Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

All my certainties have evaporated:

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me. Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher – faster than thought – rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

‘Understanding,’ the lecturer told us, ‘is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fertilised egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?’

OK: people change. Slowly. Imperceptibly.’ He nods. ‘Imperceptibly – exactly! But does that make it any less real? Who’s swallowed the lie? It’s seeing the life of your body as the life of one person that’s the illusion. The idea that “you” are made up of all the events since your birth is nothing but a useful fiction.

And I thought, what’s this magic thing called ‘humanity’, anyway? Isn’t half of it, at least, in the eyes of the beholder?

Dolores’s software starts hunting

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

I knew that at least we’d shared something that had made us feel closer.

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

‘Anything’s bearable – so long as it’s finite.’

The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world.