Грег Иган - Permutation City

Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings.

(Unless, of course, he was the control.)

"Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets."

He'd lost any real feeling for what was happening. He just counted.

"Pseudo-random ordering of states."

"One. Two. Three."

Now he was . . . dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time -- and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, "assembled himself from these scrambled fragments. He'd been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle -- but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow -- on their own terms -- the pieces remained connected.

"Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak. "You're sweating."

"Both of me?"

Squeak. The djinn laughed. "What do you think?"

Paul said, "Do me one small favor. The experiment is over. Shut down one of me -- control or subject, I don't care."

Squeak. "Done."

"Now there's no need to conceal anything, is there? So run the pseudo-random effect on me again -- and stay on-line. This time, you count to ten."

Squeak. Durham shook his head. "Can't do it, Paul. Think about it: you can't be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions aren't known."

Of course; the broken vase problem all over again.

Paul said, "Record yourself, then, and use that."

The djinn seemed to find the request amusing, but he agreed; he even slowed down the recording so it lasted ten model-time seconds. Paul watched the blurred lips and jaws intently, listened carefully to the drone of white noise.

Squeak. "Happy now?"

"You did scramble me, and not the recording?"

Squeak. "Of course. Your wish is my command."

"Yeah? Then do it again."

Durham grimaced, but obliged.

Paul said, "Now, scramble the recording."

It looked just the same. Of course.

"Again."

Squeak. "What's the point of all this?"

"Just do it."

Paul watched, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, convinced that he was on the verge of . . . what? Finally confronting the "obvious" fact that the wildest permutations in the relationship between model time and real time would be undetectable to an isolated Copy? He'd accepted the near certainty of that, tacitly, for almost twenty years . . . but the firsthand experience of having his mind literally scrambled -- to absolutely no effect -- was still provocative in a way that the abstract understanding had never been.

He said, "When do we move on to the next stage?"

Squeak. "Why so keen all of a sudden?"

"Nothing's changed. I just want to get it over and done with."

Squeak. "Lining up all the other machines is taking some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isn't designed to accommodate whims about geography. It's a bit like going to a bank and asking to deposit some money . . . at a certain location in a particular computer's memory. Basically, people think I'm crazy."

Paul felt a momentary pang of empathy, recalling his own anticipation of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. He smothered it. The two of them were irreversibly different people now, with different problems and different goals -- and the stupidest thing he could do would be to forget that.

Squeak. "I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements, save you the boredom -- if that's what you want."

"You're too kind. But I'd rather stay conscious. I've got a lot to think about."

7

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

"Twelve to eighteen months? Are they sure?"

Francesca Deluca said drily, "What can I say? They modeled it."

Maria did her best to sound calm. "That's plenty of time. We'll get you scanned. We'll get the money together. I can sell the house, and borrow some from Aden --"

Francesca smiled but shook her head. "No, darling." Her hair had grayed a little since Maria had last really looked at her, last consciously gauged her appearance, but she showed no obvious signs of ill health. "What's the point? Even if I wanted that -- and I don't -- what's the use of a scan that will never be run?"

"It will be run. Computing power will get cheaper. Everybody's counting on that. Thousands of people have scan files waiting --"

"How many frozen corpses have ever been revived?"

"That's not the same thing at all."

"How many?"

"Physically, none. But some have been scanned --"

"And proved non-viable. All the interesting ones -- the celebrities, the dictators -- are brain-damaged, and nobody cares about the rest."

"A scan file is nothing like a frozen corpse. You'd never become non-viable."

"No, but I'd never become worth bringing back to life, either."

Maria stared at her angrily. " I'll bring you back to life. Or don't you believe I'll ever have the money?"

Francesca said, "Maybe you will. But I'm not going to be scanned, so forget about it."

Maria hunched forward on the couch, not knowing how to sit, not knowing where to put her hands. Sunlight streamed into the room, obscenely bright, revealing every speck of lint on the carpet; she had to make an effort not to get up and close the blinds. Why hadn't Francesca told her on the phone? All of this would have been a thousand times easier by phone.

She said, "All right, you're not going to be scanned. Someone in the world must be making nanomachines for liver cancer. Even just experimental ones."

"Not for this cell type. It's not one of the common onco-genes, and nobody's sure of the cell surface markers."

"So? They can find them, can't they? They can look at the cells, identify the markers, and modify an existing nanomachine. All the information they need is there in your body." Maria pictured the mutant proteins which enabled metastasis poking through the cell walls, highlighted in ominous yellow.

Francesca said, "With enough time and money and expertise, I'm sure that would be possible . . . but as it happens, nobody plans to do it in the next eighteen months."

Maria started shuddering. It came in waves. She didn't make a sound; she just sat and waited for it to pass.

Finally, she said, "There must be drugs."

Francesca nodded. "I'm on medication to slow the growth of the primary tumor, and limit further metastasis. There's no point in a transplant; I already have too many secondary tumors -- actual liver failure is the least of my worries. There are general cytotoxic drugs I could take, and there's always radiation therapy -- but I don't think the benefits are worth the side effects."

"Would you like me to stay with you?"

"No."

"It'd be no trouble. You know I can work from anywhere."

"There's no need for it. I'm not going to be an invalid."

Maria closed her eyes. She couldn't imagine feeling this way for another hour, let alone another year. When her father had died of a heart attack, three years before, she'd promised herself that she'd raise the money to have Francesca scanned by her sixtieth birthday. She was nowhere near on target. I screwed up. I wasted time. And now it's almost too late.

Thinking aloud, she said, "Maybe I'll get some work in Seoul."

"I thought you'd decided not to go."

Maria looked up at her, uncomprehending. "Why don't you want to be scanned? What are you afraid of? I'd protect you, I'd do whatever you asked. If you didn't want to be run until slowdown is abolished, I'd wait. If you wanted to wake up in a physical body -- an organic body -- I'd wait."