Permutation City

Then he began to remember the details of his preparations. He'd anticipated feeling this way. He'd planned for it. However bad he felt, it was all part of the expected progression of responses. Panic. Regret. Analysis. Acceptance.

Two out of four; so far, so good.

Paul uncovered his eyes, and looked around the room. Away from a few dazzling patches of direct sunshine, everything glowed softly in the diffuse light: the matte white brick walls, the imitation (imitation) mahogany furniture; even the posters -- Bosch, Dali, Ernst, and Giger -- looked harmless, domesticated. Wherever he turned his gaze (if nowhere else), the simulation was utterly convincing; the spotlight of his attention made it so. Hypothetical light rays were being traced backward from individual rod and cone cells on his simulated retinas, and projected out into the virtual environment to determine exactly what needed to be computed: a lot of detail near the center of his vision, much less toward the periphery. Objects out of sight didn't 'vanish' entirely, if they influenced the ambient light, but Paul knew that the calculations would rarely be pursued beyond the crudest first-order approximations: Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights reduced to an average reflectance value, a single gray rectangle -- because once his back was turned, any more detail would have been wasted. Everything in the room was as finely resolved, at any given moment, as it needed to be to fool him -- no more, no less.

He had been aware of the technique for decades. It was something else to experience it. He resisted the urge to wheel around suddenly, in a futile attempt to catch the process out -- but for a moment it was almost unbearable, just knowing what was happening at the edge of his vision. The fact that his view of the room remained flawless only made it worse, an irrefutable paranoid fixation: No matter how fast you turn your head, you'll never even catch a glimpse of what's going on all around you . . .

He closed his eyes again for a few seconds. When he opened them, the feeling was already less oppressive. No doubt it would pass; it seemed too bizarre a state of mind to be sustained for long. Certainly, none of the other Copies had reported anything similar . . . but then, none of them had volunteered much useful data at all. They'd just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and then terminated themselves -- all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining consciousness.

And this one? How was he different from Copy number four? Three years older. More stubborn? More determined? More desperate for success? He'd believed so. If he hadn't felt more committed than ever -- if he hadn't been convinced that he was, finally, prepared to see the whole thing through -- he would never have gone ahead with the scan.

But now that he was "no longer" the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham -- "no longer" the one who'd sit outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance -- all of that determination seemed to have evaporated.

Suddenly he wondered: What makes me so sure that I'm not still flesh and blood? He laughed weakly, hardly daring to take the possibility seriously. His most recent memories seemed to be of lying on a trolley in the Landau Clinic, while technicians prepared him for the scan -- on the face of it, a bad sign -- but he'd been overwrought, and he'd spent so long psyching himself up for "this," that perhaps he'd forgotten coming home, still hazy from the anesthetic, crashing into bed, dreaming . . .

He muttered the password, "Abulafia" -- and his last faint hope vanished, as a black-on-white square about a meter wide, covered in icons, appeared in midair in front of him.

He gave the interface window an angry thump; it resisted him as if it was solid, and firmly anchored. As if he was solid, too. He didn't really need any more convincing, but he gripped the top edge and lifted himself off the floor. He instantly regretted this; the realistic cluster of effects of exertion -- down to the plausible twinge in his right elbow -- pinned him to this "body," anchored him to this "place," in exactly the way he knew he should be doing everything he could to avoid.