SubStance

"Exhalation," a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang, virtuoso of the genre and the form, begins with a truism, refuted: "It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end" (37). The narrator's promise is so alluring—knowledge of life's origin, knowledge of its expiration, and knowledge of the relation between the two—that we may be forgiven for overlooking the parenthetical. Argon amounts to less than one percent of the air breathed within Earth's atmosphere. The narrator specifies that "others call [air] argon," others who may or may not live where the narrator does. In any case, Chiang has transported us elsewhere.

Where, exactly? In a world governed by parameters and constraints distinct from Earth's, yet recognizable to us—which is to say that "Exhalation" is a thought experiment. What if, we are invited to contemplate, inhalation and exhalation were distinct processes, rather than inseparable phases of an autonomic, autopoietic, and ecological cycle? Chiang severs inhalation from bodies, rendering it strictly mechanical. Exhalation, by contrast, remains the province of bodies; individuals partake in this activity whatever else they may be doing. The disembodied inhale literalizes resource extraction, and the embodied exhale a process of extinction coextensive with the achievement of a certain equilibrium or homeostasis. Perhaps unexpectedly, the extinctive exhale holds the key to a future that deflates operas of total destruction and annihilation. "Exhalation," I propose, unlocks a horizon of human persistence contingent on Man's exhaustion.

All lungs in "Exhalation" are artificial. They at least appear so to us; within the world of the story, they are not seen as replicas of "actual" organs. Every day, all members of the humanoid species to [End Page 22] which the narrator belongs head to filling stations to remove pairs of empty lungs from their chests and replace them with new ones "heavy with air" (Chiang 37). The characters are supplied air that has already been "inhaled"—aspirated from "the reservoir of air deep underground, the great lung of the world, the source of all our nourishment"—and they spend the day exhaling it (38). Breathing is closely associated with social exchanges and transactions in Chiang's world as it is on Earth, although for distinct reasons. Breathing as it is practiced within Earth's atmosphere is shorthand for being in relation: to breathe in and out is to incorporate and process alterity, and to breathe the same air as others is to share conditions of experience, if not necessarily experience itself. In "Exhalation," the filling stations operate as agoras, facilitating social interactions that are not so directly tied to respiration. "We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our homes," the narrator explains, "but when one is alone, the act of opening one's chest and replacing one's lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others, however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure" (38). Nodding, knowingly or not, to breathing as it occurs on Earth with a subordinate clause, the narrator muses, "While this perhaps does not constitute air sharing in the strictest sense, there is camaraderie derived from the awareness that all our air comes from the same source" (38).

It is at a filling station that the narrator hears the rumor that precipitates the story's events. At noon on the first day of the year, the district's public crier customarily recites a passage of verse—a ritual calibrated to last exactly one hour. For the first time this year, the turret clock struck the hour before the crier had finished. The hypothesis that the clock's mechanism was defective is invalidated by news of a similar incident in a separate district where the central clock uses a different mechanism, marking the hours by the flow of mercury. Is time out of joint? No: bodies are.

The...