Permutation City

by Greg Egan

Copies could only receive realistic external visitors if they had friends or relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a factor of seventeen.

A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World.

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.’

‘Listen, I was thirty-three when the first Copy was made. You were five years old, you grew up with the idea – but to me, it’s still … too strange. It’s something rich eccentrics do – the way they used to freeze their corpses. To me, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to be imitated by a computer after my death is just … farcical. I’m not an eccentric millionaire, I don’t want to spend my money – or yours – building some kind of … talking monument to my ego. I still have a sense of proportion.’ She looked at Maria imploringly. ‘Doesn’t that count for anything any more?’ ‘You wouldn’t be imitated. You’d be you.’ ‘Yes and no.’

On the train home, Maria sat next to a boy of about seven, who twitched all the way to the silent rhythms of a nerve-induced PMV – participatory music video. Nerve induction had been developed to treat epilepsy, but now its most common use seemed to bring about the symptoms it was meant to alleviate. Glancing at him sideways, she could see his eyeballs fluttering behind his mirror shades.