- Permanently . . .
- . . . closer.
- Isn’t that the point?
- I don’t know anymore.
Silence. Hesitation.
Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my turn to reply.
* * * *
I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a mental hiatus to pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when I’d woken in someone else’s Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my torso and legs, then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex shop-window dummy - but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no great shock. I sat up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little numb and hollow, but my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt located between my eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern transplant, my jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change, avoiding the need for months of physiotherapy.
I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one bed, one table, one chair, one clock, one HV
set. On the wall, a framed reproduction of an Escher lithograph: “Bond of Union,” a portrait of the artist and, presumably, his wife, faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind, joined into a single, linked band. I traced the outer surface from start to finish, and was disappointed to find that it lacked the Möbius twist I was expecting.
No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside the bed, a full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous form. It suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry games, he might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified the HV set accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange right for left. What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window between the rooms. I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection looked appropriately embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however unlikely it was. Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could reveal the difference. No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucault’s, would twist the same way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to the mirror and thumped it. It didn’t seem to yield at all, but then, either a brick wall, or an equal and opposite thump from behind, could have been the explanation.
I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anything - for all I knew, the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was irrelevant. The room was irrelevant. The point was . . .
I sat on the bed. I recalled someone - Michael, probably - wondering if I’d panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If I’d woken in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was from my past(s), I’d no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I had two long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect of being changed back into Sian or Michael didn’t bother me at all; the wishes of both to regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the desire for personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of their re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories would not be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the other of them would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common denominator than any kind of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than the sum of my parts. My purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the strangeness for Sian, and to answer a question for Michael, and when the time came I’d be happy to bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and valued.
So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, I’d undergone no fundamental change - but even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally? Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head just full of second-hand description - intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language? If my mind were radically different, would that difference be something I could even perceive - or would all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?
The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith - and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.
I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest they could get, and what had come of me?
Michael’s hope remained precisely as reasonable - and as unproven - as ever. After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michael’s search was over, even if it had ended in failure. Now he’d have no choice but to accept that, and move on.
I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and off. I was actually starting to get bored, but I wasn’t going to waste eight hours and several thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.
I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation of my two copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the rooms and bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name couldn’t find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have done it, but I didn’t have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded promising - highly sensitive to air currents but the only paper in the room was the Escher, and I couldn’t bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed the mirror, and observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would have had the added bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but as I raised the chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting sets of short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of sensory deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment, it could be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for amusement.
So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentley’s clients probably ended up doing.
As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for their privacy - and both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental declarations of frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had something to hide. Their curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; they’d wanted to understand each other, but, of course, not to pry.
All of these contradictions continued in me, but - staring at the ceiling, trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty seconds - I didn’t really have to make a decision. It was the most natural thing in the world to let my mind wander back over the course of their relationship, from both points of view.
It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiar - like an extended attack of deja vu. It’s not that they’d often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.
It wasn’t in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple personality. Sian and Michael simply weren’t there - to justify, to explain, to deceive each other all over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should have attempted to do all this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of my role, unable to decide on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry, and let their memories flow.
After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a chance to break the mirror. We tried to stay together.
We lasted a week.
Bentley had made - as the law required - snapshots of our jewels prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to them - and then had him explain to us why - but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.
We couldn’t forgive each other, because there was nothing to forgive. Neither of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to understand, and sympathise with, completely.
We knew each other too well, that’s all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic detail. It wasn’t that the truth hurt; it didn’t, any longer. It numbed us. It smothered us. We didn’t know each other as we knew ourselves; it was worse than that. In the self, the details blur in the very processes of thought; mental self-dissection is possible, but it takes great effort to sustain. Our mutual dissection took no effort at all; it was the natural state into which we fell in each other’s presence. Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.
And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.
I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn’t much want to think about . . . but then, I’d always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).
Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.
Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.
* * * *
UNSTABLE ORBITS IN THE SPACE OF LIES
I always feel safest sleeping on the freeway — or at least, those stretches of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium between the surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully along the fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatown — not quite drowned out by the influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism from the west, and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism from the north), I can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that Maria and I are not going to wake up believing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing powers of tax reform.
So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the horizon — and Maria gone — I don’t panic. No faith, no world view, no belief system, no culture, could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The borders of the basins of attraction
do
fluctuate, advancing and retreating by tens of metres daily —
but it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I can’t think why she would have walked off and left me, without a word — but Maria does things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice versa. Even after a year together, we still have that.
I don’t panic — but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want to get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way she would have headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she departed, that should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.
The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted — but it’s possible to steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions. The easiest way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant attractor to build up momentum — while taking care to arrange to be deflected at the last minute by a countervailing influence.
Choosing the first attractor — the belief to which surrender must be feigned — is always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like
sniffing the wind,
like following an external trail; sometimes it seems like pure introspection, like trying to determine ‘my own’ true beliefs . . . and sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zen — and that’s how it strikes me now . . . which in itself just about answers the question. The balance here is delicate, but one influence
is
marginally stronger: Eastern philosophies are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from where I stand — and knowing the purely geographical reasons for this doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between the freeway and the railway line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my pack, and start walking.
A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my solitude: without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to make use of them: one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the food. Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors seem to tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just aren’t worth the cost — although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical monoculture have their own unique ‘reasons’ for not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my vegetable gardens when I passed by last night; it makes a pathetic breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think about the bread rolls that I’ll steal when I’m back with Maria again, and my anticipation almost overshadows the bland, woody taste of the present.
The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section flanked by deserted factories and abandoned houses, and against this background of relative silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger and clearer. That glib label — ‘Chinatown’ — was always an oversimplification, of course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct cultures besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from Thai to Timorese — and several varieties of every religion from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that finally stabilised would probably seem utterly bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the district. To the present-day citizens, of course, the strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s the definition of
stability,
the whole reason the attractors exist. If I marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find myself sharing the local values and beliefs, I’d be perfectly happy to stay that way for the rest of my life.