Permutation City

Kate said, "I love it when you go all doctrinaire on me." She stepped forward and kissed him -- then as he reached out to hold her, she slipped away into yet another body, leaving him embracing nothing but dead weight. "Now shut up and let's go take a look."

+ + +

Peer doubted that he'd ever know exactly why he'd died. No amount of agonized introspection, tortuous video-postcard interrogation of ex-friends, or even expert system analysis of his final scan file, had brought him any nearer to the truth. The gap was too wide to be bridged; the last four years of his corporeal life had been lost to him -- and the events of the period seemed more like an ill-fated excursion into a parallel world than any mere episode of amnesia.

The coroner had returned an open finding. Rock-climbing accidents were rare, the best technology was almost foolproof -- but David Hawthorne had scornfully eschewed all the mollycoddling refinements (including the black box implants which could have recorded the actions leading up to his death, if not the motives behind them). No pitons full of microchips, which could have performed ultrasound tomography of the cliff face and computed their own load-bearing capacity; no harness packed with intelligent crash balloons, which could have cushioned his sixty-meter fall onto jagged rocks; no robot climbing partner, which could have carried him twenty kilometers over rugged terrain with a broken spine and delivered him into intensive care as if he'd floated there on a cloud of morphine.

Peer could empathize, to a degree. What was the point of being scanned, only to remain enslaved by an obsolete respect for the body's fragility? Having triumphed over mortality, how could he have gone on living as if nothing had changed? Every biological instinct, every commonsense idea about the nature of survival had been rendered absurd -- and he hadn't been able to resist the urge to dramatize the transformation.

That didn't prove that he'd wanted to die.

But whether his death had been pure misfortune, unequivocal suicide, or the result of some insanely dangerous stunt not (consciously) intended to be fatal, the four-years-out-of-date David Hawthorne had awakened in the virtual slums to realize that, personally, he'd given the prospect about as much serious consideration as that of awakening in Purgatory. Whatever he'd come to believe in those missing years, whatever he'd imagined in his last few seconds of life on that limestone overhang, up until his final scan he'd always pictured his virtual resurrection as taking place in the distant future, when either he'd be seriously wealthy, or the cost of computing would have fallen so far that money would scarcely matter.

He'd been forty-six years old, in perfect health; a senior executive with Incite PLC -- Europe's twenty-fifth largest marketing firm -- second-in-charge of the interactive targeted mail division. With care, he could have died at the age of a hundred and fifty, to become an instant member of the elite -- perhaps, by then, in a cybernetic body barely distinguishable from the real thing.

But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he'd actually signed up for.

And whatever the convoluted psychological explanation for his death, in financial terms the result was very simple. He'd died too soon.

In a real-time week -- a few subjective hours -- he had gone from a model of flesh and blood in the lavish virtual apartment he'd bought at the time of his first scan, to a disembodied consciousness observing his Bunker. Even that hadn't been enough to let him cling to his role in the outside world. Full life insurance was not available to people who'd been scanned -- let alone those who also indulged in dangerous recreations -- and the coroner's verdict had even ruled out payment from the only over-priced watered-down substitute policy he'd been able to obtain. At a slowdown of thirty, the lowest Bunker-to-real-time factor the income from his investments could provide, communication was difficult, and productive work was impossible. Even if he'd started burning up his capital to buy the exclusive use of a processor cluster, the time-rate difference would still have rendered him unemployable. Copies whose trust funds controlled massive shareholdings, deceased company directors who sat on the unofficial boards which met twice a year and made three or four leisurely decisions, could live with the time-dilated economics of slowdown. Hawthorne had died before achieving the necessary financial critical mass -- let alone the kind of director-emeritus status where he could be paid for nothing but his name on the company letterhead.