Collected short fiction.., p.149
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 149
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Lincoln knew that he dreamed that night, but when he woke he had trouble remembering the dream. He knocked on his grandmother’s door; she’d been up for hours. “I can’t sleep in this place,” she complained. “It’s quieter than the farm.”
She was right, Lincoln realized. They were close to the highway, but traffic noise, music, sirens, all the usual city sounds, barely reached them.
They went down to breakfast. When they’d eaten, Lincoln was at a loss to know what to do. He went to the reception desk; the same woman was there.
He didn’t need to speak. She said, “They’re not quite ready for you, sir. Feel free to watch TV, take a walk, use the gym. You’ll know when you’re needed.”
He turned to his grandmother. “Let’s take a walk.”
They left the motel and walked around the stadium, then headed east away from the highway, ending up in a leafy park a few blocks away. All the people around them were doing ordinary things: pushing their kids on swings, playing with their dogs. Lincoln’s grandmother said, “If you want to change your mind, we can always go home.”
As if his mind were his own to change. Still, at this moment the compulsion that had brought him here seemed to have waned. He didn’t know whether the Steveware had taken its eyes off him or was deliberately offering him a choice, a chance to back out.
He said, “I’ll stay.” He dreaded the idea of hitting the road only to find himself summoned back. Part of him was curious, too. He wanted to be brave enough to step inside the jaws of this whale, on the promise that he would be disgorged in the end.
They returned to the motel, ate lunch, watched TV, ate dinner. Lincoln checked his phone; his friends had been calling, wondering why he hadn’t been in touch. He hadn’t told anyone where he’d gone. He’d left it to his parents to explain everything to Sam.
He dreamed again, and woke clutching at fragments. Good times, an edge of danger, wide blue skies, the company of friends. It seemed more like a dream he could have had on his own than anything that might have come from the Steveware cramming his mind with equations so he could help test another crackpot idea that the swarms had collected thirty years ago by Googling the physics of immortality.
Three more days passed, just as aimlessly. Lincoln began to wonder if he’d failed some test, or if there’d been a miscalculation leading to a glut of zombies.
Early in the morning of their fifth day in Atlanta, as Lincoln splashed water on his face in the bathroom, he felt the change. Shards of his recurrent dream glistened potently in the back of his mind, while a set of directions through the motel complex gelled in the foreground. He was being summoned. It was all he could do to bang on his grandmother’s door and shout out a garbled explanation before he set off down the corridor.
She caught up with him. “Are you sleepwalking? Lincoln?”
“I’m still here, but they’re taking me soon.”
She looked frightened. He grasped her hand and squeezed it. “Don’t worry,” he said. He’d always imagined that when the time came he’d be the one who was afraid, drawing his courage from her.
He turned a corner and saw the corridor leading into a large space that might once have been a room for conferences or weddings. Half a dozen people were standing around; Lincoln could tell that the three teenagers were fellow zombies, while the adults were just there to look out for them. The room had no furniture but contained an odd collection of items, including four ladders and four bicycles. There was cladding on the walls, soundproofing, as if the whole building weren’t quiet enough already.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lincoln saw a dark mass of quivering fur: a swarm of rats, huddled against the wall. For a moment his skin crawled, but then a heady sense of exhilaration swept his revulsion away. His own body held only the tiniest fragment of the Steveware; at last he could confront the thing itself.
He turned toward the rats and spread his arms. “You called, and I came running. So what is it you want?” Disquietingly, memories of the Pied Piper story drifted into his head. Irresistible music lured the rats away. Then it lured away the children.
The rats gave no answer, but the room vanished.
4
Ty hit a patch of dust on the edge of the road, and it rose up around him. He whooped with joy and pedaled twice as hard, streaking ahead to leave his friends immersed in the cloud.
Errol caught up with him and reached across to punch him on the arm, as if he’d raised the dust on purpose. It was a light blow, not enough to be worth retribution; Ty just grinned at him.
It was a school day, but they’d all sneaked off together before lessons began. They couldn’t do anything in town—there were too many people who’d know them—but then Dan had suggested heading for the water tower. His father had some spray paint in the shed. They’d climb the tower and tag it.
There was a barbed-wire fence around the base of the tower, but Dan had already been out here on the weekend and started a tunnel, which didn’t take them long to complete. When they were through, Ty looked up and felt his head swimming. Carlos said, “We should have brought a rope.”
“We’ll be okay.”
Chris said, “I’ll go first.”
“Why?” Dan demanded.
Chris took his fancy new phone from his pocket and waved it at them. “Best camera angle. I don’t want to be looking up your ass.”
Carlos said, “Just promise you won’t put it on the Web. If my parents see this, I’m screwed.”
Chris laughed. “Mine, too. I’m not that stupid.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t be on camera if you’re holding the thing.”
Chris started up the ladder. Dan went next, with one paint can in the back pocket of his jeans. Ty followed, then Errol and Carlos.
The air had been still down on the ground, but as they went higher a breeze came out of nowhere, cooling the sweat on Ty’s back. The ladder started shuddering; he could see where it was bolted securely to the concrete of the tower, but in between it could still flex alarmingly. He’d treat it like a fairground ride, he decided: a little scary, but probably safe.
