Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  One of Sean’s friends called out to him impatiently, and he broke into a run. I watched him dragging his board into the surf; that wasn’t my thing, but I could imagine – just barely – what he would make of the revelations that the ocean offered up to every glance.

  As I waded into the breaking waves, I ducked down and splashed water on my face to make sure that no one would notice my tears. This was what it meant to see the world. This was my escape from the terror of blindness, from the family curse clawing at my heels: not the first, too-forgiving childhood version, when they’d unwrapped my bandages and over three long months taught me to turn a blur of muddy colors into the pale glimpse of reality that I’d naively accepted as the thing itself.

  As I moved my hands through the swell, overwhelmed by the density of greens-within-green, for a second or two, or perhaps a whole minute, I actually believed that I’d been lied to: that everyone on Earth saw things this way, except for the poor fools with artificial eyes, who, if forced from a young enough age to lower their expectations, had no idea what they’d been missing.

  But as this momentary delusion passed and my unwarranted anger dissipated, the inverted truth that replaced it was almost as disorienting. The world before me remained, undeniably, the world as it needed to be seen, and those to whom it was unreachable were as helpless and pitiful as if their empty sockets had been filled with glass or stone.

  #

  “Two p.m., Sunday the fourth,” I muttered.

  “What?” Mehdi followed my gaze, but saw nothing that could have prompted these words.

  “Forget it.” The message was painted clearly on the billboard we were passing – painted, over a patch of blue, in other shades of blue. In the small park the billboard overlooked, I could see more heptachromatic graffiti on benches and playground equipment, but I forced myself to stop staring and walk on.

  “What did you think, Jake?” Dylan pressed me. Everyone else had spent the last ten minutes raving about the movie, but I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “It was all right,” I conceded.

  “All right?” Quan glared at me as if I’d just spat on his shoes. “It was incredible!”

  “OK.”

  Dylan, Mehdi and Quan had been my friends for years, and we’d got into the habit of seeing all the new 3D blockbusters together. I’d come along to this latest action flick because I hadn’t wanted to offend them, but I’d known from the start that all the stunts and effects that might once have been breathtaking would be lost on me.

  “When they lassoed his helicopter from the train, and he slid down the rope and jumped through that window—” Mehdi thumped his chest emphatically. “It was like doing the whole thing yourself, for real.”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “That was cool.”

  The honest thing would have been to admit how phoney every last scene had appeared to me – and why. I couldn’t risk news of my alteration getting back to my parents, but I had no reason to believe that my friends would betray me. The truth was, I didn’t want them to know what I’d done. What was the point, when they had no hope of understanding it?

  The next weekend, I told my parents I was seeing another movie. I arrived at the park at a quarter past one; it was empty of people, but the same message was still there on the billboard.

  I hunted for some of the smaller scrawls I’d noticed in passing. HEP RULES and FOUR MORE FEARS were drawn repeatedly in ornate, almost indecipherable scripts, the style and colors the same each time. I was staring at one of these tags on a bench when someone spoke behind me.

  “You want that as a tattoo?”

  I turned. It was a girl, not much older than me. “Do you sterilize your needles?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I didn’t mean permanent. One day, maybe.” She was carrying a backpack, holding its shoulder straps in her hand; she hefted it onto the bench and unzipped it. “I made the inks myself,” she said, taking out a small bottle. “Six months of trial and error.”

  I peered into the backpack; there must have been forty vials in there. “That’s a lot of work.”

  “The hard part is finding two or three that will be invisible to tris on lots of different backgrounds.”

  “How can you tell?” I wondered.

  She took out her phone, tapped the screen and held it up, showing me its graffiti-free image of the bench. I felt my face flush at the stupidity of my question – and knowing how that would look only intensified the response.

  “Why did you come early?” she asked. “That spoils the fun.”

  “You’re early too,” I countered.

  “I’m not early, I’m here to mark the trail.”

  I’d half guessed that this would be some kind of treasure hunt. “So you’re in charge?”

  She nodded. “My name’s Lucy.”

  “I’m Jake.”

  “Do you want to help me?”

  “Sure.”

  A family had come into the park, a couple and two young kids, heading for the swings. The mother watched us suspiciously as Lucy took out a camel’s hair brush and began painting on a corner of the billboard – but we weren’t wielding spray-cans, and our watercolor vandalism seemed to be having no effect at all.

  Three blocks north then turn left, Lucy wrote. Listen for the sound of squealing brakes.

  “Let’s go,” she said, handing me the backpack. “You can carry this if you like.”

  We set out across the city, starting with a nearby amusement arcade. There was a Formula One game close to the western entrance, the sound effects blaring out onto the street; Lucy squatted down beside the wall and asked me for “number twenty-three”. The vials in her backpack had been sorted into four separate pouches, making it easier to find each one. A few passersby looked at us askance, but if Lucy’s brushstrokes left no mark it was hardly a police matter. I raised my phone and viewed the scene through tri eyes: she seemed to be delicately cleaning the brown-painted bricks.

  When she handed the ink back to me, I looked at the label more carefully. “Cinnamon and cloves? That’s what’s in here?”

