Greg Egan - Quarantine

When I finally shut up, the woman says, 'Okay' — but not to me. My guard takes the gun away from my head, but doesn't move me from the chair, and I suddenly realize what's about to happen. I suffer a brief moment of pure frustration — unconscious most of the time, blindfolded the rest; how am I ever going to find out anything? — before P3smothers this unproductive sentiment. The needle goes into the vein, the drug flows into my bloodstream. I don't fight it; there's no point.

I wake on a bed, not even handcuffed. I glance around; I'm in a small, almost empty flat. A man I haven't seen before is sitting on a chair in a corner of the room, watching me expressionlessly, resting a gun on his knee. I can hear street sounds from below, maybe fifteen or twenty storeys down. It's seven forty-seven, January 6th.

I rise, and head for the bathroom; the guard makes no move to stop me. There's a toilet, a shower, a sink; a non-opening window about thirty centimetres square, the pane dimpled so that it passes no clear image; a ventilation grille in the ceiling, half the size of the window. I urinate, then wash my hands and face. With the water still running, I quickly search the room, but there's nothing that could be remotely useful as a weapon.

The rest of the flat is a single room, with a kitchen in one corner; a small refrigerator, unplugged, with the door ajar; a microwave and hotplates built into the counter top. There's a window above the sink, covered by closed Venetian blinds. I start towards this area, but the guard says, 'There's nothing there you need. Breakfast is on its way.' I nod and turn back. I pace beside the bed, stretching cramped muscles.

Shortly afterwards, another man brings in a carton packed with assorted fast food, and coffee. I eat sitting on the bed. The guard doesn't join in, and ignores my attempts at conversation. His eyes move only to follow me, so at times he appears almost as if he's in a kind of stupor, but I know precisely how alert he really is; I've spent enough twelve-hour stake-outs in a similar condition. When a mod grants you vigilance, you're literally incapable of anything less; boredom, distraction and impatience have simply become inaccessible modes of thought. Unprimed, I may joke about zombies — but primed, I have no doubt that this is where the real strength of neurotechnology lies: not in the creation of exotic new mental states, but in the conscious, deliberate restriction of possibilities, in focusing, and empowering, the act of choice.

I half expect to be drugged yet again, as soon as I've finished eating, but this doesn't happen. I don't push my luck; I lie on the bed and gaze at the ceiling like a model prisoner, obviating any need for restraint. I have no intention of causing my captors the slightest difficulty, until the odds are a great deal better that it would do me some good.

And if no such opportunity arises?

What happens if I can't escape?

Killing me would be the simplest choice in most respects. But what are the alternatives? What could my interrogator's promise of leniency entail — assuming, for the sake of speculation, that it meant anything at all?

A memory wipe, perhaps. A crude one. If BDI aren't willing to spend a fortune mapping my brain to extract information for their own benefit, they're hardly going to do so out of concern for the integrity of my personality. Natural human memory didn't evolve with any reason to be easily reversible; eliminating a given piece of knowledge, while leaving everything else intact, is a massive computational task. The only way to be cheap and thorough is to cut a wide swath.

Dead, brain-wiped, or free. In order of decreasing probability. So how do I change the odds? How can I hope to discover — or invent — a reason for my captors to keep me alive and intact, when I still don't know who they are and what they're doing? And how can I hope to find that out, when I have no means of gathering data?

I still have Cufct's snapshots in my head. I go through them again, one by one, on the chance that I might have missed something crucial. All the shots of workstation screens are packed with information — but DNA sequences, protein models and neural maps don't mean a lot to me. I can 'read' them — in the sense that a child can spell out the individual letters of even the most difficult piece of text — but I don't stand a chance of recognizing any of the structures portrayed, let alone deducing anything about their function or context.

I'm fed again. The guard is changed. I shuffle the facts for hours, but nothing new crystallizes out of the contradictions. Escape remains as unlikely as ever. Rushing the guard would be suicide; crashing through the window and falling to the street would be marginally less likely to kill me — except that I'd probably be shot half-way across the room.

As the possibilities thin out, P3seems to be dragging me further and further into a state of detachment. It wants me to gather more data — but it knows that I can't. It wants me to concentrate on plausible strategies for survival — but acknowledges that there are none. What's it going to do when all of its goals have been ruled out, when all of its elaborate optimization criteria have been rendered meaningless? Shut down? Bow out? Leave me to make my own choice between equally futile options?

Towards evening, the man who led me to the interrogation yesterday comes into the room. He tosses a pair of handcuffs onto the bed.

'Put them on. Behind your back.'

What now? More questioning? I stand, pick up the cuffs. The other guard aims his weapon at my forehead, and flicks it onto auto.

'Where are you taking me?'

Nobody replies. I hesitate, then snap on the cuffs. The first man approaches me, producing a hypodermic capsule. It all seems almost familiar by now.

Yeah. The same old routine. Nothing to fear. What better way to do it? The capsule is the same pale blue as before, but his grip conceals the markings.

'Can't you tell me where I'm going?'

He ignores me, unsheathes the capsule. He looks right at me — but his mods have pared him down until there's nothing left for his eyes to betray.

'I just — '

He places two fingers on my neck and stretches the skin. I say evenly, 'I want to speak to your boss again. There's something I didn't tell her. Something important I have to explain.'

No reaction. The gun is still on auto; if I struggle, I'm dead for sure. The needle goes in. There's nothing to do but wait. I open my eyes and blink at the bright ceiling, then look around. I haven't even been moved. I am deprimed, though.

It's 16:03, January 7th. The guard's chair, still in place, is empty.

I lie perfectly still for a while, feeling numb and disoriented. When I try to get to my feet, I find that I'm weaker than I realized; I sit on the edge of the bed, with my head on my knees, trying to clear my thoughts.

A wave of pure, suffocating claustrophobia passes through me. I would have died like a good little robot. That's the worst of it: the way I calmly accepted the loss of hope, the narrowing of the possibilities, every step of the way. I would have dug my own fucking grave, if they'd asked me.

But they didn't. So why am I still alive? What was I sedated for? If my memory has been tampered with, they've done a seamless job — an unlikely feat in a day. (Then again, maybe they've spent a year on it, and everything that persuades me otherwise is a fabrication.)

I look up as the door opens. The guard who injected me yesterday comes in; he's armed, but his weapon is holstered, as if he knows what state I'm in. Maybe they've dissolved my priming mods. I query P3;it still exists. I stop short of invoking it.