Permutation City

Would that have worked, would that have helped? Some formula as inane as the voodoo of Confession, as glib as the dying words of some tortured soul finding Hollywood redemption?

He felt himself moving across the darkness. No tunnels of light; no light at all. Sedative dreams, not near- death hallucinations. Death was hours or days away; by then he’d surely be comatose again. One small mercy.

He waited. No revelations, no insights, no lightning bolts of blinding faith. Just blackness and uncertainty and fear.

+ + +

Thomas sat motionless in front of the terminal long after the recording had finished.

The clone had been right: the ritual had been pointless, misguided. He was and always would be the murderer; nothing could make him see himself as the innocent software child of the dead Thomas Riemann, unfairly burdened with the killer’s guilt. Not unless he redefined himself completely: edited his memories, rewrote his personality. Sculpted his mind into someone new.

In other words: died.

That was the choice. He had to live with what he was in its entirety, or create another person who’d inherit only part of what he’d been.

He laughed angrily and shook his head. “I’m not passing through the eye of any needle. I killed Anna. I killed Anna. That’s who I am.” He reached for the scar which defined him, and stroked it as if it were a talisman.

He sat for a while longer, reliving the night in Hamburg one more time, weeping with shame at what he’d done.

Then he unlocked the drinks cabinet and proceeded to make himself confident and optimistic. The ritual had been pointless—but if nothing else, it had rid him of the delusion that it might have been otherwise.

Some time later, he thought about the clone. Drifting into narcosis. Suffering a crudely modeled extrapolation of the disease which had killed the original. And then, at the moment of simulated death, taking on a new body, young and healthy—with a face plucked from a photograph from Christmas, 1985.

Resurrection—for an instant. No more than a formality. The script had frozen the young murderer, without even waking him.

And then?

Thomas was too far gone to agonize about it. He’d done what he’d done for the sake of the ritual. He’d delivered the clone into Durham’s hands, to grant it—like the flesh-and-blood it believed itself to be—the remote chance of another life, in a world beyond death, unknowable.

And if the whole thing had been a mistake, there was no way, now, to undo it.

PART TWO Permutation City

23

Maria woke from dreamless sleep, clearheaded, tranquil. She opened her eyes and looked around. The bed, the room, were unfamiliar; both were large and luxurious. Everything appeared unnaturally pristine, unsullied by human habitation, like an expensive hotel room. She was puzzled, but unperturbed; an explanation seemed to be on the verge of surfacing. She was wearing a nightdress she’d never seen before in her life.

She suddenly remembered the Landau Clinic. Chatting with the technicians. Borrowing the marker pen. The tour of the recovery rooms. The anesthetist asking her to count.

She pulled her hands out from beneath the sheet. Her left palm was blank; the comforting message she’d written there was gone. She felt the blood drain from her face.

Before she had a chance to think, Durham stepped into the room. For a moment, she was too shocked to make a sound—then she screamed at him, “What have you done to me? I’m the Copy, aren’t I? You’re running the Copy!” Trapped in the launch software, with two minutes to live?

Durham said quietly, “Yes, you’re the Copy.”

“How? How did you do it? How could I let it happen?” She stared at him, desperate for a reply, enraged more than anything else by the thought that they might both vanish before she’d heard the explanation, before she understood how he’d broken through all of her elaborate safeguards. But Durham just stood by the doorway looking bemused and embarrassed—as if he’d anticipated a reaction like this, but couldn’t quite credit it now that it was happening.

Finally, she said, “This isn’t the launch, is it? This is later. You’re another version. You stole me, you’re running me later.”

“I didn’t steal you.” He hesitated, then added cautiously, “I think you know exactly where you are. And I agonized about waking you—but I had to do it. There’s too much going on here that you’ll want to see, want to be a part of; I couldn’t let you sleep through it all. That would have been unforgivable.”

Maria disregarded everything he’d said. “You kept my scan file after the launch. You duplicated it, somehow.”

“No. The only place your scan file data ever went was the Garden-of-Eden configuration. As agreed. And now you’re in Permutation City. In the TVC universe—now commonly known as Elysium. Running on nothing but its own laws.”

Maria sat up in bed slowly, bringing her knees up to her chest, trying to accept the situation without panicking, without falling apart. Durham was insane, unpredictable. Dangerous. When was she going to get that into her skull? In the flesh, she could probably have broken his fucking neck if she had to, to defend herself—but if he controlled this environment, she was powerless: he could rape her, torture her, do anything at all. The very idea of him attacking her still seemed ludicrous—but she couldn’t rely on the way he’d treated her in the past to count for anything. He was a liar and a kidnapper. She didn’t know him at all.

Right now, though, he was being as civilized as ever; he seemed intent on keeping up the charade. She was afraid to test this veneer of hospitality—but she forced herself to say evenly, “I want to use a terminal.”

Durham gestured at the space above the bed, and a terminal appeared. Maria’s heart sank; she realized that she’d been hanging on to the slender hope that she might have been human. And that was still possible. Durham himself had once been memory-wiped and fooled into thinking he was a Copy, when he was merely a visitor. Or at least he’d claimed that it had happened, in another world.

She tried half a dozen numbers, starting with Francesca’s, ending with Aden’s. The terminal declared them all invalid. She couldn’t bring herself to try her own. Durham watched in silence. He seemed to be caught between genuine sympathy and a kind of clinical fascination—as if an attempt to make a few phone calls cast doubt on her sanity; as if she was engaged in some bizarre, psychotic behavior worthy of the closest scrutiny: peering behind a mirror in search of the objects seen in the reflection; talking back to a television program… or making calls on a toy phone.

Maria pushed the floating machine away angrily; it moved easily, but came to a halt as soon as she took her hands off it. Patchwork VR and its physics-of-convenience seemed like the final insult.

She said, “Do you think I’m stupid? What does a dummy terminal prove?”

“Nothing. So why don’t you apply your own criteria?” He said, “Central computer,” and the terminal flashed up an icon-studded menu, headed permutation city computing facility. “Not many people use this interface, these days; it’s the original version, designed before the launch. But it still plugs you into as much computing power as the latest co-personality links.”

He showed Maria a text file. She recognized it immediately; it was a program she’d written herself, to solve a large, intentionally difficult, set of Diophantine equations. The output of this program was the key they’d agreed upon to unlock Durham’s access to the other Copies, “after” the launch.

He ran it. It spat out its results immediately: a screenful of numbers, the smallest of which was twenty digits long. On any real-world computer, it should have taken years.