Permutation City

21

(Remit not paucity)

JUNE 2051

Maria woke from a dream of giving birth. A midwife had urged her, 'Keep pushing! Keep pushing!' She'd screamed through gritted teeth, but done as she was told. The 'child' had turned out to be nothing but a blood- stained statue, carved from smooth, dark wood.

Her head was throbbing. The room was in darkness. She'd taken off her wristwatch, but she doubted that she'd been asleep for long; if she had, the bed would have seemed unfamiliar, she would have needed time to remember where she was, and why. Instead, the night's events had come back to her instantly. It was long after midnight, but it wasn't a new day yet.

She sensed Durham's absence before reaching across the bed to confirm it, then she lay still for a while and listened. All she heard was distant coughing, coming from another flat. No lights were on; she would have seen the spill.

The smell hit her as she stepped out of the bedroom. Shit and vomit, with a sickly sweet edge. She had visions of Durham reacting badly to a day of stress and a night of champagne, and she almost turned around and went back to the bedroom, to open the window and bury her face in a pillow.

The bathroom door was half-closed, but there were no sound effects suggesting that he was still in there; not a moan. Her eyes began to water. She couldn't quite believe that she'd slept through all the noise.

She called out, 'Paul? Are you all right?' There was no reply. If he was lying unconscious in a pool of vomit, alcohol had nothing to do with it; he had to be seriously ill. Food poisoning? She pushed open the door and turned on the light.

He was in the shower recess. She backed out of the room quickly, but details kept registering long after she'd retreated. Coils of intestine. Bloodred shit. He looked like he'd been kneeling, and then sprawled sideways. At first, she was certain that she'd seen the knife, red against the white tiles -- but then she wondered if in fact she'd seen nothing but the Rorschach blot of a random blood stain.

Maria's legs started to give way. She made it to one of the chairs. She sat there, light-headed, fighting to remain conscious; she'd never fainted in her life, but for a time it was all she could do to keep herself from blacking out.

The first thing she felt clearly was a sense of astonishment at her own stupidity, as if she'd just marched, with her eyes wide open, straight into a brick wall. Durham had believed that his Copy had achieved immortality -- and proved the dust hypothesis. The whole purpose of his own life had been fulfilled by the project's completion. What had she expected him to do, after that? Carry on selling insurance?

It was Durham she'd heard screaming through gritted teeth, shaping her dream.

And it was Durham who'd kept pushing, Durham who looked like he'd tried to give birth.

She called for an ambulance. 'He's cut his abdomen open with a knife. The wound is very deep. I didn't look closely, but I think he's dead.' She found that she could speak calmly to the emergency services switchboard puppet; if she'd had to say the same things to a human being, she knew she would have fallen apart.

When she hung up, her teeth started chattering, and she kept emitting brief sounds of distress which didn't seem to belong to her. She wanted to get dressed before the ambulance and police arrived, but she didn't have the strength to move -- and the thought of even caring if she was discovered naked began to seem petty beyond belief. 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