  “No. That’s just how I think of it.”

  I turned back to the words she’d written on the wall of the arcade: East until you hit stale bread. I doubted that I’d seen many spices in bulk since I’d run the rainbow app, but even if there was no literal resemblance the name did evoke the hue: a rich, sharp brown that ought to have smelled of those aromatic ingredients.

  “Then what’s it made of?”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m not telling you. Work it out for yourself.” She glanced at her watch. “We need to keep moving.”

  She let me paint the last clue, and the arrow that marked the treasure, though I needed her advice on the color schemes. The loot itself was a sheet of paper that she stuffed inside an empty toilet roll and hid behind a bush in a courtyard outside the museum.

  “What does that number mean?” A long string of letters and digits had been written on the paper, in what I assumed was tri-invisible ink.

  “It’s a kind of code,” Lucy explained. “If you type it into the web site you get another number that lets you prove that you were the winner.”

  “You built your own web site for this?”

  She shook her head, amused. “It’s for anyone. Tris play something similar, but they usually do it with GPS and AR: there are no real-world clues, but you can see them with your phone or your glasses.”

  “So do you stay here and watch?” I asked. “See how long people take?”

  “Sometimes. We can do that if you like.”

  We sat on a bench with a view of the hiding place. Fifteen minutes later, a skinny young boy on a skateboard rolled up and went straight for the prize.

  When he’d retrieved it, Lucy cupped her hands around her mouth and called out to him, “Well done, Tim!”

  Tim skated across the courtyard to join us, thumbing numbers into his phone as he went. He looked about ten, which made me uneasy; Sean had implied that there was some unwritten co
de fixing the minimum age for the hack at twelve.

  As Lucy was introducing us, two other competitors showed up. Before long there were a dozen people gathered around the bench, debating the merits of the hunt and cracking the kind of jokes about the ramshackle city and its hapless tris that would have been wasted in any other company. Tim was the youngest, but I’d have guessed that nobody was older than fourteen. I stayed quiet, conscious of my position as a newcomer, though nobody showed any sign of snubbing me.

  As the afternoon wore on and people left, the dome of the sky seemed tinged with melancholy. When only Lucy and I were left, she read my thoughts.

  “You think you’ve lost all your old friends,” she said. “And a few random heps are no replacement.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed.

  “You haven’t lost anyone,” she said. “It’s good to get together with the rainbow crowd, but no one’s forcing you to be a snob about it. Would your friends have dumped you if you’d gone blind?”

  I shook my head, ashamed. “Have you told anyone?” I asked her. “Any of your tri friends?”

  “No. But I still hang out with them. I just have to hold my tongue and not offer too many fashion tips.”

  Her own clothing appeared as grimy as anyone else’s – and the technology to make it otherwise probably didn’t exist outside of NASA clean rooms – but I could see her harmonious choices in the elements she could control.

  “We do this on the first Sunday of every month,” she said. “Tim will be marking the course next time – but if you like, we could team up and follow the clues together.”

  I said, “That sounds good.”

  2

  “Call,” I declared. If I couldn’t quite keep my tone neutral, the faint tell in my voice sounded more like fear than confidence. Danny could only make three of a kind, and Cheng the same – albeit higher – while the dark-eyed woman who never gave her name could rise above them both with a straight. Everyone else at the table had folded, some of them needlessly. In that company, my own modest flush was a sure bet, but the last thing I felt was invincible.

  Danny folded. Cheng raised the bet by fifty, then the dark-eyed woman raised it another fifty.

  I agonized for five long seconds. My rule was never to win more than a thousand a night, and this would push me over the limit. But if I folded now, I would have spent eight hours in this dispiriting place for the sake of just three hundred dollars.

  I slid my chips forward, matching the bet. Cheng shot an irritated glance my way, and folded.

  The dark-eyed woman raised, again. Her face was so impassive that I began to doubt, if not the evidence of my own eyes, that of my memory. I didn’t dare glance down at the backs of her cards again, but I was certain that one bore the twisted-hour-glass stain in the lacquer that I’d noticed on the five of clubs in the showdown-before-last, while the other had a florid tint to half its royal blue ink that had been unmissable when the six of hearts had come my way much earlier in the night. In this back-alley game they did not change the decks between every hand, and even if I could have missed the dealer feeding a fresh pack into the shuffling machine, no two decks ever featured identical flaws. So either I’d grown confused as to the significance of the blemishes I’d seen, or my opponent was very good at bluffing.

  “I’ll match,” I said, offering up the chips.

  The dark-eyed woman allowed herself a triumphant smile as she showed her cards: five of clubs, six of hearts. With the seven, eight and nine of diamonds in the flop she had a straight, but nothing better.

  The relief on my own face wasn’t feigned. I turned up my three and six of diamonds. The woman’s lingering smile made me wonder if the loss had even registered before the dealer raked the pot and sent the rest in my direction, but perhaps the secret to her bluff had been a kind of self-hypnotic conviction that her hand was unbeatable, and it took a few seconds to snap out of it and allow the truth to sink in.

