Permutation City

18

(Remit not paucity)

MAY 2051

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate's hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing against him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to have been left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They'd been driving back to London from her father's funeral in Yorkshire; it had seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.

The perfect meadow itself was no reason for suspicion; neither of them were verisimilitude freaks, masochistic re-creators of the irritating details of real environments. Good sex was, equally, a matter of choice. But Peer still found himself wondering if Kate really had agreed to the act. She hadn't actually made love to him for months -- however many times he'd recycled the memories of the last occasion -- and he couldn't rule out the possibility that he'd merely decided to fool himself into believing that she'd finally relented. He'd never gone quite so far before -- so far as he presently knew -- but he had a vague memory of resolving to do a thorough job of concealing the evidence if he ever did.

He could clearly remember Kate beginning to flirt as they'd toured Carter's city, and then reaching out and starting to undress him as they stood in the exit doorway. He'd shut down all limits on her access to his body while she'd been unbuttoning his shirt -- and he'd bellowed with shock and delight when, in the middle of their physically plausible foreplay, an invisible second Kate, twenty times his size, had picked him up in one hand, raised him to her mouth, and licked his body from toes to forehead like a sweet-toothed giant taking the icing off a man-shaped cake.

None of this struck him as especially unlikely; if Kate had decided to make love again, it was the kind of thing he could imagine her doing. That in itself proved nothing. He could have scripted this fantasy to fit everything he knew about her -- or chosen the scenario, and then rewritten his 'knowledge' of her to accommodate the action. In either case, software could have laid down a trail of false memories: a plausible transition from their meeting with Carter -- which he felt certain had actually happened -- to this moment. All memories of having planned the deception would have been temporarily suppressed.

Kate stopped moving. She shook her head, spattering his face and chest with sweat, and said, 'Are you here where you seem to be, or off somewhere else?'

'I was about to ask you the same question.'

She smiled wickedly. 'Ah. Then maybe this body you hope is me only asked you first to put your mind at ease.'

In the sky above her right shoulder, Peer could see a stray cloud taking on a new shape, a whimsical sculpture parodying the bodies on the grass below.

He said, 'And then admitted as much?'

Kate nodded, and started slowly rising. 'Of course. For the very same reason. How many levels of bluffing will it take before you get bored and say: Fuck it, I don't care?'

She lifted herself until they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes.

The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling very slightly.

She said, 'Don't you find it ironic?'

'What?'

'Trans-humans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that.'

Peer said, 'No, I don't find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that, or castration.'

She smiled down at him. 'I love you, you know. But would I tell you that? Or would you be stupid enough to pretend that I had?'

Warm, sweet rain began to fall.

He said, 'I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.'

+ + +

Peer sat on the lowest of the four wooden steps leading up to the back porch of his homestead, glancing down now and then at his bare feet and thin brown arms. Ten-year-old farm boy at dusk. Kate had made both the environment and the body for him, and be liked the tranquil mood of the piece. There was no invented family, no role to play; this was a painting, not a drama. One place, one moment, lasting as long as he chose to inhabit it. The scenery wasn't quite photorealist -- there were subtle distortions of form, color and texture which made it impossible to forget that he was inhabiting a work of art -- but there were no sledgehammer techniques: no visible brushstrokes, no Van Gogh lighting effects.

Violating the whole aesthetic, an interface window hovered in front of him, a meter above the chicken- feed-scattered dirt. The cloning utility insisted on following an elaborate confirmation sequence; Peer kept saying, 'Please skip to the final question, I know exactly what I'm doing' -- but icons in legal wigs and gowns kept popping up in front of the window and declaring solemnly, 'You must read this warning carefully. Your brain model will be directly examined for evidence of complete understanding before we proceed to the next stage.'

It was a thousand times more trouble than baling out -- he knew that for certain, having almost done it -- but then, baling out entailed fewer legal complications for the people outside. Peer's estate was controlled by an executor, who'd signed a contract obliging her to act according to 'any duly authenticated communications -- including, but not limited to, visual and/or auditory simulations of a human being appearing to proffer instructions or advice.' What duly authenticated meant revolved around a ninety-nine-digit code key which had been 'hardwired' into Peer's model-of-a-brain when his Copy was generated from his scan file. He could summon it up consciously if he had to, in some unlikely emergency, but normally he made use of it by a simple act of will. He'd record a video postcard, wish it to be duly authenticated -- and it was done. Unless the key was stolen -- plucked right out of the computer memory which contained the data representing his brain -- Peer was the only software on the planet capable of encrypting instructions to his executor in a form compatible with her own matching key. It was the closest thing he had to a legal identity.

By law, any clone which a Copy made of itself had to be given a new key. It was up to the initial Copy, prior to the cloning, to divide up the worldly assets between the two future selves -- or rather, divide them up between the executor's two portfolios.

Peer fought his way through the process of assuring the cloning utility that he really had meant what he'd told it from the start: The clone would require no assets of its own. Peer would run it on sufferance, paying for its running time himself. He didn't plan on keeping it conscious for more than a minute or two; just long enough to reassure himself that he was doing the right thing.

He almost wished that Kate was with him, now. She'd offered to be here, but he'd turned her down. He would have been glad of her support, but this had to be done in private.

Finally, the utility said, 'This is your last chance to cancel. Are you sure you wish to proceed?'

Peer closed his eyes. When I see my original, sitting on the porch, I'll know who I am, and accept it.

He said, 'Yes, I'm sure.'

Peer felt no change. He opened his eyes. His newly made twin stood on the ground where the interface window had been, staring at him, wide-eyed. Peer shivered. He recognized the boy as himself,