The Extra 

Greg Egan 


Daniel Gray didn't merely arrange for his Extras to live in a building within 
the grounds of his main residence - although that in itself would have been 
shocking enough. At the height of his midsummer garden party, he had their 
trainer march them along a winding path which took them within metres of 
virtually every one of his wealthy and powerful guests. 
 There were five batches, each batch a decade younger than the preceding one, 
each comprising twenty-five Extras (less one or two here and there; naturally, 
some depletion had occurred, and Gray made no effort to hide the fact). Batch A 
were forty-four years old, the same age as Gray himself. Batch E, the 
four-year-olds, could not have kept up with the others on foot, so they followed 
behind, riding an electric float. 
 The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair - 
and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in 
styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far 
as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against 
it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was 
acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and 
causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like 
naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were 
not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures' 
totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than 
human. 
 The parade was a great success. Everyone applauded demurely as it passed by - 
in the context, an extravagant gesture of approval. They weren't applauding the 
Extras themselves, however impressive they were to behold; they were applauding 
Daniel Gray for his audacity in breaking the taboo. 
 Gray could only guess how many people in the world had Extras; perhaps the 
wealthiest ten thousand, perhaps the wealthiest hundred thousand. Most owners 
chose to be discreet. Keeping a stock of congenitally brain-damaged clones of 
oneself - in the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the 
techniques were perfected), as the recipients of brain transplants - was not 
illegal, but nor was it widely accepted. Any owner who went public could expect 
a barrage of anonymous hate mail, intense media scrutiny, property damage, 
threats of violence - all the usual behaviour associated with the public debate 
of a subtle point of ethics. There had been legal challenges, of course, but 
time and again the highest courts had ruled that Extras were not human beings. 
Too much cortex was missing; if Extras deserved human rights, so did half the 
mammalian species on the planet. With a patient, skilled trainer, Extras could 
learn to run in circles, and to perform the simple, repetitive exercises that 
kept their muscles in good tone, but that was about the limit. A dog or a cat 
would have needed brain tissue removed to persuade it to live such a boring 
life. 
 Even those few owners who braved the wrath of the fanatics, and bragged about 
their Extras, generally had them kept in commercial stables - in the same city, 
of course, so as not to undermine their usefulness in a medical emergency, but 
certainly not within the electrified boundaries of their own homes. What ageing, 
dissipated man or woman would wish to be surrounded by reminders of how healthy 
and vigorous they might have been, if only they'd lived their lives differently? 

 Daniel Gray, however, found the contrasting appearance of his Extras entirely 
pleasing to behold, given that he, and not they, would be the ultimate 
beneficiary of their good health. In fact, his athletic, clean-living brothers 
had already supplied him with two livers, one kidney, one lung, and quantities 
of coronary artery and mucous membrane. In each case, he'd had the donor put 
down, whether or not it had remained strictly viable; the idea of having 
imperfect Extras in his collection offended his aesthetic sensibilities. 
 After the appearance of the Extras, nobody at the party could talk about 
anything else. Perhaps, one stereovision luminary suggested, now that their host 
had shown such courage, it would at last became fashionable to flaunt one's 
Extras, allowing full value to be extracted from them; after all, considering 
the cost, it was a crime to make use of them only in emergencies, when their 
pretty bodies went beneath the surgeon's knife. 
 Gray wandered from group to group, listening contentedly, pausing now and then 
to pluck and eat a delicate spice-rose or a juicy claret-apple (the entire 
garden had been designed specifically to provide the refreshments for this 
annual occasion, so everything was edible, and everything was in season). The 
early afternoon sky was a dazzling, uplifting blue, and he stood for a moment 
with his face raised to the warmth of the sun. The party was a complete success. 
Everyone was talking about him. He hadn't felt so happy in years. 
 "I wonder if you're smiling for the same reason I am." 
 He turned. Sarah Brash, the owner of Continental Bio-Logic, and a recent former 
lover, stood beside him, beaming in a faintly unnatural way. She wore one of the 
patterned scarfs which Gray had made available to his guests; a variety of 
gene-tailored insects roamed the garden, and her particular choice of scarf 
attracted a bee whose painless sting contained a combination of a mild stimulant 
and an aphrodisiac. 
 He shrugged. "I doubt it." 
