empathetic onlooker, judging the old man with compassion – or the old man himself, repeating his own long-rehearsed defense.

  How close was he to crossing the line?

  Maybe he had enough, now, to write from the same dark place as the old man – and in time to outdo him, making all his fanciful ambitions come true.

  But only by becoming what the old man had never wanted him to be. Only by rolling the same boulder to the giddy peak of impunity, then watching it slide down into the depths of remorse, over and over again, with no hope of ever breaking free.

  11

  Adam waited for the crew from the thrift store to come and collect the boxes in which he’d packed the old man’s belongings. When they’d gone, he locked up the house, and left the key in the combination safe attached to the door.

  Gina had been livid when he’d talked to Ryan directly and shamed him into taking the deal: the family could have the house, but the bulk of the old man’s money would go to a hospital in San Salvador. What remained would be just enough to keep Adam viable: paying his maintenance contract, renewing his license to walk in public, and stuffing unearned stipends into the pockets of the figure-heads of the shell companies whose sole reason to exist was to own him.

  He strode toward the gate, wheeling a single suitcase. Away from the shelter of the old man’s tomb, he’d have no identity of his own to protect him, but he’d hardly be the first undocumented person who’d tried to make it in this country.

  When the old man’s life had disintegrated, he’d found a way to turn the shards into stories that meant something to people like him. But Adam’s life was broken in a different way, and the world would take time to catch up. Maybe in twenty years, maybe in a hundred, when enough of them had joined him in the Valley, he’d have something to say that they’d be ready to hear.

  SEVENTH SIGHT

  1

  On my twelfth birthday, my cousin Sean sent me the keys to the rainbow. I carried them around in my phone for six days, unused, burning a hole in my pocket. Sean had hacked his own implants almost eighteen months before, so I was fairly sure that it would be safe to follow him, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen if my father caught me rewiring my retinas.

  I waited for a Sunday afternoon, when my parents were preoccupied with a movie. I closed the door to my room and drew the curtains. The door had no lock, so I lay in bed with my head under the covers, staring at my phone until the screen went dark. In the blackness I thought about my grandfather, blinded by nothing more than the gene we shared, but sightless for so long that the implants had been powerless to bring him back into the light. My confidence in the trail Sean had blazed began to waver; his implants and mine were the same model, but everyone’s body was unique. I did not want to end up blind – and even if the changes I wrought were reversible with a trip to the optometrist to restore the implants’ settings, that was not something I could do without my parents finding out.

  I jiggled the phone and it lit up again, showing the circular rainbow of the app’s startup screen. The hues in this fanciful icon were crisper and clearer than those of any rainbow I’d seen in the sky, but then my bio-sighted friends had assured me that they could never make out the mythical “seven colors”, either, and I had no reason to doubt them. My implants did their best to mimic the color vision of the human eye, by matching the typical responses of the three kinds of human cone cells. But this mimicry was a matter of choice, not necessity – and I wouldn’t need any new hardware inside my skull in order to move beyond it.

  The quantum dots scattered across my artificial retinas included millions of spares, ready to step in if any of the currently active sensors failed. These spares were not pre-committed to any particular color, lest the demand for replacements skewed green or blue and left the red ones wasting space, like some unpopular flavor of Skittles. But since the choice was made, not with pigment molecules or colored filters, but by setting a series of voltages across a quantum well, there was nothing to constrain the possibilities to the three traditional colors. The app Sean had sent me could instruct the implants to wake all my spares – and tune them to four new bands, between and beyond the original three.

  I ran a fingertip along the rainbow’s edge, trying to reach a decision. The implants made me normal, they allowed me to fit in. Why ask for anything more? Left to my biological fate I would not have been fully blind for another decade, but my parents had opted for replacement as early as possible, giving me the best chance of adapting to the device.

  But that had been six years ago. If I didn’t try this experiment now, while my brain was still flexible enough to make sense of the new information, I might die without ever knowing what I’d missed.

  I lifted my finger from its stalling arc and tapped the button above: CONTINUE.

  The app needed to know the implants’ serial numbers and service password, but both were printed plainly in my owner’s manual. The manufacturer’s warranty had expired, leaving nothing to void, and the app’s screed claimed that it could hide its actions from any health professional making routine adjustments. So long as nothing went wrong that I couldn’t fix by sending the spares back to sleep, there was a chance that my spectral trespasses would remain undetected.

  The next screen showed response curves. The standard red and green ones already overlapped considerably, while the blue one stood almost aloof from them. The app’s default choice was to squeeze two new curves in between blue and green, and then add one at the near-infrared end and one at the near-ultraviolet. There was also a set of default “opposition formulas”, which specified the way in which information was to be extracted from various combinations of the new primary colors – just as the difference between the red and green responses was computed in every human eye and passed along to the brain.

