Reasons To Be Cheerful
Greg Egan
A DF Books NERDs Release
Copyright ©1999 by Greg EganFirst published in Interzone #118, April 1997
Thanks to Caroline Oakley, Anthony Cheetham, John Douglas, Peter Robinson, Kate Messenger, PhilipPatterson, Tony Gardner, Russ Galen, David Pringle, Lee Montgomerie, Gardner Dozois, Sheila
Williams, and Bill Congreve.
1
In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. Itnever occurred to me to ask why. Though school included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing
well enough academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At home, I was
free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and particle physics, quaternions and galactic
evolution, and to write my own Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And
though I was a skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport left me
comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own terms. Whenever I
ran—and I ran everywhere—it felt good.
I had food, shelter, safety, loving parents, encouragement, stimulation. Why shouldn't I have been happy?
And though I can't have entirely forgotten how oppressive and monotonous classwork and schoolyard
politics could be, or how easily my usual bouts of enthusiasm were derailed by the most trivial problems,
when things were actually going well for me I wasn't in the habit of counting down the days until it all
turned sour. Happiness always brought with it the belief that it would last, and though I must have seen
this optimistic forecast disproved a thousand times before, I wasn't old and cynical enough to be
surprised when it finally showed signs of coming true.
When I started vomiting repeatedly, Dr Ash, our GP, gave me a course of antibiotics and a week off
school. I doubt it was a great shock to my parents when this unscheduled holiday seemed to cheer me up
rather more than any mere bacterium could bring me down, and if they were puzzled that I didn't evenbother feigning misery, it would have been redundant for me to moan constantly about my achingstomach when I was throwing up authentically three or four times a day.
The antibiotics made no difference. I began losing my balance, stumbling when I walked. Back in Dr
Ash's surgery, I squinted at the eye chart. She sent me to a neurologist at Westmead Hospital, whoordered an immediate MRI scan. Later the same day, I was admitted as an in-patient. My parents
learned the diagnosis straight away, but it took me three more days to make them spit out the wholetruth.
I had a tumor, a medulloblastoma, blocking one of the fluid-filled ventricles in my brain, raising thepressure in my skull. Medulloblastomas were potentially fatal, though with surgery followed by aggressive
radiation treatment and chemotherapy, two out of three patients diagnosed at this stage lived five more
years.

I pictured myself on a railway bridge riddled with rotten sleepers, with no choice but to keep moving,trusting my weight to each suspect plank in turn. I understood the danger ahead, very clearly ... and yet I
felt no real panic, no real fear. The closest thing to terror I could summon up was an almost exhilaratingrush of vertigo, as if I was facing nothing more than an audaciously harrowing fairground ride.
There was a reason for this.
The pressure in my skull explained most of my symptoms, but tests on my cerebrospinal fluid had also
revealed a greatly elevated level of a substance called Leu-enkephalin—an endorphin, a neuropeptide
which bound to some of the same receptors as opiates like morphine and heroin. Somewhere along theroad to malignancy, the same mutant transcription factor that had switched on the genes enabling thetumor cells to divide unchecked had apparently also switched on the genes needed to produce
Leu-enkephalin.
This was a freakish accident, not a routine side-effect. I didn't know much about endorphins then, but myparents repeated what the neurologist had told them, and later I looked it all up. Leu-enkephalin wasn't
an analgesic, to be secreted in emergencies when pain threatened survival, and it had no stupefying
narcotic effects to immobilize a creature while injuries healed. Rather, it was the primary means ofsignaling happiness, released whenever behavior or circumstances warranted pleasure. Countless otherbrain activities modulated that simple message, creating an almost limitless palette of positive emotions,and the binding of Leu-enkephalin to its target neurons was just the first link in a long chain of events
mediated by other neurotransmitters. But for all these subtleties, I could attest to one simple,
unambiguous fact: Leu-enkephalin made you feel good.
My parents broke down as they told me the news, and I was the one who comforted them, beaming
placidly like a beatific little child martyr from some tear-jerking oncological mini-series. It wasn't a matterof hidden reserves of strength or maturity; I was physically incapable of feeling bad about my fate. And
because the effects of the Leu-enkephalin were so specific, I could gaze unflinchingly at the truth in a waythat would not have been possible if I'd been doped up to the eyeballs with crude pharmaceutical
opiates. I was clear-headed but emotionally indomitable, positively radiant with courage.
****
I had a ventricular shunt installed, a slender tube inserted deep into my skull to relieve the pressure,pending the more invasive and risky procedure of removing the primary tumor; that operation wasscheduled for the end of the week. Dr Maitland, the oncologist, had explained in detail how my treatment
would proceed, and warned me of the danger and discomfort I faced in the months ahead. Now I was
strapped in for the ride and ready to go.
Once the shock wore off, though, my un-blissed-out parents decided that they had no intention of sittingback and accepting mere two-to-one odds that I'd make it to adulthood. They phoned around Sydney,then further afield, hunting for second opinions.
My mother found a private hospital on the Gold Coast—the only Australian franchise of the
Nevada-based “Health Palace” chain—where the oncology unit was offering a new treatment for
medulloblastomas. A genetically engineered herpes virus introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid would
infect only the replicating tumor cells, and then a powerful cytotoxic drug, activated only by the virus,
would kill the infected cells. The treatment had an 80 percent five-year survival rate, without the risks ofsurgery. I looked up the cost myself, in the hospital's web brochure. They were offering a package deal:
three months’ meals and accommodation, all pathology and radiology services, and all pharmaceuticals,
for sixty thousand dollars.

My father was an electrician, working on building sites. My mother was a sales assistant in a department
store. I was their only child, so we were far from poverty-stricken, but they must have taken out asecond mortgage to raise the fee, saddling themselves with a further fifteen or twenty years’ debt. The
two survival rates were not that different, and I heard Dr Maitland warn them that the figures couldn't
really be compared, because the viral treatment was so new. They would have been perfectly justified intaking her advice and sticking to the traditional regime.
Maybe my enkephalin sainthood spurred them on somehow. Maybe they wouldn't have made such agreat sacrifice if I'd been my usual sullen and difficult self, or even if I'd been nakedly terrified rather thanpreternaturally brave. I'll never know for sure—and either way, it wouldn't make me think any less ofthem. But just because the molecule wasn't saturating their skulls, that's no reason to expect them to havebeen immune to its influence.
On the flight north, I held my father's hand all the way. We'd always been a little distant, a little mutuallydisappointed in each other. I knew he would have preferred a tougher, more athletic, more extrovertedson, while to me he'd always seemed lazily conformist, with a world view built on unexamined platitudes
and slogans. But on that trip, with barely a word exchanged, I could feel his disappointment beingtransmuted into a kind of fierce, protective, defiant love, and I grew ashamed of my own lack of respectfor him. I let the Leu-enkephalin convince me that, once this was over, everything between us wouldchange for the better.
****
From the street, the Gold Coast Health Palace could have passed for one more high-rise beach front
hotel—and even from the inside, it wasn't much different from the hotels I'd seen in video fiction. I had aroom to myself, with a television wider than the bed, complete with network computer and cable modem.
If the aim was to distract me, it worked. After a week of tests, they hooked a drip into my ventricularshunt and infused first the virus, and then three days later, the drug.
