Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

A while after that I got a pen pal in Switzerland. She was a music student, a violinist, and I told her I was studying physics at the local university. She sent me a photo, and, eventually, I did the same, after waiting for one of my best-looking hosts. We exchanged letters regularly, every week for more than a year. One day she wrote, saying she was coming to visit, asking for details of how we could meet. I don’t think I’d ever felt as lonely as I did then. If I hadn’t sent that photo, I could at least have seen her for one day. I could have spent a whole afternoon, talking face to face with my only true friend, the only person in the world who actually knew, not one of my hosts, but me. I stopped writing at once, and I gave up renting the post office box.

(“Intimacy,” I once told Sian, after we’d made love, “is the only cure for solipsism.” She laughed and said, “Don’t get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it hasn’t even cured me of masturbation.”)

The legal definition of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA fingerprint of the body, according to a standard set of markers, to the serial number of the jewel. When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can’t be doing anything very radical or profound.