Permutation City

by Greg Egan

and on a good night, a strong enough sense of camaraderie, telepathy, synergy, could by the mutual consent of the crowd take over, melting away (for a moment) all personal barriers, mental and mock-physical, reconstructing audience and performers into a single organism: one hundred eyes, two hundred limbs, one giant neural net resonating with the memories, perceptions and emotions of all the people it had been.

Peer had once asked himself: Was that kernel of invariants – and the more-or-less unbroken thread of memory – enough? Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way?

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?

Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.

Understanding exactly how far she could go was more than enough to rid her of any desire to take a single step in that direction.

Maybe the time came, for everyone, when there was no way forward, no other choice but death. Maybe the Lambertians were right, maybe “infinity” was meaningless … and “immortality” was a mirage no human should aspire to.

Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder … and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new?