The tumor began shrinking almost immediately; they showed me the scans. My parents seemed happy
but dazed, as if they'd never quite trusted a place where millionaire property developers came for scrotaltucks to do much more than relieve them of their money and offer first-class double-talk while I
continued to decline. But the tumor kept on shrinking, and when it hesitated for two days in a row theoncologist swiftly repeated the whole procedure, and then the tendrils and blobs on the MRI screen grewskinnier and fainter even more rapidly than before.
I had every reason to feel unconditional joy now, but when I suffered a growing sense of unease instead I
assumed it was just Leu-enkephalin withdrawal. It was even possible that the tumor had been releasing
such a high dose of the stuff that literally nothing could have made me feel better—if I'd been lofted tothe pinnacle of happiness, there'd be nowhere left to go but down. But in that case, any chink of darkness
in my sunny disposition could only confirm the good news of the scans.
One morning I woke from a nightmare—my first in months—with visions of the tumor as a clawedparasite thrashing around inside my skull. I could still hear the click of carapace on bone, like the rattle ofa scorpion trapped in a jam jar. I was terrified, drenched in sweat ... liberated. My fear soon gave way
to a white-hot rage: the thing had drugged me into compliance, but now I was free to stand up to it, tobellow obscenities inside my head, to exorcize the demon with self-righteous anger.
I did feel slightly cheated by the sense of anticlimax that came from chasing my already-fleeing nemesis
downhill, and I couldn't entirely ignore the fact that imagining my anger to be driving out the cancer was acomplete reversal of true cause and effect—a bit like watching a forklift shift a boulder from my chest,
then pretending to have moved it myself by a mighty act of inhalation. But I made what sense I could ofmy belated emotions, and left it at that.
Six weeks after I was admitted, all my scans were clear, and my blood, CSF and lymphatic fluid were
free of the signature proteins of metastasizing cells. But there was still a risk that a few resistant tumor
cells remained, so they gave me a short, sharp course of entirely different drugs, no longer linked to theherpes infection. I had a testicular biopsy first—under local anesthetic, more embarrassing thanpainful—and a sample of bone marrow taken from my hip, so my potential for sperm production and my
supply of new blood cells could both be restored if the drugs wiped them out at the source. I lost hairand stomach lining, temporarily, and I vomited more often, and far more wretchedly, than when I'd firstbeen diagnosed. But when I started to emit self-pitying noises, one of the nurses steelily explained thatchildren half my age put up with the same treatment for months.
These conventional drugs alone could never have cured me, but as a mopping-up operation they greatly
diminished the chance of a relapse. I discovered a beautiful word: apoptosis—cellular suicide,programmed death—and repeated it to myself, over and over. I ended up almost relishing the nausea andfatigue; the more miserable I felt, the easier it was to imagine the fate of the tumor cells, membranes
popping and shriveling like balloons as the drugs commanded them to take their own lives. Die in pain,
zombie scum! Maybe I'd write a game about it, or even a whole series, culminating in the spectacular
Chemotherapy III: Battle for the Brain. I'd be rich and famous, I could pay back my parents, and life
would be as perfect in reality as the tumor had merely made it seem to be.
****
I was discharged early in December, free of any trace of disease. My parents were wary and jubilant inturn, as if slowly casting off the fear that any premature optimism would be punished. The side-effects ofthe chemotherapy were gone; my hair was growing back, except for a tiny bald patch where the shunt
had been, and I had no trouble keeping down food. There was no point returning to school now, two
weeks before the year's end, so my summer holidays began immediately. The whole class sent me atacky, insincere, teacher-orchestrated get-well email, but my friends visited me at home, only slightly
embarrassed and intimidated, to welcome me back from the brink of death.
So why did I feel so bad? Why did the sight of the clear blue sky through the window when I opened
my eyes every morning—with the freedom to sleep-in as long as I chose, with my father or mother home
all day treating me like royalty, but keeping their distance and letting me sit unnagged at the computer
screen for sixteen hours if I wanted—why did that first glimpse of daylight make me want to bury my facein the pillow, clench my teeth and whisper: “I should have died. I should have died.”?
Nothing gave me the slightest pleasure. Nothing—not my favorite netzines or web sites, not the njari
music I'd once reveled in, not the richest, the sweetest, the saltiest junk food that was mine now for theasking. I couldn't bring myself to read a whole page of any book, I couldn't write ten lines of code. I
couldn't look my real-world friends in the eye, or face the thought of going online.
Everything I did, everything I imagined, was tainted with an overwhelming sense of dread and shame. The
only image I could summon up for comparison was from a documentary about Auschwitz that I'd seen atschool. It had opened with a long tracking shot, a newsreel camera advancing relentlessly toward thegates of the camp, and I'd watched that scene with my spirits sinking, already knowing full well what had
happened inside. I wasn't delusional; I didn't believe for a moment that there was some source of
unspeakable evil lurking behind every bright surface around me. But when I woke and saw the sky, I felt
the kind of sick foreboding that would only have made sense if I'd been staring at the gates of Auschwitz.
Maybe I was afraid that the tumor would grow back, but not that afraid. The swift victory of the virus in
the first round should have counted for much more, and on one level I did think of myself as lucky, andsuitably grateful. But I could no more rejoice in my escape, now, than I could have felt suicidally bad at
the height of my enkephalin bliss.
My parents began to worry, and dragged me along to a psychologist for “recovery counseling.” The
whole idea seemed as tainted as everything else, but I lacked the energy for resistance. Dr Bright and I“explored the possibility” that I was subconsciously choosing to feel miserable because I'd learned toassociate happiness with the risk of death, and I secretly feared that recreating the tumor's main symptom
could resurrect the thing itself. Part of me scorned this facile explanation, but part of me seized on it,
hoping that if I owned up to such subterranean mental gymnastics it would drag the whole process into
the light of day, where its flawed logic would become untenable. But the sadness and disgust thateverything induced in me—birdsong, the pattern of our bathroom tiles, the smell of toast, the shape of myown hands—only increased.
I wondered if the high levels of Leu-enkephalin from the tumor might have caused my neurons to reduce
their population of the corresponding receptors, or if I'd become “Leu-enkephalin-tolerant” the way aheroin addict became opiate-tolerant, through the production of a natural regulatory molecule thatblocked the receptors. When I mentioned these ideas to my father, he insisted that I discuss them with Dr
Bright, who feigned intense interest but did nothing to show that he'd taken me seriously. He kept tellingmy parents that everything I was feeling was a perfectly normal reaction to the trauma I'd been through,and that all I really needed was time, and patience, and understanding.
****
I was bundled off to high school at the start of the new year, but when I did nothing but sit and stare at
my desk for a week, arrangements were made for me to study online. At home, I did manage to work
my way slowly through the curriculum, in the stretches of zombie-like numbness that came between thebouts of sheer, paralyzing unhappiness. In the same periods of relative clarity, I kept thinking about thepossible causes of my affliction. I searched the biomedical literature and found a study of the effects ofhigh doses of Leu-enkephalin in cats, but it seemed to show that any tolerance would be short-lived.
Then, one afternoon in March—staring at an electron micrograph of a tumor cell infected with herpes
virus, when I should have been studying dead explorers—I finally came up with a theory that madesense. The virus needed special proteins to let it dock with the cells it infected, enabling it to stick to themlong enough to use other tools to penetrate the cell membrane. But if it had acquired a copy of the
Leu-enkephalin gene from the tumor's own copious RNA transcripts, it might have gained the ability tocling, not just to replicating tumor cells, but to every neuron in my brain with a Leu-enkephalin receptor.