 She laughed and took his arm, then came still closer and whispered, "I've been 
thinking a very wicked thought." 
 He made no reply. He'd lost interest in Sarah a month ago, and the sight of her 
in this state did nothing to rekindle his desire. He had just broken off with 
her successor, but he had no wish to repeat himself. He was trying to think of 
something to say that would be offensive enough to drive her away, when she 
reached out and tenderly cupped his face in her small, warm hands. 
 Then she playfully seized hold of his sagging jowls, and said, in tones of mock 
aggrievement, "Don't you think it was terribly selfish of you, Daniel? You gave 
me your body . . . but you didn't give me your best one." 
Gray lay awake until after dawn. Vivid images of the evening's entertainment 
kept returning to him, and he found them difficult to banish. The Extra Sarah 
had chosen - C7, one of the twenty-four-year-olds - had been muzzled and tightly 
bound throughout, but it had made copious noises in its throat, and its eyes had 
been remarkably expressive. Gray had learnt, years ago, to keep a mask of mild 
amusement and boredom on his face, whatever he was feeling; to see fear, 
confusion, distress and ecstasy, nakedly displayed on features that, in spite of 
everything, were unmistakably his own, had been rather like a nightmare of 
losing control. 
 Of course, it had also been as inconsequential as a nightmare; he had not lost 
control for a moment, however much his animal look-alike had rolled its eyes, 
and moaned, and trembled. His appetite for sexual novelty aside, perhaps he had 
agreed to Sarah's request for that very reason: to see this primitive aspect of 
himself unleashed, without the least risk to his own equilibrium. 
 He decided to have the creature put down in the morning; he didn't want it 
corrupting its clone-brothers, and he couldn't be bothered arranging to have it 
kept in isolation. Extras had their sex drives substantially lowered by drugs, 
but not completely eliminated - that would have had too many physiological 
side-effects - and Gray had heard that it took just one clone who had discovered 
the possibilities, to trigger widespread masturbation and homosexual behaviour 
throughout the batch. Most owners would not have cared, but Gray wanted his 
Extras to be more than merely healthy; he wanted them to be innocent, he wanted 
them to be without sin. He was not a religious man, but he could still 
appreciate the emotional power of such concepts. When the time came for his 
brain to be moved into a younger body, he wanted to begin his new life with a 
sense of purification, a sense of rebirth. 
 However sophisticated his amorality, Gray freely admitted that at a certain 
level, inaccessible to reason, his indulgent life sickened him, as surely as it 
sickened his body. His family and his peers had always, unequivocally, 
encouraged him to seek pleasure, but perhaps he had been influenced - 
subconsciously and unwillingly - by ideas which still prevailed in other social 
strata. Since the late twentieth century, when - in affluent countries - 
cardiovascular disease and other "diseases of lifestyle" had become the major 
causes of death, the notion that health was a reward for virtue had acquired a 
level of acceptance unknown since the medieval plagues. A healthy lifestyle was 
not just pragmatic, it was righteous. A heart attack or a stroke, lung cancer or 
liver disease - not to mention AIDS - was clearly a punishment for some vice 
that the sufferer had chosen to pursue. Twenty-first century medicine had 
gradually weakened many of the causal links between lifestyle and life 
expectancy - and the advent of Extras would, for the very rich, soon sever them 
completely - but the outdated moral overtones persisted nonetheless. 
 In any case, however fervently Gray approved of his gluttonous, sedentary, 
drug-hazed, promiscuous life, a part of him felt guilty and unclean. He could 
not wipe out his past, nor did he wish to, but to discard his ravaged body and 
begin again in blameless flesh would be the perfect way to neutralise this 
irrational self-disgust. He would attend his own cremation, and watch his 
"sinful" corpse consigned to "hellfire"! Atheists, he decided, are not immune to 
religious metaphors; he had no doubt that the experience would be powerfully 
moving, liberating beyond belief. 
Three months later, Sarah Brash's lawyers informed him that she had conceived a 
child (which, naturally, she'd had transferred to an Extra surrogate), and that 
she cordially requested that Gray provide her with fifteen billion dollars to 
assist with the child's upbringing. 