  The idea of editing any of these details – adding my own idiosyncratic twist to the process – made my hands sweat. I would not have known where to start constructing my own private notion of the ideal palette. But if that also proved that I was in no position to make an informed choice to accept the defaults, I took some comfort from the orderly appearance of the seven curves on offer. They covered the spectrum, evenly and efficiently, each little hill in the serried row peaking at a wavelength some fifty nanometers away from its neighbor. Nothing about them looked strange, demanding elaborate justifications from the depths of biophysics. Nothing cried out to be changed.

  I hit ACCEPT, and moved on to the next page.

  WARNING

  Activating and re-tuning spare sensors in your artificial retinas (ARs) may lead to permanent changes in your brain’s visual pathways. While this app can restore the ARs to their original state, we make no such promises about your visual cortex.

  The decision is yours alone.

  The Rainbow Project

  This disclaimer did not unnerve me at all. That the brain was altered by the information it did or didn’t receive was old news to me, writ large in my family’s history. The implants had come just in time to h
elp my father, but not as much as they had helped me, and my uncles and cousins of various ages joined up the dots. The more I thought about it, the surer I became that the most frightening thing would be to lose this chance, while Sean and his friends sprinted far ahead of me and disappeared into the far end of the rainbow.

  I tapped PROCEED.

  The warning gave way to a flickering Bluetooth icon and a progress bar. I watched the text above the bar spelling out the stages as the app and implants worked together: cataloging the spare sensors, testing them internally, retuning them, testing them again.

  The progress bar paused at ninety-five percent, then the app asked me if the sky was clear and I’d obtained a suitable prism. It was, and I had. I climbed out of bed and opened the curtains to admit a narrow wedge of sunlight, then I placed the prism Sean had given me on my desk and moved it back and forth until the spectrum it cast on the wall formed an uninterrupted band.

  Following the app’s instructions, I turned my head slowly, shifting my gaze steadily across the spectrum from left to right, starting just before the red end. In my earbuds the app counted down the nanometers as it verified its tweaks to the quantum dots at every wavelength. It was all reassuringly mundane, like a human version of the procedure after changing an ink cartridge, where you print and scan an alignment page.

  The app said, “Done”. I looked down at my phone, and the progress bar had reached one hundred percent. The image zoomed out to show the circular rainbow again, then it shrank to a point and the app quit, taking me back to the phone’s home screen.

  I opened the curtains and let the sunlight fill my room. Nothing looked different; I’d been warned that any change in the way I perceived the world could take days or weeks. But my impatience was offset by a sense of relief: whatever else I’d done, at least I hadn’t damaged the implants and left myself blind.

  #

  “These flowers are dying,” I told my father as I set the table for dinner. “Do you want me to throw them out?”

  “Dying?” He stepped out of the kitchen and peered at the center-piece, then came closer and examined the individual blooms. “They’re fine, Jake. What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry,” I said stupidly. “It must have been a trick of the light.”

  He frowned, puzzled, but then went back to draining vegetables. I fetched my mother and my sister, and we all sat down to eat.

  Throughout the meal, I kept stealing glances at the flowers. My father grew a few different kinds in a small garden at the front of the house, and though I’d never taken much interest in them I couldn’t help but be familiar with their appearance at various stages of health and decay. In fact, these daffodils hadn’t even wilted: the petals were firm, not drooping. Yet the uniform yellow I was accustomed to had been modified by a flared pattern that I’d mistaken for a kind of withering, with streaks radiating out from the center of each flower that looked like shadows, not so much discolored as subdued.

  It was only when I stopped worrying about the flowers and paid attention to my family that I realized how far the change had progressed. My father’s face looked as if he’d developed a rash, albeit with a strong left-right symmetry, his cheeks flushed red and a roseate Rorschach blot decorating his temple. But if the effect was disconcertingly close to bad-TV-alien makeup, my mother and sister wore much the same mask with a twist: their actual cosmetics, which I usually barely noticed, now looked as if they’d been applied by an eager four-year-old who’d viewed the process as a form of finger-painting. Streaks and ridges stood out all over their faces; it was all I could do to keep myself from staring, or making some inane, self-incriminating joke by asking them whether they’d enjoyed their mud baths.

  After dinner, the four of us sat down to watch a sitcom, giving me an excuse to keep my eyes on the screen instead of the garish people around me. But the longer I spent gazing at the electronic image the flatter its colors seemed, until the live action began to resemble some kind of stylized animation. It was not that I’d yet started to think of my family’s facial decorations as normal, but the actors’ skin tones looked as plastic as any mannequin’s, and the sets around them like the pastel story-book castles from a children’s show. I only had to glance across at the couch on which my parents sat to see how much richer and subtler the hues of the simplest real object could be.