And then the cytotoxic drug, activated only in infected cells, would have come along and killed them all.
Deprived of any input, the pathways those dead neurons normally stimulated were withering away. Every
part of my brain able to feel pleasure was dying. And though at times I could, still, simply feel nothing,mood was a shifting balance of forces. With nothing to counteract it, the slightest flicker of depression
could now win every tug-of-war, unopposed.
I didn't say a word to my parents; I couldn't bear to tell them that the battle they'd fought to give me thebest possible chance of survival might now be crippling me. I tried to contact the oncologist who'dtreated me on the Gold Coast, but my phone calls floundered in a Muzak-filled moat of automatedscreening, and my email was ignored. I managed to see Dr Ash alone, and she listened politely to mytheory, but she declined to refer me to a neurologist when my only symptoms were psychological: bloodand urine tests showed none of the standard markers for clinical depression.
The windows of clarity grew shorter. I found myself spending more and more of each day in bed, staring

out across the darkened room. My despair was so monotonous, and so utterly disconnected fromanything real, that to some degree it was blunted by its own absurdity: no one I loved had just beenslaughtered, the cancer had almost certainly been defeated, and I could still grasp the difference between
what I was feeling and the unarguable logic of real grief, or real fear.
But I had no way of casting off the gloom and feeling what I wanted to feel. My only freedom came
down to a choice between hunting for reasons to justify my sadness—deluding myself that it was myown, perfectly natural response to some contrived litany of misfortunes—or disowning it as somethingalien, imposed from without, trapping me inside an emotional shell as useless and unresponsive as aparalyzed body.
My father never accused me of weakness and ingratitude; he just silently withdrew from my life. My
mother kept trying to get through to me, to comfort or provoke me, but it reached the point where I
could barely squeeze her hand in reply. I wasn't literally paralyzed or blind, speechless or feeble-minded.
But all the brightly lit worlds I'd once inhabited—physical and virtual, real and imaginary, intellectual andemotional—had become invisible, and impenetrable. Buried in fog. Buried in shit. Buried in ashes.
By the time I was admitted to a neurological ward, the dead regions of my brain were clearly visible on
an MRI scan. But it was unlikely that anything could have halted the process even if it had been
diagnosed sooner.
And it was certain that no one had the power to reach into my skull and restore the machinery ofhappiness.
2
The alarm woke me at ten, but it took me another three hours to summon up the energy to move. I threw
off the sheet and sat on the side of the bed, muttering half-hearted obscenities, trying to get past theinescapable conclusion that I shouldn't have bothered. Whatever pinnacles of achievement I scaled today(managing not only to go shopping, but to buy something other than a frozen meal) and whatevermonumental good fortune befell me (the insurance company depositing my allowance before the rent wasdue) I'd wake up tomorrow feeling exactly the same.
Nothing helps, nothing changes. Four words said it all. But I'd accepted that long ago; there wasnothing left to be disappointed about. And I had no reason to sit here lamenting the bleeding obvious forthe thousandth time.
Right?
Fuck it. Just keep moving.
I swallowed my “morning” medication, the six capsules I'd put out on the bedside table the night before,
then went into the bathroom and urinated a bright yellow stream consisting mainly of the last dose's
metabolites. No antidepressant in the world could send me to Prozac Heaven, but this shit kept my
dopamine and serotonin levels high enough to rescue me from total catatonia—from liquid food, bedpans
and sponge baths.
I splashed water on my face, trying to think of an excuse to leave the flat when the freezer was still half
full. Staying in all day, unwashed and unshaven, did make me feel worse: slimy and lethargic, like somepale parasitic leech. But it could still take a week or more for the pressure of disgust to grow strong
enough to move me.
I stared into the mirror. Lack of appetite more than made up for lack of exercise—I was as immune tocarbohydrate comfort as I was to runner's high—and I could count my ribs beneath the loose skin of mychest. I was 30 years old, and I looked like a wasted old man. I pressed my forehead against the coolglass, obeying some vestigial instinct which suggested that there might be a scrap of pleasure to be
extracted from the sensation. There wasn't.
In the kitchen, I saw the light on the phone: there was a message waiting. I walked back into thebathroom and sat on the floor, trying to convince myself that it didn't have to be bad news. No one had
to be dead. And my parents couldn't break up twice.
I approached the phone and waved the display on. There was a thumbnail image of a severe-looking
middle-aged woman, no one I recognized. The sender's name was Dr Z. Durrani, Department of
Biomedical Engineering, University of Cape Town. The subject line read: “New Techniques in Prosthetic
Reconstructive Neuroplasty.” That made a change; most people skimmed the reports on my clinicalcondition so carelessly that they assumed I was mildly retarded. I felt a refreshing absence of disgust, theclosest I could come to respect, for Dr Durrani. But no amount of diligence on her part could save thecure itself from being a mirage.
Health Palace's no-fault settlement provided me with a living allowance equal to the minimum wage, plus
reimbursement of approved medical costs; I had no astronomical lump sum to spend as I saw fit.
However, any treatment likely to render me financially self-sufficient could be paid for in full, at thediscretion of the insurance company. The value of such a cure to Global Assurance—the total remaining
cost of supporting me until death—was constantly falling, but then so was medical research funding,worldwide. Word of my case had got around.
Most of the treatments I'd been offered so far had involved novel pharmaceuticals. Drugs had freed mefrom institutional care, but expecting them to turn me into a happy little wage-earner was like hoping foran ointment that made amputated limbs grow back. From Global Assurance's perspective, though,shelling out for anything more sophisticated meant gambling with a much greater sum—a prospect that no
doubt sent my case manager scrambling for his actuarial database. There was no point indulging in rashexpenditure decisions when there was still a good chance that I'd suicide in my forties. Cheap fixes werealways worth a try, even if they were long shots, but any proposal radical enough to stand a real chanceof working was guaranteed to fail the risk/cost analysis.
I knelt by the screen with my head in my hands. I could erase the message unseen, sparing myself thefrustration of knowing exactly what I'd be missing out on ... but then, not knowing would be just as bad. I
tapped the PLAY button and looked away; meeting the gaze of even a recorded face gave me a feelingof intense shame. I understood why: the neural circuitry needed to register positive non-verbal messages
was long gone, but the pathways that warned of responses like rejection and hostility had not merely
remained intact, they'd grown skewed and hypersensitive enough to fill the void with a strong negative
signal, whatever the reality.
I listened as carefully as I could while Dr Durrani explained her work with stroke patients.
Tissue-cultured neural grafts were the current standard treatment, but she'd been injecting an elaborately
tailored polymer foam into the damaged region instead. The foam released growth factors that attracted
axons and dendrites from surrounding neurons, and the polymer itself was designed to function as a
network of electrochemical switches. Via microprocessors scattered throughout the foam, the initiallyamorphous network was programmed first to reproduce generically the actions of the lost neurons, thenfine-tuned for compatibility with the individual recipient.
Dr Durrani listed her triumphs: sight restored, speech restored, movement, continence, musical ability.
My own deficit—measured in neurons lost, or synapses, or raw cubic centimeters—lay beyond the rangeof all the chasms she'd bridged to date. But that only made it more of a challenge.

