Greg Egan - Quarantine

The ASR tower has its own private restaurant, on the eighteenth floor. Ms Chung informs me, gleefully, that her contract includes unlimited free food. She slips her ID card into a slot in the table, and illustrated menus appear, embedded in the table's surface. She orders quickly, then glances up at me, puzzled.

'Aren't you going to eat?'

'Not while I'm on duty.'

She laughs, disbelieving. 'You're going to fast for twelve hours? Don't be ridiculous. Lee Hing-cheung ate on duty. Why shouldn't you?'

I shrug. 'I expect we have different mods. The mod that controls my metabolism is designed to cope with short periods of fasting — in fact, it does a better job keeping my blood sugar at the optimal level if I don't complicate things by eating.'

'What do you mean, "complicate things"?'

'After a meal, there's usually an insulin overshoot — you know, that slightly drowsy feeling that comes with satiety.

That can be controlled, to some degree, but it's simpler if I rely on steady glycogen conversion.'

She shakes her head, half amused, half disapproving, and looks around the crowded restaurant. Steam rises from every table, drawn up in neat columns by the silent tug of the ceiling ducts. 'But… isn't the smell of all this enough to make you ravenous?'

'The connection is decoupled.'

'You mean you have no sense of smell?'

'No, I mean it has no effect on my appetite. All the usual sensory and biochemical cues are disabled. I can't feel hungry; it's impossible.'

'Ah.' A robot cart arrives and deftly unloads her first course. She takes a mouthful of what I think is squid, and chews it rapidly. 'Isn't that potentially dangerous?'

'Not really. If my glycogen reserves dropped below a certain level, I'd be informed — with a simple, factual message from the relevant mod, which it would then be up to me to act on. As opposed to persistent hunger pangs, which might distract me from something more pressing.'

She nods. 'So you've forced your body to stop treating you like a child. No more crude punishments and rewards to encourage correct behaviour; animals might need that shit to survive, but we humans are smart enough to set our own priorities.' She nods again, begrudgingly. 'I can see the attraction in that. But where do you draw the line?'

'What line?'

'The line between "you" and "your body" … between the drives you acknowledge as "your own", and the ones you treat as some kind of imposition. Sure, why be inconvenienced by hunger? But then, why be distracted by sex? Or why give in to the urge to have children? Why let yourself be affected by grief? Or guilt? Or compassion? Or logic? If you're going to set your own priorities, there has to be someone left to have priorities.' She looks at me pointedly, as if she half expects me to leap onto the table and publicly renounce appetite suppression forever, now that I've been warned of the horrors to which it might lead. I don't have the heart to tell her that she's too late, on every count.

I say, 'Everything you do changes who you are. Eating changes who you are. Not eating changes who you are. Spraying your throat with analgesics changes who you are. What's the difference between using a mod to switch off hunger, and using a drug to switch off pain? It's just the same.'

She shakes her head. 'You can trivialize anything that way; everything's "just the same as" something less extreme. But neural mods are not "just the same as" analgesics. There are mods that change people's values — '

'And they never changed before?'

'Slowly. For good reasons.'

'Or bad reasons. Or none at all. What do you think: the average person sits down one day and constructs some kind of meticulously rational moral philosophy — which they modify appropriately, if and when they discover its flaws? That's pure fantasy. Most people are just pushed around by the things they live through, shaped by influences they can't control. Why shouldn't they alter themselves — if it's what they want, if it makes them happy?'

'But who's happy? Not the person who used the mod; they no longer exist.'

'That's pretty old-fashioned. Change equals suicide.'

'Well, maybe it does.' She laughs suddenly. 'I suppose I must sound like a total hypocrite. If a little moral nanosurgery creates a whole new person, then my one-and-only mod probably makes me a member of a whole new species — '

I cut her off quickly. 'You mustn't discuss that here.'

She frowns. 'Why not? This is a company restaurant. Everyone here works for ASR.'

'Yes — but there are twenty-three separate projects going on in this building. Different staff have clearance for different projects. You have to keep that in mind.'

'All I said — '

'I know what you said. I'm sorry. But it's part of my job to make sure that security is maintained.'

She seems angry for a moment, then says, 'I suppose I should take comfort in that.'

'Why?'

'Because I'd rather believe that your job is to keep me from opening my mouth in the wrong place, than believe that I'm really in need of a bodyguard.'

The apartment is deep in the core of the building, so it has no true windows, but the real-time holograms in their place have such fine resolution and such wide angles of view that the difference is academic — except for the security advantages. I search each room quickly; it doesn't take long to be sure that there are no human intruders, and it's not worth looking for anything more subtle. A thorough sweep for microrobots would last a week, and cost several hundred thousand dollars. As for nanomachines and viruses, forget it.

I bid Ms Chung good night, and sit in the anteroom, watching the entrance. There's no sound from within — I think she's reading — and if anything's happening in the adjoining apartments, it's lost to the insulation. Even the airconditioning is inaudible. In fact, all I can hear is the faint mixture of insect noises — probably synthetic — that's piped throughout the building for some fashionable pseudo-psychological reason; imitation Arnhem Land eco-ambience to keep us all attuned with Nature. Random at one level, but with enough order to keep it from becoming infuriating; in any case, P3 has no problem blocking it out. I slip into stake-out mode. Hours pass, uneventfully. Lee arrives to take my place.

Chung Po-kwai's chant invades my dreams. I instruct Boss to filter it out, but it keeps sneaking in, disguised; a random telegraphy of dots and dashes in every sound, every rhythm, every motion … from myself as a boy, bouncing a basketball, swapping hands: right, left, right, right, left, right, left, right, left, left, left… to the mining robot in the warehouse, lurching in and out of its container — a subject itself supposedly forbidden.

Flaws in P3, flaws in Boss … what have I got, a brain tumour? I run the integrity checks in every mod in my skull, and all declare themselves perfectly intact.

The experiment continues, day after day, with no apparent progress. Po-kwai sounds as patient as ever as she calls out the data, but outside Room 619 her usual cheerfulness starts to take on a defensive edge, and I soon learn not to antagonize her by talking about her results. I can't really tell if Leung, Lui and Tse are disappointed; they argue amongst themselves, mainly in English, but use jargon that I find incomprehensible. There's no question of asking them about the project; to them, I'm basically just another component of the building's security system, no more to be kept apprised of the state of the experiment than a camera on the ceiling, or a scanner in the corridor. And rightly so; that's what my role should be.

Coming on duty one evening, though, I find myself alone with Dr Lui in the elevator. He nods at me and says, awkwardly, 'So, how are you finding the work, Nick?'