Грег Иган - Permutation City

Thomas closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. Most of the room ceased being computed; he pictured himself adrift in Durham's sea of random numbers, carrying the chair and a fragment of floor with him, the only objects granted solidity by his touch.

He said, "I'm not in any danger." The room flickered half-way back into existence, subtly modified the sound of his words, then dissolved into static again. Who did he believe would accuse him? There was no one left to care about Anna's death. He'd outlived them all.

But as long as the knowledge of what he'd done continued to exist, inside him, he could never be certain that it wouldn't be revealed.

For months after the crime, he'd dreamed that Anna had come to his apartment. He'd wake, sweating and shouting, staring into the darkness of his room, waiting for her to show herself. Waiting for her to tear the skin of normality from the world around him, to reveal the proof of his damnation: blood, fire, insanity.

Then he'd started rising from his bed when the nightmare woke him, walking naked into the shadows, daring her to be there. Willing it. He'd enter every room in the apartment, most of them so dark that he had to feel his way with an outstretched hand, waiting for her fingers suddenly to mesh with his.

Night after night, she failed to appear. And gradually, her absence became a horror in itself; vertiginous, icy. The shadows were empty, the darkness was indifferent. Nothing lay beneath the surface of the world. He could have slaughtered a hundred thousand people, and the night would still have failed to conjure up a single apparition to confront him.

He wondered if this understanding would drive him mad.

It didn't.

After that, his dreams had changed; there were no more walking corpses. Instead, he dreamed of marching into Hamburg police station and making a full confession.

Thomas stroked the scar on the inside of his right forearm, where he'd scraped himself on the brickwork outside the window of Anna's room, making his clumsy escape. No one, not even Ilse, had ever asked him to account for it; he'd invented a plausible explanation, but the lie had remained untold.

He knew he could have his memories of the crime erased. Edited out of his original scan file, his current brain model, his emergency snapshots. No other evidence remained. It was ludicrous to imagine that anyone would ever have the slightest reason -- let alone the legal right, let alone the power -- to seize and examine the data which comprised him . . . but if it eased his paranoid fears, why not? Why not neutralize his unease at the technical possibility of his mind being read like a book -- or a ROM chip -- by turning the metaphor, or near-literal truth, to his own advantage? Why not rewrite the last incriminating version of his past? Other Copies exploited what they'd become with inane sybaritic excesses. Why not indulge himself in some peace of mind?

Why not? Because it would rob him of his identity. For sixty-five years, the tug on his thoughts of that one night in Hamburg had been as constant as gravity; everything he'd done since had been shaped by its influence. To tear out the entire tangled strand of his psyche -- render half of his remaining memories incomprehensible -- would be to leave himself a baffled stranger in his own life.

Of course, any sense of loss, or disorientation, could be dealt with, too, subtracted out . . . but where would the process of amputation end? Who would remain to enjoy the untroubled conscience he'd manufactured? Who'd sleep the sleep of the just in his bed?

Memory editing wasn't the only option. Algorithms existed which could transport him smoothly and swiftly into a state of enlightened acceptance: rehabilitated, healed, at peace with himself and his entire uncensored past. He wouldn't need to forget anything; his absurd fear of incrimination by mind-reading would surely vanish, along with his other neuroses-of-guilt.

But he wasn't prepared to swallow that fate, either -- however blessed he might have felt once the transformation was complete. He wasn't sure that there was any meaningful distinction between redemption and the delusion of redemption . . . but some part of his personality -- though he cursed it as masochistic and sentimental -- baulked at the prospect of instant grace.

Anna's killer was dead! He'd burnt the man's corpse! What more could he do, to put the crime behind him?

On his "deathbed," as his illness had progressed -- as he'd flirted giddily every morning with the prospect of ordering his final scan -- he'd felt certain that witnessing the fate of his body would be dramatic enough to purge him of his stale, mechanical, relentless guilt. Anna was dead; nothing could change that. A lifetime of remorse hadn't brought her back. Thomas had never believed that he'd "earned" the right to be free of her -- but he'd come to realize that he had nothing left to offer the little tin metronome in his skull but an extravagant ritual of atonement: the death of the murderer himself.

But the murderer had never really died. The corpse consigned to the furnace had been nothing but shed skin. Two days before being scanned, Thomas had lost his nerve and countermanded his earlier instructions: that his flesh-and-blood self be allowed to regain consciousness after the scan.

So the dying human had never woken, never known that he was facing death. And there had been no separate, mortal Thomas Riemann to carry the burden of guilt into the flames.

+ + +

Thomas had met Anna in Hamburg in the summer of 1983, in a railway station cafe. He was in town to run errands for his father. She was on her way to West Berlin, for a concert. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

The cafe was crowded, they shared a table. Anna's appearance wasn't striking -- dark-haired, green-eyed, her face round and flat. Thomas would never have looked twice at her if they'd passed in the street -- but she soon made an impression.

She looked him over appraisingly, then said, "I'd kill for a shirt like that. You have expensive tastes. What do you do to support them?"

Thomas lied carefully. "I was a student. Engineering. Up until a few months ago. It was hopeless, though; I was failing everything."

"So what do you do now?"

He looked doleful. "My father owns a merchant bank. I went into engineering to try to get away from the family business, but --"

She wasn't sympathetic at all. "But you screwed up, and now he's stuck with you?"

"And vice versa."

"Is he very rich?"

"Yes."

"And you hate him?"

"Of course."

She smiled sweetly. "Why don't I kidnap him for you? You give me all the inside information, and we'll split the ransom money, fifty-fifty."

"You kidnap bankers for a living, do you?"

"Not exclusively."

"I think you work in a record store."

"You're wrong."

"Or a second-hand clothes shop."

"You're getting colder."

"Who are you meeting in Berlin?"

"Just some friends."

When her train was announced, he asked her for her number. She wrote it on the sleeve of his shirt.

For the next few months whenever he was traveling north, be phoned her. Three times, she made excuses. He almost gave up, but he kept recalling the mocking expression on her face, and he knew he wanted to see her again.

Early in November, she finally said, "Drop round, if you like. I'm not doing anything."

He'd planned to take her to a nightclub, but she had a child with her, a baby just a few months old. "He's not mine. I'm looking after him for a friend." They watched TV, then had sex on the sofa. Climbing off him, Anna said, "You're really quite sweet." She kissed him on the cheek, then vanished into the bedroom, locking him out. Thomas fell asleep watching an old John Wayne movie. Two teenage girls with smeared mascara pounded on the door around two in the morning and Anna sold them a plastic sachet of white powder.