"Encased us both in fake skin and let it do the fucking for us."
The ganger jittered in uncertain circles between the two of them. "Issy, what you want from me?"
The ganger’s head swelled obscenely towards Cleve.
"Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like I feel for you." The ganger’s lower lip stretched, stretched, a filament of it reaching for Issy’s own mouth. The black cavity of its maw was a tunnel, longing to swallow her up. She shuddered and rolled back farther. Her back came up against the bathtub.
Softly: "What do you feel for me, Issy?"
"Fuck you."
"I do. We do. It’s good. But what do you feel for me, Issy?"
"Don’t ridicule me. You know."
"I don’t know shit, Issy! You talk, talk, talk! And it’s all about what racist insult you heard yesterday, and who tried to cheat you at the store, and how high the phone bill is. You talk around stuff, not about it!"
"Shut up!"
The ganger flailed like a hook-caught fish between them.
Quietly, Cleve said, "The only time we seem to reach each other now is through our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more, and it’s still not enough."
An involuntary sound came from Issy’s mouth, a hooked, wordless query.
"Cleve, is that why…" She looked at him, at the intense brown eyes in the expressive brown face. When had he started to look so sad all the time? She reached a hand out to him. The ganger grabbed it. Issy saw fireworks behind her eyes. She screamed. She felt Cleve’s hand on her waist, felt the hand clutch painfully as he tried to shove her away to safety with his other hand. Blindly she reached out, tried to bat the ganger away. Her hand met Cleve’s in the middle of the fog that was the ganger. All the pleasure centres in her body exploded.
A popping sound. A strong, seminal smell of bleach. The ganger was gone. Issy and Cleve sagged to the floor.
"Rass," she sighed. Her calves were knots the size of potatoes. And she’d be sitting tenderly for a while.
"I feel like I’ve been dragged five miles behind a run-away horse," Cleve told her. "You all right?"
"Yeah, where’d that thing go, the ganger?"
"Shit, Issy, I’m so sorry. Should have drained the suits like you said."
"Chuh. Don’t dig nothing. I could have done it too."
"I think we neutralized it. Touched each other, touched it: We canceled it out. I think."
"Touched each other. That simple." Issy gave a little rueful laugh. "Cleve, I… you’re my honey, you know? You sweet me for days. I won’t forget anymore to tell you," she said, "and keep telling you."
His smile brimmed over with joy. He replied, "You, you’re my live wire. You keep us both juiced up, make my heart sing in my chest." He hesitated, spoke bashfully, "And my dick leap in my pants when I see you."
A warmth flooded Issy at his sweet, hot talk. She felt her eyelashes dampen. She smiled. "See, the dirty words not so hard to say. And the anger not so hard to show."
Tailor-sat on the floor, beautiful Buddha-body, he frowned at her. "I ’fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?"
She was dropping down with fatigue. She leaned and softly touched his face. "I don’t know what that is like. But I know you. I know you would never hurt me. You must say what on your mind, Cleve. To me, at least." She closed her eyes, dragged herself exhaustedly into his embrace.
He said, "You know, I dream of the way you full up my arms."
"You’re sticky," she murmured. "Like candy." And fell asleep, touching him.
(2000)
LEARNING TO BE ME
Greg Egan
Gregory Egan was born in Perth in 1961. He studied Mathematics at the University of Western Australia then worked as a computer programmer. In the early 2000s he took time out of his writing career to advocate for refugees arriving in Australia. Egan’s first two hard-sf novels, Quarantine (1992) and Permutation City (1994) set the pace for a career that has seen him win the Hugo Award once and be nominated eight other times. His philosophically adept stories often explore unusual psychologies and unexpected ways of thinking, while having more fun than is entirely decent with concepts of body and neural modification and artificial evolution. He is notoriously camera-shy, and claims that none of the pictures of Greg Egan on the Web are actually of him.
I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.
I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: "Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…"
And it too wonders—
(I knew, because I wondered)
—it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.
As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.
Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: "Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?" We all replied—unthinkingly, indignantly—"The real human!" When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, "Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever."
We beat him until he bled.
By the time I was fourteen, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked "Are you the jewel or the human?" had to be "The human"—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world "I am the jewel"—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body—was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).