Permutation City

furniture; no drawers, no table, no visitor's chair. Just the monitors to one side of his bed, mounted on stainless steel trolleys. And no terminal, no communications equipment of any kind -- not even a wall-mounted audio handset.

He probed the needle in his forearm, just below the inside of the elbow. A tight, seamless rubber sleeve, several centimeters wide, covered the entry point; it seemed to take forever to get his fingernails under the edge -- and once he'd succeeded, it was no help. The sleeve was too tight to be dragged down his arm, and too elastic to be rolled up like a shirt sleeve. How did anyone, ever, take the thing off? He tugged at the drip tube itself; held in place by the sleeve, it showed no sign of yielding. The other end vanished inside the drug pump.

[Thomas began to wonder if the immovable needle, on top of the Kafkaesque room controller, would make the clone suspicious -- but it seemed that the possibility of some future self waking the scan file a second time was too convoluted an explanation to occur to him in the middle of a crisis like this.]

He'd have to take the pump with him. That was a nuisance -- but if he was going to march through the building wrapped in a sheet, looking for a terminal, it could hardly make him more conspicuous than he would have been anyway.

He started to peel the electrodes from his chest when a pulse of numbing warmth swept through his right arm. The pump beeped twice; he turned to see a green LED glowing brightly in the middle of the box, a light he hadn't noticed before.

The wave of paralysis spread out from his shoulder before he could react -- crimp the tube? He tried to roll himself out of the bed but if his body responded at all, he couldn't feel it.

His eyes fluttered closed. He struggled to remain conscious -- and succeeded. [The script guaranteed the clone several minutes of lucidity -- which had nothing to do with the opiate's true pharmacological effects.]

There'd be a computer log of his EEG. Someone would be alerted, soon, to the fact that he'd been awake . . . and they'd understand that the only humane thing to do would be to revive him.

But someone should have been alerted the moment he woke.

It was far more likely that he'd be left to die.

[Thomas felt ill. This was sadistic, insane.

It was too late for squeamishness, though. Everything he was witnessing had already happened.]

His body was numb, but his mind was crystalline. Without the blur of visceral distractions, his fear seemed purer, sharper than anything he'd ever experienced.

He tried to dredge up the familiar, comforting truths: The Copy would survive, it would live his life for him. This body was always destined to perish; he'd accepted that long ago. Death was the irreversible dissolution of the personality; this wasn't death, it was a shedding of skin. There was nothing to fear.

Unless he was wrong about death. Wrong about everything.

He lay paralyzed, in darkness. Wishing for sleep; terrified of sleep. Wishing for anything that might distract him; afraid of wasting his last precious minutes, afraid of not being prepared.

Prepared? What could that mean? Extinction required no preparation. He wasn't making any deathbed pleas to a God he'd stopped believing in at the age of twelve. He wasn't about to cast aside seventy years of freedom and sanity, to return to his infantile faith. Approach the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, or you won't get in? That very line was one which had helped him see through the crude mechanics of entrapment; the translation was all too obvious (even to a child): This bullshit would insult any adult's intelligence -- but swallow it anyway, or you'll burn forever.

He was still afraid, though. The hooks had gone in deep.

The irony was, he had finally come to his senses and abandoned the whole insane idea of having himself woken, intentionally. To confront his mortality! To purge his Copy of guilt! What a pathetic fucking joke that would have been. And now the supposed beneficiary of the fatuous gesture would never even know that it had happened, anyway, by accident.

The blackness in his skull seemed to open out, an invisible view expanding into an invisible vista. Any sense of being in the hospice bed, merely numb and sightless, was gone now; he was lost on a plain of darkness.

What could he have told the Copy, anyway? The miserable truth? I'm dying in fear. I killed Anna for no reason but selfishness and cowardice -- and now, in spite of everything, I'm still afraid that there might be an afterlife. A God. Judgement. I've regressed far enough to start wondering if every childish superstition I ever held might yet turn out to be true -- but not far enough to embrace the possibility of repentance.

Or some anodyne lie? I'm dying in peace, I've found forgiveness, I've laid all my ghosts to rest. And you're free, now, to live your own life. The sins of the father will not be visited upon the son.

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.