Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  “Why? What am I meant to do – try suing him after he’s already gone bankrupt repaying the people he’s cheated?”

  “You won’t have to sue him. The court is almost certain to award you compensation as one of the victims – especially if you’ve helped bring the case to trial. There’s a fund, revenue from fines. It doesn’t matter whether Durham can pay you himself.”

  Maria digested that. The truth was, it still stank. What she wanted to do was cut her losses and walk away from the whole mess. Pretend it had never happened.

  And then what? Go crawling back to Aden for money? There were still no jobs around; she couldn’t afford to write off three months’ work. A few thousand dollars wouldn’t get Francesca scanned – but the lack of it could force her to sell the house sooner than she wanted to.

  She said, “What if I make him suspicious? If I suddenly start asking all these questions…”

  “Just keep it natural. Anyone in your position would be curious; it’s a strange job he’s given you – he must expect questions. And I know you went along with what he told you at the start, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have given it more thought and decided that there are a few things that still puzzle you.”

  Maria said, “All right, I’ll do it.” Had she ever had a choice? “But don’t expect him to tell me the truth. He’s already lied to me; he’s not going to change his story now.”

  “Maybe not. But you might be surprised. He might be desperate to have someone to take into his confidence – someone to boast to. Or he might just drop a few oblique hints. Anything’s possible, as long as you keep talking to him.”

  When Hayden had left, Maria sat in the living room, too agitated to do anything but run through the whole exchange again in her head. An hour before, she’d been exhausted, but triumphant; now she just felt weary and stupid. Keep working as if nothing had happened! The thought of tackling photosynthesis in A. lamberti – for the sake, now, of ingratiating herself with the Fraud Squad – was so bizarre it made her giddy.

  It was a pity Durham hadn’t been honest with her, and invited her in on the scam. If she’d known all along that she was meant to be helping to screw rich Copies out of their petty cash, at least the work would have had the real-world foundation she’d always felt was missing.

  She finally went upstairs, without having eaten. Her connection to the JSN had been logged off automatically, but the message from Juno, locally generated, still hovered in the workspace. As she gestured to the terminal to switch itself off, she wondered if she should have asked Hayden: Is it you who’s been tapping my phone line?

  Chapter 14

  (Remit not paucity)

  February 2051

  Seated in his library, Thomas viewed the final report in his knowledge miner’s selection from the last real-time week of news. A journalist in a fur-lined coat appeared to address the camera, standing in light snow in front of the US Supreme Court building – although she was more likely to have been seated in a warm studio, watching a software puppet mime to her words.

  “Today’s five-to-one majority decision means that the controversial Californian statute will remain in force. Authorities taking possession of computer storage media to check for simulations of the brain, body, or personality of a suspected felon, dead or alive, are not violating the Fourth Amendment rights of either the next-of-kin, or the owners of the computer hardware. Chief Justice Andrea Steiner stressed that the ruling does not affect the status of Copies themselves, one way or another. The software, she said, can be confiscated and examined – but it will not stand trial.”

  The terminal blinked back to a menu. Thomas stretched his arms above his head, acutely conscious for a moment of the disparity between his frail appearance and the easy strength he felt in his limbs. He had become his young self again, after all. Become him in the flesh – whether or not he chose to face him in the mirror. But the thought led nowhere.

  Thomas had been following the saga of the Californian legislation from the start. He hoped Sanderson and her colleagues knew what they were doing; if their efforts backfired, it could have unpleasant ramifications for Copies everywhere. Thomas’s own public opinion model had shrugged its stochastic shoulders and declared that the effects of the law could go either way, depending on the steps taken to follow through – and several other factors, most of which would be difficult to anticipate, or manipulate.

  Clearly, the aim was to shock apathetic US voters into supporting human rights for Copies – lest the alternative be de facto kidnap, mind pillage, and possibly even execution, all without trial. The computer-literate would understand just how useless the law would be in practice – but they’d already been largely won over. The Unclear Family rated highest with the demographics least likely to grasp the technical realities – a storehouse of good will that had yet to be fully exploited. Thomas could see the possibilities. Resurrected blue-collar worker Larry Unclear could turn out to have been under suspicion of murder at the time of his death. Flashback: Misunderstanding in bar leads to heated, highly visible, argument between Larry and guest-star X. Comic escalation to full-scale brawl. Taking advantage of the confusion, guest-star Y smashes a bottle over the skull of guest-star X – while Larry, with his usual endearing ineffectuality, has ended up comatose under a table. The new law could see him dragged from his home and family in the dead of night for a Kafkaesque virtual interrogation, in which his guilty dreams of being responsible are taken to be memories of actually committing the crime … while guest-star Y, still a living human, receives a civilized trial, lies through his teeth, and is acquitted. Son Leroy could save the day somehow, at the last minute, as usual.