I waited almost stoically for the one small catch, in six or seven figures. The voice from the screen said,“If you can meet your own travel expenses and the cost of a three-week hospital stay, my research grant
will cover the treatment itself.”
I replayed these words a dozen times, trying to find a less favorable interpretation—one task I wasusually good at. When I failed, I steeled myself and emailed Durrani's assistant in Cape Town, asking forclarification.
There was no misunderstanding. For the cost of a year's supply of the drugs that barely kept me
conscious, I was being offered a chance to be whole again for the rest of my life.
****
Organizing a trip to South Africa was completely beyond me, but once Global Assurance recognized theopportunity it was facing, machinery on two continents swung into action on my behalf. All I had to do
was fight down the urge to call everything off. The thought of being hospitalized, of being powerlessagain, was disturbing enough, but contemplating the potential of the neural prosthesis itself was likestaring down the calendar at a secular Judgment Day. On 7 March 2023, I'd either be admitted into an
infinitely larger, infinitely richer, infinitely better world ... or I'd prove to be damaged beyond repair. And
in a way, even the final death of hope was a far less terrifying prospect than the alternative; it was somuch closer to where I was already, so much easier to imagine. The only vision of happiness I could
summon up was myself as a child, running joyfully, dissolving into sunlight—which was all very sweet andevocative, but a little short on practical details. If I'd wanted to be a sunbeam, I could have cut my wrists
anytime. I wanted a job, I wanted a family, I wanted ordinary love and modest ambitions—because I
knew these were the things I'd been denied. But I could no more imagine what it would be like, finally, toattain them, than I could picture daily life in 26-dimensional space.
I didn't sleep at all before the dawn flight out of Sydney. I was escorted to the airport by a psychiatricnurse, but spared the indignity of a minder sitting beside me all the way to Cape Town. I spent mywaking moments on the flight fighting paranoia, resisting the temptation to invent reasons for all thesadness and anxiety coursing through my skull. No one on the plane was staring at me disdainfully.
The Durrani technique was not going to turn out to be a hoax. I succeeded in crushing these“explanatory” delusions ... but as ever, it remained beyond my power to alter my feelings, or even to
draw a clear line between my purely pathological unhappiness, and the perfectly reasonable anxiety thatanyone would feel on the verge of radical brain surgery.
Wouldn't it be bliss, not to have to fight to tell the difference all the time? Forget happiness; even afuture full of abject misery would be a triumph, so long as I knew that it was always for a reason.
****
Luke De Vries, one of Durrani's postdoctoral students, met me at the airport. He looked about 25, andradiated the kind of self-assurance I had to struggle not to misread as contempt. I felt trapped andhelpless immediately; he'd arranged everything, it was like stepping on to a conveyor belt. But I knewthat if I'd been left to do anything for myself the whole process would have ground to a halt.
It was after midnight when we reached the hospital in the suburbs of Cape Town. Crossing the car park,
the insect sounds were wrong, the air smelled indefinably alien, the constellations looked like cleverforgeries. I sagged to my knees as we approached the entrance.
“Hey!” De Vries stopped and helped me up. I was shaking with fear, and then shame too, at the
spectacle I was making of myself.

“This violates my Avoidance Therapy.”“Avoidance Therapy?”“Avoid hospitals at all costs.”
De Vries laughed, though if he wasn't merely humoring me I had no way of telling. Recognizing the factthat you'd elicited genuine laughter was a pleasure, so those pathways were all dead.
He said, “We had to carry the last subject in on a stretcher. She left about as steady on her feet as youare.”“That bad?”“Her artificial hip was playing up. Not our fault.”
We walked up the steps and into the brightly lit foyer.
****
The next morning—Monday, 6 March, the day before the operation—I met most of the surgical team
who'd perform the first, purely mechanical, part of the procedure: scraping clean the useless cavities left
behind by dead neurons, prising open with tiny balloons any voids that had been squeezed shut, and thenpumping the whole oddly-shaped totality full of Durrani's foam. Apart from the existing hole in my skull
from the shunt 18 years before, they'd probably have to drill two more.
A nurse shaved my head and glued five reference markers to the exposed skin, then I spent the afternoon
being scanned. The final, three-dimensional image of all the dead space in my brain looked like aspelunker's map, a sequence of linked caves complete with rock falls and collapsed tunnels.
Durrani herself came to see me that evening. “While you're still under anesthetic,” she explained, “thefoam will harden, and the first connections will be made with the surrounding tissue. Then the
microprocessors will instruct the polymer to form the network we've chosen to serve as a starting point.”
I had to force myself to speak; every question I asked—however politely phrased, however lucid andrelevant—felt as painful and degrading as if I was standing before her naked asking her to wipe shit outof my hair. “How did you find a network to use? Did you scan a volunteer?” Was I going to start my newlife as a clone of Luke De Vries—inheriting his tastes, his ambitions, his emotions?
“No, no. There's an international database of healthy neural structures—20,000 cadavers who diedwithout brain injury. More detailed than tomography; they froze the brains in liquid nitrogen, sliced themup with a diamond-tipped microtome, then stained and electron-micrographed the slices.”
My mind balked at the number of exabytes she was casually invoking; I'd lost touch with computing
completely. “So you'll use some kind of composite from the database? You'll give me a selection of
typical structures, taken from different people?”
Durrani seemed about to let that pass as near enough, but she was clearly a stickler for detail, and she
hadn't insulted my intelligence yet. “Not quite. It will be more like a multiple exposure than a composite.
We've used about 4,000 records from the database—all the males in their twenties or thirties—and
wherever someone has neuron A wired to neuron B, and someone else has neuron A wired to neuron C... you'll have connections to both B and C. So you'll start out with a network that in theory could bepared down to any one of the 4,000 individual versions used to construct it—but in fact, you'll pare it
down to your own unique version instead.”That sounded better than being an emotional clone or a Frankenstein collage; I'd be a roughly hewn
sculpture, with features yet to be refined. But—
“Pare it down how? How will I go from being potentially anyone, to being ... ?” What? My 12-year-old
self, resurrected? Or the 30-year-old I should have been, conjured into existence as a remix of these
4,000 dead strangers? I trailed off; I'd lost what little faith I'd had that I was talking sense.
Durrani seemed to grow slightly uneasy, herself—whatever my judgment was worth on that. She said,“There should be parts of your brain, still intact, which bear some record of what's been lost. Memories
of formative experiences, memories of the things that used to give you pleasure, fragments of innate
structures that survived the virus. The prosthesis will be driven automatically toward a state that's
compatible with everything else in your brain—it will find itself interacting with all these other systems,
and the connections that work best in that context will be reinforced.” She thought for a moment.
“Imagine a kind of artificial limb, imperfectly formed to start with, that adjusts itself as you use it:
stretching when it fails to grasp what you reach for, shrinking when it bumps something unexpectedly ...
until it takes on precisely the size and shape of the phantom limb implied by your movements. Which itself
is nothing but an image of the lost flesh and blood.”That was an appealing metaphor, though it was hard to believe that my faded memories contained
enough information to reconstruct their phantom author in every detail—that the whole jigsaw of who I'dbeen, and might have become, could be filled in from a few hints along the edges and the jumbled-up
pieces of 4,000 other portraits of happiness. But the subject was making at least one of us
uncomfortable, so I didn't press the point.
I managed to ask a final question. “What will it be like, before any of this happens? When I wake up
from the anesthetic and all the connections are still intact?”
