“Yeah right, ditYosil. It’s obvious you want to make dit-to-dit copying work. How else can you survive past the thirtieth renewal? But honestly, what kind of a solution is that? The second-order copy always has a flawed soul-imprint. And it gets worse when you copy that one. Errors magnify. By the third transfer, you’re lucky if it can even walk or talk.”

“So they say.”

“So they say? Listen, half of my work involves catching copyright violators who ditnap the golems of movied stars and courtesans and such, in order to sell bootleg knockoffs. Force-imprint counterfeiting may work for sex toys, if the customer has low standards, but it’s no solution to your problem, Yosil.”

“We’ll see about that. Now please try to relax and cooperate.”

“Why should I? It’s hard to make a really good imprint from a resisting subject. I can make things more difficult for you.”

“True. But consider. The better the copy, the more it will share your abilities, your drives, and especially your low opinion of me!” Maharal chuckled. “A quality copy will be your ally in trying to defeat me.”

I pondered.

“Those other Alberts you captured … they must have tried it both ways.”

“True. Only when the copy was poor, I just tried again. And again, till you chose to cooperate. Then we made real progress.”

“Your idea of progress doesn’t sound like mine.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe you can’t grasp the long-range benefits of my program, though I tried to explain on other occasions. In any event, your problem now is a pragmatic one, Albert. Shackled, there’s little that just one of you can do. Two of you might accomplish more. The logic is inescapable.”

“Damn you.”

He shrugged. “Think about it for a while, Albert. I have plenty of ditto blanks to experiment with.”

Maharal’s gray departed, leaving me there to ponder, frustrated because he clearly must have had the same conversation many times before, with other me’s, learning through experience which arguments worked.

Man, I wish I’d been more careful to track my missing dittos over the years! I simply assumed that a high rate of loss was unavoidable in this line of work. As long as each case went well, some casualties seemed worthwhile. It’s not quite as hard core an attitude as Clara has — sending herselves again and again to gladiatorial battlefields for the sake of PEZ and country, with scant likelihood they’ll return unscathed. Even so, I vowed to try harder in the future.

If I ever get out of here.

If I get another chance.

Well, all right. I gave in to Yosil’s logic. Concentrating during imprint would ensure my brotherdit emerges from the kiln filled with loathing for all mad scientists.

And I turned out to be right about that.

As if it would make any difference.

Well now, for the record, this isn’t the first time I remember doing a ditto-to-ditto transfer.

Come on, everybody tries it. Most people are unhappy with the product, which often emerges as a pitifully shallow caricature. It can be painful to watch, like seeing a version of yourself that’s drunk, stoned, or damaged beyond medical help. Back in college, some of the guys used to make frankies for laughs. But I never got into that kind of stuff.

Partly because my second-order dits never showed overt signs of degradation. No tremors or apparent memory gaps. No comic reeling or slurring. Boring! I might as well make all my copies directly. It felt more comfortable that way. Anyway, why violate the UK warranty? They can repossess your kiln.

I always knew I was a good copier. A small fraction of folks are gifted that way. I was even part of a research study when I was younger. So? It makes no practical difference. What’s the point in dit-to-dit transfer, even if you do it well?

Besides, it feels odd. Not at all like inloading. To lie on the original side of the machine in clay form, especially when the soul-sifter starts probing through you with tendrils that are better tuned to scanning neurons. The tetragramatron has to work harder to grasp the Standing Wave, delicately plucking all the chords of your inner symphony, borrowing and amplifying every note in order to start an identical resonant melody playing in another instrument, nearby.

Funny thing. This time I definitely felt something like an echo coming from the new ditto — still a lifeless lump on its warming tray. The sensation of déjà vu that our grandparents used to find so eerie — that we now call a “ripple in the Standing Wave” — swarmed over me then like a chilly breath. A whirling-ghostly wind. A feeling of intimate familiarity with myself that I did not like at all.

Was this part of the experiment? Part of what Maharal was trying to achieve?

“Two centuries ago, William James coined the term ‘stream of consciousness,’ ” Maharal commented happily, while he twiddled dials. “James was referring to the way each of us invests our sense of identity in an illusion. The illusion of continuity — like perceiving a single river, flowing from one source to the sea.

“Even dittotech didn’t change this romantic delusion. It only added multiple side branches and tributaries to the river, all of them still flowing back into a single soul, an entity that each person arrogantly chooses to call me.

“But a river is nothing in itself! It’s amorphous. A mirage. An ever-changing churn of individual tumbling molecules and moments. Even ancient mystics knew that stepping twice into a stream, from exactly the same spot, will immerse you in completely different ‘rivers.’ Into different liquids that were peed into the flow by different elephants, at different places and times upstream.”

“You make philosophy so refreshingly earthy,” I muttered, lying there helpless under his monologue.

“Thanks. In fact, that particular metaphor was yours. Another Albert Morris golem expressed it, years ago. Which goes to prove my point, dear fellow. The Standing Wave is something much more than just continuity of memory. It has to be! There must be some kind of connection to a higher — or a lower — level.”

I knew his game. Maharal was trying to distract me, so my anger wouldn’t interfere with the imprinting process. Yet his voice conveyed something sincere. He cared about the crap he was uttering.

Anyway, the weird sensations had me wanting some distraction from those strangely powerful resonant echoes. Though my head was clamped between the sifter probes, I turned my eyes to meet Maharal’s.

“You’re talking about God, right?”

“Well … yes. In a manner of speaking.”

“Isn’t that just a bit odd, Professor? You’ve spent your life encroaching on the province of religion, helping make it practical for anyone to duplicate the soul-field, like a cheap photograph. There’s hardly anyone the old church conservatives hate more than you.”

“I’m not talking about religion,” he answered with a biting tone. “All that I and others have done, by introducing this technology, is take another step in a long campaign, pushing back a confused muddle of contradictory superstitions in order to let in more light. First Galileo and Copernicus battled to free astronomy from priests who declared the entire cosmos off limits to human understanding. Then Newton, Boltzmann, and Einstein liberated physics. For a while, religions claimed that life was too mysterious for anyone but the Creator Himself to understand — till we analyzed the genome and commenced designing new species in the lab. Today, most babies get some kind of optimizing gene therapy, before or after conception, and nobody objects.”

“Why would they?” I asked, momentarily puzzled. “Never mind. Let me guess. You’re about to extend this historical trend to consciousness—”

“And the human soul, yes. It was the last bulwark of twentieth-century religion. Let science explain nature’s laws, from quasars down to quarks! From geology to biology! So what? Those laws were mere recipes and background scenery, concocted long ago by a creator who cares far more about matters of the spirit! That’s what they said.