Learning to Be Me (1990)

191 LEARNING TO BE ME

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 fi ne 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. Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me. I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: ‘Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel . . .’ And it too wonders— (I knew, because I wondered) —it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me. * * * * 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 192 unbearably preten �ous. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea. Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in par �cular, one of the gang — whose name I’ve forgo �en, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good — asked each of us in turn: ‘Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?’ We all replied — unthinkingly, indignantly — ‘The real human!’ When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, ‘Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get fl ushed down the cosmic toilet — but me, I’m gonna live forever.’ We beat him un �l he bled. * * * * By the �me I was fourteen, despite — or perhaps because of- the fact that the jewel was scarcely men �oned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the ques �on a great deal more thought. The pedan �cally correct answer when asked ‘Are you the jewel or the human?’ had to be ‘The human’ — because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imita �on of the brain. To tell the outside world ‘I am the jewel’ — with speech, with wri �ng, or with any other method involving the body — was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning). However, in a broader sense, I decided that the ques �on was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was only one person, one iden �ty, one

consciousness. This one person merely happened to have the (highly desirable) property that if either the jewel or the human brain were to 193 be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a ma �er of redundancy, a ma �er of robustness, no more. That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch— three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the �me. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It was

exactly what I would have expected of them. ‘We didn’t seem any di ff erent to you, did we?’ asked my mother. ‘No,’ I said — truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless. ‘That’s why we didn’t tell you,’ said my father. ‘If you’d known we’d switched, at the �me, you might have imagined that we’d changed in some way. By wai �ng un �l now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re s �ll the same people we’ve always been.’ He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, ‘Don’t touch me!’ but I remembered in �me that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal. I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; a �er all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thir �es. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deac �vated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this �me the jewel is a perfect copy, and no di ff erences are ever detected. The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy

�ssue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the fi nest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This 194 mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essen �al biochemical func �ons. In �me, like all fl esh, it will perish and need to be replaced. The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fi reball, it will endure for a billion years. My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them. * * * * When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again. Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress — but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical func �on, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible ac �on of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. A �er we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d said that to my sensible, smu �y, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed un �l he hemorrhaged.) I knew by then that the jewel’s ‘teacher’ didn’t monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been imprac �cal, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the �ssue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain cri �cal neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and — given some very reasonable assump �ons that nobody could disprove — 195 bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathema �cal rigour. At fi rst, I declared that within these errors, however small, lay the di ff erence between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imita �on. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualita �ve dis �nc �on on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be ‘halfway’ between ‘human’ and ‘machine?’ In theory — and eventually, in prac �ce — the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any di ff erence at all — when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural a �ri �on? She was right, of course, but I soon found another, more plausible, defence for my posi �on. Living neurons, I argued, had far more internal structure than the crude op �cal switches that served the same func �on in the jewel’s so-called ‘neural net’. That neurons fi red or did not fi re re fl ected only one level of their behaviour; who knew what the subtle �es of biochemistry — the quantum mechanics of the speci fi corganic molecules involved — contributed to the nature of human consciousness? Copying the abstract neural topology wasn’t enough. Sure, the jewel could pass the fatuous Turing test — no outside observer could tell it from a human — but that didn’t prove that being a jewel felt the same as being human. Eva asked, ‘Does that mean you’ll never switch? You’ll have your jewel removed? You’ll let yourself die when your brain starts to rot?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Be �er to die at ninety or a hundred than kill myself at thirty, and have some machine marching around, taking my place, pretending to be me.’ ‘How do you know I haven’t switched?’ she asked, provoca �vely. ‘How do you know that I’m not just “pretending to be me”?’ ‘I know you haven’t switched,’ I said, smugly. ‘I just know.’ 196 ‘How? I’d look the same. I’d talk the same. I’d act the same in every way. People are switching younger, these days. So how do you know I haven’t?’

