Permutation City

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 sca

"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": sca

"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 begi

"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. Sca

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."