Helen Simpson, Robert Nozick, and the Unanswered Spores

The second paragraph of Helen Simpson's story "Scan," in the Summer 2007 Granta (pg 86):

Perhaps this was what it was like, being born, the claustrophobic tunnel; you were being squeezed by the passage walls themselves, with no inkling of the future but that far gleam of light. What about before you were born, though; before you were conceived? Well, you can't remember it so it can't have been too bad, she told herself; presumably it will be the same after you've died. The trouble with this idea was, before you've been born you've not been you; but once you've been alive you definitely have been you; and the idea of the extinction of the you that has definitely existed is quite different from the idea of your non-existence before you did exist. Why were they stuck here? Had the train broken down?

At last, a reply to Nozick (bear with me, see below), although it does not answer the Question of the Spores. I've treated this before in ancient, pre-blog software blogging (why wasn't I smart enough to start a blog company back then?), and on the Usenet before that, but here we go again:

From Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions, Cambridge Univ Press, 1979, from a footnote to a chapter entitled "Death."

...I suspect that something essential is omitted from the account of the badness of death by an analysis which treats it as a deprivation of possibilities. My suspicion is supported by the following suggestion of Robert Nozick. We could imagine discovering that people developed from individual spores that had existed indefinitely far in advance of their birth. In this fantasy, birth never occurs naturally more than one hundred years before the permanent end of the spore's existence. But then we discover a way to trigger the premature hatching of these spores, and people are born who have thousands of years of active life before them. Given such a situation, it would be possible to imagine oneself having come into existence thousands of years previously. If we put aside the question whether this would really be the same person, even given the identity of the spore, then the consequence appears to be that a person's birth at a given time could deprive him of many earlier years of possible life. Now while it would be cause for regret that one had been deprived of all those possible years of life by being born too late, the feeling would differ from that which many people have about death. I conclude that something about the future prospect of permanent nothingness is not captured by the analysis in terms of denied possibilities. If so, then Lucretius's argument [(Thane): that because being dead is like being not born and you dont regret when you weren't born, you shouldn't think being dead is so bad, either] still awaits an answer....

So—does Simpson answer the Question of the Spores?

[I'm still confused.]