“Think fast. Think fast.”
He knelt over her, one knee to either side, took her face in his hands, then closed his eyes. He brought her head forward, then slammed it back against the wall. Five times. Then he held his fingers near her nostrils, without opening his eyes. He felt no exhalation.
Thomas was in his Frankfurt apartment, a month after the murder, dreaming. Anna stood by the bed. He reached out from beneath the blankets into the darkness, eyes closed. She took his hand in hers. With her other hand, she stroked the scar on his forearm tenderly, then she pushed one finger easily through his brittle skin and liquefying flesh. He thrashed against the sheets, but she wouldn’t let go; she dug with her fingers until she was gripping naked bone. When she snapped the ulna and radius, he convulsed with pain and ejaculated suddenly, everything his corrupt body contained departing in a single stream: dark clotted blood, maggots, pus, excrement.
Thomas was in his suburban mansion, sitting naked on the floor at the end of the hallway, startled. He shifted his right hand, and realized he was clutching a small vegetable knife. And he remembered why.
There were seven faint pink scars on his abdomen, seven digits, still legible, right-way-up as he gazed down at them: 1053901. He set to work recarving the first six.
He didn’t trust the clocks. The clocks lied. And although every incision he made in his skin healed perfectly, given time, for a long time it seemed he had managed to repair the numbers before they faded. He didn’t know what they measured, except their own steady ascent, but they seemed like a touchstone of something approaching sanity.
He recut the final digit as a two, then licked his fingers and wiped the blood away. At first it seeped back, but after five or six repetitions, the fresh wound stood clean and red against his pale skin. He pronounced the number several times. “One million, fifty three thousand, nine hundred and two.”
Thomas climbed to his feet and walked down the hall. His body knew only the time he carved upon it; he never felt tired, or hungry, or even unclean—he could sleep or not sleep, eat or not eat, wash or not wash; it made no perceptible difference. His hair and fingernails never grew. His face never aged.
He stopped outside the library. He believed he’d methodically torn all the books to shreds several times, but on each occasion the debris had been cleared away and the books replaced, in his absence.
He walked into the room. He glanced at the terminal in the corner, the object of his deepest loathing; he’d never been able to damage it—smash, chip, bend or even scratch any part of its visible form. Indestructible or not, it had never functioned.
He wandered from shelf to shelf, but he’d read every book a dozen or more times. They’d all become meaningless. The library was well-stocked, and he’d studied the sacred texts of every faith; those few which, by some stretch of poetic licence, might have been said to describe his condition offered no prospect for changing it. In the distant past, he’d undergone a hundred feverish conversions; he’d ranted to every deity which humanity had ever postulated. If he’d stumbled on the one which existed—the one responsible for his damnation—his pleas had been to no avail.
The one thing he’d never expected after death was uncertainty. It had worried him deeply, at first: being cast into Hell, without so much as a glimpse of Heaven to taunt him, and a smug I-told-you-so from the faithful on their way up—let alone a formal trial before the God of his childhood, in which every doctrinal assertion he’d ever doubted was proclaimed as Absolute Truth, and every theological debate was resolved, once and for all.
But he’d since decided that if his condition was eternal and irreversible, it hardly mattered what the God who’d made it so was named.
Thomas sat cross-legged on the floor of the library, and tried to empty his mind.
“Think fast. Think fast.”
Anna lay before him, bleeding and unconscious. Time slowed down. The moment he was approaching seemed impossible to face, impossible to traverse yet again—but he inched toward it, and he knew that he had no power to turn away.
He’d come to understand that all the visions of his own decay and mutilation were nothing but elaborate gestures of self-loathing. When his flesh was torn from his body it was a distraction—almost a relief. His suffering did not illuminate his crime; it drowned his thoughts in an anesthetic haze. It was a fantasy of power, a fantasy of retribution.
But here there was no balm of self-righteous pain, no pretence that his baroque tortures were working some alchemy of justice. He knelt over Anna, and could not weep, could not flinch, could not blind himself to the measure of what he’d done.
He might have called an ambulance. He might have saved her life. It would have taken so little strength, so little courage, so little love, that he could not imagine how a human being could have failed to possess enough of each, and still walk the Earth.
But he had. He had.
So he brought her head forward, and slammed it against the wall.
26
After a week as Durham’s guest, Maria went looking for a place of her own.
Her anger had faded, the numbness of shock had faded, the fifth or sixth wave of disbelief had finally lifted. But she still felt almost paralyzed by the strangeness of the truths she’d been forced to accept: her exile from the universe of flesh-and-blood humanity; the impossible existence of Elysium; intelligent life in the Autoverse. She couldn’t begin to make sense of any of these things until she had a fixed point to stand on.
She had refused to pack any luggage to accompany her scan file into the next life; it would have felt like she was humoring Durham if she’d made the slightest concession to the needs of a Copy who she’d believed would never run. No environments, no furniture, no clothes; no photographs, no diaries, no scanned memorabilia. No VR duplicate of her old narrow terrace to make her feel at home. She might have set about reconstructing it from memory, detail by detail—or let architectural software pluck a perfect imitation straight out of her brain—but she didn’t feel strong enough to deal with the emotional contradictions: the tug of the old world, the taint of self- deception. Instead, she decided to choose one of the pre-defined apartments in the City itself.
Durham assured her that nobody would begrudge her the use of public resources. “Of course, you could copy the City into your own territory and run a private version at your own expense—defeating the whole point. This is the one environment in all of Elysium which comes close to being a
So Permutation City offered her its disingenuous, municipally sanctioned, quasi-objective presence for free, while her model-of-a-body ran on processors in her own territory—and the two systems, by exchanging data, contrived her experience of walking the streets, entering the sleek metallic buildings, and exploring the empty apartments which might have smelled of paint, but didn’t. She felt nervous on her own, so Durham came with her, solicitous and apologetic as ever. His regret seemed sincere on one level—he wasn’t indifferent to the pain he’d caused her—but beneath that there didn’t seem to be much doubt: he clearly expected to be wholly forgiven for waking her, sooner or later.
She asked him, “How does it feel, being seven thousand years old?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how I want it to feel.”
She found a place in the northeast quadrant, halfway between the central tower and the City’s rim. From the bedroom, she could see the mountains in the east, the glistening waterfall, a distant patch of forest. There were better views available, but this one seemed right; anything more spectacular would have made her feel self- conscious.
Durham showed her how to claim residency: a brief dialogue with the apartment software. He said, “You’re the only Elysian in this tower, so you can program all your neighbors any way you like.”
