Permutation City

by Greg Egan

All that it took to destroy something, here, was to fail to keep track of it.

She could stand there admiring the artistry of the illusion for as long as she liked, but nothing could bring back the surge of elation she’d felt when she’d been deceived.

Pain was more than the memory of pain.

Making his way down the smooth mirrored face of the skyscraper was, still, the purest joy he could imagine: the warmth of the sun reflecting back on him, the sharp cool gusts of wind, the faint creak of steel and concrete. Adrenaline and tranquillity. The cycle of exertion and perfect recovery. Perpetual motion. Touching infinity.

‘Don’t knock tautology. Better to base a religion on tautology than fantasy.’

It was like hearing someone admit that they studied chess but never played the game.

But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he’d actually signed up for.

Everything in here is just beautiful, inconsequential fiction.’ Including you. Including me.

‘The poor fool had it all upside down. Slaughtering people is real – and living an ordinary life is some kind of dream, some

Three hundred million people are living in refugee camps, and you’re offering sanctuary to sixteen billionaires! What do they need protection from?

There never can, and never will be, Gods.’