Blog & White

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A collection of short stories by Greg Egan.

• The Infinite Assassin: the identity crisis of an assassin that exists in an uncountable number of parallel universes.
• The Hundred-Light-Year Diary: people know what is going to happen because they can read the diaries they will write in the future, until history is too horrible to write about truthfully.
• Eugene: future parents design their child to be a genius, but their child's message from the future convinces them not to do it.
• The Caress: a cop discovers a woman-panther chimera, and is then abducted and surgically altered by a billionaire to play for a few seconds in the living re-creation of a famous painting containing the chimera and a man.
• Blood Sisters: twin sisters get the same disease and one dies because she's given a placebo: pharmaceutical research is more efficient when done on the whole population.
• Axiomatic: neural implants allow you to chose what you want to believe; the narrator stops believing that murder is never justified to kill his wife's murderer.
• The Safe-Deposit Box: the narrator regularly moves from one person's body to another; he discovers that his original body is now devoid of mind after an abusive medical experiment.
• Seeing: after having been attacked, the narrator's subjective point of view (as produced by his brain)is to see his body from the outside.
• A Kidnapping: the narrator gets a ransom demand for his wife who has not actually been kidnapped; the victim is a simulated, conscious version of his wife.
• Learning to Be Me: everybody has a computer in their brain learning to be them, before replacing the brain's function; the narrator is the computer who got accidentally out of sync with its brain and now has a separate consciousness.
• The Moat: while a scientist works on replacing the DNA bases with artificial ones to isolate humans from pathogens, isolationists want to shelter Australia from climate refugees.
• The Walk: the executioner for a criminal organization walks his victim to his isolated place of execution, but spares him and commits suicide after having convinced him to use a neural implant to share his belief in a form of reincarnation (based on the necessary repetition of the quantum states of the finite number of particles in an infinite universe).
• The Cutie: the narrator gets Cutie, a process to get a baby that will barely develop for four years after birth and then die; but he got a cheap knock-off who actually learns to talk and walk but will still die at age four.
• Into Darkness: the narrator is a volunteer who enters the wormhole that randomly reappears in the city, to fetch people who get stuck, as moving backwards is impossible.
• Appropriate Love: when her husband needs a new body after a terrible accident, his wife accepts (constrained by the insurance policy) to carry his brain in her womb for two years until the new body is grown.
• The Moral Virologist: a devout christian creates a sexually transmitted virus that defeats condoms and quickly kills people having homosexual relationships or sex with a second partner; when he discovers that it would be fatal to babies being breast-fed longer than 4 weeks, that becomes a sin as well.
• Closer: a couple tries all forms of body-mind swapping, as the man wants to “really know” his partner; after performing a temporary merge of their minds they separate because for knowing each other too well.
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies: a phenomenon made people of a city permeable to the beliefs of those in close proximity, creating isolated groups sharing a given belief; some people try to navigate between them, trying not to get caught and find a way out of the city, but someone points out that they too share a common belief.

© Amazon.fr

Yoko, Khâny et leurs amis se rendent sur une base vinéenne en orbite autour de Saturne pour comprendre ce qui est arrivé à une ancienne expédition vinéenne chargée de construire une cité spatiale sur une comète morte, elle aussi orbitant Saturne, et laquelle émet un message de détresse. Dansa la partie avant un vaisseau naufragé sur la comète, Yoko et Khâny découvrent Ryâ et son jumeau androïde. Ils affirment avoir été maltraités par les vinéens. Yoko découvre ensuite la partie arrière du vaisseau, dans laquelle un créature faite d'énergie plasmique révèle avoir crée Ryâ pour prendre le contrôle de la galaxie mais que cette dernière s'est enfuie ; la créature attaque ensuite Yoko, qui ne doit son salut qu'à l'arrivée de ses amis. Khâny décide d'emmener Ryâ et son frère, mais de cacher leur existence et les plans des anciens vinéens aux vinéens modernes. En quittant Saturne, leur vaisseau est arrêté par un conteneur spatiale géré par des androïdes chargés de veiller sur des surdouées en hibernation que Khâny avait découvertes, dont elle seule connaissait l'existence et à qui elle comptait confier Ryâ et son frère. Elle se laisse convaincre par Yoko de toutes les emmener sur Terre et de les cacher dans le temple des immortels.