  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 snap-shots. No other evidence remained. It was ludicrous to imagine th
at 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 – rendering 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 – balked at the prospect of instant grace.

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

  On his “death bed”, 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 café. 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 café 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, he 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.

  Thomas, still on the couch, asked her if the powder was heroin, or cocaine.

  “Heroin.”

  “Do you use that shit?”

  “No.” She regarded him with mild amusement; she didn’t care if he believed her or not.

  He woke again at half past five. Anna had gone. The baby was still in his crib, screaming. Thomas changed him and fed him; Anna had shown him where everything was. He wanted a shower, but there was no hot water. He shaved, and left in time for his meeting, telling himself Anna would be back soon. All morning, and all through lunch, he could smell the sour odor of the child’s skin on his hands, and he wondered if the smiling property developers could smell it too.

  He phoned from the hotel, paying for the night he hadn’t spent there, knowing that his father would scrutinize his expenses. Anna was home; he’d woken her. Someone nearby grunted with displeasure. Thomas didn’t mention the child.

  The next time, he came on a Saturday afternoon, with no need to be anywhere else in a hurry. They met at the Alsterpavillon, drank their coffee looking down on the buffoons in rowboats on the Binnenalster, then went shopping on Jungfernstieg. Thomas paid for the clothes Anna chose, authentic gothic designer trash that looked far worse than the cheapest imitation; it seemed she didn’t really want to dress like him, after all. They walked arm-in-arm from shop to shop, and in the entrance to the most expensive boutique, they stopped and kissed for several minutes, blocking the way of customers trying to get past, then went in and spent a lot of money.

  Later, in a nightclub with a bad live band who dressed like The Beatles and did Sex Pistols covers, they ran into Martin, a tall wiry blond youth who Anna introduced as a friend. Martin was all vicious back-slapping amiability, trying so hard to be intimidating that he was almost comical. They all staggered back to Anna’s flat together, and sat on the floor listening to records. When Anna went to the toilet, Martin drew a knife and told Thomas he intended to kill him. He was very drunk. Thomas stood up, kicked him once in the face, breaking his nose, then took away the knife and dragged him moaning out into the hall. Thomas turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on the blood, then locked the door.

  Anna came out of the bathroom. Thomas told her what had happened. She went out and checked on Martin, and put a pillow under his head.

  While Anna was undressing him, Thomas said, “On TV once, I saw an Engl
ish soldier who’d just come back from Northern Ireland. And he said, ‘It was hell there, but at least it was real. At least I’ve lived now.’” Thomas laughed sadly. “The poor fool had it all upside down. Slaughtering people is real – and living an ordinary life is some kind of dream, some kind of delusion? Poor fucked-up kid.”

  He searched Anna for needle marks, but he couldn’t find a single one.

  Back in his office in Frankfurt, alone in his apartment, at the dinner table in his parents’ home, Thomas thought about Anna, in images and scents. The memories never distracted him; he could carry on a conversation, or keep reading a mortgage schedule, while she played in his head like wallpaper music.

  His father cornered him at Easter. “You should think about getting married. It makes no difference to me, but there are social advantages you’re going to need, sooner or later. And think how happy it would make your mother.”

  Thomas said, “I’m twenty-four years old.”

  “I was engaged when I was twenty-four.”

  “Maybe I’m gay. Or perhaps I have an incurable venereal disease.”

  “I don’t see why either should be an obstacle.”

  Thomas saw Anna every second weekend. He bought her whatever she asked for. Sometimes she had the child with her. The boy was called Erik.

  Thomas asked her, “Who’s the mother? Have I met her?”

  She said, “You don’t want to.”

  He worried about her sometimes – afraid she’d get herself arrested, or beaten up by junkies or rivals – but she seemed to be able to take care of herself. He could have hired private detectives to uncover the mysteries of her life, and bodyguards to watch over her, but he knew he had no right. He could have bought her an apartment, set her up with investments – but she never suggested anything of the kind, and he suspected she’d be deeply insulted if he made the offer. His gifts were lavish, but he knew she could have lived without them. They were using each other. She was, he told himself, as independent as he was.