Transition Dreams by Greg Egan

 


"We can't tell you what your own transition dreams will be. The only thing that's certain is that you won't remember them."

So begins this fascinating Greg Egan SF tale where Ms. Caroline Bausch sits behind her stylish executive desk and gives the narrator, an older man I'll call Grant Applegate, the lowdown on what he'll experience during the procedure where he will leave his human body (including his human brain) and enter the body of a cyborg, complete with computerized brain. The good news: he will awake with his identity and memory intact. Oh, yes, he will be his same old self but with an indestructible body and mind. The not so good news: there will be transition dreams at some point during the transformation.

Grant Applegate has his questions. If he will not remember his transition dreams, why on earth is he being told they exist? Is the nature of consciousness in a human and a Gleisner robot (the name of the human cyborg he will become, the one that's produced by the Gleisner Corporation) really the same? Grant Applegate is painfully aware he's posing questions to Caroline Bausch, who is herself a Gleisner robot. How much trust can he put in the answers?

Recognizing he has little choice at his advanced age, Grant signs the papers to undergo the procedure. He leaves the building and reflects on his decision as he walks to the train that will take him home. "The cytokine injections don't get my immune system humming the way they did twenty years ago. One hundred and seven, this August. The number sounds surreal. But then, so did twenty-seven, so did forty-three, so did sixty-one."

Grant shares his anxiety with Alice, his wife. That night, he wakes up and can't get back to sleep. It's 2 a.m. but he's restless and gets out of bed and heads for the supermarket opposite the railway station. He enters and picks up a carton on milk but when he goes to pay at the register, he has a bizarre conversation with an old man who had the robot procedure himself.

Grant leaves but he can't shake all the nagging thoughts about what he's about to do. Damn, what is he afraid of? "What horrors do I think are locked up in my skull, waiting to run amok in the data stream from comatose human to comatose machine?"

Then it happens: fifty yards from home, Grant feels a stabbing pain in his chest. He sinks to his knees. The next thing he knows, an orderly is pushing him down the hall to the operating room. Grant begins to panic. "Where is my wife, Alice?" "Shouldn't the Gleisner people be contacted?" The orderly curtly puts him off with a sinister smile. None of this is making any sense. Then it hits him - this is his transition dream! Grant Applegate struggles to find some solid ground, a baseline for his immediate experience. Ah, Caroline Bausch's warning is helping him after all. Thank goodness.

Grant continues to move down the hall. He reflects, "Who am I? What do I know for sure about the man who'll wake inside the robot? I struggle to pin down a single certain fact about him, but under scrutiny everything dissolves into confusion and doubt.
Someone chants, "Ashes to ashes, coma to coma."

Of course, the question raised by Greg Egan's short story: if Grant Applegate is, in fact, experiencing a transition dream, when did the dream begin? When Grant entered the hospital? When he had his heart attack? When he had his bizarre conversation at the grocery story? Or, quite possibly, it started when he entered the office of Caroline Bausch and had that mind-boggling conversation about becoming a robot. In other words, Grant Applegate died a natural death in the beginning of the 21st century and his entire experience contained in this short story is his transition dream (his Bardo dream according to Tibetan Buddhism) between his current life and his next rebirth.

Greg Egan hard SF meets The Twilight Zone.


Australian author Greg Egan, born 1961 - Greg takes pride in not having any photos of himself available on the web. This photo is the way I picture the outstanding SF novelist writing at his computer.