Durrani confessed, “That's one thing I'll have no way of knowing, until you tell me yourself.”****
Someone repeated my name, reassuringly but insistently. I woke a little more. My neck, my legs, myback were all aching, and my stomach was tense with nausea.
But the bed was warm, and the sheets were soft. It was good just to be lying there.
“It's Wednesday afternoon. The operation went well.”
I opened my eyes. Durrani and four of her students were gathered at the foot of the bed. I stared at her,astonished: the face I'd once thought of as “severe” and “forbidding” was ... riveting, magnetic. I could
have watched her for hours. But then I glanced at Luke De Vries, who was standing beside her. He wasjust as extraordinary. I turned one by one to the other three students. Everyone was equally mesmerizing;
I didn't know where to look.
“How are you feeling?”
I was lost for words. These people's faces were loaded with so much significance, so many sources offascination, that I had no way of singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful,reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant ... a white noise of qualities, all positive, butultimately incoherent.
But as I shifted my gaze compulsively from face to face, struggling to make sense of them, their meanings
finally began to crystallize—like words coming into focus, though my sight had never been blurred.

I asked Durrani, “Are you smiling?”“Slightly.” She hesitated. “There are standard tests, standard images for this, but ... please, describe my
expression. Tell me what I'm thinking.”
I answered unselfconsciously, as if she'd asked me to read an eye chart. “You're ... curious? You'relistening carefully. You're interested, and you're ... hoping that something good will happen. And you're
smiling because you think it will. Or because you can't quite believe that it already has.”She nodded, smiling more decisively. “Good.”
I didn't add that I now found her stunningly, almost painfully, beautiful. But it was the same for everyonein the room, male and female: the haze of contradictory moods that I'd read into their faces had cleared,
but it had left behind a heart-stopping radiance. I found this slightly alarming—it was too indiscriminate,
too intense—though in a way it seemed almost as natural a response as the dazzling of a dark-adapted
eye. And after 18 years of seeing nothing but ugliness in every human face, I wasn't ready to complain
about the presence of five people who looked like angels.
Durrani asked, “Are you hungry?”I had to think about that. “Yes.”
One of the students fetched a prepared meal, much the same as the lunch I'd eaten on Monday: salad, abread roll, cheese. I picked up the roll and took a bite. The texture was perfectly familiar, the flavor
unchanged. Two days before, I'd chewed and swallowed the same thing with the usual mild disgust that
all food induced in me.
Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I wasn't in ecstasy; the experience was as strange and painful asdrinking from a fountain with lips so parched that the skin had turned to salt and dried blood.
As painful, and as compelling. When I'd emptied the plate, I asked for another. Eating was good,eating was right, eating was necessary. After the third plate, Durrani said firmly, “That's enough.” I
was shaking with the need for more; she was still supernaturally beautiful, but I screamed at her,outraged.
She took my arms, held me still. “This is going to be hard for you. There'll be surges like this, swings in all
directions, until the network settles down. You have to try to stay calm, try to stay reflective. The
prosthesis makes more things possible than you're used to ... but you're still in control.”I gritted my teeth and looked away. At her touch I'd suffered an immediate, agonizing erection.
I said, “That's right. I'm in control.”****In the days that followed, my experiences with the prosthesis became much less raw, much less violent. I
could almost picture the sharpest, most ill-fitting edges of the network being—metaphorically—wornsmooth by use. To eat, to sleep, to be with people remained intensely pleasurable, but it was more likean impossibly rosy-hued dream of childhood than the result of someone poking my brain with a highvoltage wire.
Of course, the prosthesis wasn't sending signals into my brain in order to make my brain feel pleasure.
The prosthesis itself was the part of me that was feeling all the pleasure—however seamlessly thatprocess was integrated with everything else: perception, language, cognition ... the rest of me. Dwellingon this was unsettling at first, but on reflection no more so than the thought experiment of staining blue all
the corresponding organic regions in a healthy brain, and declaring, “They feel all the pleasure, not you!”
I was put through a battery of psychological tests—most of which I'd sat through many times before, aspart of my annual insurance assessments—as Durrani's team attempted to quantify their success. Maybea stroke patient's fine control of a formerly paralyzed hand was easier to measure objectively, but I musthave leaped from bottom to top of every numerical scale for positive affect. And far from being a sourceof irritation, these tests gave me my first opportunity to use the prosthesis in new arenas—to be happy inways I could barely remember experiencing before. As well as being required to interpret mundanely
rendered scenes of domestic situations—what has just happened between this child, this woman, and thisman; who is feeling good and who is feeling bad?—I was shown breathtaking images of great works ofart, from complex allegorical and narrative paintings to elegant minimalist essays in geometry. As well as
listening to snatches of everyday speech, and even unadorned cries of joy and pain, I was playedsamples of music and song from every tradition, every epoch, every style.
That was when I finally realized that something was wrong.
Jacob Tsela was playing the audio files and noting my responses. He'd been deadpan for most of thesession, carefully avoiding any risk of corrupting the data by betraying his own opinions. But after he'dplayed a heavenly fragment of European classical music, and I'd rated it 20 out of 20, I caught a flicker ofdismay on his face.
“What? You didn't like it?”Tsela smiled opaquely. “It doesn't matter what I like. That's not what we're measuring.”“I've rated it already, you can't influence my score.” I regarded him imploringly; I was desperate forcommunication of any kind. “I've been dead to the world for 18 years. I don't even know who thecomposer was.”He hesitated. “J.S. Bach. And I agree with you: it's sublime.” He reached for the touchscreen andcontinued the experiment.
So what had he been dismayed about? I knew the answer immediately; I'd been an idiot not to notice
before, but I'd been too absorbed in the music itself.
I hadn't scored any piece lower than 18. And it had been the same with the visual arts. From my 4,000
virtual donors I'd inherited, not the lowest common denominator, but the widest possible taste—and inten days, I still hadn't imposed any constraints, any preferences, of my own.
All art was sublime to me, and all music. Every kind of food was delicious. Everyone I laid eyes on was a
vision of perfection.
Maybe I was just soaking up pleasure wherever I could get it, after my long drought, but it was only amatter of time before I grew sated, and became as discriminating, as focused, as particular, as everyone
else.
“Should I still be like this? Omnivorous?” I blurted out the question, starting with a tone of mild curiosity,
ending with an edge of panic.
Tsela halted the sample he'd been playing—a chant that might have been Albanian, Moroccan, orMongolian for all I knew, but which made hair rise on the back of my neck, and sent my spirits soaring.
Just like everything else had.

He was silent for a while, weighing up competing obligations. Then he sighed and said, “You'd better talkto Durrani.”****
Durrani showed me a bar graph on the wallscreen in her office: the number of artificial synapses that hadchanged state within the prosthesis—new connections formed, existing ones broken, weakened orstrengthened—for each of the past ten days. The embedded microprocessors kept track of such things,
and an antenna waved over my skull each morning collected the data.
Day one had been dramatic, as the prosthesis adapted to its environment; the 4,000 contributing
networks might all have been perfectly stable in their owners’ skulls, but the Everyman version I'd been
given had never been wired up to anyone's brain before.
Day two had seen about half as much activity, day three about a tenth.
