Axiomatic Read Online Free PDF Page B

real life, with the advent of the Hazzard Machines, the rates of death and injury through crime, natural disaster, industrial and transport accidents, and many kinds of disease, had certainly plummeted — but such events weren’t forecast and then paradoxically ‘avoided’; they simply, consistently, became increasingly rare in reports from the future — reports which proved to be as reliable as those from the past.

    A residue of ‘seemingly avoidable’ tragedies remains, though, and the people who know that they’re going to be involved react in different ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anesthesia) in somnambulist religions; a few succumb to the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the ROMs, and go kicking and screaming all the way.

    When I met up with Pria, on schedule, in the Casualty Department of St Vincent’s, he was a bloody, shivering mess. His arm was broken, as expected. He’d also been sodomised with a bottle and slashed on the arms and chest. I stood beside him in a daze, choking on the sour taste of all the stupid jokes I’d made, unable to shake the feeling that I was to blame. I’d lie to him, lie to myself- —

    As they pumped him full of painkillers and tranquillisers, he said, ‘Fuck it, James, I’m not letting on. I’m not going to say how bad it was; I’m not frightening that kid to death. And you’d better not, either.’ I nodded earnestly and swore that I wouldn’t; redundantly, of course, but the poor man was delirious.

    And when it was time to write up the day’s events, I dutifully regurgitated the light-hearted treatment of my friend’s assault that I’d memorised long before I even knew him.

    Dutifully? Or simply because the cycle was closed, because I had no choice but to write what I’d already read? Or . . . both? Ascribing motives is a strange business, but I’m sure it always has been. Knowing the future doesn’t mean we’ve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. Some philosophers still ramble on about ‘the loss of free will’ (I suppose they can’t help themselves), but I’ve never been able to find a meaningful definition of what they think this magical thing ever was. The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual’s —
    unique and complex — inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do — and what greater ‘freedom’ could anyone demand? If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain? (A popular theory — before quantum indeterminism was shown to be nothing but an artefact of the old time-asymmetric world-view.) Or some mystical invention called the soul . . . but then what, precisely, would govern its behaviour? Laws of metaphysics every bit as problematical as those of neurophysiology.

    I believe we’ve lost nothing; rather, we’ve gained the only freedom we ever lacked: who we are is now shaped by the future, as well as the past. Our lives resonate like plucked strings, standing waves formed by the collision of information flowing back and forth in time.

    Information — and disinformation.

    Alison looked over my shoulder at what I’d typed. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said.

    I replied by hitting the check key — a totally unnecessary facility, but that’s never stopped anyone using it. The text I’d just typed matched the received version precisely. (People have talked about automating the whole process — transmitting what must be transmitted, without any human intervention whatsoever
    — but nobody’s ever done it, so perhaps it’s impossible.)

    I hit save, burning the day’s entry on to the chip that would be transmitted shortly after my death, then said — numbly, idiotically (and inevitably) — ‘What if I’d warned him?’

    She shook her head. ‘Then you’d have warned him. It still would