Permutation City

When first resurrected, he'd worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty. A window with a view of the city seemed harmless enough -- but to walk, and ride, through an artificial crowd scene struck him as grotesque, and the few times he'd tried it, he'd found it acutely distressing. It was too much like life -- and too much like his dream of one day being among people again. He had no doubt that he would have become desensitized to the illusion with time, but he didn't want that. When he finally inhabited a telepresence robot as lifelike as his lost body -- when he finally rode a real train again, and walked down a real street -- he didn't want the joy of the experience dulled by years of perfect imitation.

He had no wish to delude himself -- but apart from declining to mimic his corporeal life to the point of parody, it was hard to define exactly what that meant. He baulked at the prospect of the nearest door always opening magically onto his chosen destination, and he had no desire to snap his fingers and teleport. Acknowledging -- and exploiting -- the unlimited plasticity of Virtual Reality might have been the most "honest" thing to do . . . but Thomas needed a world with a permanent structure, not a dream city which reconfigured itself to his every whim.

Eventually, he'd found a compromise. He'd constructed an auxiliary geography -- or architecture -- for his private version of Frankfurt; an alternative topology for the city, in which all the buildings he moved between were treated as being stacked one on top of the other, allowing a single elevator shaft to link them all. His house "in the suburbs" began sixteen stories "above" his city office; in between were board rooms, restaurants, galleries and museums. Having decided upon the arrangement, he now regarded it as immutable -- and if the view from each place, once he arrived, blatantly contradicted the relationship, he could live with that degree of paradox.

Thomas stepped out of the elevator into the ground floor entrance hall of his home. The two-story building, set in a modest ten hectares of garden, was his alone -- as the real-world original had been from the time of his divorce until his terminal illness, when a medical team had moved in. At first, he'd had cleaning robots gliding redundantly through the corridors, and gardening robots at work in the flower beds -- viewing them as part of the architecture, as much as the drain pipes, the air-conditioning grilles, and countless other "unnecessary" fixtures. He'd banished the robots after the first week. The drain pipes remained.

His dizziness had passed, but he strode into the library and poured himself a drink from two cut-glass decanters, a bracing mixture of Confidence and Optimism. With a word, he could have summoned up a full mood-control panel -- an apparition which always reminded him of a recording studio's mixing desk -- and adjusted the parameters of his state of mind until he reached a point where he no longer wished to change the settings . . . but he'd become disenchanted with that nakedly technological metaphor. Mood-altering "drugs," here, could function with a precision, and a lack of side effects, which no real chemical could ever have achieved -- pharmacological accuracy was possible, but hardly mandatory -- and it felt more natural to gulp down a mouthful of "spirits" for fortification than it did to make adjustments via a hovering bank of sliding potentiometers.

Even if the end result was exactly the same.

Thomas sank into a chair as the drink started to take effect -- as a matter of choice, it worked gradually, a pleasant warmth diffusing out from his stomach before his brain itself was gently manipulated -- and began trying to make sense of his encounter with Paul Durham.

You have to let me show you exactly what you are.

There was a terminal beside the chair. He hit a button, and one of his personal assistants, Hans Löhr, appeared on the screen.

Thomas said casually, "Find out what you can about my visitor, will you?"

Löhr replied at once, "Yes, sir."