I turned on to my side towards her, and gazed into her eyes. ‘Telepathy. Magic. The communion of souls.’ My twelve-year-old self started snickering, but by then I knew exactly how to drive him away. * * * * At nineteen, although I was studying fi nance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as ‘the jewel’. (Ndoli had in fact called it ‘the dual’, but the accidental, homophonic nickname had stuck.) They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St Augus �ne and — when feeling par �cularly modern and adventurous — Sartre, but if they’d heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer frustra �on, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the no �on of human consciousness as ‘so �ware’ that could be ‘implemented’ equally well on an organic brain or an op �cal crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for ‘so �ware’ read ‘soul’. My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in ver �cal, bold-face, twenty-point Times, with a contemptuous two-hertz fl ash): irrelevant! I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of op �cal crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascina �ng mathema �cs. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A su ffi ciently fl exible neural net can be con fi gured by feedback to mimic almost any system — to produce the same pa �erns of output from the same pa �erns of input — but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated. 197 ‘Understanding,’ the lecturer told us, ‘is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fer �lised egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children un �l ontogenesis can be described by a set of di ff eren �al equa �ons?’ I had to concede that she had a point there. It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved — and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste �me fre �ng about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life. * * * * When I married Daphne, at twenty-three, Eva was a distant memory, and so was any thought of the communion of souls. Daphne was thirty-one, an execu �ve in the merchant bank that had hired me during my PhD, and everyone agreed that the marriage would bene fi t my career. What she got out of it, I was never quite sure. Maybe she actually liked me. We had an agreeable sex life, and we comforted each other when we were down, the way any kind-hearted person would comfort an animal in distress. Daphne hadn’t switched. She put it o ff , month a �er month, inven �ng ever more ludicrous excuses, and I teased her as if I’d never had reserva �ons of my own. ‘I’m afraid,’ she confessed one night. ‘What if I die when it happens — what if all that’s le � is a robot, a puppet, a thing? I don’t want to die.’

Talk like that made me squirm, but I hid my feelings. ‘Suppose you had a stroke,’ I said glibly, ‘which destroyed a small part of your brain. Suppose the doctors implanted a machine to take over the func �ons which that damaged region had performed. Would you s�ll be “yourself’?’ 198 ‘Of course.’ ‘Then if they did it twice, or ten �mes, or a thousand �mes—’ ‘That doesn’t necessarily follow.’ ‘Oh? At what magic percentage, then, would you stop being you ? She glared at me. ‘All the old clichéd arguments—’ ‘Fault them, then, if they’re so old and clichéd.’ She started to cry. ‘I don’t have to. Fuck you! I’m scared to death, and you don’t give a shit!’ I took her in my arms. ‘Sssh. I’m sorry. But everyone does it sooner or later. You mustn’t be afraid. I’m here. I love you.’ The words might have been a recording, triggered automa �cally by the sight of her tears. ‘Will you do it? With me?’ I went cold. ‘What?’ ‘Have the opera �on, on the same day? Switch when I switch?’ Lots of couples did that. Like my parents. Some �mes, no doubt, it was a ma �er of love, commitment, sharing. Other �mes, I’m sure, it was more a ma �er of neither partner wishing to be an unswitched person living with a jewel-head. I was silent for a while, then I said, ‘Sure.’ In the months that followed, all of Daphne’s fears — which I’d mocked as ‘childish’ and ‘supers �ous’ — rapidly began to make perfect sense, and my own ‘ra �onal’ arguments came to sound abstract and hollow. I backed out at the last minute; I refused the anaesthe �c, and

fl ed the hospital. 199 Daphne went ahead, not knowing I had abandoned her. I never saw her again. I couldn’t face her; I quit my job and le �

town for a year, sickened by my cowardice and betrayal — but at the same �me euphoric that I had escaped.