 His first reaction was a mixture of irritation and amusement at his own 
naivety. He should have suspected that there'd been more to Sarah's request than 
sheer perversity. Her wealth was comparable to his own, but the prospect of 
living for centuries seemed to have made the rich greedier than ever; a fortune 
that sufficed for seven or eight decades was no longer enough. 
 On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter to court - and 
then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of winning. He'd had a 
vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility, at least 
on every occasion he'd had a sperm count measured. He couldn't prove that he 
hadn't had the operation temporarily reversed, since that could now be done with 
hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the Extra was the father of the 
child, and he could prove that. Although the Extras' brain damage resulted 
solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were 
genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA 
which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What's more, 
these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered 
by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray's biotechnology advisers 
assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice, 
virtually impossible. 
 Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the father, and hoped 
to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the upkeep of its human 
offspring. Gray's legal experts were substantially less reassuring than his 
geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadn't raped her - as she no doubt 
knew, he'd taped everything that had happened that night - but that wasn't the 
point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have deprived her of the 
right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also showed, Gray had known 
full well what was happening, and had clearly approved. That the late Extra had 
been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant. 
 After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray finally gave up 
worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years, and was unlikely 
to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his remaining Extras 
vasectomised - to prove to the courts, when the time came, that he was not 
irresponsible - and then he pushed the whole business out of his mind. 
 Almost. 
 A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while that he was 
dreaming, he saw the night's events re-enacted, except that this time it was he 
who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarah's hands and tongue, while the Extra 
stood back and watched. 
 But . . . had they merely swapped places, he wondered, or had they swapped 
bodies? His dreamer's point of view told him nothing - he saw all three bodies 
from the outside - but the lean young man who watched bore Gray's own 
characteristic jaded expression, and the middle-aged man in Sarah's embrace 
moaned and twitched and shuddered, exactly as the Extra had done. 
 Gray was elated. He still knew that he was only dreaming, but he couldn't 
suppress his delight at the inspired idea of keeping his old body alive with the 
Extra's brain, rather than consigning it to flames. What could be more 
controversial, more outrageous, than having not just his Extras, but his own 
discarded corpse, walking the grounds of his estate? He resolved at once to do 
this, to abandon his long-held desire for a symbolic cremation. His friends 
would be shocked into the purest admiration - as would the fanatics, in their 
own way. True infamy had proved elusive; people had talked about his last stunt 
for a week or two, and then forgotten it - but the midsummer party at which the 
guest of honour was Daniel Gray's old body would be remembered for the rest of 
his vastly prolonged life. 
Over the next few years, the medical research division of Gray's vast corporate 
empire began to make significant progress on the brain transplant problem. 
 Transplants between newborn Extras had been successful for decades. With 
identical genes, and having just emerged from the very same womb (or from the 
anatomically and biochemically indistinguishable wombs of two clone-sister 
Extras), any differences between donor and recipient were small enough to be 
overcome by a young, flexible brain. 
 However, older Extras - even those raised identically - had shown remarkable 
divergences in many neural structures, and whole-brain transplants between them 
had been found to result in paralysis, sensory dysfunction, and sometimes even 
death. Gray was no neuroscientist, but he could understand roughly what the 
problem was: Brain and body grow and change together throughout life, becoming 
increasingly reliant on each other's idiosyncrasies, in a feed-back process 
riddled with chaotic attractors - hence the unavoidable differences, even 
between clones. In the body of a human (or an Extra), there are thousands of 
sophisticated control systems which may include the brain, but are certainly not 
contained within it, involving everything from the spinal cord and the 
peripheral nervous system, to hormonal feedback loops, the immune system, and, 
ultimately, almost every organ in the body. Over time, all of these elements 
adapt in some degree to the particular demands placed upon them - and the brain 
grows to rely upon the specific characteristics that these external systems 
acquire. A brain transplant throws this complex interdependence into disarray - 
at least as badly as a massive stroke, or an extreme somatic trauma. 
 Sometimes, two or three years of extensive physiotherapy could enable the 
transplanted brain and body to adjust to each other - but only between clones of 
equal age and indistinguishable lifestyles. When the brain donor was a model of 
a likely human candidate - an intentionally overfed, under-exercised, 
drug-wrecked Extra, twenty or thirty years older than the body donor - the 
result was always death or coma. 