  I scooped up my winnings and rose from the table.

  “Hey, Jake!” Danny was scowling at me. “Give me a chance to win it back!” He was drunk, and he hadn’t done well all night. I checked my watch and shook my head apologetically. “Next week, I promise.”

  I took my chips to the cashier, and glanced back at the table. Danny was staying put, to try his luck with the late crowd.

  As I walked to my car, I skirted three glistening patches on the ground. The street lights were sparse here, but the neon fronts of the nightclubs in the adjoining strip were enough to illuminate the residual blood stains that spring rain seemed merely to rearrange, and no tri felt compelled to scrub away.

  It was almost 4 a.m. when I got home, but Lucy was still up. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  I showed her my winnings, fanning out the notes so she could count them at a glance.

  Lucy had had her misgivings from the start, but now she seemed more anxious than ever. “I don’t want you ending up in prison. Or worse.”

  “It wouldn’t come to that. There’s nothing they could prove; they’d just ban me.” I slumped onto the couch. “You should be in bed,” I chided her. Unless I’d become so confused by the card room’s time-distorting ambience that I’d lost a day, she was due at work in less than five hours.

  “And what if you do get banned?” she persisted.

  “I never win enough to look suspicious.” Heps were far too rare to pose much of a threat, and even the high-end casinos could hardly scan everyone’s skulls with MRI machines. The small games I joined were run by people who were very far from amateurs, but so long as I could retain enough self-discipline not to overplay my advantage, I felt sure that I could hide in the statistical shadows of the merely lucky.

  Lucy said, “The gallery’s letting me go at the end of the month.”

  That shook me. Whatever fate I was courting, her own use of her talents could not have been more honest. “What are they going to replace you with – a mass spectrometer?”

  “Not quite,” she replied. “But there’s some new software that pretty much does what I do, with a multispectral camera and brushstroke analysis. They can lease the whole thing for a tenth of my salary.”

  The gallery had only given her three days a week since she’d come back from maternity leave, but she still earned about as much as I dared acquire by my own methods.

  “We’re such fuck-ups,” she said angrily.

  “That’s not true.”

  She turned away from me and gazed with loathing at one of her own paintings: a city threatened by fire, the skyscrapers scintillating through the smoke haze, every blistering current of air as palpable as the freeways below. “I kept kidding myself that I had a foot in the door – but I might as well have been a kitchen-hand, pretending that I was on some fast-track to chef just because I could sniff out bad produce a little sooner than anyone else.”

  “So they’ve found some machine to help them assess provenance,” I said. “That doesn’t take anything away from your paintings.”

  Lucy laughed bitterly. “If I couldn’t sell anything even when I had connections, what do you think my chances are going to be now?”

  “What are you saying?” I pressed her, aiming for a gently skeptical tone. “It’s all down to nepotism?”

  “No,” she admitted. “The work does matter. But it’s going to be harder than ever to get it seen.”

  I was trying to be the voice of reason, calmly talking her back from the edge – but the trouble was, she understood the problems she was facing far better than I did. “For an art dealer to look at a painting is some kind of special favor?”

  “Yes,” Lucy declared bluntly. “For a tri to look carefully enough to see a tenth of what’s there takes something special. That doesn’t happen as a matter of course.”

  I spread my arms in resignation, and went to take a shower.

  On my way to bed, I looked in on Zelda. She’d slept through all the talking, and I resisted the urge to lean down and kiss her lest she wake and start bawling
.

  Zelda was almost six months old – so we only had six more to decide whether or not to give her the gene therapy vector. After that point, the quality of the repaired retinal cells would start to fall off with time. If she was going to be a tri at all I wanted her at least to have the sharpest vision that state could entail.

  Five years before, when I’d moved in with Lucy, we’d sworn that we’d never sentence our children to live in the flat, cartoonish world that we’d escaped. But while Sean was still winning titles as a pro surfer, most of us had ended up struggling, thwarted or resentful. When I could count the number of heps I’d grown up with who had truly flourished on the fingers of one hand, how could I bequeath the same prospects to my daughter?

  #

  “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise you fifty,” Marcus announced. I’d folded a few rounds ago, after forcing myself to stay in and lose a little for appearances’ sake. Now there were only two players left, and they seemed to be intent on a game of chicken.

  “I’ll match,” Danny replied. His hand was terrible, but at some point he must have convinced himself that he could bluff his way to victory, and having chosen that strategy he was too stubborn to veer off course.

  Marcus raised another fifty.

  “Fuck you,” Danny whispered, and matched the bet.

  I watched them with a growing sense of dread, willing Marcus to back down. I hadn’t set eyes on him before that night, so I could still imagine that it was possible. Danny would just keep charging ahead like a freight train.

  “I guess I’ll have to raise you again,” Marcus taunted him.

  Danny slid the last of his chips forward. “Matched.”

  Marcus hesitated. “I’m good,” he decided.

  Danny laid down his pair of nines, which made two pairs beside the kings in the flop. Marcus had a king and queen in the hole, giving him trips; I could have made the same, but only with sevens. Everyone else had had rubbish.