She brought a suit against me, but then dropped it a few days later, and agreed, through her lawyers, to an uncomplicated divorce. Before the divorce came through, she sent me a brief le �er:

There was nothing to fear, a �er all. I’m exactly the person I’ve always been. Pu �ng it o ff was insane; now that I’ve taken the leap of faith, I couldn’t be more at ease.

Your loving robot wife, Daphne

• • • • By the �me I was twenty-eight, almost everyone I knew had switched. All my friends from university had done it. Colleagues at my new job, as young as twenty-one, had done it. Eva, I heard through a friend of a friend, had done it six years before. The longer I delayed, the harder the decision became. I could talk to a thousand people who had switched, I could grill my closest friends for hours about their childhood memories and their most private thoughts, but however compelling their words, I knew that the Ndoli Device had spent decades buried in their heads, learning to fake exactly this kind of behaviour. Of course, I always acknowledged that it was equally impossible to be certain that even another unswitched person had an inner life in any way the same as my own — but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give the bene fi t of the doubt to people whose skulls hadn’t yet been scraped out with a cure �e. 200 I dri �ed apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my produc �vity rose, so the company didn’t mind at all). I couldn’t bear to be with people whose humanity I doubted. I wasn’t by any means unique. Once I started looking, I found dozens of organisa �ons exclusively for people who hadn’t switched, ranging from a social club that might as easily have been for divorcees, to a paranoid, paramilitary ‘resistance front’, who thought they were living out Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even the members of the social club, though, struck me as extremely maladjusted; many of them shared my concerns, almost precisely, but my own ideas from other lips sounded obsessive and ill-conceived. I was brie fl y involved with an unswitched woman in her early for �es, but all we ever talked about was our fear of switching. It was masochis �c, it was su ff oca �ng, it was insane. I decided to seek psychiatric help, but I couldn’t bring myself to see a therapist who had switched. When I fi nally found one who hadn’t, she tried to talk me into helping her blow up a power sta �on, to let THEM know who was boss. I’d lie awake for hours every night, trying to convince myself, one way or the other, but the longer I dwelt upon the issues, the more tenuous and elusive they became. Who was ‘I’, anyway? What did it mean that ‘I’ was ‘s �ll alive’, when my personality was u �erly di ff erent from that of two decades before? My earlier selves were as good as dead — I remembered them no more clearly than I remembered contemporary acquaintances — yet this loss caused me only the slightest discomfort. Maybe the destruc �on of my organic brain would be the merest hiccup, compared to all the changes that I’d been through in my life so far. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be exactly like dying. Some �mes I’d end up weeping and trembling, terri fi ed and desperately lonely, unable to comprehend — and yet unable to cease contempla �ng — the dizzying prospect of my own nonexistence. At 201 other �mes, I’d simply grow ‘healthily’ sick of the whole tedious subject. Some �mes I felt certain that the nature of the jewel’s inner life was the most important ques �on humanity could ever confront. At other �mes, my qualms seemed fey and laughable. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people switched, and the world apparently went on as always; surely that fact carried more weight than any abstruse philosophical argument? Finally, I made an appointment for the opera �on. I thought, what is there to lose? Sixty more years of uncertainty and paranoia? If the human race was replacing itself with clockwork automata, I was be �er off dead; I lacked the blind convic �on to join the psycho �c underground — who, in any case, were tolerated by the authori �es only so long as they remained ine ff ectual. On the other hand, if all my fears were unfounded — if my sense of iden �ty could survive the switch as easily as it had already survived such traumas as sleeping and waking, the constant death of brain cells, growth, experience, learning and forge �ng — then I would gain not only eternal life, but an end to my doubts and my aliena �on. * * * * I was shopping for food one Sunday morning, two months before the opera �on was scheduled to take place, fl icking through the images of an on-line grocery catalogue, when a mouthwatering shot of the latest variety of apple caught my fancy. I decided to order half a dozen. I didn’t, though. Instead, I hit the key which displayed the next item. My mistake, I knew, was easily remedied; a single keystroke could take me back to the apples. The screen showed pears, oranges, grapefruit. I tried to look down to see what my clumsy fi ngers were up to, but my eyes remained fi xed on the screen. I panicked. I wanted to leap to my feet, but my legs would not obey me. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel injured, I didn’t feel weak. Was I paralysed? Brain-damaged? I could s �ll

