Permutation City

With his eyes still closed, he gripped the release lever.

I’m nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.

His fingernails needed cutting; they dug painfully into the skin of his palm.

Had he never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking? Maybe he had—but a dream was not a life. If the only way he could “reclaim” his body, “reclaim” his world, was to wake and forget—

He pulled the lever.

After a few seconds, he emitted a constricted sob—a sound more of confusion than any kind of emotion—and opened his eyes.

The lever had come away in his hand.

He stared dumbly at this metaphor for… what? A bug in the termination software? Some kind of hardware glitch?

Feeling—at last—truly dreamlike, he unstrapped the parachute, and unfastened the neatly packaged bundle.

Inside, there was no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever else there might plausibly have been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.

Dear Paul,

The night after the scan was completed, I looked back over the whole preparatory stage of the project, and did a great deal of soul-searching. And I came to the conclusion that—right up to the very last moment—my attitude had been poisoned with ambivalence.

With hindsight, I realized just how foolish my qualms were—but that was too late for you. I couldn’t afford to ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?

This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked down someone who could make a few alterations to the virtual-environment utilities. I know that wasn’t strictly legal… but you know how important it is to me that you—that we—succeed this time.

I trust you’ll understand, and I’m confident that you’ll accept the situation with dignity and equanimity.

Best wishes,

Paul

He sank to his knees, still holding the note, staring at it with disbelief. I can’t have done this. I can’t have been so callous.

No?

He could never have done it to anyone else. He was sure of that. He wasn’t a monster, a torturer, a sadist.

And he would never have gone ahead himself without the bale-out option as a last resort. Between his ludicrous fantasies of stoicism, and the sanity-preserving cop-out of relating only to the flesh-and-blood version, he must have had moments of clarity when the bottom line had been: If it’s that bad, I can always put an end to it.

But as for making a Copy, and then—once its future was no longer his future, no longer anything for him to fear—taking away its power to escape… and rationalizing this hijacking as nothing more than an over-literal act of self-control…

It rang so true that he hung his head in shame.

Then he dropped the note, raised his head, and bellowed with all the strength in his non-existent lungs: “DURHAM! YOU PRICK!”

+ + +

Paul thought about smashing furniture. Instead, he took a long, hot shower. In part, to calm himself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic calculations would annoy the cheapskate no end. He scrutinized the droplets and rivulets of water on his skin, searching for some small but visible anomaly at the boundary between his body—computed down to subcellular resolution—and the rest of the simulation, which was modelled much more crudely. If there were any discrepancies, though, they were too subtle to detect.

He dressed, and ate a late breakfast, shrugging off the surrender to normality. What was he meant to do? Go on a hunger strike? Walk around naked, smeared in excrement? He was ravenous, having fasted before the scan, and the kitchen was stocked with a—literally—inexhaustible supply of provisions. The muesli tasted exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast, but he knew there was a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and aroma. The detailed effects of chewing, and the actions of saliva, were being faked from a patchwork of empirical rules, not generated from first principles; there were no individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by enzymes—just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated with each microscopic “parcel” of saliva. Eventually, these would lead to plausible increases in the concentrations of amino acids, various carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to humble sodium and chloride ions, in similar “parcels” of gastric juices… which in turn would act as input data to the models of his intestinal villus cells. From there, into the bloodstream.

Urine and feces production were optional—some Copies wished to retain every possible aspect of corporeal life—but Paul had chosen to do without. (So much for smearing himself in excrement.) His bodily wastes would be magicked out of existence long before reaching bladder or bowel. Ignored out of existence; passively annihilated. All that it took to destroy something, here, was to fail to keep track of it.

Coffee made him feel alert, but also slightly detached—as always. Neurons were modeled in the greatest detail, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites had been present on each individual neuron in his original’s brain at the time of the scan, his own model-of-a-brain incorporated every one of them—in a simplified, but functionally equivalent, form.

And the physical reality behind it all? A cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal, configured as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred identical units in a basement vault… somewhere on the planet. Paul didn’t even know what city he was in; the scan had been made in Sydney, but the model’s implementation would have been contracted out by the local node to the lowest bidder at the time.

He took a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and made a shallow cut across his left forearm. He flicked a few drops of blood onto the sink—and wondered exactly which software was now responsible for the stuff. Would the blood cells die off slowly—or had they already been surren-dered to the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too unsophisticated to represent them, let alone keep them “alive”?

If he tried to slit his wrists, when exactly would Durham intervene? He gazed at his distorted reflection in the blade. Most likely, his original would let him die, and then run the whole model again from scratch, simply leaving out the knife. He’d rerun all the earlier Copies hundreds of times, tampering with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap trick, some distraction which would keep them from wanting to bale out. It was a measure of sheer stubbornness that it had taken him so long to admit defeat and rewrite the rules.

Paul put down the knife. He didn’t want to perform that experiment. Not yet.

+ + +

Outside his own apartment, everything was slightly less than convincing; the architecture of the building was reproduced faithfully enough, down to the ugly plastic potted plants, but every corridor was deserted, and every door to every other apartment was sealed shut—concealing, literally, nothing. He kicked one door, as hard as he could; the wood seemed to give slightly, but when he examined the surface, the paint wasn’t even marked. The model would admit to no damage here, and the laws of physics could screw themselves.

There were pedestrians and cyclists on the street—all purely recorded. They were solid rather than ghostly, but it was an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they were like infinitely strong, infinitely disinterested robots. Paul hitched a ride on one frail old woman’s back for a while; she carried him down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all felt the same: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.

The street wasn’t meant to serve as anything but three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies interacted with each other, they often used cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative crowds. Plazas, parks, open-air cafes; all very reassuring, no doubt, when you were fighting off a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. Copies