"Greg Egan - Learning To Be Me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan

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
werewrong, 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 makesme feel strange and giddy, how must it make thejewel 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, becauseI 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 blase 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: “Whoare
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, becauseyou'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