‘And imagine what kind of reaction you’d get from the existing sects. The ones who think they’ve had all the answers for the last thirty-four years.’ Yeah. The ones I’m supposed to be guarding you against.
Po-kwai nods, then stretches and stifles a yawn. I resist the temptation to suggest that she must be tired. She says, ‘I don’t know how you put up with me. If I’m not boring you with my dreams, or bitching about the way ASR is treating me, I’m spouting all this angst about obliterating alien civilizations and murdering our own alternatives.’
‘Don’t apologize for that. I’m interested.’
‘Are you?’ She gives me a searching look, then shakes her head in mock frustration. ‘I can’t read you, you know. If you were humouring me, I wouldn’t know the difference. I’ll just have to take your word for it.’ She glances at her wristwatch—an ostentatious (and now dishonest) emblem of a mod-free brain. ‘It’s after three. I suppose I’d better—’ She moves towards the doorway, then hesitates. ‘I know you physically can’t get sick of this job—but what does your family think about you working all night, every night?’
‘I don’t have a family.’
‘Really? No kids? I imagined you with—’
‘No wife, no kids.’
‘Who, then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Girlfriends? Boyfriends?’
‘Nobody. Not since my wife died.’
She cringes. ‘Oh, Nick. I’m sorry. Shit. My usual brilliant tact. When did it happen? Not… since you’ve been working here? Nobody told me—’
‘No, no. It was almost seven years ago.’
‘And—what? You’re still in mourning?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve never been in mourning.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have a mod that… defines my responses. I don’t grieve for her. I don’t miss her. All I can do is remember her. And I don’t need anyone else. I can’t need anyone else.’
She hesitates, curiosity no doubt battling some outmoded sense of propriety, before it strikes home that I have no grief to respect. ‘But… how did you feel at the time? Before you had this mod installed?’
‘I was a cop, then. I was on duty when she died—or near enough. So…’ I shrug. ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’
For an instant, I’m starkly aware that this confession is as improbable as anything I’ve done all night—that the smeared Nick-and-Po-kwai is plucking it from the thinnest realms of possibility with as much fastidiousness as each feat of lock-picking and sentry-dodging. But then the moment passes, and the illusion of will, the smooth flow of rationalization, returns.
‘I wasn’t hurt by her death—but I knew that I would be. I knew that as soon as I deprimed—shut down my behavioural mod—I’d suffer. Badly. So I did the obvious, sensible thing: I took steps to protect myself. Or rather, my primed self took steps to protect my unprimed self. The zombie boy scout came to the rescue.’
She’s doing a pretty good job of hiding her reaction, but it’s not hard to imagine: equal parts pity and revulsion. ‘And your superiors just let you go ahead?’
‘Oh, shit, no. I had to resign. The department wanted to throw me to the jackals: grief therapists, loss counsellors, trauma-adjustment specialists.’ I laugh. ‘These things aren’t left to chance, you know; there’s a departmental protocol several megabytes long, and an army of people to implement it. And to be fair to them, they weren’t inflexible—they offered me all kinds of choices. But staying primed until I could physically circumvent the whole problem wasn’t one of them. Not because it would have made me a bad cop. But it would have been awfully bad PR: join the police force, lose your spouse—and rewire your brain so you don’t give a fuck.
‘I could have sued to keep my job, I suppose; legally, I had a right to use any mod I liked, so long as it didn’t affect my work. But there didn’t seem much point in making a fuss. I was happy enough the way things turned out.’
‘Happy?’
‘Yes. The mod made me happy. Not buzzed, not wired—not euphoric. Just… as happy as Karen had made me, when she was alive.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Of course I do. It’s true. It’s not a matter of opinion; that’s precisely what it did. It’s a matter of neural anatomy.’
‘So she was dead, and you felt just fine?’
‘I know that sounds callous. And of course I wish she’d survived. But she didn’t survive, and there was nothing I could do about that. So I made her death… irrelevant.’
She hesitates, then says, ‘And you never think that, maybe…?’
‘What? That it’s all some kind of awful travesty? That I’d rather not be this way? That I should have gone through the natural process of grief, and emerged with all my natural emotional needs intact?’ I shake my head. ‘No. The mod is a complete package, a self-contained set of beliefs on every aspect of the matter—including its own appropriateness. The zombie boy scout was no fool; you don’t leave any loose ends, or the whole thing unravels. I can’t believe it’s a travesty. I can’t regret it. It’s exactly what I want, and it always will be.’
‘But don’t you ever wonder what you’d think, what you’d feel… without the mod?’
‘Why should I? Why should I care? How much time do you spend wondering what you’d be like with a totally different brain? This is who I am.’
‘In an artificial state—’
I sigh. ‘So what? Everyone’s in an artificial state. Everyone’s brain is self-modified. Everyone tries to shape who they are. Are neural mods so terrible, simply because they do it so well—because they actually let people get what they want? Do you honestly think that the brain-wiring that comes from natural selection, and an accidental life, and people’s own—largely ineffectual—striving to change themselves “naturally”, is some kind of touchstone of perfection? Okay: we spent thousands of years inventing ludicrous religious and pseudo-scientific reasons as to why all the things we couldn’t control just happened to be the best of all possible alternatives. God must have done a perfect job—and if not God, then evolution; either way, tampering would be sacrilege. And it’s going to take a long time for the whole culture to grow out of that bullshit. But face the truth: it’s a heap of outdated excuses for not wanting the things we couldn’t have.
‘You think it’s tragic that I’m happy with the way I am? Well, at least I know why I’m happy. And at least I don’t have to kid myself that the end product of a few trillion random events constitutes the indisputable, unimprovable pinnacle of creation.’
I wait an hour after she’s gone, and then collapse. The process (of course) is uneventful; the past (inevitably) is ‘still’ as I remember it. I’m fully aware that this proves nothing, that it couldn’t seem to happen any other way—but the irrational lesson of the padlock is reinforced nonetheless: fearing that I won’t be the one to survive, and then finding that I have survived (as if that were some kind of miracle, and not a tautology), drives home the conviction that there’s always only one ‘true’ version of me. It may be a delusion—but it’s the kind of delusion that I badly need.
I think back over my forced confession with a faint sense of humiliation, but it doesn’t last long. So, Po-kwai knows about Karen. She disapproves. She pities me. I’ll live.