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

It was a compromise - but I could think of no realistic way in which it could
have been improved.
I called Bentley, and made a reservation.
In perfect sensory deprivation, my thoughts seemed to dissipate into the
blackness around me before they were even half-formed. This isolation didn't
last long, though; as our short-term memories merged, we achieved a kind of
telepathy: One of us would think a message, and the other would "remember"
thinking it, and reply in the same way.
- I really can't wait to uncover all your grubby little secrets.
- I think you're going to be disappointed. Anything I haven't already told you,
I've probably repressed.
- Ah, but repressed is not erased. Who knows what will turn up?
- We'll know, soon enough.
I tried to think of all the minor sins I must have committed over the years,
all the shameful, selfish, unworthy thoughts, but nothing came into my head but
a vague white noise of guilt. I tried again, and achieved, of all things, an
image of Sian as a child. A young boy slipping his hand between her legs, then
squealing with fright and pulling away. But she'd described that incident to me,
long ago. Was it her memory, or my reconstruction?
- My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know, half the time
when I've told you something that happened before we met, the memory of the
telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself. Almost replacing
it.
- It's the same for me.
- Then in a way, our memories have already been moving towards a kind of
symmetry, for years. We both remember what was said, as if we'd both heard it
from someone else.
Agreement. Silence. A moment of confusion. Then:
- This neat division of "memory" and "personality" Bentley uses; is it really
so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you can't talk about "data" and
"program" in any absolute sense.
- Not in general, no. His classification must be arbitrary, to some extent. But
who cares?
- It matters. If he restores "personality," but allows "memories" to persist, a
misclassification could leave us . . .
- What?
- It depends, doesn't it? At one extreme, so thoroughly "restored," so
completely unaffected, that the whole experience might as well not have
happened. And at the other extreme . . .
- Permanently . . .
- . . . closer.
- Isn't that the point?
- I don't know anymore.


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Silence. Hesitation.
Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my turn to reply.