Грег Иган - Permutation City

Francesca smiled. "I know you would, darling. That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"I don't want to argue about it."

Maria was desperate. "I won't argue. But can't you tell me? Please?"

Francesca relented. "Listen, I was thirty-three when the first Copy was made. You were five years old, you grew up with the idea -- but to me, it's still . . . too strange. It's something rich eccentrics do -- the way they used to freeze their corpses. To me, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to be imitated by a computer after my death is just . . . farcical. I'm not an eccentric millionaire, I don't want to spend my money -- or yours -- building some kind of . . . talking monument to my ego. I still have a sense of proportion." She looked at Maria imploringly. "Doesn't that count for anything any more?"

"You wouldn't be imitated. You'd be you."

"Yes and no."

"What's that supposed to mean? You always told me you believed --"

"I do believe that Copies are intelligent. I just wouldn't say that they are -- or they aren't -- "the same person as" the person they were based on. There's no right or wrong answer to that; it's a question of semantics, not a question of truth.

"The thing is, I have my own sense -- right now -- of who I am . . . what my boundaries are . . . and it doesn't include a Copy of me, run at some time in the indefinite future. Can you understand that? Being scanned wouldn't make me feel any better about dying. Whatever a Copy of me might think, if one was ever run."

Maria said, angrily, "That's just being perverse. That's as stupid as . . . saying when you're twenty years old, "I can't picture myself at fifty, a woman that old wouldn't really be me. " And then killing yourself because there's nothing to lose but that older woman, and she's not inside your 'boundaries.'"

"I thought you said you weren't going to argue."

Maria looked away. "You never used to talk like this. You're the one who always told me that Copies had to be treated exactly like human beings. If you hadn't been brain-washed by that 'religion' --"

"The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference has no position on Copies, one way or the other."

"It has no position on anything."

"That's right. So it can hardly be their fault that I don't want to be scanned, can it?"

Maria felt physically sick. She'd held off saying anything on the subject for almost a year; she'd been astonished and appalled, but she'd struggled to respect her mother's choice -- and now she could see that that had been insane, irresponsible beyond belief. You don't stand by and let someone you love -- someone who gave you your own understanding of the world -- have their brain turned to pulp.

She said, "It's their fault, because they've undermined your judgment. They've fed you so much bullshit that you can't think straight about anything, anymore."

Francesca just looked at her reprovingly. Maria felt a pang of guilt -- How can you make things harder for her, now? How can you start attacking her, when she's just told you that she's dying? -- but she wasn't going to fold now, take the easy way out, be "supportive."

She said, "'God makes no difference . . . because God is the reason why everything is exactly what it is?' That's supposed to make us all feel at peace with the cosmos, is it?"

Francesca shook her head. "At peace? No. It's just a matter of clearing away, once and for all, old ideas like divine intervention -- and the need for some kind of proof, or even faith, in order to believe."

Maria said, "What do you need, then? I don't believe, so what am I missing?"

"Belief?"

"And a love of tautology."

"Don't knock tautology. Better to base a religion on tautology than fantasy."

"But it's worse than tautology. It's . . . redefining words arbitrarily, it's like something out of Lewis Carroll. Or George Orwell. "God is the reason for everything . . . whatever that reason is." So what any sane person would simply call the laws of physics, you've decided to rename G-O-D . . . solely because the word carries all kinds of historical resonances -- all kinds of misleading connotations. You claim to have nothing to do with the old religions -- so why keep using their terminology?"

Francesca said, "We don't deny the history of the word. We make a break from the past in a lot of ways -- but we also acknowledge our origins. God is a concept people have been using for millennia. The fact that we've refined the idea beyond primitive superstitions and wish-fulfilment doesn't mean we're not part of the same tradition."

"But you haven't refined the idea, you've made it meaningless! And rightly so -- but you don't seem to realize it. You've stripped away all the obvious stupidities -- all the anthropomorphism, the miracles, the answered prayers -- but you don't seem to have noticed that once you've done that, there's absolutely nothing left that needs to be called religion. Physics is not theology. Ethics is not theology. Why pretend that they are?"

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept -- to keep honing it, rather than discarding it -- despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago."

"And you know perfectly well where that compulsion comes from! It has nothing to do with any real divine being; it's just a product of culture and neurobiology -- a few accidents of evolution and history."

"Of course it is. What human trait isn't?"

"So why give in to it?"

Francesca laughed. "Why give in to anything? The religious impulse isn't some kind of . . . alien mind virus. It's not -- in its purest form, stripped of all content -- the product of brain-washing. It's a part of who I am."

Maria put her face in her hands. "Is it? When you talk like this, it doesn't sound like you."

Francesca said, "Don't you ever want to give thanks to God when things are going well for you? Don't you ever want to ask God for strength when you need it?"

"No."

"Well, I do. Even though I know God makes no difference. And if God is the reason for everything, then God includes the urge to use the word God. So whenever I gain some strength, or comfort, or meaning, from that urge, then God is the source of that strength, that comfort, that meaning.

"And if God -- while making no difference -- helps me to accept what's going to happen to me, why should that make you sad?"

+ + +

On the train home, Maria sat next to a boy of about seven, who twitched all the way to the silent rhythms of a nerve-induced PMV -- participatory music video. Nerve induction had been developed to treat epilepsy, but now its most common use seemed to bring about the symptoms it was meant to alleviate. Glancing at him sideways, she could see his eyeballs fluttering behind his mirror shades.

As the shock of the news diminished, slightly, Maria began to see things more clearly. It was really all about money, not religion. She wants to be a martyr, to save me from spending a cent. All the rest is rationalization. She must have picked up a load of archaic bullshit from her own parents about the virtues of not being a "burden" -- not imposing too much on the next generation, not "ruining the best years of their lives."

She'd left her cycle in a locker at Central Station. She rode home slowly through the leisurely Sunday evening traffic, still feeling drained and shaky, but a little more confident, now that she'd had a chance to think it through. Twelve to eighteen months? She'd raise the money in less than a year. Somehow. She'd show Francesca that she could shoulder the burden -- and once that was done, her mother could stop inventing excuses.