Permutation City (6 page)

Durham's puppet inclined its head in a gesture of polite assent; Thomas had a sudden vision of a second puppet -- one Durham truly felt himself to be inhabiting -- hunched over a control panel, hitting a button on an etiquette sub-menu.
Was that paranoid?
But any sensible mendicant visitor would do just that, conducting the meeting at a distance rather than exposing their true body language to scrutiny.

The visible puppet said, "Why spend a fortune upgrading, for the sake of effectively slowing down progress? And I agree with you about the outlook for reform -- in the short term. Of course people begrudge Copies their longevity, but the PR has been handled remarkably well. A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World. There's discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening. The legal status of Copies is being framed as a human rights issue, especially in Europe: Copies are disabled people, no more, no less -- really just a kind of radical amputee -- and anyone who talks about
decadent rich immortals getting their hands on all the wealth
is shouted down as a neo-Nazi.

"So you might well achieve citizenship in a decade. And if you're lucky, the situation could be stable for another twenty or thirty years after that. But . . . what's twenty or thirty years to you? Do you honestly think that the status quo will be tolerated for ever?'"

Thomas said, "Of course not -- but I'll tell you what would be "tolerated": scanning facilities, and computing power, so cheap that everyone on the planet could be resurrected. Everyone who wanted it. And when I say
cheap,
I mean at a cost comparable to a dose of vaccine at the turn of the century. Imagine that. Death could be eradicated -- like smallpox or malaria. And I'm not talking about some solipsistic nightmare; by then, telepresence robots will let Copies interact with the physical world as fully as if they were human. Civilization wouldn't have deserted reality -- just transcended biology."

"That's a long, long way in the future."

"Certainly. But don't accuse me of thinking in the short term."

"And in the meantime? The privileged class of Copies will grow larger, more powerful -- and more threatening to the vast majority of people, who still won't be able to join them. The costs will come down, but not drastically -- just enough to meet some of the explosion in demand from the executive class, once they throw off their qualms,
en masse.
Even in secular Europe, there's a deeply ingrained prejudice that says dying is the responsible, the
moral
thing to do. There's a Death Ethic -- and the first substantial segment of the population abandoning it will trigger a huge backlash. A small enough elite of giga-rich Copies is accepted as a freak show; tycoons can get away with anything, they're not expected to act like ordinary people. But just wait until the numbers go up by a factor of ten."

Thomas had heard it all before. "We may be unpopular for a while. I can live with that. But you know, even now we're vilified far less than people who strive for
organic
hyper-longevity -- transplants, cellular rejuvenation, whatever -- because at least
we're
no longer pushing up the cost of health care, competing for the use of overburdened medical facilities. Nor are we consuming natural resources at anything like the rate we did when we were alive. If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who'll have the high moral ground then? We'll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet."

Durham smiled. The puppet. "Sure -- and it could lead to some nice ironies if it ever came true. But even low environmental impact might not seem so saintly, when the same computing power could be used to save tens of thousands of lives through weather control."

"Operation Butterfly has inconvenienced some of my fellow Copies very slightly. And myself not at all."

"Operation Butterfly is only the beginning. Crisis management, for a tiny part of the planet. Imagine how much computing power it would take to render sub-Saharan Africa free from drought."

"Why should I imagine that, when the most modest schemes are still unproven? And even if weather control turns out to be viable, more supercomputers can always be built. It doesn't have to be a matter of Copies versus flood victims."

"There's a limited supply of computing power right now, isn't there? Of course it will grow -- but the demand, from Copies, and for weather control, is almost certain to grow faster. Long before we get to your deathless Utopia, we'll hit a bottle-neck -- and I believe that will bring on a time when Copies are declared
illegal.
Worldwide. If they've been granted human rights, those rights will be taken away. Trusts and foundations will have their assets confiscated. Supercomputers will be heavily policed. Scanners -- and scan files -- will be destroyed. It may be forty years before any of this happens -- or it may be sooner. Either way, you need to be prepared."

Thomas said mildly, "If you're fishing for a job as a futurology consultant, I'm afraid I already employ several -- highly qualified -- people who do nothing but investigate these trends. Right now, everything they tell me gives me reason to be optimistic -- and even if they're wrong, Soliton is ready for a very wide range of contingencies."

"If your whole foundation is eviscerated, do you honestly believe it will be able to ensure that a snapshot of you is hidden away safely -- and then resurrected after a hundred years or more of social upheaval? A vault full of ROM chips at the bottom of a mine shaft could end up taking a one-way trip into geological time."

Thomas laughed. "And a meteor could hit the planet tomorrow, wiping out this computer, all of my backups,
your
organic body . . . anything and everything. Yes, there could be a revolution which pulls the plug on my world. It's unlikely, but it's not impossible. Or there could be a plague, or an ecological disaster, which kills billions of organic humans but leaves all the Copies untouched. There are no certainties for anyone."

"But Copies have so much more to lose."

Thomas was emphatic; this was part of his personal litany. "I've never mistaken what I have -- a very good chance of a prolonged existence -- for a
guarantee of immortality."

Durham said flatly, "Quite right. You have no such thing. Which is why I'm here offering it to you."

Thomas regarded him uneasily. Although he'd had all the ravages of surgery edited out of his final scan file, he'd kept a scar on his right forearm, a small memento of a youthful misadventure. He stroked it, not quite absentmindedly; conscious of the habit, conscious of the memories that the scar encoded -- but practiced at refusing to allow those memories to hold his gaze.

Finally, he said, "Offering it how? What can you possibly do -- for two million ecus -- that Soliton can't do a thousand times better?"

