Permutation City

"Is there any reason to stay in emergency mode? Is there some snap decision I'm going to have to make? Are there missiles heading for --" He checked a display. "-- Dallas?" Dallas? The US dollar must have fallen sharply against the yen.

Kate said nothing, so Peer glanced at icons for a body and a room, and willed them to be active. His disembodied consciousness, and the floating screens of the Bunker, fleshed out into a young man, barefoot in blue jeans and a T-shirt, sitting in a windowless control room -- what might have been the operations center for a medium-sized office building.

The body's physiological state continued directly from its last moments on the wall of the skyscraper -- and it felt good: loose-limbed, invigorated. Peer recorded a snapshot, so he could get the feeling back again at will. He looked at Kate imploringly; she relented and joined him, vanishing from the screen and appearing on a chair beside him.

She said, "I am Solipsist Nation. What happens outside doesn't matter to me . . . but we still need certain guarantees, certain minimum standards."

Peer laughed. "So what are you going to do? Become a lobbyist now? Spend all your time petitioning Brussels and Geneva? "Human rights" are for people who want to play at being human. I know who I am. I am not human." He plunged his fist into his chest, effortlessly penetrating shirt, skin and ribs, and tore his heart out. He felt the parting of his flesh, and the aftermath -- but although aspects of the pain were "realistic," preprogrammed barriers kept it isolated within his brain, a perception without any emotional, or even metabolic, consequences. And his heart kept beating in his hand as if nothing had happened; the blood passed straight between the ragged ends of each broken artery, ignoring the "intervening distance."

Kate said, "Blink and ten hours are gone. That's no disaster -- but where is it heading? State-of-emergency decrees, nationalizing all the computing power in Tokyo for weather control?"

"Tokyo?"

"Some models show Greenhouse Typhoons reaching the Japanese islands in the next thirty years."

"Fuck Tokyo. We're in Dallas."

"Not any more." She pointed to the status display; exchange-rate fluctuations, and the hunt for the cheapest QIPS, had flung them back across the Pacific. "Not that it matters. There are plans for the Gulf of Mexico, too."

Peer put his heart on the floor and shrugged, then groped around in his chest cavity in search of other organs. He finally settled on a handful of lung. Torn free, the pink tissue continued to expand and contract in time with his breathing; functionally, it was still inside his rib cage. "Start looking for security, and you end up controlled by the demands of the old world. Are you Solipsist Nation, or not?"

Kate eyed his bloodless wound, and said quietly, "Solipsist Nation doesn't mean dying of stupidity. You take your body apart, and you think it proves you're invulnerable? You plant a few forced-perspective memories, and you think you've already lived forever? I don't want some cheap illusion of immortality. I want the real thing."

Peer frowned, and started paying attention to her latest choice of body. It was still recognizably "Kate" -- albeit the most severe variation on the theme he'd seen. Short-haired, sharp-boned, with piercing gray eyes; leaner than ever, plainly dressed in loose-fitting white. She looked ascetic, functional, determined.

She said -- mock-casually, as if changing the subject -- "Interesting news: there's a man -- a visitor -- approaching the richest Copies, selling prime real estate for second versions at a ludicrous rate."

"How much?"

"Two million ecus."

"What -- per month?"

"No. Forever."

Peer snorted. "It's a con."

"And outside, he's been contracting programmers, designers, architects. Commissioning -- and paying for -- work that will need at least a few dozen processor clusters to run on."

"Good move. That might actually persuade a few of the doddering old farts that he can deliver what he's promising. Not many, though. Who's going to pay without getting the hardware on-line and running performance tests? How's he going to fake that? He can show them simulations of glossy machines, but if the things aren't real, they won't crunch. End of scam."

"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid. The last word I had was he'd talked to Riemann."

"I don't believe any of this. They all have their own hardware -- why would they bother?"

"They all have a high profile. People know that they have their own hardware. If things get ugly, it can be confiscated. Whereas this man, Paul Durham, is nobody. He's a broker for someone else, obviously -- but whoever it is, they're acting like they have access to more computing power than Fujitsu, at about a thousandth of the cost. And none of it is on the open market. Nobody officially knows it exists."

"Or unofficially. Because it doesn't. Two million ecus!"

"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid."

"According to your sources."