Closer
Egan, Greg. "Closer." Strange Plasma #5 (1992). Eidolon 9 (Winter 1992). Cybersex anthology (which we have used for annotation below). For translations, prize, full set of "tags" (keyword description), and other reprints, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of February 2023 on-line here.[1]
Tags on ISFDb as of 11 February 2023 include "solipsism (1), merged minds (1), in other body experience (1), body switching (1), body switch (1), body swap (1), brain implant."
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Title: "Closer" can be — and here definitely is (pp. 369, 371) — an adjective, the comparative for "close" as "near" and meaning "nearer," which works for the story's theme of people getting sexually close and closer. The heteronym noun "closer" can refer to someone who closes a deal or a reliable relief pitcher in baseball, or, as "file closer" in formal military usage "a non-commissioned officer who marches behind troops in line, or on the flank when in column, to assist in preserving the formation and alinement"[2] but which the Initial Compiler recalls from some fiction on World War I as a slang term for a non-commissioned officer or officer who'd follow troops advancing across no-man's-land to shoot anyone refusing to advance.[3] Perhaps there should be an initial hesitation over which "closer" for readers to hear when getting into the story.
Opening and Closing Line (given its own paragraph): "Nobody wants to spend eternity alone." Key line from a key character: "The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person — any more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect? ¶ If not, I was alone" (p. 358). The rest of the story is working out that issue primarily through sex, in a future world where at the age of 18 people's brains can be "removed and discarded, and control of" their bodies "handed over to" a "'jewel' — the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate" one's "brain, down to the level of individual neurons" (p. 359). And people can be what has been called «a-mortal»: living out lives of indefinite length, which can be overstated as, "eternity."
See "Closer" for a high concentration of issues relevant here: such as have been formulated elsewhere, "When Am I Still Me?" (or, "After changes we are more or less the same" — really?), and, as mostly throw-away lines in rapid succession:
"the seeding of Venus with terraforming nanomachines" "a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots" "a concert of interactive computerized improvisations" (p. 360).
Plus, as indicated by the tags mentioned above: technologies for switching and sharing bodies, replacement bodies and consciousness transfer thereinto, high-tech wiring and cybernetically-mediated sharing of experiences leading to a robot-mediated sharing of consciousness ... etc. In all cases the technological marvels are subordinate to questions of gender, identify, and relations of "I" and "Other" and if to be other than alone one needs Others with whom to interact but never totally know. (Possibly in the deep background here: Martin Buber, I and Thou [Ich und Du 1923].)[4]
Cf. and contrast The Ware Tetralogy and a number of works cross listed there.
RDE, finishing, 11Feb23