 The theoretical solution, if not the detailed means of achieving it, was 
obvious. Those portions of the brain responsible for motor control, the 
endocrine system, the low-level processing of sensory data, and so on, had to be 
retained in the body in which they had matured. Why struggle to make the donor 
brain adjust to the specifics of a new body, when that body's original brain 
already contained neural systems fine-tuned to perfection for the task? If the 
aim was to transplant memory and personality, why transplant anything else? 
 After many years of careful brain-function mapping, and the identification and 
synthesis of growth factors which could trigger mature neurons into sending 
forth axons across the boundaries of a graft, Gray's own team had been the first 
to try partial transplants. Gray watched tapes of the operations, and was both 
repelled and amused to see oddly shaped lumps of one Extra's brain being 
exchanged with the corresponding regions of another's; repelled by visceral 
instinct, but amused to see the seat of reason - even in a mere Extra - being 
treated like so much vegetable matter. 
 The forty-seventh partial transplant, between a sedentary, ailing 
fifty-year-old, and a fit, healthy twenty-year-old, was an unqualified success. 
After a mere two months of recuperation, both Extras were fully mobile, with all 
five senses completely unimpaired. 
 Had they swapped memories and "personalities"? Apparently, yes. Both had been 
observed by a team of psychologists for a year before the operation, and their 
behaviour extensively characterised, and both had been trained to perform 
different sets of tasks for rewards. After the selective brain swap, the learned 
tasks, and the observed behavioural idiosyncrasies, were found to have followed 
the transplanted tissue. Of course, eventually the younger, fitter Extra began 
to be affected by its newfound health, becoming substantially more active than 
it had been in its original body - and the Extra now in the older body soon 
showed signs of acquiescing to its ill-health. But regardless of any 
post-transplant adaption to their new bodies, the fact remained that the Extras' 
identities - such as they were - had been exchanged. 
 After a few dozen more Extra-Extra transplants, with virtually identical 
outcomes, the time came for the first human-Extra trials. 
 Gray's parents had both died years before (on the operating table - an almost 
inevitable outcome of their hundreds of non-essential transplants), but they had 
left him a valuable legacy; thirty years ago, their own scientists had 
(illegally) signed up fifty men and women in their early twenties, and Extras 
had been made for them. These volunteers had been well paid, but not so well 
paid that a far larger sum, withheld until after the actual transplant, would 
lose its appeal. Nobody had been coerced, and the seventeen who'd dropped out 
quietly had not been punished. An eighteenth had tried blackmail - even though 
she'd had no idea who was doing the experiment, let alone who was financing it - 
and had died in a tragic ferry disaster, along with three hundred and nine other 
people. Gray's people believed in assassinations with a low signal-to-noise 
ratio. 
 Of the thirty-two human-Extra transplants, twenty-nine were pronounced 
completely successful. As with the Extra-Extra trials, both bodies were soon 
fully functional, but now the humans in the younger bodies could - after a month 
or two of speech therapy - respond to detailed interrogation by experts, who 
declared that their memories and personalities were intact. 
 Gray wanted to speak to the volunteers in person, but knew that was too risky, 
so he contented himself with watching tapes of the interviews. The psychologists 
had their barrages of supposedly rigourous tests, but Gray preferred to listen 
to the less formal segments, when the volunteers spoke of their life histories, 
their political and religious beliefs, and so on - displaying at least as much 
consistency across the transplant as any person who is asked to discuss such 
matters on two separate occasions. 
 The three failures were difficult to characterise. They too learnt to use their 
new bodies, to walk and talk as proficiently as the others, but they were 
depressed, withdrawn, and uncooperative. No physical difference could be found - 
scans showed that their grafted tissue, and the residual portions of their 
Extra's brain, had forged just as many interconnecting pathways as the brains of 
the other volunteers. They seemed to be unhappy with a perfectly successful 
result - they seemed to have simply decided that they didn't want younger 
bodies, after all. 
 Gray was unconcerned; if these people were disposed to be ungrateful for their 
good fortune, that was a character defect that he knew he did not share. He 
would be utterly delighted to have a fresh young body to enjoy for a while - 
before setting out to wreck it, in the knowledge that, in a decade's time, he 
could take his pick from the next batch of Extras and start the whole process 
again. 
