Or did he believe there was a chance that Durham was telling the truth? That he could run a second Copy, in a place nobody could reach in a billion years?

The terminal chimed. Thomas said, "Yes?"

Heidrich had taken over from Löhr; sometimes the shifts seemed to change so fast that it made Thomas giddy. "You have a meeting of the Geistbank board in five minutes, sir."

"Thank you, I'll be right down."

Thomas checked his appearance in the mirror. He said, "Comb me." His hair was made passably tidy, his complexion less pale, his eyes clear; certain facial muscles were relaxed, and others tightened. His suit required no attention; as in life, it could not be wrinkled.

He almost laughed, but his newly combed expression discouraged it. Expediency, honesty, complacency, insanity. It was a tightrope walk. He was ninety years old by one measure, eighty-five-and-a-half by another -- and he still didn't know how to live.

On his way out, he picked up his Confidence & Optimism and poured it on the carpet.

9

(Rip, tie, cut toy man)

JUNE 2045

Paul took the stairs down, and circled the block a few times, hoping for nothing more than to forget himself for a while. He was tired of having to think about what he was, every waking moment. The streets around the building were familiar enough, not to let him delude himself, but at least to allow him to take himself for granted.

It was hard to separate fact from rumor, but he'd heard that even the giga-rich tended to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics had reportedly set themselves up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately wanted to convince your-self that you were the same person as your memories suggested, the worst thing to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

Paul didn't believe that he "was" his original. He knew he was nothing but a cloud of ambiguous data. The miracle was that he was capable of believing that he existed at all.

What gave him that sense of identity?

Continuity. Consistency. Thought following thought in a coherent pattern.

But where did that coherence come from?

In a human, or a Copy being run in the usual way, the physics of brain or computer meant that the state of mind at any one moment directly influenced the state of mind that followed. Continuity was a simple matter of cause and effect; what you thought at time A affected what you thought at time B affected what you thought at time C . . .

But when his subjective time was scrambled, the flow of cause and effect within the computer bore no relationship whatsoever to the flow of his experience -- so how could it be an essential part of it? When the program spelled out his life DBCEA, but it still felt exactly like ABCDE . . . then surely the pattern was all, and cause and effect were irrelevant. The whole experience might just as well have arisen by chance.

Suppose an intentionally haywire computer sat for a thousand years or more, twitching from state to state in the sway of nothing but electrical noise. Might it embody consciousness?

In real time, the answer was: probably not -- the probability of any kind of coherence arising at random being so small. Real time, though, was only one possible reference frame; what about all the others? If the states the machine passed through could be rearranged in time arbitrarily, then who could say what kind of elaborate order might emerge from the chaos?

Paul caught himself. Was that fatuous? As absurd as insisting that every room full of monkeys really did type the complete works of Shakespeare -- they just happened to put the letters in a slightly different order? As ludicrous as claiming that every large-enough quantity of rock contained Michelangelo's David, and every warehouse full of paint and canvas contained the complete works of Rembrandt and Picasso -- not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skillful forger to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?

For a statue or a painting, yes, it was a joke. Where was the observer who perceived the paint to be in contact with the canvas, who saw the stone figure suitably delineated by air?

If the pattern in question was not an isolated object, though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join up the dots from within . . .

There was no doubt that it was possible. He'd done it. In the final trial of the second experiment, he'd assembled himself and his surroundings -- effortlessly -- from the dust of randomly scattered moments, from apparent white noise in real time. True, what the computer had done had been contrived, guaranteed to contain his thoughts and perceptions coded into its seemingly aimless calculations. But given a large enough collection of truly random numbers, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn't include, purely by accident, hidden patterns as complex and coherent as the ones which underlay him.

And wouldn't those patterns, however scrambled they might be in real time, be conscious of themselves, just as he'd been conscious, and piece their own subjective world together, just as he had done?

Paul returned to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness and unreality. So much for forgetting himself; he felt more charged than ever with the truth of his strange nature.

Did he still want to bale out? No. No! How could he declare that he'd happily wake and forget himself -- wake and "reclaim" his life -- when he was beginning to glimpse the answers to questions which his original had never even dared to ask?

10

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

Maria arrived at the cafe fifteen minutes early -- to find Durham already there, seated at a table close to the entrance. She was surprised, but relieved; with the long wait she'd been expecting suddenly canceled, she had no time to grow nervous. Durham spotted her as she walked in; they shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, ordered coffee from the table's touch-screen menus. Seeing Durham in the flesh did nothing to contradict the impression he'd made by phone: middle-aged, quiet, conservatively dressed; not exactly the archetypical Autoverse junkie.

Maria said, "I always thought I was the only Autoverse Review subscriber living in Sydney. I've been in touch with Ian Summers in Hobart a couple of times, but I never realized there was anyone so close."

Durham was apologetic. "There's no reason why you would have heard of me. I'm afraid I've always confined myself to reading the articles; I've never contributed anything or participated in the conferences. I don't actually work in the Autoverse, myself. I don't have the time. Or the skills, to be honest."

Maria absorbed that, trying not to appear too startled. It was like hearing someone admit that they studied chess but never played the game.