Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  He said, “That’s all right. All I wanted from you was your soul.”

  Chapter 20

  (Can’t you time trip?)

  Resting between descents, Peer looked up and finally realized what had been puzzling him. The clouds above the skyscraper were motionless; not merely stationary with respect to the ground, but frozen in every detail. The wispiest tendrils at the edges, presumably vulnerable to the slightest breeze, remained undisturbed for as long as he studied them. The shape of every cloud seemed flawlessly natural – but all the dynamism implicit in the wind-wrought forms, compelling at a glance, was pure illusion. Nothing in the sky was changing.

  For a moment, he was simply bemused by this whimsical detail. Then he remembered why he’d chosen it.

  Kate had vanished. She’d lied; she hadn’t cloned herself at all. She’d moved to Carter’s city, leaving no other version behind.

  Leaving him – or half of him – alone.

  The revelation didn’t bother him. On the skyscraper, nothing ever did. He clung to the wall, recuperating happily, and marveled at what he’d done to heal the pain. Back in cloud time, before he’d always been descending.

  He’d set up the environment as usual – the city, the sky, the building – but frozen the clouds, as much to simplify things as to serve as a convenient reminder.

  Then he’d mapped out a series of cues for memory and mood changes over fifteen subjective minutes. He’d merely sketched the progression, like a naïve musician humming a melody to a transcriber; the software he’d used had computed the actual sequence of brain states. Moment would follow moment “naturally”; his model-of-a-brain would not be forced to do anything, but would simply follow its internal logic. By fine-tuning that logic in advance and loading the right memories, the desired sequence of mental events would unfold: from A to B to C to … A.

  Peer looked over his shoulder at the ground, which never grew closer, and smiled. He’d dreamed of doing this before, but he’d never had the courage. Losing Kate forever – while knowing that he was with her – must have finally persuaded him that he had nothing to gain by putting it off any longer.

  The scheme wouldn’t slip his mind completely – he could vaguely remember experiencing exactly the same revelation several times before – but his short-term memory had been selectively impaired to limit the clarity of this recursive false history, and once he was distracted, a series of free associations would eventually lead him back to exactly the state of mind he’d been in at the cycle’s beginning. His body – with respect to every visible cue in the environment – would also be back where it had started. The ground and sky were static, and every story of the building was identical, so his perceptions would be the same. And every muscle and joint in his body would have recovered perfectly, as always.

  Peer laughed at his cloud-self’s ingenuity, and started to descend again. It was an elegant situation, and he was glad he’d finally had a cloud-reason to make it happen.

  There was one detail, though, which he couldn’t focus on, one choice he’d made back in cloud time which he seemed to have decided to obscure from himself completely.

  Had he programmed his exoself to let him run through the cycle a predetermined number of times? ABCABCABC … and then some great booming DEF breaking through the sky like the fist of God – or a tendril of cumulus actually moving – putting an end to his perpetual motion? A grappling hook could tear him from the side of the building, or some subtle change in the environment could nudge his thoughts out of their perfectly circular orbit. Either way, experiencing one uninterrupted cycle would be the same as experiencing a thousand, so if there was an alarm clock ticking away at all, his next cycle – subjectively – would be the one when the buzzer went off.

  And if there was no clock? He might have left his fate in external hands. A chance communication from another Copy, or some event in the world itself, could be the trigger which would release him.

  Or he might have chosen absolute solipsism. Grinding through the cycle whatever else happened, until his executor embezzled his estate, terrorists nuked the supercomputers, civilization crumbled, the sun went out.

  Peer stopped and shook his head to flick sweat out of his eyes. The sense of déjà vu the action triggered was, presumably, purely synthetic; it told him nothing about the number of times he’d actually repeated the gesture. It suddenly struck him as unlikely that he’d done anything as inelegant as running the cycle more than once. His subjective time closed up in a loop, rolled in on itself; there was no need to follow the last moment with an external repetition of the first. Whatever happened – externally – “afterward”, the loop was subjectively seamless and complete. He could have shut himself down completely, after computing a single cycle, and it would have made no difference.

  The breeze picked up, cooling his skin. Peer had never felt so tranquil; so physically at ease, so mentally at peace. Losing Kate must have been traumatic, but he’d put that behind him. Once and forever.

  He continued his descent.

  Chapter 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. Blood-red 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.

  Chapter 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 died of lymphoma before the turn of the century. His parents had both survived into their nineties, showing every sign of achieving immortality by sheer force of will – but they’d died before scanning technology was perfected, having scorned Thomas’s suggestion of cryonic preservation. “I have no intention,” his father had explained curtly, “of doing to myself what nouveau riche Americans have done to their pets.” The young man in the photograph didn’t look much like the image Thomas would have conjured up by closing his eyes and struggling to remember – but the expression on his face, captured in transition from haunted to smug, rang true. Half afraid that the camera would reveal his secret; half daring it to try.