 There were "failures" amongst the Extras as well, but that was hardly 
surprising - the creatures had no way of even beginning to comprehend what had 
happened to them. Symptoms ranged from loss of appetite to extreme, 
uncontrollable violence; one Extra had even managed to batter itself to death on 
a concrete floor, before it could be tranquillised. Gray hoped his own Extra 
would turn out to be well-behaved - he wanted his old body to be clearly 
sub-human, but not utterly berserk - but it was not a critical factor, and he 
decided against diverting resources towards the problem. After all, it was the 
fate of his brain in the Extra's body that was absolutely crucial; success with 
the other half of the swap would be an entertaining bonus, but if it wasn't 
achieved, well, he could always revert to cremation. 
Gray scheduled and cancelled his transplant a dozen times. He was not in urgent 
need by any means - there was nothing currently wrong with him that required a 
single new organ, let alone an entire new body - but he desperately wanted to be 
first. The penniless volunteers didn't count - and that was why he hesitated: 
trials on humans from those lower social classes struck him as not much more 
reassuring than trials on Extras. Who was to say that a process that left a 
rough-hewn, culturally deficient personality intact, would preserve his own 
refined, complex sensibilities? Therein lay the dilemma: he would only feel safe 
if he knew that an equal - a rival - had undergone a transplant before him, in 
which case he would be deprived of all the glory of being a path-breaker. Vanity 
fought cowardice; it was a battle of titans. 
 It was the approach of Sarah Brash's court case that finally pushed him into 
making a decision. He didn't much care how the case itself went; the real battle 
would be for the best publicity; the media would determine who won and who lost, 
whatever the jury decided. As things stood, he looked like a naive fool, an 
easily manipulated voyeur, while Sarah came across as a smart operator. She'd 
shown initiative; he'd just let himself (or rather, his Extra) get screwed. He 
needed an edge, he needed a gimmick - something that would overshadow her petty 
scheming. If he swapped bodies with an Extra in time for the trial - becoming, 
officially, the first human to do so - nobody would waste time covering the 
obscure details of Sarah's side of the case. His mere presence in court would be 
a matter of planet-wide controversy; the legal definition of identity was still 
based on DNA fingerprinting and retinal patterns, with some clumsy exceptions 
thrown in to allow for gene therapy and retina transplants. The laws would soon 
be changed - he was arranging it - but as things stood, the subpoena would apply 
to his old body. He could just imagine sitting in the public gallery, 
unrecognised, while Sarah's lawyer tried to cross-examine the quivering, 
confused, wild-eyed Extra that his discarded "corpse" had become! Quite possibly 
he, or his lawyers, would end up being charged with contempt of court, but it 
would be worth it for the spectacle. 
 So, Gray inspected Batch D, which were now just over nineteen years old. They 
regarded him with their usual idiotic, friendly expression. He wondered, not for 
the first time, if any of the Extras ever realised that he was their 
clone-brother, too. They never seemed to respond to him any differently than 
they did to other humans - and yet a fraction of a gram of foetal brain tissue 
was all that had kept him from being one of them. Even Batch A, his 
"contemporaries", showed no sign of recognition. If he had stripped naked and 
mimicked their grunting sounds, would they have accepted him as an equal? He'd 
never felt inclined to find out; Extra "anthropology" was hardly something he 
wished to encourage, let alone participate in. But he decided he would return to 
visit Batch D in his new body; it would certainly be amusing to see just what 
they made of a clone-brother who vanished, then came back three months later 
with speech and clothes. 
 The clones were all in perfect health, and virtually indistinguishable. He 
finally chose one at random. The trainer examined the tattoo on the sole of its 
foot, and said, "D12, sir." 
 Gray nodded, and walked away. 
He spent the week before the transplant in a state of constant agitation. He 
knew exactly which drugs would have prevented this, but the medical team had 
advised him to stay clean, and he was too afraid to disobey them. 
 He watched D12 for hours, trying to distract himself with the supposedly 
thrilling knowledge that those clear eyes, that smooth skin, those taut muscles, 
would soon be his. The only trouble was, this began to seem a rather paltry 
reward for the risk he would be taking. Knowing all his life that this day would 
come, he'd learnt not to care at all what he looked like; by now, he was so used 
to his own appearance that he wasn't sure he especially wanted to be lean and 
muscular and rosy-cheeked. After all, if that really had been his fondest wish, 
he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite effective pharmaceuticals 
and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he had chosen not to use them. 