From day four on, though, there'd been nothing but background noise. My episodic memories, however
pleasurable, were apparently being stored elsewhere—since I certainly wasn't suffering fromamnesia—but after the initial burst of activity, the circuitry for defining what pleasure was had undergone
no change, no refinement at all.
“If any trends emerge in the next few days, we should be able to amplify them, push them forward—like
toppling an unstable building, once it's showing signs of falling in a certain direction.” Durrani didn't soundhopeful. Too much time had passed already, and the network wasn't even teetering.
I said, “What about genetic factors? Can't you read my genome, and narrow things down from that?”
She shook her head. “At least 2,000 genes play a role in neural development. It's not like matching a
blood group or a tissue type; everyone in the database would have more or less the same small
proportion of those genes in common with you. Of course, some people must have been closer to you intemperament than others—but we have no way of identifying them genetically.”“I see.”Durrani said carefully, “We could shut the prosthesis down completely, if that's what you want. There'dbe no need for surgery—we'd just turn it off, and you'd be back where you started.”
I stared at her luminous face. How could I go back? Whatever the tests and the bar graphs said ... how
could this be failure? However much useless beauty I was drowning in, I wasn't as screwed-up as I'dbeen with a head full of Leu-enkephalin. I was still capable of fear, anxiety, sorrow; the tests had
revealed universal shadows, common to all the donors. Hating Bach or Chuck Berry, Chagall or Paul
Klee was beyond me, but I'd reacted as sanely as anyone to images of disease, starvation, death.
And I was not oblivious to my own fate, the way I'd been oblivious to the cancer.
But what was my fate, if I kept using the prosthesis? Universal happiness, universal shadows ... half thehuman race dictating my emotions? In all the years I'd spent in darkness, if I'd held fast to anything, hadn't
it been the possibility that I carried a kind of seed within me: a version of myself that might grow into aliving person again, given the chance? And hadn't that hope now proved false? I'd been offered the
stuff of which selves were made—and though I'd tested it all, and admired it all, I'd claimed none of it as
my own. All the joy I'd felt in the last ten days had been meaningless. I was just a dead husk, blowing
around in other peoples’ sunlight.
I said, “I think you should do that. Switch it off.”Durrani held up her hand. “Wait. If you're willing, there is one other thing we could try. I've been
discussing it with our ethics committee, and Luke has begun preliminary work on the software ... but inthe end, it will be your decision.”“To do what?”“The network can be pushed in any direction. We know how to intervene to do that—to break thesymmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others. Just because it hasn't happened
spontaneously, that doesn't mean it can't be achieved by other means.”
I laughed, suddenly light-headed. “So if I say the word ... your ethics committee will choose the music I
like, and my favorite foods, and my new vocation? They'll decide who I become?” Would that be sobad? Having died, myself, long ago, to grant life now to a whole new person? To donate, not just a lungor a kidney, but my entire body, irrelevant memories and all, to an arbitrarily constructed—but fully
functioning—de novo human being?
Durrani was scandalized. “No! We'd never dream of doing that! But we could program themicroprocessors to let you control the network's refinement. We could give you the power to choose foryourself, consciously and deliberately, the things that make you happy.”****
De Vries said, “Try to picture the control.”I closed my eyes. He said, “Bad idea. If you get into the habit, it will limit your access.”“Right.” I stared into space. Something glorious by Beethoven was playing on the lab's sound system; it
was difficult to concentrate. I struggled to visualize the stylized, cherry-red, horizontal slider control thatDe Vries had constructed, line by line, inside my head five minutes before. Suddenly it was more than avague memory: it was superimposed over the room again, as clear as any real object, at the bottom of
my visual field.
“I've got it.” The button was hovering around 19.
De Vries glanced at a display, hidden from me. “Good. Now try to lower the rating.”
I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. “How? How can you try to like something less?”“You don't. Just try to move the button to the left. Visualize the movement. The software's monitoring
your visual cortex, tracking any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button
moving—and the image will oblige.”
It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was sticking, but I managed to maneuver it down to 10
before stopping to assess the effect.
“Fuck.”“I take it it's working?”
I nodded stupidly. The music was still ... pleasant ... but the spell was broken completely. It was like
listening to an electrifying piece of rhetoric, then realizing half-way through that the speaker didn't believea word of it—leaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it of all its real force.
I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained it, the whole scheme had soundedtoo bizarre to be real. And since I'd already failed to assert myself over the prosthesis—despite billions
of direct neural connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to interact withthe thing and shape it in my own image—I'd feared that when the time came to make a choice, I'd beparalyzed by indecision.
But I knew, beyond doubt, that I should not have been in a state of rapture over a piece of classicalmusic that I'd either never heard before, or—since apparently it was famous, and ubiquitous—sat
through once or twice by accident, entirely unmoved.
And now, in a matter of seconds, I'd hacked that false response away.
There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I'd just have to do it consciously, every stepof the way.
De Vries, tinkering with his keyboard, said cheerfully, “I'll color-code virtual gadgets for all the major
systems in the prosthesis. With a few days’ practice it'll all be second nature. Just remember that someexperiences will engage two or three systems at once ... so if you're making love to music that you'dprefer not to find so distracting, make sure you turn down the red control, not the blue.” He looked up
and saw my face. “Hey, don't worry. You can always turn it up again later if you make a mistake. Or if
you change your mind.”3
It was nine p.m. in Sydney when the plane touched down. Nine o'clock on a Saturday night. I took a
train into the city center, intending to catch the connecting one home, but when I saw the crowds alighting
at Town Hall station I put my suitcase in a locker and followed them up on to the street.
I'd been in the city a few times since the virus, but never at night. I felt like I'd come home after half alifetime in another country, after solitary confinement in a foreign gaol. Everything was disorienting, one
way or another. I felt a kind of giddy déjà vu at the sight of buildings that seemed to have been faithfully
preserved, but still weren't quite as I remembered them, and a sense of hollowness each time I turned acorner to find that some private landmark, some shop or sign I remembered from childhood, hadvanished.
I stood outside a pub, close enough to feel my eardrums throb to the beat of the music. I could see
people inside, laughing and dancing, sloshing armfuls of drinks around, faces glowing with alcohol andcompanionship. Some alive with the possibility of violence, others with the promise of sex.
I could step right into this picture myself, now. The ash that had buried the world was gone; I was
free to walk wherever I pleased. And I could almost feel the dead cousins of these revellers—reborn
now as harmonics of the network, resonating to the music and the sight of their soul-mates—clamoring in
my skull, begging me to carry them all the way to the land of the living.
I took a few steps forward, then something in the corner of my vision distracted me. In the alley besidethe pub, a boy of 10 or 12 sat crouched against the wall, lowering his face into a plastic bag. After a few
inhalations he looked up, dead eyes shining, smiling as blissfully as any orchestra conductor.
I backed away.
Someone touched my shoulder. I spun around and saw a man beaming at me. “Jesus loves you, brother!
Your search is over!” He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. I gazed into his face, and his condition wastransparent to me: he'd stumbled on a way to produce Leu-enkephalin at will—but he didn't know it, so
he'd reasoned that some divine wellspring of happiness was responsible. I felt my chest tighten with

horror and pity. At least I'd known about my tumor. And even the fucked-up kid in the alley understoodthat he was just sniffing glue.
And the people in the pub? Did they know what they were doing? Music, companionship, alcohol,
sex ... where did the border lie? When did justifiable happiness turn into something as empty, as
pathological, as it was for this man?
