Permutation City (2 page)

He shook his head. "It's been ten years, and nothing's changed.
What's wrong with you?
Do you honestly still believe that you're brave enough -- or crazy enough -- to be your own guinea pig?
Do you?"

He paused again, but only for a moment; he didn't expect a reply.

He'd argued long and hard with the first Copy, but after that, he'd never had the stomach for it.

"Well, I've got news for you:
You're not."

With his eyes still closed, he gripped the release lever.

I'm nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.

His fingernails needed cutting; they dug painfully into the skin of his palm.

Had he never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking? Maybe he had -- but a dream was not a life. If the only way he could "reclaim" his body, "reclaim" his world, was to wake and forget --

He pulled the lever.

After a few seconds, he emitted a constricted sob -- a sound more of confusion than any kind of emotion -- and opened his eyes.

The lever had come away in his hand.

He stared dumbly at this metaphor for . . . what? A bug in the termination software? Some kind of hardware glitch?

Feeling -- at last -- truly dreamlike, he unstrapped the parachute, and unfastened the neatly packaged bundle.

Inside, there was no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever else there might plausibly have been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.

Dear Paul,

The night after the scan was completed, I looked back over the whole preparatory stage of the project, and did a great deal of soul-searching. And I came to the conclusion that
--
right up to the very last moment
--
my
attitude had been poisoned with ambivalence.

With hindsight, I realized just how foolish my qualms were
--
but that was too late for you. I couldn't afford to ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?

This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked down someone who could make a few alterations to the virtual-environment utilities. I know that wasn't strictly legal . . . but you know how important it is to me that you
--
that we
--
succeed this time.

I trust you’ll understand, and I'm confident that you'll accept the situation with dignity and equanimity.

Best wishes,

Paul

He sank to his knees, still holding the note, staring at it with disbelief.
I
can't have done this. I can't have been so callous.

No?

He could never have done it to anyone else. He was sure of that. He wasn't a monster, a torturer, a sadist.

And he would never have gone ahead himself without the bale-out option as a last resort. Between his ludicrous fantasies of stoicism, and the sanity-preserving cop-out of relating only to the flesh-and-blood version, he must have had moments of clarity when the bottom line had been:
If it's that bad, I can always put an end to it.

But as for making a Copy, and then -- once its future was no 'longer
his
future, no longer anything for
him
to fear -- taking away its power to escape . . . and rationalizing this
hijacking
as nothing more than an over-literal act of self-control . . .

It rang so true that he hung his head in shame.

Then he dropped the note, raised his head, and bellowed with all the strength in his non-existent lungs: "DURHAM! YOU
PRICK!"

+ + +

Paul thought about smashing furniture. Instead, he took a long, hot shower. In part, to calm himself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic calculations would annoy the cheapskate no end. He scrutinized the droplets and rivulets of water on his skin, searching for some small but visible anomaly at the boundary between his body -- computed down to subcellular resolution -- and the rest of the simulation, which was modelled much more crudely. If there were any discrepancies, though, they were too subtle to detect.

He dressed, and ate a late breakfast, shrugging off the surrender to normality.
What was he meant to do? Go on a hunger strike? Walk around naked, smeared in excrement?
He was ravenous, having fasted before the scan, and the kitchen was stocked with a -- literally -- inexhaustible supply of provisions. The muesli tasted exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast, but he knew there was a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and aroma. The detailed effects of chewing, and the actions of saliva, were being faked from a patchwork of empirical rules, not generated from first principles; there
were no
individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by enzymes -- just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated with each microscopic "parcel" of saliva. Eventually, these would lead to plausible increases in the concentrations of amino acids, various carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to humble sodium and chloride ions, in similar "parcels" of gastric juices . . . which in turn would act as input data to the models of his intestinal villus cells. From there, into the bloodstream.

Urine and feces production were optional -- some Copies wished to retain every possible aspect of corporeal life -- but Paul had chosen to do without. (So much for smearing himself in excrement.) His bodily wastes would be magicked out of existence long before reaching bladder or bowel. Ignored out of existence; passively annihilated. All that it took to destroy something, here, was to fail to keep track of it.

Coffee made him feel alert, but also slightly detached -- as always. Neurons were modeled in the greatest detail, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites had been present on each individual neuron in his original's brain at the time of the scan, his own model-of-a-brain incorporated every one of them -- in a simplified, but functionally equivalent, form.

And the physical reality behind it all?
A cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal, configured as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred identical units in a basement vault . . . somewhere on the planet. Paul didn't even know what city he was in; the scan had been made in Sydney, but the model's implementation would have been contracted out by the local node to the lowest bidder at the time.