When Chris reached the top, Dan let go of the ladder with one hand, took the paint can, and reached out sideways into the expanse of white concrete. He quickly shaped a blue background, a distorted diamond, and then called down to Errol, who was carrying the red.
When Ty had passed the can up, he looked away, out across the expanse of brown dust. He could see the town in the distance. He glanced up and saw Chris leaning forward, gripping the ladder with one hand behind his back while he aimed the phone down at them.
Ty shouted up at him, “Hey, Scorsese! Make me famous!”
Dan spent five minutes adding finicky details in silver. Ty didn’t mind; it was good just being here. He didn’t need to mark the tower himself; whenever he saw Dan’s tag, he’d remember this feeling.
They clambered down, then sat at the base of the tower and passed the phone around, checking out Chris’s movie.
5
Lincoln had three rest days before he was called again, this time for four days in succession. He fought hard to remember all the scenes he was sleepwalking through, but even with his grandmother adding her accounts of the “playacting” she’d witnessed, he found it hard to hold on to the details.
Sometimes he hung out with the other actors, shooting pool in the motel’s game room, but there seemed to be an unspoken taboo against discussing their roles. Lincoln doubted that the Steveware would punish them even if they managed to overcome the restraint, but it was clear that it didn’t want them to piece too much together. It had even gone to the trouble of changing Steve’s name (as Lincoln and the other actors heard it, though presumably not Steve himself), as if the anger they felt toward the man in their ordinary lives might have penetrated into their roles. Lincoln couldn’t even remember his own mother’s face when he was Ty; the farm, the Crash, the whole history of the last thirty years, was gone from his thoughts entirely.
In any case, he had no wish to spoil the charade. Whatever the Steveware thought it was doing, Lincoln hoped it would believe it was working perfectly, all the way from Steve’s small-town childhood to whatever age it needed to reach before it could write this creation into flesh and blood, congratulate itself on a job well done, and then finally, mercifully, dissolve into rat piss and let the world move on.
A fortnight after they’d arrived, without warning, Lincoln was no longer needed. He knew it when he woke, and after breakfast the woman at reception asked him, politely, to pack his bags and hand back the keys. Lincoln didn’t understand, but maybe Ty’s family had moved out of Steve’s hometown, and the friends hadn’t stayed in touch. Lincoln had played his part; now he was free.
When they returned to the lobby with their suitcases, Dana spotted them and asked Lincoln if he was willing to be debriefed. He turned to his grandmother. “Are you worried about the traffic?” He’d already phoned his father and told him they’d be back by dinnertime.
She said, “You should do this. I’ll wait in the truck.”
They sat at a table in the lobby. Dana asked his permission to record his words, and he told her everything he could remember.
When Lincoln had finished, he said, “You’re the Stevologist. You think they’ll get there in the end?”
Dana gestured at her phone to stop recording. “One estimate,” she said, “is that the Stevelets now comprise a hundred thousand times the computational resources of all the brains of all the human beings who’ve ever lived.”
Lincoln laughed. “And they still need stage props and extras, to do a little VR?”
“They’ve studied the anatomy of ten million human brains, but I think they know that they still don’t fully understand consciousness. They bring in real people for the bit parts, so they can concentrate on the star. If you gave them a particular human brain, I’m sure they could faithfully copy it into software, but anything more complicated starts to get murky. How do they know their Steve is conscious, when they’re not conscious themselves? He never gave them a reverse Turing test, a checklist they could apply. All they have is the judgment of people like you.”
Lincoln felt a surge of hope. “He seemed real enough to me.” His memories were blurred—and he wasn’t even absolutely certain which of Ty’s four friends was Steve—but none of them had struck him as less than human.
Dana said, “They have his genome. They have movies, they have blogs, they have e-mails: from Steve and a lot of people who knew him. They have a thousand fragments of his life. Like the borders of a giant jigsaw puzzle.”
“So that’s good, right? A lot of data is good?”
Dana hesitated. “The scenes you described have been played out thousands of times before. They’re trying to tweak their Steve to write the right e-mails, pull the right faces for the camera—by himself, without following a script like the extras. A lot of data sets the bar very high.”
As Lincoln walked out to the parking lot, he thought about the laughing, carefree boy he’d called Chris. Living for a few days, writing an e-mail—then memory-wiped, re-set, started again. Climbing a water tower, making a movie of his friends, but later turning the camera on himself, saying one wrong word—and wiped again.
A thousand times. A million times. The Steveware was infinitely patient, and infinitely stupid. Each time it failed, it would change the actors, shuffle a few variables, and run the experiment over again. The possibilities were endless, but it would keep on trying until the sun burned out.
Lincoln was tired. He climbed into the truck beside his grandmother, and they headed for home.
Tangled Up
From Urban Fantasies, edited by David King and Russell Blackford; Ebony Books, Melbourne, 1985.
