Permutation City

Then something broke through her paralysis, and she rose to her feet and staggered around the room, picking up the clothes they’d scattered on the floor just hours before.

She found herself fully dressed, slumped in a corner of the living room, reciting a litany of excuses in her head. She’d never humored him. She’d argued against his insane beliefs at every opportunity. How could she have saved him? By walking out on the project? That would have changed nothing. By trying to get him committed? His doctors had already pronounced him cured.

The worst thing she’d done was stand by and let him shut down his own Copy.

And there was still a chance—

She sprang to her feet, rushed over to the nearest terminal, and logged back on to the project’s JSN account.

But Durham’s scan file was gone, deleted as meticulously, as irreversibly, as her own. The audit records showed no sign that the data had been preserved elsewhere; like her own file, it had even been flagged explicitly for exclusion from the JSN’s automatic hourly backups. The only place the data had been reproduced had been inside the Garden-of-Eden configuration itself—and every trace of that structure had been obliterated.

She sat at the terminal, replaying the file which showed Durham’s Copy conducting his experiments: testing the laws of his universe, rushing joyfully toward… what? The unheralded, inexplicable annihilation of everything he was in the process of establishing as the basis for his own existence?

And now his corpse lay in the bathroom, dead by his own hands, on his own terms; victim of his own seamless logic.

Maria buried her face in her hands. She wanted to believe that the two deaths were not the same. She wanted to believe that Durham had been right, all along. What had the JSN computers in Tokyo and Seoul meant to the Copy? No experiment performed within the TVC universe could ever have proved or disproved the existence of those machines. They were as irrelevant—to him—as Francesca’s ludicrous God Who Makes No Difference.

So how could they have destroyed him? How could he be dead?

There were quick, heavy footsteps outside, then a pounding on the door. Maria went to open it.

She wanted to believe, but she couldn’t.

22 (Remit not paucity) JUNE 2051

Thomas prepared himself to witness a death.

The flesh-and-blood Riemann was the man who’d killed Anna—not the Copy who’d inherited the killer’s memories. And the flesh-and-blood Riemann should have had the opportunity to reflect on that, before dying. He should have had a chance to accept his guilt, to accept his mortality. And to absolve his successor.

That hadn’t been allowed to happen.

But it wasn’t too late, even now. A software clone could still do it for him—believing itself to be flesh and blood. Revealing what the mortal, human self would have done, if only it had known that it was dying.

Thomas had found a suitable picture in a photo album—old chemical hardcopy images which he’d had digitized and restored soon after the onset of his final illness. Christmas, 1985: his mother, his father, his sister Karin and himself, gathered outside the family home, dazzled by the winter sunshine. Karin, gentle and shy, had died of lymphoma before the turn of the century. His parents had both survived into their nineties, showing every sign of achieving immortality by sheer force of will—but they’d died before scanning technology was perfected, having scorned Thomas’s suggestion of cryonic preservation. “I have no intention,” his father had explained curtly, “of doing to myself what nouveau riche Americans have done to their pets.” The young man in the photograph didn’t look much like the image Thomas would have conjured up by closing his eyes and struggling to remember—but the expression on his face, captured in transition from haunted to smug, rang true. Half afraid that the camera would reveal his secret; half daring it to try.

Thomas had kept copies of his deathbed scan file—off-line, in vaults in Geneva and New York—with no explicit purpose in mind, other than the vaguest notion that if something went irreparably wrong with his model, and the source of the prolem—a slow virus, a subtle programming error—rendered all of his snapshots suspect, starting life again with no memories since 2045 would be better than nothing.

Having assembled the necessary elements, he’d scripted the whole scenario in advance and let it run— without observing the results. Then he’d frozen the clone and sent it to Durham at the last possible moment— without giving himself a chance to back out, or, worse, to decide that he’d botched the first attempt, and to try again.

Now he was ready to discover what he’d done, to view the fait accompli. Seated in the library—with the drinks cabinet locked—he gestured to the terminal to begin.

The old man in the bed looked much worse than Thomas had expected: sunken-eyed, jaundiced and nearly bald. (So much for the honesty of his own appearance, the “minimal” changes he’d made to render himself presentable.) His chest was furrowed with scars, criss-crossed by a grid of electrodes; his skull was capped with a similar mesh. A pump suspended beside the bed fed a needle in his right arm. The clone was sedated by a crudely modeled synthetic opiate flowing into his crudely modeled bloodstream, just as Thomas’s original had been sedated by the real thing, from the time of the scan until his death three days later.

In this replay, though, the narcotic was scheduled to undergo a sudden drop in concentration—for no physically plausible reason, but none was required. A graph in a corner of the screen plotted the decline.

Thomas watched, sick with anxiety, feverish with hope. This—at last—was the ritual which he’d always believed might have cured him.

The old man attained consciousness, without opening his eyes; the EEG waveforms meant nothing to Thomas, but the software monitoring the simulation had flagged the event with a subtitle. Further text followed: 

The anesthetic still hasn’t taken. Can’t they get anything right? [Garbled verbalization.] The scan can’t be over. I can’t be the Copy yet. The Copy will wake with a clear head, seated in the library, premodified to feel no disorientation. So why am I awake?

The old man opened his eyes.

Thomas shouted, “Freeze!” He was sweating, and nauseous, but he made no move to banish the unnecessary symptoms. He wanted catharsis, didn’t he? Wasn’t that the whole point? The subtitles gave only a crude hint of what the clone was experiencing. Much greater clarity was available; the recording included traces from key neural pathways. If he wanted to, he could read the clone’s mind.

He said, “Let me know what he’s thinking, what he’s going through.” Nothing happened. He clenched his fists and whispered, “Restart.”

The library vanished; he was flat on his back in the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling, dazed. He looked down and saw the cluster of monitors beside him, the wires on his chest. The motion of his eyes and head was wrong—intelligible, but distressingly out of synch with his intentions. He felt fearful and disoriented—but he wasn’t sure how much of that was his own reaction and how much belonged to the clone. Thomas shook his own head in panic, and the library—and his body—returned.

He stopped the playback, and reconsidered.

He could break free any time he wanted to. He was only an observer. There was nothing to fear.

Fighting down a sense of suffocation, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the recording.

+ + +

He looked around the room groggily. He wasn’t the Copy—that much was certain. And this wasn’t any part of