  Thomas had kept copies of his death-bed scan file – off-line, in vaults in Geneva and New York – with no explicit purpose in mind, other than the vaguest notion that if something went irreparably wrong with his model, and the source of the problem – a slow virus, a subtle programming error – rendered all of his snapshots suspect, starting life again with no memories since 2045 would be better than nothing.

  Having assembled the necessary elements, he’d scripted the whole scenario in advance and let it run – without observing the results. Then he’d frozen the clone and sent it to Durham at the last possible moment – without giving himself a chance to back out, or, worse, to decide that he’d botched the first attempt, and to try again.

  Now he was ready to discover what he’d done, to view the fait accompli. Seated in the library – with the drinks cabinet locked – he gestured to the terminal to begin.

  The old man in the bed looked much worse than Thomas had expected: sunken-eyed, jaundiced, and nearly bald. (So much for the honesty of his own appearance, the “minimal” changes he’d made to render himself presentable.) His chest was furrowed with scars, crisscrossed by a grid of electrodes; his skull was capped with a similar mesh. A pump suspended beside the bed fed a needle in his right arm. The clone was sedated by a crudely modeled synthetic opiate flowing into his crudely modeled bloodstream, just as Thomas’s original had been sedated by the real thing, from the time of the scan until his death three days later.

  In this replay, though, the narcotic was scheduled to undergo a sudden drop in concentration – for no physically plausible reason, but none was required. A graph in a corner of the screen plotted the decline.

  Thomas watched, sick with anxiety, feverish with hope. This – at last – was the ritual which he’d always believed might have cured him.

  The old man attained consciousness, without opening his eyes; the EEG waveforms meant nothing to Thomas, but the software monitoring the simulation had flagged the event with a subtitle. Further text followed:

  The anesthetic still hasn’t taken. Can’t they get anything right? [Garbled verbalization.] The scan can’t be over. I can’t be the Copy yet. The Copy will wake with a clear head, seated in the library, pre-modified to feel no disorientation. So why am I awake?

  The old man opened his eyes.

  Thomas shouted, “Freeze!” He was sweating, and nauseous, but he made no move to banish the unnecessary symptoms. He wanted catharsis, didn’t he? Wasn’t that the whole point? The subtitles gave only a crude hint of what the clone was experiencing. Much greater clarity was available; the recording included traces from key neural pathways. If he wanted to, he could read the clone’s mind.

  He said, “Let me know what he’s thinking, what he’s going through.” Nothing happened. He clenched his fists and whispered, “Restart.”

  The library vanished; he was flat on his back in the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling, dazed. He looked down and saw the cluster of monitors beside him, the wires on his chest. The motion of his eyes and head was wrong – intelligible, but distressingly out of synch with his intentions. He felt fearful and disoriented – but he wasn’t sure how much of that was his own reaction and how much belonged to the clone. Thomas shook his own head in panic, and the library – and his body – returned.

  He stopped the playback, and reconsidered.

  He could break free any time he wanted to. He was only an observer. There was nothing to fear.

  Fighting down a sense of suffocation, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the recording.

  #

  He looked around the room groggily. He wasn’t the Copy – that much
was certain. And this wasn’t any part of the Landau Clinic; as a VIP shareholder and future client, he’d toured the building too many times to be wrong about that. If the scan had been postponed for some reason, he ought to be back home – or on his way. Unless something had gone wrong requiring medical attention which the Landau was unable to provide?

  The room was deserted, and the door was closed. He called out hoarsely, “Nurse!” He was too weak to shout.

  The room controller replied, “No staff are available to attend to you, at present. Can I be of assistance?”

  “Can you tell me where I am?”

  “You’re in Room 307 of Valhalla.”

  “Valhalla?” He knew he’d done business with the place, but he couldn’t remember why.

  The room controller said helpfully, “Valhalla is the Health Dynamics Corporation of America’s Frankfurt Hospice.”

  His bowels loosened with fright; they were already empty. [Thomas squirmed in sympathy, but kept himself from breaking free.] Valhalla was the meat-rack he’d hired to take care of his comatose body until it expired, after the scan – with the legal minimum of medical attention, with no heroic measures to prolong life.

  He had been scanned – but they’d fucked up.

  They’d let him wake.

  It was a shock, but he came to terms with it rapidly. There was no reason to panic. He’d be out of here and scanned again in six hours flat – and whoever was responsible would be out on the streets even faster. He tried to raise himself into a sitting position, but he was too dizzy from the lingering effects of the drug infusion to coordinate the action. He slumped back onto the pillows, caught his breath, and forced himself to speak calmly.

  “I want to talk to the director.”

  “I’m sorry, the director is not available.”

  “Then, the most senior member of staff you can find.”