I stumbled away, and headed back toward the station. All around me, people were laughing andshouting, holding hands, kissing ... and I watched them as if they were flayed anatomical figures, revealing
a thousand interlocking muscles working together with effortless precision. Buried inside me, themachinery of happiness recognized itself, again and again.
I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every last shred of the human capacity for joy into
my skull. But to claim any part of it, I'd have to swallow the fact—more deeply than the tumor had everforced me to swallow it—that happiness itself meant nothing. Life without it was unbearable, but as an
end in itself, it was not enough. I was free to choose its causes—and to be happy with my choices—butwhatever I felt once I'd bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all mychoices had been wrong.
****
Global Assurance had given me until the end of the year to get my act together. If my annual
psychological assessment showed that Durrani's treatment had been successful—whether or not I
actually had a job—I'd be thrown to the even less tender mercies of the privatized remnants of social
security. So I stumbled around in the light, trying to find my bearings.
On my first day back I woke at dawn. I sat down at the phone and started digging. My old net
workspace had been archived; at current rates it was only costing about ten cents a year in storage fees,
and I still had $36.20 credit in my account. The whole bizarre informational fossil had passed intact fromcompany to company through four takeovers and mergers. Working through an assortment of tools to
decode the obsolete data formats, I dragged fragments of my past life into the present and examined
them, until it became too painful to go on.
The next day I spent twelve hours cleaning the flat, scrubbing every corner—listening to my old njari
downloads, stopping only to eat, ravenously. And though I could have refined my taste in food back tothat of a 12-year-old salt-junky, I made the choice—thoroughly un-masochistic, and more pragmaticthan virtuous—to crave nothing more toxic than fruit.
In the following weeks I put on weight with gratifying speed, though when I stared at myself in the mirror,
or used morphing software running on the phone, I realized that I could be happy with almost any kind of
body. The database must have included people with a vast range of ideal self-images, or who'd diedperfectly content with their actual appearances.
Again, I chose pragmatism. I had a lot of catching up to do, and I didn't want to die at 55 from a heart
attack if I could avoid it. There was no point fixating on the unattainable or the absurd, though, so after
morphing myself to obesity, and rating it zero, I did the same for the Schwarzenegger look. I chose alean, wiry body—well within the realms of possibility, according to the software—and assigned it 16 out
of 20. Then I started running.
I took it slowly at first, and though I clung to the image of myself as a child, darting effortlessly from street
to street, I was careful never to crank up the joy of motion high enough to mask injuries. When I limped
into a chemist looking for liniment, I found they were selling something called prostaglandin modulators,
anti-inflammatory compounds that allegedly minimized damage without shutting down any vital repair

processes. I was skeptical, but the stuff did seem to help; the first month was still painful, but I wasneither crippled by natural swelling, nor rendered so oblivious to danger signs that I tore a muscle.
And once my heart and lungs and calves were dragged screaming out of their atrophied state, it wasgood. I ran for an hour every morning, weaving around the local back streets, and on Sunday afternoons
I circumnavigated the city itself. I didn't push myself to attain ever faster times; I had no athletic ambitions
whatsoever. I just wanted to exercise my freedom.
Soon the act of running melted into a kind of seamless whole. I could revel in the thudding of my heart
and the feeling of my limbs in motion, or I could let those details recede into a buzz of satisfaction and justwatch the scenery, as if from a train. And having reclaimed my body, I began to reclaim the suburbs, one
by one. From the slivers of forest clinging to the Lane Cove river to the eternal ugliness of Parramatta
Road, I crisscrossed Sydney like a mad surveyor, wrapping the landscape with invisible geodesics thendrawing it into my skull. I pounded across the bridges at Gladesville and Iron Cove, Pyrmont,
Meadowbank, and the Harbor itself, daring the planks to give way beneath my feet.
I suffered moments of doubt. I wasn't drunk on endorphins—I wasn't pushing myself that hard—but it
still felt too good to be true. Was this glue-sniffing? Maybe ten thousand generations of my ancestors
had been rewarded with the same kind of pleasure for pursuing game, fleeing danger, and mapping theirterritory for the sake of survival, but to me it was all just a glorious pastime.
Still, I wasn't deceiving myself, and I wasn't hurting anyone. I plucked those two rules from the core of
the dead child inside me, and kept on running.
****
Thirty was an interesting age to go through puberty. The virus hadn't literally castrated me, but having
eliminated pleasure from sexual imagery, genital stimulation, and orgasm—and having partly wrecked thehormonal regulatory pathways reaching down from the hypothalamus—it had left me with nothing worth
describing as sexual function. My body disposed of semen in sporadic joyless spasms—and without thenormal lubricants secreted by the prostate during arousal, every unwanted ejaculation tore at the urethrallining.
When all of this changed, it hit hard—even in my state of relative sexual decrepitude. Compared to wet
dreams of broken glass, masturbation was wonderful beyond belief, and I found myself unwilling tointervene with the controls to tone it down. But I needn't have worried that it would rob me of interest in
the real thing; I kept finding myself staring openly at people on the street, in shops and on trains, until by a
combination of willpower, sheer terror, and prosthetic adjustment I managed to kick the habit.
The network had rendered me bisexual, and though I quickly ramped my level of desire down
considerably from that of the database's most priapic contributors, when it came to choosing to bestraight or gay, everything turned to quicksand. The network was not some kind of population-weighted
average; if it had been, Durrani's original hope that my own surviving neural architecture could hold sway
would have been dashed whenever the vote was stacked against it. So I was not just 10 or 15 per centgay; the two possibilities were present with equal force, and the thought of eliminating either felt as
alarming, as disfiguring, as if I'd lived with both for decades.
But was that just the prosthesis defending itself, or was it partly my own response? I had no idea. I'dbeen a thoroughly asexual 12-year-old, even before the virus; I'd always assumed that I was straight, andI'd certainly found some girls attractive, but there'd been no moonstruck stares or furtive groping to backup that purely esthetic opinion. I looked up the latest research, but all the genetic claims I recalled fromvarious headlines had since been discredited—so even if my sexuality had been determined from birth,there was no blood test that could tell me, now, what it would have become. I even tracked down my
pre-treatment MRI scans, but they lacked the resolution to provide a direct, neuroanatomical answer.
I didn't want to be bisexual. I was too old to experiment like a teenager; I wanted certainty, I wanted
solid foundations. I wanted to be monogamous—and even if monogamy was rarely an effortless state foranyone, that was no reason to lumber myself with unnecessary obstacles. So who should I slaughter? I
knew which choice would make things easier ... but if everything came down to a question of which of
the 4,000 donors could carry me along the path of least resistance, whose life would I be living?
Maybe it was all a moot point. I was a 30-year-old virgin with a history of mental illness, no money, noprospects, no social skills—and I could always crank up the satisfaction level of my only current option,and let everything else recede into fantasy. I wasn't deceiving myself, I wasn't hurting anyone. It waswithin my power to want nothing more.
****
I'd noticed the bookshop, tucked away in a back street in Leichhardt, many times before. But one
Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in
the front window, I had to stop and laugh.
I was drenched in sweat from the winter humidity, so I didn't go in and buy the book. But I peered inthrough the display toward the counter, and spotted a HELP WANTED sign.
