Permutation City (22 page)

Maria thought this sounded too glib by far, but she let it pass. "What about the hardware? How does that check out?"

"It
doesn't. There'll never be any hardware. Durham will vanish long before he has to produce it."

"Vanish with what? Money handed over with no questions asked -- no safeguards, no guarantees?"

Hayden smiled knowingly. "Money handed over, mostly, for legitimate purposes. He's commissioned a VR city. He's commissioned an Autoverse planet. He's entitled to take a percentage of the fees -- there's no crime in that, so long as it's disclosed. For the first few months, everything he does will be scrupulously honest. Then at some point, he'll ask his backers to pay for a consultants' report -- say, a study of suitably robust hardware configurations. Tenders will be called for. Some of them will be genuine -- but the most attractive ones will be forged. Later, Durham will claim to have received the report, the "consultants" will be paid . . . and he'll never be seen again."

Maria said, "You're guessing. You have no idea what his plans are."

"We don't know the specifics -- but it will be something along those lines."

Maria slumped back in her chair. "So, what now? What do I do? Call Durham and tell him the whole thing's off?"

"Absolutely not! Keep working as if nothing had happened -- but try to make contact with him more often. Find excuses to talk to him. See if you can gain his trust. See if you can get him to talk about his work. His clients. The refuge."

Maria was indignant. "I don't remember volunteering to be your informant."

Hayden said coolly, "It's up to you, but if you're not willing to cooperate, that makes our job very difficult . . ."

"There's a difference between
cooperation
and playing unpaid spy!"

Hayden almost smiled. "If you're worried about money, you'll have a far better chance of being paid if you help us to convict Durham."

"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 photo-synthesis 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?

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 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.