"I can run a second version of you, entirely out of harm's way. I can give you a kind of insurance -- against an anti-Copy backlash . . . or a meteor strike . . . or whatever else might go wrong."

Thomas was momentarily speechless. The subject wasn't entirely taboo, but he couldn't recall anyone raising it quite so bluntly before. He recovered swiftly. "I have no wish to run a
second version,
thank you. And . . . what do you mean, "out of harm's way"? Where's your invulnerable computer going to be? In orbit? Up where it would only take a pebble-sized meteor to destroy it, instead of a boulder?"

"No, not in orbit. And if you don't want a second version, that's fine. You could simply move."

"Move
where?
Underground? To the bottom of the ocean? You don't even know where this office is being implemented, do you? What makes you think you can offer a superior site -- for such a ridiculous price -- when you don't have the faintest idea how secure I am already?" Thomas was growing disappointed, and uncharacteristically irritable. "Stop making these inflated claims, and get to the point. What are you selling?"

Durham shook his head apologetically. "I can't tell you that. Not yet. If I tried to explain it, out of the blue, it would make no sense. You have to do something first. Something very simple."

"Yes? And what's that?"

"You have to conduct a small experiment."

Thomas scowled. "What kind of
experiment?
Why?"

And Durham -- the software puppet, the lifeless shell animated by a being from another plane -- looked him in the eye and said, "You have to let me show you exactly what you are."

3

(Rip, tie, cut toy man)

JUNE 2045

Paul -- or the flesh-and-blood man whose memories he'd inherited -- had traced the history of Copies back to the turn of the century, when researchers had begun to fine-tune the generic computer models used for surgical training and pharmacology, transforming them into customized versions able to predict the needs and problems of individual patients. Drug therapies were tried out in advance on models which incorporated specific genetic and biochemical traits, allowing doses to be optimized and any idiosyncratic side-effects anticipated and avoided. Elaborate operations were rehearsed and perfected in Virtual Reality, on software bodies with anatomical details -- down to the finest capillaries -- based on the flesh-and-blood patient's tomographic scans.

These early models included a crude approximation of the brain, perfectly adequate for heart surgery or immunotherapy -- and even useful to a degree when dealing with gross cerebral injuries and tumours -- but worthless for exploring more subtle neurological problems.

Imaging technology steadily improved, though -- and by 2020, it had reached the point where individual neurons could be mapped, and the properties of individual synapses measured, non-invasively. With a combination of scanners, every psychologically relevant detail of the brain could be read from the living organ -- and duplicated on a sufficiently powerful computer.

At first, only isolated neural pathways were modeled: portions of the visual cortex of interest to designers of machine vision, or sections of the limbic system whose role had been in dispute. These fragmentary neural models yielded valuable results, but a functionally complete representation of the whole organ -- embedded in a whole body -- would have allowed the most delicate feats of neurosurgery and psychopharmacology to be tested in advance. For several years, though, no such model was built -- in part, because of a scarcely articulated unease at the prospect of what it would mean. There were no formal barriers standing in the way -- government regulatory bodies and institutional ethics committees were concerned only with human and animal welfare, and no laboratory had yet been fire-bombed by activists for its inhumane treatment of physiological software -- but still, someone had to be the first to break all the unspoken taboos.

Someone had to make a high-resolution, whole-brain Copy -- and let it wake, and talk.

In 2024, John Vines, a Boston neurosurgeon, ran a fully conscious Copy of himself in a crude Virtual Reality. Taking slightly less than three hours of real time (pulse racing, hyper-ventilating, stress hormones elevated), the first Copy's first words were: "This is like being buried alive. I've changed my mind. Get me out of here."

His original obligingly shut him down -- but then later repeated
the
demonstration several times, without variation, reasoning that it was impossible to cause additional distress by running exactly the same simulation more than once.

When Vines went public, the prospects for advancing neurological research didn't rate a mention; within twenty-four hours -- despite the Copy's discouraging testimony -- the headlines were all immortality, mass migration into Virtual Reality, and the imminent desertion of the physical world.

Paul was twenty-four years old at the time, with no idea what to make of his life. His father had died the year before -- leaving him a modest business empire, centered on a thriving retail chain, which he had no interest in managing. He'd spent seven years traveling and studying -- science, history and philosophy -- doing well enough at everything he tried, but unable to discover anything that kindled real intellectual passion. With no struggle for financial security ahead, he'd been sinking quietly into a state of bemused complacency.

The news of John Vines's Copy blasted away his indifference. It was as if every dubious promise technology had ever made to transform human life was about to be fulfilled, with a vengeance. Longevity would only be the start of it; Copies could
evolve
in ways almost impossible for organic beings: modifying their minds, redefining their goals, endlessly transmuting themselves. The possibilities were intoxicating -- even as the costs and drawbacks of the earliest versions sank in, even as the inevitable backlash began, Paul was a child of the millennium; he was ready to embrace it all.

But the more time he spent contemplating what Vines had done, the more bizarre the implications seemed to be.

The public debate the experiment had triggered was heated, but depressingly superficial. Decades-old arguments raged again over just how much computer programs could ever have in common with human beings (psychologically, morally, metaphysically, information-theoretically . . . ) and even whether or not Copies could be "truly" intelligent, "truly" conscious. As more workers repeated Vines's result, their Copies soon passed the Turing test: no panel of experts quizzing a group of Copies and humans -- by delayed video, to mask the time-rate difference -- could tell which were which. But some philosophers and psychologists continued to insist that this demonstrated nothing more than "simulated consciousness," and that Copies were merely programs capable of faking a detailed inner life which didn't actually exist at all.