Closer by Greg Egan

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

I’ll probably need to revisit Closer by Greg Egan a few more times before I fully wrap my head around it, because there is a lot going on here. It’s deeply philosophical and the final act gets super weird in that very Egan way. Subjective versus objective reality, shared memories, merging identities, gender swapping, consciousness transfer into clones and the slow drift toward a singularity of mind. There’s no shortage of big ideas here and often felt like I was constantly sprinting just to keep up.

The story keeps circling one deceptively simple question: how can one person ever truly understand the consciousness of another? In Egan’s future, advanced technology brings humanity tantalizingly close to an answer. At eighteen, the narrator undergoes a procedure know as the switch, a common rite of passage in which the physical brain is removed and replaced by the "jewel" (this tech appears in another Egan story called "Learning to Be Me"), a device implanted shortly after birth that can store, copy, and manipulate consciousness itself. The science is fascinating but it’s really just the framework for a much more intimate exploration of connection and identity.

That’s where the line “Nobody wants to spend eternity alone” comes in and why it’s so important that it opens and closes the story. Michael, the narrator, is in a relationship with Sian, yet he’s constantly uneasy about how little he can truly know her inner world. Even with all this advanced technology, there’s still a gap between minds that can’t quite be bridged. His reflection that “Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality” drives home just how limited our tools for understanding one another really are.

The tragedy and the tenderness of Closer is that the desire to fully merge with another person contains curiosity and intellectual ambition but more importantly, it’s this unshakeable fear of isolation stretched across eternity. If consciousness can be copied, extended, or made effectively immortal, then loneliness becomes an even more terrifying prospect. That single line reframes the story as a technological possibility, intrinsically linked to a very human anxiety: no matter how advanced we become, the deepest motivation behind all this mind-bending science is still the same old hope of not having to be alone forever.

You can read this story HERE.