Permutation City

Thomas had kept copies of his deathbed scan file -- off-line, in vaults in Geneva and New York -- with no explicit purpose in mind, other than the vaguest notion that if something went irreparably wrong with his model, and the source of the prolem -- a slow virus, a subtle programming error -- rendered all of his snapshots suspect, starting life again with no memories since 2045 would be better than nothing.

Having assembled the necessary elements, he'd scripted the whole scenario in advance and let it run -- without observing the results. Then he'd frozen the clone and sent it to Durham at the last possible moment -- without giving himself a chance to back out, or, worse, to decide that he'd botched the first attempt, and to try again.

Now he was ready to discover what he'd done, to view the fait accompli. Seated in the library -- with the drinks cabinet locked -- he gestured to the terminal to begin.

The old man in the bed looked much worse than Thomas had expected: sunken-eyed, jaundiced and nearly bald. (So much for the honesty of his own appearance, the "minimal" changes he'd made to render himself presentable.) His chest was furrowed with scars, criss-crossed by a grid of electrodes; his skull was capped with a similar mesh. A pump suspended beside the bed fed a needle in his right arm. The clone was sedated by a crudely modeled synthetic opiate flowing into his crudely modeled bloodstream, just as Thomas's original had been sedated by the real thing, from the time of the scan until his death three days later.

In this replay, though, the narcotic was scheduled to undergo a sudden drop in concentration -- for no physically plausible reason, but none was required. A graph in a corner of the screen plotted the decline.

Thomas watched, sick with anxiety, feverish with hope. This -- at last -- was the ritual which he'd always believed might have cured him.

The old man attained consciousness, without opening his eyes; the EEG waveforms meant nothing to Thomas, but the software monitoring the simulation had flagged the event with a subtitle. Further text followed:

The anesthetic still hasn't taken. Can't they get anything right? [Garbled verbalization.] The scan can't be over. I can't be the Copy yet. The Copy will wake with a clear head, seated in the library, premodified to feel no disorientation. So why am I awake?

The old man opened his eyes.

Thomas shouted, "Freeze!" He was sweating, and nauseous, but he made no move to banish the unnecessary symptoms. He wanted catharsis, didn't he? Wasn't that the whole point? The subtitles gave only a crude hint of what the clone was experiencing. Much greater clarity was available; the recording included traces from key neural pathways. If he wanted to, he could read the clone's mind.

He said, "Let me know what he's thinking, what he's going through." Nothing happened. He clenched his fists and whispered, "Restart."

The library vanished; he was flat on his back in the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling, dazed. He looked down and saw the cluster of monitors beside him, the wires on his chest. The motion of his eyes and head was wrong -- intelligible, but distressingly out of synch with his intentions. He felt fearful and disoriented -- but he wasn't sure how much of that was his own reaction and how much belonged to the clone. Thomas shook his own head in panic, and the library -- and his body -- returned.

He stopped the playback, and reconsidered.

He could break free any time he wanted to. He was only an observer. There was nothing to fear.

Fighting down a sense of suffocation, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the recording.

+ + +

He looked around the room groggily. He wasn't the Copy -- that much was certain. And this wasn't any part of the Landau Clinic; as a VIP shareholder and future client, he'd toured the building too many times to be wrong about that. If the scan had been postponed for some reason, he ought to be back home -- or on his way. Unless something had gone wrong requiring medical attention which the Landau was unable to provide?

The room was deserted, and the door was closed. He called out hoarsely, "Nurse!" He was too weak to shout.

The room controller replied, "No staff are available to attend to you, at present. Can I be of assistance?"

"Can you tell me where I am?"

"You're in Room 307 of Valhalla."

"Valhalla?" He knew he'd done business with the place, but he couldn't remember why.

The room controller said helpfully, "Valhalla is the Health Dynamics Corporation of America's Frankfurt Hospice."