Deal Me In Challenge: Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan

Card Drawn:

"The Jewel" is the path to immortality but at what cost?

My main issue with the Hard Science Fiction genre is that it can be frustratingly inaccessible with its high density of information and unrelenting technical jargon. Taken from Greg Egan's excellent collection entitled Axiomatic, "Learning to Be Me" finds a nice balance between the author's mind-bending scientific concepts and adept story-telling abilities. What does it mean to be human? is often at the heart of a lot of science fiction but here the author reverses the question: What is it like not to be human? Set in the not-so-distant future, this story introduces a new technology where the brain is eventually removed and replaced by a device called "The Jewel," allowing humans to live forever. The device is implanted at birth while the brain is still in the early stages of development and learns over time to replicate all the cognitive functions, sensory inputs and active neurons that make up a person's consciousness. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

Transhumanism is the primary ideological discourse explored in the story. Those individuals with the Jewel implant would technically still be human but that does not necessarily mean that they actually feel human. The protagonist undergoes the procedure and struggles to reconcile between his human self and Jewel self. Egan then delivers a terrifying scenario: what if a person undergoes "the switch" (as it is referred to in the story) but there is an error and they no longer have control over their new brain? The paradox of subjectivity engenders the protagonist's otherness and is dramatized by his intense paranoia. An intense cognitive dissonance gives way to the story's psychological realism as the protagonist is confronted by the ontological Other: himself. He is both human and nonhuman. The story's fatalistic implications seem to suggest that humanism is under threat by technological advancements and our impending dissolution is inevitable.

The first person narrative voice gives us direct access to his inner thoughts but this focalization is undermined by the nonhuman aspects of this technological modification. Therefore, who is the real person during this merging of consciousness? Egan's narrative ingenuity is most apparent with the shifting focalization that occurs simultaneously, making the first person narrative voice particularly tricky to pin down. Is the protagonist a reliable narrator or is the Jewel the unreliable narrative voice the entire time? Fascinating stuff.