Permutation City

He lowered himself to the floor with a grunt. He was the Copy. Whatever his inherited memories told him, he was "no longer" human; he would never inhabit his real body "again." Never inhabit the real world again . . . unless his cheapskate original scraped up the money for a telepresence robot -- in which case he could spend his time blundering around in a daze, trying to make sense of the lightning-fast blur of human activity. His model-of-a-brain ran seventeen times slower than the real thing. Yeah, sure, if he hung around, the technology would catch up, eventually -- and seventeen times faster for him than for his original. And in the meantime? He'd rot in this prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out Durham's precious research -- while the man lived in his apartment, spent his money, slept with Elizabeth . . .

Paul leant against the cool surface of the interface, dizzy and confused. Whose precious research? He'd wanted this so badly -- and he'd done this to himself with his eyes wide open. Nobody had forced him, nobody had deceived him. He'd known exactly what the drawbacks would be -- but he'd hoped that he would have the strength of will (this time, at last) to transcend them: to devote himself, monk-like, to the purpose for which he'd been brought into being, content in the knowledge that his other self was as unconstrained as ever.

Looking back, that hope seemed ludicrous. Yes, he'd made the decision freely -- for the fifth time -- but it was mercilessly clear, now, that he'd never really faced up to the consequences. All the time he'd spent, supposedly "preparing himself" to be a Copy, his greatest source of resolve had been to focus on the outlook for the man who'd remain flesh and blood. He'd told himself that he was rehearsing "making do with vicarious freedom" -- and no doubt he had been genuinely struggling to do just that . . . but he'd also been taking secret comfort in the knowledge that he would "remain" on the outside -- that his future, then, still included a version with absolutely nothing to fear.

And as long as he'd clung to that happy truth, he'd never really swallowed the fate of the Copy at all.

People reacted badly to waking up as Copies. Paul knew the statistics. Ninety-eight percent of Copies made were of the very old, and the terminally ill. People for whom it was the last resort -- most of whom had spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options; some of whom had even died between the taking of the scan and the time the Copy itself was run. Despite this, fifteen percent decided on awakening -- usually in a matter of hours -- that they couldn't face living this way.

And of those who were young and healthy, those who were merely curious, those who knew they had a perfectly viable, living, breathing body outside?

The bale-out rate so far had been one hundred percent.

Paul stood in the middle of the room, swearing softly for several minutes, acutely aware of the passage of time. He didn't feel ready -- but the longer the other Copies had waited, the more traumatic they seemed to have found the decision. He stared at the floating interface; its dreamlike, hallucinatory quality helped, slightly. He rarely remembered his dreams, and he wouldn't remember this one -- but there was no tragedy in that.

He suddenly realized that he was still stark naked. Habit -- if no conceivable propriety -- nagged at him to put on some clothes, but he resisted the urge. One or two perfectly innocent, perfectly ordinary actions like that, and he'd find he was taking himself seriously, thinking of himself as real, making it even harder . . .

He paced the bedroom, grasped the cool metal of the doorknob a couple of times, but managed to keep himself from turning it. There was no point even starting to explore this world.

He couldn't resist peeking out the window, though. The view of north Sydney was flawless; every building, every cyclist, every tree, was utterly convincing -- but that was no great feat; it was a recording, not a simulation. Essentially photographic -- give or take some computerized touching up and filling in -- and totally predetermined. To cut costs even further, only a tiny part of it was "physically" accessible to him; he could see the harbor in the distance, but he knew that if he tried to go for a stroll down to the water's edge . . .

Enough. Just get it over with.

Paul turned back to the interface and touched a menu icon labelled utilities; it spawned another window in front of the first. The function he was seeking was buried several menus deep -- but he knew exactly where to look for it. He'd watched this, from the outside, too many times to have forgotten.