"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

which time you'll be disembodied. Over the first ten minutes, you'll gain equal
access to each other's memories. Over the second ten minutes, you'll both be
moved, gradually, towards the compromise personality.
"Once that's done, your Ndoli Devices will be identical - in the sense that
both will have all the same neural connections with all the same weighting
factors - but they'll almost certainly be in different states. I'll have to
black you out, to correct that. Then you'll wake - "
Who'll wake?
" - in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones can't be made sufficiently
alike.
"You'll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched rooms. Rather like
hotel suites, really. You'll have HV to keep you amused if you need it - without
the videophone module, of course. You might think you'd both get an engaged
signal, if you tried to call the same number simultaneously - but in fact, in
such cases the switching equipment arbitrarily lets one call through, which
would make your environments different."
Sian asked, "Why can't we phone each other? Or better still, meet each other?
If we're exactly the same, we'd say the same things, do the same things - we'd
be one more identical part of each other's environment."
Bentley pursed his lips and shook his head. "Perhaps I'll allow something of
the kind in a future experiment, but for now I believe it would be too . . .
potentially traumatic."
Sian gave me a sideways glance, which meant: This man is a killjoy.
"The end will be like the beginning, in reverse. First, your personalities will
be restored. Then, you'll lose access to each other's memories. Of course, your
memories of the experience itself will be left untouched. Untouched by me, that



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is; I can't predict how your separate personalities, once restored, will act -
filtering, suppressing, reinterpreting those memories. Within minutes, you may
end up with very different ideas about what you've been through. All I can
guarantee is this: For the eight hours in question, the two of you will be
identical."
We talked it over. Sian was enthusiastic, as always. She didn't much care what
it would be like; all that really mattered to her was collecting one more novel
experience.
"Whatever happens, we'll be ourselves again at the end of it," she said.
"What's there to be afraid of? You know the old Ndoli joke."
"What old Ndoli joke?"
"Anything's bearable - so long as it's finite."
I couldn't decide how I felt. The sharing of memories notwithstanding, we'd
both end up knowing, not each other, but merely a transient, artificial third
person. Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through
exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view - even if the
experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point
of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.