I was thinking this morning about a SF story I had read a few years ago.
The basic idea was that at birth everyone had a small recorder implanted in their brain. Then at around the age of eightteen, when your brain was fully grown but before it could start to decay from cell loss, you had your brain removed and replaced by this artifical brain which had all of the recordings played into it.
Most people thought this was a good idea because the artifical brains lasted forver without any fears of senility or Alzheimer’s. And they figured that because the artifical brain had all your memories you were exactly the same as you had been before.
But there was a small group of people who believed that when you had your real brain removed you died. Afterwards, there would be some artifical construct which had your memories but that wouldn’t be you.
Anyone recognize this story and able to tell me the title and author?
If you want to know where a science fiction, fantasy, or horror short story has appeared, the answer is always to go to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
In this case, you search the database for “Greg Egan”. You scroll down to the list of his short stories. You click on “The Safe-Deposit Box”. That brings you to a webpage which tells you that it appeared in the September 1990 issue of Asimov’s and in his collection Axiomatic.