* * * * *
Soft lights and air-conditioning in the editing room. All the light panels on all the benches are switched on. No shadows. I’m running a shot back and forth, back and forth, trying to remember when it was taken, trying to remember taking it, trying to remember. I have no idea what time it is outside. In here there is no time at all, except for the time you find by counting up frames. The little wheels on the frame counter spin with a tiny whirring noise, from 000259 down to 000000 and then back up again, as I wind the shot back and forth. I think vaguely about the new electronic frame counters with no sprockets, with tiny lasers and microprocessors to count the perforations as they stream on by. My shooting records are garbled, jumbled, meaningless to me; I don’t even recognise the handwriting. Five hundred spools sit in a box near by, and I suppose they belong to me. It’s very hard to tell.
A long time ago there was a conversation, unless I dreamed it or saw it in a film. Ed and I decide that our next films will refer to each other, as a means of extending their effects on the audience. Both are to be fragmented, disjointed, surrealistic, disorienting. In my film, the carload of people who are followed about by the camera will pass by a drive-in, where Ed’s film will be glimpsed: they will circle the drive-in, trying to decide whether to go in or not; then they will drive away. In Ed’s film, the housewife who eats her kitchen will wander about the house, the television running all the time; and she will flick her remote control unit as she wanders. My film will briefly appear on her television, but she will be in the bedroom at the time, vacuuming the mirror, and she will flick to another station before she wanders into the lounge room. This is simple enough. What will make it all more difficult is the portions of each other’s films we will show: for as the car circles the drive-in the housewife will be in the bedroom; and her television will show the car circling the drive-in, which will be showing her television showing the drive-in, and so on.
“And so on,” I said to Ed.
“And so on,” he agreed.
This may sound impossible, but it’s not; for the actual regression would be only finite, taken to perhaps ten or twenty stages until the images are so minute as to be invisible. Ed and I decided to keep the television screen and the drive-in screen to three-quarters of the frame size, so that the twentieth image would be three-quarters to the twentieth power (about one three-hundredth) of the frame size; and three-quarters of that twentieth image would be empty blackness—but nobody would notice. We decided that twenty images would be the most we could afford.
When I think of this conversation I remember the blueness of the sky and the smell of the grass, so it must have taken place sometime, somewhere. I think of another conversation, with someone else (I’m not sure who) trying to justify this idea (I’m not sure how) and arguing angrily (I’m not sure why). I can’t remember any of the words. I can only remember some of the words from the conversation with Ed.
I remember sitting in the shade on the river bank with the distant noise of the actors as they ate (distant because my eyes were closed) their evening meal before the night’s shooting. Perhaps I don’t remember the river bank from the same night as the drive-in; for there were many evenings in the shade, everything in shade with the sun behind the trees. I remember opening my eyes and squinting against the sun reflected off a distant glassy skyscraper, and moving my head up and down, watching the patch of orange fire climb up and down the building, too lazy to shift myself to the left or right and get rid of the glare entirely.
Round and round the drive-in we went, trying to get shots right. The film really showing there was soft-focus hard-core porn, and the cast were easily distracted. We could have done it all much later, when the drive-in was closed; but having an image on the screen would make it easier to identify the image’s position during the matting process. Strictly we were breaching copyright just by filming the porn film, but it would be blotted out and replaced by Ed’s television shot (appropriately deformed to match the varying obliqueness of the screen); so nobody would ever know.
I remember coming around from behind the screen and seeing Ed’s television on the screen; and on it I saw the drive-in screen, with the car’s rear vision mirror in the foreground, one of the actors glimpsed in the mirror smiling, as it said in the script, and Ed’s television on the screen, and so on.
“And so on,” I said to Ed.
“And so on,” he agreed.
I remember looking from the screen down to the rear vision mirror and seeing the actor smiling, and thinking: I can see the mirror too. I can see Robert smiling. I must be in the car. Thinking about it now, I realise that perhaps I was not in the car. Perhaps I was in my screening room at home; and I walked around the screen there; and came across the projected image of the shot, months later, after all the special printing operations had been done; and I looked one image too deep, saw the filmed drive-in screen (thinking it was the real one), and looked down and saw the filmed rear vision mirror (thinking it was there to touch). It’s very hard to tell.
I feel sure that at one time I knew exactly what had happened, and why, but that doesn’t help me now; for I remember only that I knew, not what I knew.
I remember yelling at someone, a tall girl in black jeans, who kept giggling halfway through a shot, take after take.
“Why are you in this film?” I’d ask her.
“Well, I saw it,” she’d giggle.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I saw it.”
“Saw the ad?”
“I saw a film on the plane called Burning Desire and while she did it in the wardrobe they panned around the room and it was on her TV, and I was in it.” She said that with great pride, as if she had already achieved some great success. “I was in it.”
“Are you going to stop giggling?”
“Well I’ll have to eventually, won’t I? I didn’t when I saw it.”
“Take thirty-five.”
I remember standing in the darkness, standing by the car, looking over across empty asphalt and seeing a camera set up, one man peering through the finder and panning slowly, and I could feel my face slip on to the frame on one side, and slip off on the other side. I walked angrily up to him and grabbed him by the back of his shirt, pulled him away from the camera.