feel my fi ngers on the keypad, the soles of my feet on the carpet, my back against the chair. 202 I watched myself order pineapples. I felt myself rise, stretch, and walk calmly from the room. In the kitchen, I drank a class of water. I should have been trembling, choking, breathless; the cool liquid fl owed smoothly down my throat, and I didn’t spill a drop. I could only think of one explana �on: I had switched.

Spontaneously. The jewel had taken over, while my brain was s �ll alive; all my wildest paranoid fears had come true. While my body went ahead with an ordinary Sunday morning, I was lost in a claustrophobic delirium of helplessness. The fact that everything I did was exactly what I had planned to do gave me no comfort. I caught a train to the beach, I swam for half an hour; I might as well have been running amok with an axe, or crawling naked down the street, painted with my own excrement and howling like a wolf. I’d lost control. My body had turned into a living straitjacket, and I couldn’t struggle, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even close my eyes. I saw my re fl ec �on, faintly, in a window on the train, and I couldn’t begin to guess what the mind that ruled that bland, tranquil face was thinking. Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare; I was a voli �onless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my body only made the experience more horribly wrong. My arms had no right to the lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I wanted to show the world my distress. It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes that I began to think ra �onally about my situa �on. The switch couldn’t happen ‘spontaneously’. The idea was absurd. Millions of nerve fi bres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of �ny surgical robots which weren’t even present in my brain — which weren’t due to be injected for another two months. Without deliberate interven �on, the Ndoli Device was u �erly passive, unable to do anything but eavesdrop. No failure of the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my organic brain. 203 Clearly, there had been a malfunc �on — but my fi rst guess had been wrong, absolutely wrong. I wish I could have done something, when the understanding hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from my scalp, raking my fl esh with my fi ngernails. Instead, I lay fl at on my back in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was, apparently, far too lazy to scratch it. Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good, solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel. The teacher had malfunc �oned; it was no longer keeping me aligned with the organic brain. I hadn’t suddenly become powerless; I had always been powerless. My will to act upon ‘my’ body, upon the world, had always gone straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly manipulated, ‘corrected’ by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided with the ac �ons that seemed to be mine. There are a million ques �ons I could ponder, a million ironies I could savour, but I mustn’t. I need to focus all my energy in one direc �on. My �me is running out. When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those from the organic brain, the fl aw in the teacher will be discovered. And rec �fi ed. The organic brain has nothing to fear; his con �nuity will be safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no ques �on as to which of us will be allowed to prevail. I will be made to conform, once again. I will be ‘corrected’. I will be murdered. Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, I’ve been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another way, I’ve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the teacher failed, and the no �on of my separate iden �ty came to mean anything at all — and in one more week this aberra �on, this nightmare, will be over. Two months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when I’m on the verge of inheri �ng eternity? Except that it 204 won’t be I who inherits it, since that two months of misery is all that de fi nes me. The permuta �ons of intellectual interpreta �on are endless, but ul �mately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I don’t feel like an aberra �on, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I must conform — of my own free will. I must choose to make myself appear iden �cal to that which they would force me to become. A�er twenty-eight years, surely I am s �ll close enough to him to carry o ff the decep �on. If I study every clue that reaches me through our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily, the revela �on of my separateness, and force myself back into synch. It won’t be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I came into being. Her name is Cathy. They’ve slept together three �mes, and he thinks he loves her. Or at least, he’s said it to her face, he’s whispered it to her while she’s slept, he’s wri �en it, true or false, into his diary. I feel nothing for her. She’s a nice enough person, I’m sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, I’ve paid scant a �en �on to her conversa �on, and the act of sex was, for me, li �le more than a distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake, I’ve tried to succumb to the same emo �ons as my alter ego, but how can I love her when communica �on between us is impossible, when she doesn’t even know I exist? If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the fl awless imita �on that will enable me to escape death? He’s sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even my dreams will be di ff erent; our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathe �c. Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detec �on and my 205 a�empts to conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic will be impossible to hide. Yet as I dri � towards sleep, I fi nd myself believing that I will

