Greg Egan - Axiomatic

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Axiomatic

By Greg Egan

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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CONTENTS

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One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, its always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.

Why? They tell me Im stable. Reliable. Dependable. After each debriefing, The Companys psychologists (complete strangers, every time) shake their heads in astonishment at their printouts, and tell me that Im exactly the same person as when I went in.

The number of parallel worlds is uncountably infinite infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that Im unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.

How The Company knew this, how they found me, Ive never been told. I was recruited at the age of nineteen. Bribed. Trained. Brainwashed, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe the real constant is the way Ive been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have all emerged the same. I dont know.

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Detectors scattered across the planet have sensed the faint beginnings of the whirlpool, and pinned down the centre to within a few kilometres, but thats the most accurate fix I can expect by this means. Each version of The Company shares its technology freely with the others, to ensure a uniformly optimal response, but even in the best of all possible worlds, the detectors are too large, and too delicate, to carry in closer for a more precise reading.

A helicopter deposits me on wasteland at the southern edge of the Leightown ghetto. Ive never been here before, but the boarded-up shopfronts and grey tower blocks ahead are utterly familiar. Every large city in the world (in every world I know) has a place like this, created by a policy thats usually referred to as differential enforcement. Using or possessing S is strictly illegal, and the penalty in most countries is (mostly) summary execution, but the powers that be would rather have the users concentrated in designated areas than risk having them scattered amongst the community at large. So, if youre caught with S in a nice clean suburb, theyll blow a hole in your skull on the spot, but here, theres no chance of that. Here, there are no cops at all.

I head north. Its just after four a.m., but savagely hot, and once I move out of the buffer zone, the streets are crowded. People are coming and going from nightclubs, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling houses, brothels. Power for street lighting has been cut off from this part of the city, but someone civic-minded has replaced the normal bulbs with self-contained tritium/phosphor globes, spilling a cool, pale light like radioactive milk. Theres a popular misconception that most S users do nothing but dream, twenty-four hours a day, but thats ludicrous; not only do they need to eat, drink and earn money like everyone else, but few would waste the drug on the time when their alter egos are themselves asleep.

Intelligence says theres some kind of whirlpool cult in Leightown, who may try to interfere with my work. Ive been warned of such groups before, but its never come to anything; the slightest shift in reality is usually all it takes to make such an aberration vanish. The Company, the ghettos, are the stable responses to S; everything else seems to be highly conditional. Still, I shouldnt be complacent. Even if these cults can have no significant impact on the mission as a whole, no doubt they have killed some versions of me in the past, and I dont want it to be my turn, this time. I know that an infinite number of versions of me would survive some whose only difference from me would be that they had survived so perhaps I ought to be entirely untroubled by the thought of death.

But Im not.

Wardrobe have dressed me with scrupulous care, in a Fat Single Mothers Must Die World Tour souvenir reflection hologram T-shirt, the right style of jeans, the right model running shoes. Paradoxically, S users tend to be slavish adherents to local fashion, as opposed to that of their dreams; perhaps its a matter of wanting to partition their sleeping and waking lives. For now, Im in perfect camouflage, but I dont expect that to last; as the whirlpool picks up speed, sweeping different parts of the ghetto into different histories, changes in style will be one of the most sensitive markers. If my clothes dont look out of place before too long, Ill know Im headed in the wrong direction.

A tall, bald man with a shrunken human thumb dangling from one ear lobe collides with me as he runs out of a bar. As we separate, he turns on me, screaming taunts and obscenities. I respond cautiously; he may have friends in the crowd, and I dont have time to waste getting into that kind of trouble. I dont escalate things by replying, but I take care to appear confident, without seeming arrogant or disdainful. This balancing act pays off. Insulting me with impunity for thirty seconds apparently satisfies his pride, and he walks away smirking.

As I move on, though, I cant help wondering how many versions of me didnt get out of it so easily.

I pick up speed to compensate for the delay.

Someone catches up with me, and starts walking beside me. Hey, I liked the way you handled that. Subtle. Manipulative. Pragmatic. Full marks. A woman in her late twenties, with short, metallic-blue hair.

Fuck off. Im not interested.

In what?

In anything.

She shakes her head. Not true. Youre new around here, and youre looking for something. Or someone. Maybe I can help.

I said, fuck off.

She shrugs and falls behind, but calls after me, Every hunter needs a guide. Think about it.

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A few blocks later, I turn into an unlit side street. Deserted, silent; stinking of half-burnt garbage, cheap insecticide, and piss. And I swear I can