Permutation City

His bowels loosened with fright; they were already empty. [Thomas squirmed in sympathy, but kept himself from breaking free.] Valhalla was the meat-rack he'd hired to take care of his comatose body until it expired, after the scan -- with the legal minimum of medical attention, with no heroic measures to prolong life.

He had been scanned -- but they'd fucked up.

They'd let him wake.

It was a shock, but he came to terms with it rapidly. There was no reason to panic. He'd be out of here and scanned again in six hours flat -- and whoever was responsible would be out on the street even faster. He tried to raise himself into a sitting position, but he was too dizzy from the lingering effects of the drug infusion to coordinate the action. He slumped back onto the pillows, caught his breath, and forced himself to speak calmly.

"I want to talk to the director."

"I'm sorry, the director is not available."

"Then, the most senior member of staff you can find."

"No staff are available to attend to you, at present."

Sweat trickled into his eyes. There was no point screaming about lawsuits to this machine. In fact . . . it might be prudent not to scream about lawsuits to anyone. A place like this would be perfectly capable of responding by simply drugging him back into a coma.

What he needed to do was let someone outside know about the situation.

He said, "I'd like to make a phone call. Can you connect me to the net?"

"I have no authority to do that."

"I can give you an account number linked to my voiceprint, and authorize you to charge me for the service."

"I have no authority to accept your account number."

"Then . . . make a call, reversing all charges, to Rudolf Dieterle, of Dieterle, Hollingworth and Partners."

"I have no authority to make such a call."

He laughed, disbelieving. "Are you physically capable of connecting me to the net at all?"

"I have no authority to disclose my technical specifications."

Any insult would have been a waste of breath. He lifted his head and surveyed the room. There was no furniture; no drawers, no table, no visitor's chair. Just the monitors to one side of his bed, mounted on stainless steel trolleys. And no terminal, no communications equipment of any kind -- not even a wall-mounted audio handset.

He probed the needle in his forearm, just below the inside of the elbow. A tight, seamless rubber sleeve, several centimeters wide, covered the entry point; it seemed to take forever to get his fingernails under the edge -- and once he'd succeeded, it was no help. The sleeve was too tight to be dragged down his arm, and too elastic to be rolled up like a shirt sleeve. How did anyone, ever, take the thing off? He tugged at the drip tube itself; held in place by the sleeve, it showed no sign of yielding. The other end vanished inside the drug pump.

[Thomas began to wonder if the immovable needle, on top of the Kafkaesque room controller, would make the clone suspicious -- but it seemed that the possibility of some future self waking the scan file a second time was too convoluted an explanation to occur to him in the middle of a crisis like this.]

He'd have to take the pump with him. That was a nuisance -- but if he was going to march through the building wrapped in a sheet, looking for a terminal, it could hardly make him more conspicuous than he would have been anyway.

He started to peel the electrodes from his chest when a pulse of numbing warmth swept through his right arm. The pump beeped twice; he turned to see a green LED glowing brightly in the middle of the box, a light he hadn't noticed before.

The wave of paralysis spread out from his shoulder before he could react -- crimp the tube? He tried to roll himself out of the bed but if his body responded at all, he couldn't feel it.

His eyes fluttered closed. He struggled to remain conscious -- and succeeded. [The script guaranteed the clone several minutes of lucidity -- which had nothing to do with the opiate's true pharmacological effects.]

There'd be a computer log of his EEG. Someone would be alerted, soon, to the fact that he'd been awake . . . and they'd understand that the only humane thing to do would be to revive him.

But someone should have been alerted the moment he woke.

It was far more likely that he'd be left to die.

[Thomas felt ill. This was sadistic, insane.

It was too late for squeamishness, though. Everything he was witnessing had already happened.]

His body was numb, but his mind was crystalline. Without the blur of visceral distractions, his fear seemed purer, sharper than anything he'd ever experienced.