Permutation City

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.

PART TWO

Permutation City

23

Maria woke from dreamless sleep, clearheaded, tranquil. She opened her eyes and looked around. The bed, the room, were unfamiliar; both were large and luxurious. Everything appeared unnaturally pristine, unsullied by human habitation, like an expensive hotel room. She was puzzled, but unperturbed; an explanation seemed to be on the verge of surfacing. She was wearing a nightdress she'd never seen before in her life.

She suddenly remembered the Landau Clinic. Chatting with the technicians. Borrowing the marker pen. The tour of the recovery rooms. The anesthetist asking her to count.

She pulled her hands out from beneath the sheet. Her left palm was blank; the comforting message she'd written there was gone. She felt the blood drain from her face.

Before she had a chance to think, Durham stepped into the room. For a moment, she was too shocked to make a sound -- then she screamed at him, "What have you done to me? I'm the Copy, aren't I? You're running the Copy!" Trapped in the launch software, with two minutes to live?

Durham said quietly, "Yes, you're the Copy."

"How? How did you do it? How could I let it happen?" She stared at him, desperate for a reply, enraged more than anything else by the thought that they might both vanish before she'd heard the explanation, before she understood how he'd broken through all of her elaborate safeguards. But Durham just stood by the doorway looking bemused and embarrassed -- as if he'd anticipated a reaction like this, but couldn't quite credit it now that it was happening.

Finally, she said, "This isn't the launch, is it? This is later. You're another version. You stole me, you're running me later."

"I didn't steal you." He hesitated, then added cautiously, "I think you know exactly where you are. And I agonized about waking you -- but I had to do it. There's too much going on here that you'll want to see, want to be a part of; I couldn't let you sleep through it all. That would have been unforgivable."

Maria disregarded everything he'd said. "You kept my scan file after the launch. You duplicated it, somehow."

"No. The only place your scan file data ever went was the Garden-of-Eden configuration. As agreed. And now you're in Permutation City. In the TVC universe -- now commonly known as Elysium. Running on nothing but its own laws."

Maria sat up in bed slowly, bringing her knees up to her chest, trying to accept the situation without panicking, without falling apart. Durham was insane, unpredictable. Dangerous. When was she going to get that into her skull? In the flesh, she could probably have broken his fucking neck if she had to, to defend herself -- but if he controlled this environment, she was powerless: he could rape her, torture her, do anything at all. The very idea of him attacking her still seemed ludicrous -- but she couldn't rely on the way he'd treated her in the past to count for anything. He was a liar and a kidnapper. She didn't know him at all.

Right now, though, he was being as civilized as ever; he seemed intent on keeping up the charade. She was afraid to test this veneer of hospitality -- but she forced herself to say evenly, "I want to use a terminal."

Durham gestured at the space above the bed, and a terminal appeared. Maria's heart sank; she realized that she'd been hanging on to the slender hope that she might have been human. And that was still possible. Durham himself had once been memory-wiped and fooled into thinking he was a Copy, when he was merely a visitor. Or at least he'd claimed that it had happened, in another world.