  In bed, I lay awake wondering whether I should restore the implants to their original state. If I’d wanted everyone around me to look like a clown, there was an app that daubed face-paint over the image from my phone’s camera, but the novelty of that had worn off in half an hour when I was eight years old. I couldn’t believe that my fourteen-year-old cousin had talked me into imagining that I’d be joining some kind of sophisticated elite.

  Just before midnight, I messaged Sean: This is horrible, everything looks ugly. Why did you make me do it?

  He replied: Be patient. Wait a week. If you still don’t like it, it’s not too late to go back.

  I stared into the shadows, still feeling cheated. But I’d been a trichromat for twelve years; I needed to give myself a chance to wrap my mind around the new sensorium.

  As I placed the phone on my bedside table, I suddenly realized how much more clearly than usual I was perceiving the details of the room. It was not that I’d magically acquired thermal night vision – nothing cooler than a clothes iron would emit the kind of infrared my sensors could pick up – but traces of illumination from a neighbor’s house were spilling through the gaps around my curtain, and though once this would have granted me nothing more than a few impressionistic hints in gray, the rainbow app had transformed the view, imbuing it with a subtle palette of colors that made every object stand out from the gloom.

  The effect wasn’t comical, or ugly. It felt as if I was seeing more deeply into the night world: sharpening its edges without diminishing its allure. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was flying across the neighborhood, an eagle-eyed raptor dragging secrets out of the darkness.

  #

  The next few days of school were an exercise in learning not to stare at stained clothes and strangely spackled faces – let alone display any stronger reaction that might lead to violence, disciplinary action, or just the dangerously unanswerable question: What’s so funny? Whenever the temptation to smirk at a particularly zombie-esque schoolmate or Revlon-bombed teacher threatened to overpower me, I reminded myself that I looked every bit as ridiculous. I didn’t need a mirror: just glancing down at the sweat marks on my shirt, which resembled the gray silt left behind by retreating flood waters, brought a pang of humiliation that was enough to wipe the smile from my lips.

  Every painted wall looked slapdash and dirty, and even bare brickwork seemed to be decaying, infested with some exotic new form of mold. A part of me understood full well that this riot of variegation wasn’t really so wild – that the eighteen or twenty different tones I could discern on the surface of every brick all still belonged to what I would once have seen and named as exactly the same shade of red. But it was impossible to shake the impression that these newly revealed distinctions had to mean something: a once-uniform surface that had turned mottled couldn’t possibly hold together for long, and one good kick ought to be enough to break it apart like a rotten floorboard.

  The sky did not look blemished, but when I gazed at any part of its gentle gradient I knew exactly where the sun lay, and before long I could also judge the time of day to the nearest half hour. Sky blue was still sky blue, but now it came in a hundred delicate rings centered on the solar disk – and then imprinted with a second, subtler pattern whose bull’s eye was the zenith. Eleven a.m. had a mood of its own now, as distinct from noon as sunset or dawn.

  The following Sunday, Sean asked me to meet him at the beach. On the bus to the coast, I stared out at the car yards and advertising signs. Even the brand new BMWs looked like grubby plastic shells torn from some fairground ride, and the art-directed posters might have been lifted from a therapeutic crayon-sket
ching session at a hospital for the criminally tasteless. The strange blush of real human skin was growing on me, though; when I glanced across the aisle at a teenaged girl, her eyes closed as she listened to a track whose pounding bass leaked out from her skull and crossed the gap between us, there was nothing comical or repellent about the visible ebb and flow in the capillaries below her cheekbones.

  I waited by the roadside for someone’s older brother to drop off Sean and three friends with their surfboards. As we walked through the dunes, Sean let the others get ahead of us. “How’s it looking now?” he asked.

  “Better, I suppose.” His own face was smeared with sunscreen, but there was an eerie precision to each daub: if I had not already known that we were seeing the world through identical eyes, this would have proved it. I looked around at the low, sturdy bushes that anchored the dunes; their small, dark-green leaves weren’t much different than I remembered them. “At least I’m not freaking out all the time.”

  “Good.” He was smiling sneakily, as if he had a handful of something unpleasant hidden behind his back that he was about to bring forward and drop down the neck of my T-shirt.

  “What?” I asked, getting ready to retreat.

  We came over the top of the dunes.

  My skin turned to ice and my bowels loosened; mercifully they had nothing to expel. The ocean stretched out before us, as alien as if our last dozen steps had carried us a thousand light years. But then, even more alarmingly, the impossibly rich skeins of currents and ripples, patches of seaweed and changes of depth and turbidity, flexed like a vacillating optical illusion and settled firmly inside my old memories of the scene. What I perceived was no longer extraterrestrial: this was the same blue-green, white-foamed water I’d known all my life. Only now, without ever stepping outside the borders of its familiar colors, it was inscribed and annotated with such a richness of new detail that it was like holding up the palm of my hand to find my entire life story, in a million words and illustrations, discernible in the whorls and ridges of the skin.