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

I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a mental hiatus to
pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when I'd woken in someone
else's Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my torso and legs,
then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex shop-window dummy
- but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no great shock. I sat
up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little numb and hollow, but
my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt located between my
eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern transplant, my
jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change, avoiding the need
for months of physiotherapy.
I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one bed, one table, one
chair, one clock, one HV set. On the wall, a framed reproduction of an Escher
lithograph: "Bond of Union," a portrait of the artist and, presumably, his wife,
faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind, joined into a single, linked
band. I traced the outer surface from start to finish, and was disappointed to
find that it lacked the M├╢bius twist I was expecting.
No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside the bed, a
full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous form. It
suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry games, he
might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified the HV set
accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange right for left.
What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window between the rooms.
I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection looked appropriately
embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however unlikely it was.
Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could reveal the difference.
No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucault's, would twist the same
way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to the mirror and thumped
it. It didn't seem to yield at all, but then, either a brick wall, or an equal
and opposite thump from behind, could have been the explanation.
I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anything - for all I knew,
the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was irrelevant.
The room was irrelevant. The point was . . .
I sat on the bed. I recalled someone - Michael, probably - wondering if I'd
panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If I'd woken
in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was from my
past(s), I'd no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I had two
long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect of being
changed back into Sian or Michael didn't bother me at all; the wishes of both to
regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the desire for
personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of their
re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories would not
be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the other of them
would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common denominator than any kind
of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than the sum of my parts. My
purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the strangeness for Sian, and
to answer a question for Michael, and when the time came I'd be happy to
bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and valued.
So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way
as Sian? So far as I could tell, I'd undergone no fundamental change - but even
as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to