Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

Her hair is a diaphanous halo of possibilities,

I step into the room, take aim at her skull, and fire. The bullet shifts worlds before it can reach her, but it will kill another version, downstream.

I only started feeling like a soulless automaton when I tore it all apart with lies.

‘The victors have always written the “history”,

I can only assume that the same computers that will filter it out of my posthumous transmission will also fill in the unwritten remainder, extrapolating an innocuous life for me, fit for a child to read.

Buying back a small part of Brazil from multinational agribusiness, so food could be grown, not imported, and foreign debt curtailed?

the prevailing rhetoric was almost the reverse of that of a decade before. Modern eugenics was hailed by its practitioners as a force opposed to racist myths. Individual traits were what mattered, to be assessed ‘objectively’ on their merits, and the historical conjunctions of traits which had once been referred to as ‘racial characteristics’ were of no more interest to a modern eugenicist than national boundaries were to a geologist.

The latest privatisation legislation meant that each taxpayer could specify the precise allocation of his or her income tax between government departments, who in turn were free to spend as much of their revenue as they wished on advertising aimed at attracting more funds.

(A certain politician, a very popular man, advocates undercover operations to sell supplies of these drugs laced with fatal impurities, but he’s not yet succeeded in making that legal.)

each caller is given a ‘reliability factor’ between zero and one,

Some days I’m impressed with the sophistication of the software that makes these assessments. Other days I curse it as a heap of useless voodoo.

you have to read all the assertions

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said, ‘Lindhquistism.’

Taking one capsule, three times a day, just isn’t hard enough – whereas the schemes of the most perceptive con men were sufficiently arduous (or sufficiently expensive) to make the victims feel that they were engaged in the kind of struggle that the prospect of death requires.

this minuscule bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle age, I wasn’t yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.

I found the program that allocated medication or placebo. The program that had killed Paula, and thousands of others, for the sake of sound experimental technique.

The software avatars we use as directors are always constructed with meticulous care, by psychologists and film historians committed to re-creating the true persona of the original auteur … but some purists are never happy,

bordello?’

we already own emulation rights for most of the personas we need.’

As a genuine attempt at extortion, though … how could it ever have worked? Were they hoping that I’d transfer the money immediately – before the shock wore off, before it even occurred to me that the image of Loraine, however lifelike, proved nothing?

And the fake Loraine – not even a Copy of the real woman, but a construct based entirely on my knowledge of her, my memories, my mental images – what empathy, what loyalty, what love did I owe her?

As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious.

most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline.

I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system – to produce the same patterns of output from the same patterns of input – but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

Ranjit arrives a few minutes later, carrying a CD; he mimes staggering under its weight. ‘Latest set of amendments to the UNHCR regulations. It’s going to be a long day.’ I groan. ‘I’m having dinner with Rachel tonight. Why don’t we just feed the bloody thing to LEX and ask for a summary?’

‘And get disbarred at the next audit? No thanks.’ The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software – terrified of putting ninety per cent of its members out of work.

We’re a production line, not a research lab.

Have you ever done something so wrong that it dragged your whole life down into a choking black swamp in a sunless land of nightmares? Have you ever made a choice so foolish that it cancelled out, in one blow, everything good you might ever have done, made void every memory of happiness, made everything in the world that was beautiful, ugly, turned every last trace of self-respect into the certain knowledge that you should never have been born?

When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can’t be doing anything very radical or profound.