Looking for unskilled work had seemed futile; the total unemployment rate was 15 per cent, the youth
rate three times higher, so I'd assumed there'd always be a thousand other applicants for every job:younger, cheaper, stronger, and certifiably sane. But though I'd resumed my on-line education, I was
getting not so much nowhere, fast as everywhere, slowly. All the fields of knowledge that had gripped me
as a child had expanded a hundredfold, and while the prosthesis granted me limitless energy andenthusiasm, there was still too much ground for anyone to cover in a lifetime. I knew I'd have to sacrifice
90 per cent of my interests if I was ever going to choose a career, but I still hadn't been able to wield theknife.
I returned to the bookshop on Monday, walking up from Petersham station. I'd fine-tuned my confidence
for the occasion, but it rose spontaneously when I heard that there'd been no other applicants. The owner
was in his 60s, and he'd just done his back in; he wanted someone to lug boxes around, and take thecounter when he was otherwise occupied. I told him the truth: I'd been neurologically damaged by achildhood illness, and I'd only recently recovered.
He hired me on the spot, for a month's trial. The starting wage was exactly what Global Assurance were
paying me, but if I was taken on permanently I'd get slightly more.
The work wasn't hard, and the owner didn't mind me reading in the back room when I had nothing to do.
In a way, I was in heaven—ten thousand books, and no access fees—but sometimes I felt the terror of
dissolution returning. I read voraciously, and on one level I could make clear judgments: I could pick theclumsy writers from the skilled, the honest from the fakers, the platitudinous from the inspired. But theprosthesis still wanted me to enjoy everything, to embrace everything, to diffuse out across the dusty
shelves until I was no one at all, a ghost in the Library of Babel.
****
She walked into the bookshop two minutes after opening time, on the first day of spring. Watching herbrowse, I tried to think clearly through the consequences of what I was about to do. For weeks I'd beenon the counter five hours a day, and with all that human contact I'd been hoping for ... something. Not

wild, reciprocated love at first sight, just the tiniest flicker of mutual interest, the slightest piece ofevidence that I could actually desire one human being more than all the rest.
It hadn't happened. Some customers had flirted mildly, but I could see that it was nothing special, justtheir own kind of politeness—and I'd felt nothing more in response than if they'd been unusually, formally,
courteous. And though I might have agreed with any bystander as to who was conventionally
good-looking, who was animated or mysterious, witty or charming, who glowed with youth or radiatedworldliness ... I just didn't care. The 4,000 had all loved very different people, and the envelope thatstretched between their far-flung characteristics encompassed the entire species. That was never going tochange, until I did something to break the symmetry myself.
So for the past week, I'd dragged all the relevant systems in the prosthesis down to 3 or 4. People had
become scarcely more interesting to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with thisrandomly chosen stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive feedback; thehigher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but I'd set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.
By the time she'd chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant,
half sick with shame. I'd struck a pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman
rang true. And if everything I'd done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent ... I'd
had no other way.
I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement
ring—but I'd promised myself that I wouldn't try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: tonotice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth
woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.
I said, “Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?”
She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And
I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me
sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown
on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down.
She said, “That would be nice. I'm Julia, by the way.”“I'm Mark.” We shook hands.
“When do you finish work?”“Tonight? Nine o'clock.”“Ah.”
I said, “How about lunch? When do you have lunch?”“One.” She hesitated. “There's that place just down the road ... next to the hardware store?”“That would be great.”
Julia smiled. “Then I'll meet you there. About ten past. OK?”
I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple.
Anyone in the world can do it. It's like breathing.

I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she'd discover that in five minutes
flat. Or, worse, discover the 4,000 grown men in my head offering advice.
I went into the toilet to throw up.
****
Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. “You're new at the bookshop, aren'tyou?”“Yes.”“So what were you doing before that?”“I was unemployed. For a long time.”“How long?”“Since I was a student.”
She grimaced. “It's criminal, isn't it? Well, I'm doing my bit. I'm job-sharing, half-time only.”“Really? How are you finding it?”
“It's wonderful. I mean, I'm lucky, the position's well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary.” Shelaughed. “Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that's the only possible reason.”“You just like to have the time?”“Yes. Time's important. I hate being rushed.”
We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip
she'd made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own
long-vanquished tumor, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too
much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone—not waiting for a call, but watchingnews broadcasts, to be sure I'd have something to talk about besides myself. Who's your favorite
singer/author/artist/actor? I have no idea.
Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted
her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I'd chosen her. But ... why had I felt compelled
to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common
was the fact that they'd desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down toevolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a
judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions
had the same ancestry as everyone else's; what more could I ask?
But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head,anytime, and make those feelings vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting
to touch that dial...
Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half-shaped by chance,
to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I
was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about
Julia drive me away, now that I'd chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when,she decided to break things off, how would I take it?
We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat,
I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lackof experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I'd need six years of gymnastics training just toachieve the missionary position. I'd refused to masturbate since I'd met her; to fantasize about her, toimagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn
trying to comprehend the trap I'd dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn't want to be free.
****
Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. “That was a nice idea.” She climbed off me and flopped onto
the bed.
I'd spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing myerection. I'd heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for astronger glow of intimacy—and when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she could see the effect on me.
She brushed my cheek with her hand. “You're a sweet man. Did you know that?”
I said, “I have to tell you something.” Sweet? I'm a puppet, I'm a robot, I'm a freak.
“What?”
I couldn't speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. “I know you're gay. That's all right; I don't
mind.”“I'm not gay.” Anymore? “Though I might have been.”
Julia frowned. “Gay, bisexual ... I don't care. Honestly.”
I wouldn't have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this,and in a few weeks I'd be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I'd feel, as naturally as anyone, all thethings I was now having to choose.
I said, “When I was twelve, I had cancer.”
I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. “You don't believe me?”
She replied haltingly, “You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, ‘I losteighteen years’?”“How do you want me to say it? I'm not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand.”
When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few
seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt like I'd been knifed.
“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you.” I didn't know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I
kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.
She smiled. “What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for
both of us. But it wasn't.” She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. “It wasn't.”****
Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. She kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left atsix; I walked all the way home, weightless.
I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing
the future. I hadn't spoken to either of my parents for nine years, they didn't even know about the Durrani
treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is yourson, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.
There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I'd started
things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait,
imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.
I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasn't quite as I'd pictured it.
I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick.
No one's fault. My explanation hadn't really sunk in the night before. But now she'd had time to think
about it, and she wasn't prepared to carry on a relationship with 4,000 dead men.
I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better,by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy—happy
because I was “free” again, happy because I was better off without her ... happy because Julia wasbetter off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attainit was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.
I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned. The smell made me think ofcauterization, sealing off a wound.
I let things run their course, I didn't touch the controls—but just knowing that I could have changed
everything. And I realized then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: I'm cured now, take thesoftware away, I don't want the power to choose anymore ... I'd never be able to forget where
everything I felt had come from.
****
My father came to the flat yesterday. We didn't talk much, but he hasn't remarried yet, and he made ajoke about us going nightclub-hopping together.
At least I hope it was a joke.
Watching him, I thought: he's there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human,
proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did 4,000 more make? Everyone had to carvea life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection,
half softened by the freedom of chance. I'd just had to face the details a little more starkly.
And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness andmeaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see
clearly what lay on either side.
When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down toward
the Parramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter, and garden
run-off into the water.
He asked dubiously, “You happy with this area?”
I said, “I like it here.”