Permutation City

if not quite stretching to matters like disclosing details of his personal psychiatric history, or suggesting metaphysical gedanken experiments to his clients. Or indeed, wasting time on Copies obviously far too secure to need Gryphon's services.

Thomas leaned back from the terminal. It was almost too simple: Durham had fooled his doctors into believing that they'd cured him -- and then, with typical paranoid ingenuity and tenacity, he'd set about getting himself into a position where he could meet Copies, share the Great Truth that had been revealed to him . . . and try to extract a little money in the process.

If Thomas contacted Gryphon and told them what their mad salesman was up to, Durham would certainly lose his job, probably end up in an institution again -- and hopefully benefit from a second attempt at nanosurgery. Durham probably wasn't harming anybody . . . but ensuring that he received treatment was, surely, the kindest thing to do.

A confident, optimistic person would make the call at once. Thomas eyed his drink, but decided to hold off a little longer before drowning the alternatives.

Durham had said: 'I understand that everything I believe I've experienced was 'due to' my illness -- and I know there's no easy way to persuade you that I'm not still insane. But even if that were true . . . why should it make the question I've raised any less important to you?

'Most flesh-and-blood humans live and die without knowing or caring what they are -- scoffing at the very idea that it should matter. But you're not flesh and blood, and you can't afford the luxury of ignorance.'

Thomas rose and walked over to the mirror above the fireplace. Superficially, his appearance was still based largely on his final scan; he had the same unruly thick white hair, the same loose, mottled, translucent eighty-five-year-old skin. He had the bearing of a young man, though; the model constructed from the scan file had been thoroughly rejuvenated, internally, sweeping away sixty years' worth of deterioration in every joint, every muscle, every vein and artery. He wondered if it was only a matter of time before vanity got the better of him and he did the same with his appearance. Many of his business associates were un-aging gradually -- but a few had leaped back twenty, thirty, fifty years, or changed their appearances completely. Which was most honest? Looking like an eighty-five-year-old flesh-and-blood human (which he was not), or looking the way he'd prefer to look . . . prefer to be . . . given the choice. And he did have the choice.

He closed his eyes, put his fingertips to his cheek, explored the damaged skin. If he believed these ruins defined him, they defined him . . . and if he learned to accept a new young body, the same would be true of it. And yet, he couldn't shake the notion that external rejuvenation would entail nothing more than constructing a youthful 'mask' . . . while his 'true face' continued to exist -- and age -- somewhere. Pure Dorian Gray -- a stupid moralistic fable stuffed with 'eternal' verities long obsolete.

And it was good just to feel healthy and vigorous, to be free of the arthritis, the aches and cramps and chills, the shortness of breath he could still remember vividly. Anything more seemed too easy, too arbitrary. Any Copy could become a Hollywood Adonis in an instant. And any Copy could outrace a bullet, lift a building, move a planet from its course.

Thomas opened his eyes, reached out and touched the surface of the mirror, aware that he was avoiding making a decision. But one thing still bothered him.

Why had Durham chosen him? The man might be deluded -- but he was also intelligent and rational on some level. Of all the Copies whose insecurities he might have tried to exploit, why choose one with a watertight setup, secure hardware, a well-managed trust fund? Why choose a target who appeared to have absolutely nothing to fear?

Thomas felt the vertigo returning. It had been sixty-five years. Not one newspaper story or police report had mentioned his name; no database search, however elaborate, could link him to Anna. Nobody alive could know what he'd done -- least of all a fifty-year-old ex-psychiatric patient from the other side of the world.

Even the man who'd committed the crime was dead. Thomas had seen him cremated.

Did he seriously think that Durham's offer of sanctuary was some elaborately coded euphemism for not dredging up the past? Blackmail?

No. That was ludicrous.

So why not make a few calls, and have the poor man seen to? Why not pay for him to be treated by the best Swiss neurosurgeon (who'd verify the procedure in advance, on the most sophisticated set of partial brain models . . .)

Or did he believe there was a chance that Durham was telling the truth? That he could run a second Copy, in a place nobody could reach in a billion years?

The terminal chimed. Thomas said, 'Yes?'

Heidrich had taken over from Lohr; sometimes the shifts seemed to change so fast that it made Thomas giddy. 'You have a meeting of the Geistbank board in five minutes, sir.'

'Thank you, I'll be right down.'

Thomas checked his appearance in the mirror. He said, 'Comb me.' His hair was made passably tidy, his complexion less pale, his eyes clear; certain facial muscles were relaxed, and others tightened. His suit required no attention; as in life, it could not be wrinkled.

He almost laughed, but his newly combed expression discouraged it. Expediency, honesty, complacency, insanity. It was a tightrope walk. He was ninety years old by one measure, eighty- five-and-a-half by another -- and he still didn't know how to live.

On his way out, he picked up his Confidence & Optimism and poured it on the carpet.

9

(Rip, tie, cut toy man)

JUNE 2045

Paul took the stairs down, and circled the block a few times, hoping for nothing more than to forget himself for a while. He was tired of having to think about what he was, every waking moment. The streets around the building were familiar enough, not to let him delude himself, but at least to allow him to take himself for granted.

It was hard to separate fact from rumor, but he'd heard that even the giga-rich tended to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics had reportedly set themselves up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately wanted to convince your-self that you were the same person as your memories suggested, the worst thing to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

Paul didn't believe that he 'was' his original. He knew he was nothing but a cloud of ambiguous data. The miracle was that he was capable of believing that he existed at all.

What gave him that sense of identity?

Continuity. Consistency. Thought following thought in a coherent pattern.

But where did that coherence come from?

In a human, or a Copy being run in the usual way, the physics of brain or computer meant that the state of mind at any one moment directly influenced the state of mind that followed. Continuity was a simple matter of