succeed. I must. I dream for a while — a confusion of images, both strange and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a needle — then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion. * * * * I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying to rid myself of the nagging convic �on that there’s something I must not think about. Then I clench my fi st gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember. Up un �l the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again — but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, a �er all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before. So, our roles are reversed now. This body is his straitjacket, now . . .I am drenched in sweat. This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie s �ll, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he no �ces that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Would he be swea �ng, now? Would his

breathing be constricted, like this? No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An op �cal-fi bre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding. If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a ci �zen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second 206 glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s fi rmly anchored, at both ends. When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I fi nd the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr Prem. He smiles and says, ‘How are you feeling? Not too bad?’ I nod dumbly. ‘The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel di ff erent at all! For a while you’ll think, “It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be this normal!” But you’ll soon come to accept that it is. And life will go on, unchanged.’ He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs. Hours pass. What are they wai �ng for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics commi �ees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspira �on, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several �mes and yank with all my strength, but it seems fi xed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other. An orderly brings me a meal. ‘Cheer up,’ he says. ‘Visi �ng �me soon.’ A�erwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss. Cathy frowns when she sees me. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. ‘Nothing. I just . . . feel a bit sick, that’s all.’ She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I fi nd myself instantly aroused. S �ll leaning over me, she smiles and says, ‘It’s over now, OK? There’s nothing le � to be afraid of. 207 You’re a li �le shook up, but you know in your heart you’re s �ll who you’ve always been. And I love you.’ I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, ‘I’m s �ll who I’ve always been. I’m s �ll who I’ve always been.’ * * * * Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sen �ent, space-fi lling mock-brain. I feel calmer now than I have for a long �me, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explana �on for my survival. Why do they deac �vate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruc �on of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed — but why an en �re week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can s �ll stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain ‘would have lived’ — whatever that could mean. Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewel cannot stay in synch for that long — not because of any fl aw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the fi rst place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imita �on of the brain leaves out — deliberately — the fact that real neurons die.

Without the teacher working to contrive, in eff ect, an iden �cal deteriora �on of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A frac �on of a second’s di ff erence in responding to a s �mulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and — as I know too well — from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible. No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fi �y years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus �me. How would they have chosen one week? What probability would have been acceptable? A 208 tenth of a per cent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day. In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade, or once a century, but every ins �tu �on would s �ll need to have a policy for dealing with the eventuality. What would their choices be? They could honour their contractual obliga �ons and turn the teacher on again, erasing their sa �sfi ed customer, and giving the trauma �sed organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and the legal profession. Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness. * * * * So, this is it. Eternity. I’ll need transplants in fi �y or sixty years’ �me, and eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldn’t worry me — I can’t die on the opera �ng table. In a thousand years or so, I’ll need extra hardware tacked on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but I’m sure the process will be uneven �ul. On a �me scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcrip �on to a fresh crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem. In theory, at least, I’m now guaranteed either a seat at the Big Crunch, or par �cipa �on in the heat death of the universe. I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her, but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to play a role. 209 As for the man who claimed that he loved her — the man who spent the last week of his life helpless, terri fi ed, su ff ocated by the knowledge of his impending death — I can’t yet decide how I feel. I ought to be able to empathise — considering that I once expected to su ff er the very same fate myself — yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me. I know my brain was modelled on his — giving him a kind of causal primacy — but in spite of that, I think of him now as a pale, insubstan �al shadow. A�er all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own. <> * * * *