He took a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and made a shallow cut across his left forearm. He flicked a few drops of blood onto the sink -- and wondered exactly which software was now responsible for the stuff. Would the blood cells die off slowly -- or had they already been surren-dered to the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too unsophisticated to represent them, let alone keep them "alive"?

If he tried to slit his wrists, when exactly would Durham intervene?
He gazed at his distorted reflection in the blade. Most likely, his original would let him die, and then run the whole model again from scratch, simply leaving out the knife. He'd rerun all the earlier Copies hundreds of times, tampering with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap trick, some distraction which would keep them from wanting to bale out. It was a measure of sheer stubbornness that it had taken him so long to admit defeat and rewrite the rules.

Paul put down the knife. He didn't want to perform that experiment. Not yet.

+ + +

Outside his own apartment, everything was slightly less than convincing; the architecture of the building was reproduced faithfully enough, down to the ugly plastic potted plants, but every corridor was deserted, and every door to every other apartment was sealed shut -- concealing, literally, nothing. He kicked one door, as hard as he could; the wood seemed to give slightly, but when he examined the surface, the paint wasn't even marked. The model would admit to no damage here, and the laws of physics could screw themselves.

There were pedestrians and cyclists on the street -- all purely recorded. They were solid rather than ghostly, but it was an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they were like infinitely strong, infinitely disinterested robots. Paul hitched a ride on one frail old woman's back for a while; she carried him down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all felt the same: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.

The street wasn't meant to serve as anything but three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies interacted with each other, they often used cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative crowds. Plazas, parks, open-air cafes; all very reassuring, no doubt, when you were fighting off a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. Copies could only receive realistic external visitors if they had friends of relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a factor of seventeen. Most dutiful next-of-kin preferred to exchange video recordings. Who wanted to spend an afternoon with great-grandfather, when it burnt up half a week of your life? Paul had tried calling Elizabeth on the terminal in his study -- which should have granted him access to the outside world, via the computer's communications links -- but, not surprisingly, Durham had sabotaged that as well.

When he reached the corner of the block, the visual illusion of the city continued, far into the distance, but when he tried to step forward onto the road, the concrete pavement under his feet started acting like a treadmill, sliding backward at precisely the rate needed to keep him motionless, whatever pace he adopted. He backed off and tried leaping over the affected region, but his horizontal velocity dissipated -- without the slightest pretense of any "physical" justification -- and he landed squarely in the middle of the treadmill.

The people of the recording, of course, crossed the border with ease. One man walked straight at him; Paul stood his ground -- and found himself pushed into a zone of increasing viscosity, the air around him becoming painfully unyielding, before he slipped free to one side.

The sense that discovering a way to breach this barrier would somehow "liberate" him was compelling -- but he knew it was absurd. Even if he did find a flaw in the program which enabled him to break through, he knew he'd gain nothing but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The recording could only contain complete information for points of view within a certain, finite zone; all there was to "escape to" was a region where his view of the city would be full of distortions and omissions, and would eventually fade to black.

He stepped back from the corner, half dispirited, half amused. What had he hoped to find? A door at the edge of the model, marked
exit,
through which he could walk out into reality? Stairs leading metaphorically down to some boiler-room representation of the underpinnings of this world, where he could throw a few switches and blow it all apart? He had no right to be dissatisfied with his surroundings; they were precisely what he'd ordered.

What he'd ordered was also a perfect spring day. Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection.
Existence was beginning to seduce him.
He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.

And if this was a travesty of life, there was always the chance of improvement. Maybe he could persuade Durham to restore his communications facilities; that would be a start. And when he grew bored with libraries, news systems, databases, and -- if any of them would deign to meet him -- the ghosts of the senile rich? He could always have himself suspended until processor speeds caught up with reality -- when people would be able to visit without slowdown, and telepresence robots might actually be worth inhabiting.

He opened his eyes, and shivered in the heat. He no longer knew what he wanted -- the chance to bale out, to declare this bad dream
over
. . . or the possibility of virtual immortality -- but he had to accept that there was only one way he could make the choice his own.

He said quietly, "I won't be your guinea pig. A collaborator, yes. An equal partner. If you want my cooperation, then you're going to have to treat me like a colleague, not a . . .
piece of apparatus.
Understood?"

A window opened up in front of him. He was shaken by the sight, not of his predictably smug twin, but of the room behind him. It was only his study -- and he'd wandered through the virtual equivalent, unimpressed, just minutes before -- but this was still his first glimpse of the real world, in real time. He moved closer to the window, in the hope of seeing if there was anyone else in the room --
Elizabeth?
-- but the image was two-dimensional, the perspective remained unchanged as he approached.