He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute billionaire, and his wealth had 
brought him more sexual partners than his new body would ever attract through 
its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor needed to change his appearance 
at all. 
 So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his 
parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new 
body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing 
individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole 
new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until 
he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off. 
 When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon 
asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have 
blinked - not one his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation, 
had he cancelled their laborious preparations a thousand times. 
 But he didn't say no. 
 As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of 
absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a 
grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his 
brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments 
of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that, 
given time, might change the course of civilisation. 
 He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to provide an image he 
could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had 
survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he'd bought last year. But he couldn't 
recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and 
drifted helplessly into darkness. 
When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he 
could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or 
might have been days - punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating, 
dreamless sleep - he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a 
white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one 
eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his 
gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn't move his head, or his eyes, 
he couldn't even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The 
light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony. 
After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he 
had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his 
memory. 
 Later he could hear, too, although there wasn't much to be heard; people came 
and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any 
case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people, 
or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body 
fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige. 
 When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and 
humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control, 
no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations 
from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head 
just lolled there, he couldn't watch what they were doing to him, and they made 
no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind, 
perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had 
not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been 
explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told 
himself to be patient. 
 When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort, 
into his field of view. 
 It was his arm, his old arm - not the Extra's. 
 He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out. 
 Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel 
the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra's life-support 
machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn't impossible - as his 
parents' deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably 
tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of 
his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds 
in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they 
would have if the transplant had gone ahead. 
 For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to 
the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace - he 
couldn't speak, he couldn't even gesture - and they paid no attention. How could 
his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of 
trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly 
where he'd started? 
 But when he'd calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren't incompetent 
at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone 
wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a 
positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction 
might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of 
experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still, 
eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of 
a triumph - personally, he could have done without the set-back, but the media 
would lap it up. 
 The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control, 
was restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and 
uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience 
familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several 
times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the 
joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he 
swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own 
body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all 
his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could he put this foolishness 
aside. 
 Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow 
impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as such, seemed 
to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around 
him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his 
brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the 
lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious 
regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they'd start soon; he was 
sick of this isolation. 
One day, he had a visitor - the first person he'd seen since the operation who 
was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man, 
dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair. 
 By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching, 
surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the doctors; 
every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling 
proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to 
appear; until now, he'd presumed that they were waiting until he was able to 
fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised how 
absurd that was - how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was 
outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to 
him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why 
did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject? 
 Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet 
he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter. 
 The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds 
staring into Gray's face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or 
hallucinating. The Extra's expression hovered between boredom and mild 
amusement, just as it had in the dream he'd had all those years ago. 
 The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course 
he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be? 
 Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all. 
 Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and 
personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain 
function studies that had localised identity had been correct, but incomplete - 
unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly 
duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain. 
 In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays. 
 One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand 
servants. And now, at last, immaculate health. 
 And the other? He had one thing only. 
 The knowledge of his helplessness. 
It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air 
was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry. 
 He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He 
knew he would never master speech, and he couldn't even manage to convey meaning 
in his gestures - the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available 
to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he 
could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he 
had simply thrown tantrums - refusing to eat, refusing to cooperate. Then he had 
recalled his own plans for his old body, in the event of such recalcitrance. 
Cremation. And realised that, in spite of everything, he didn't want to die. 
 He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasn't Daniel Gray, but a 
new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12 - but this was no 
comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told him he was 
Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic confirmation of his 
long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should he be happy that he'd 
also proved - if there'd ever been any doubt - that human consciousness was the 
most physical of things, a spongy grey mess that could be cut up like a 
starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy that the other 
Daniel Gray - without a doubt, the more complete Daniel Gray - had achieved his 
lifelong ambition? 
 The trainer yanked on his collar. 
 Meekly, he stepped onto the path. 
 The lush garden was crowded like never before - this was indeed the party of 
the decade - and as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud, and even to 
cheer. 
 He might have raised his arms in acknowledgement, but the thought did not occur 
to him. 



 


Originally appeared pp33-48, Eidolon Issue 02, August 1990.
Copyright © Greg Egan, 1990. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with kind permission of the author.