He had been aware of the technique for decades. It was something else to experience it. He resisted the urge to wheel around suddenly, in a futile attempt to catch the process out -- but for a moment it was almost unbearable, just knowing what was happening at the edge of his vision. The fact that his view of the room remained flawless only made it worse, an irrefutable paranoid fixation: No matter how fast you turn your head, you'll never even catch a glimpse of what's going on all around you . . .
He closed his eyes again for a few seconds. When he opened them, the feeling was already less oppressive. No doubt it would pass; it seemed too bizarre a state of mind to be sustained for long. Certainly, none of the other Copies had reported anything similar . . . but then, none of them had volunteered much useful data at all. They'd just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and then terminated themselves -- all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining consciousness.
And this one? How was he different from Copy number four? Three years older. More stubborn? More determined? More desperate for success? He'd believed so. If he hadn't felt more committed than ever -- if he hadn't been convinced that he was, finally, prepared to see the whole thing through -- he would never have gone ahead with the scan.
But now that he was "no longer" the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham -- "no longer" the one who'd sit outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance -- all of that determination seemed to have evaporated.
Suddenly he wondered: What makes me so sure that I'm not still flesh and blood? He laughed weakly, hardly daring to take the possibility seriously. His most recent memories seemed to be of lying on a trolley in the Landau Clinic, while technicians prepared him for the scan -- on the face of it, a bad sign -- but he'd been overwrought, and he'd spent so long psyching himself up for "this," that perhaps he'd forgotten coming home, still hazy from the anesthetic, crashing into bed, dreaming . . .
He muttered the password, "Abulafia" -- and his last faint hope vanished, as a black-on-white square about a meter wide, covered in icons, appeared in midair in front of him.
He gave the interface window an angry thump; it resisted him as if it was solid, and firmly anchored. As if he was solid, too. He
didn't really need any more convincing, but he gripped the top edge and lifted himself off the floor. He instantly regretted this; the realistic cluster of effects of exertion -- down to the plausible twinge in his right elbow -- pinned him to this "body," anchored him to this "place," in exactly the way he knew he should be doing everything he could to avoid.
He lowered himself to the floor with a grunt. He was the Copy. Whatever his inherited memories told him, he was "no longer" human; he would never inhabit his real body "again." Never inhabit the real world again . . . unless his cheapskate original scraped up the money for a telepresence robot -- in which case he could spend his time blundering around in a daze, trying to make sense of the lightning-fast blur of human activity. His model-of-a-brain ran seventeen times slower than the real thing. Yeah, sure, if he hung around, the technology would catch up, eventually -- and seventeen times faster for him than for his original. And in the meantime? He'd rot in this prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out Durham's precious research -- while the man lived in his apartment, spent his money, slept with Elizabeth . . .
Paul leant against the cool surface of the interface, dizzy and confused. Whose precious research? He'd wanted this so badly -- and he'd done this to himself with his eyes wide open. Nobody had forced him, nobody had deceived him. He'd known exactly what the drawbacks would be -- but he'd hoped that he would have the strength of will (this time, at last) to transcend them: to devote himself, monk-like, to the purpose for which he'd been brought into being, content in the knowledge that his other self was as unconstrained as ever.
Looking back, that hope seemed ludicrous. Yes, he'd made the decision freely -- for the fifth time -- but it was mercilessly clear, now, that he'd never really faced up to the consequences. All the time he'd spent, supposedly "preparing himself" to be a Copy, his greatest source of resolve had been to focus on the outlook for the man who'd remain flesh and blood. He'd told himself that he was rehearsing "making do with vicarious freedom" -- and no doubt he had been genuinely struggling to do just that . . . but he'd also been taking secret comfort in the knowledge that he would "remain" on the outside -- that his future, then, still included a version with absolutely nothing to fear.
And as long as he'd clung to that happy truth, he'd never really swallowed the fate of the Copy at all.
People reacted badly to waking up as Copies. Paul knew the statistics. Ninety-eight percent of Copies made were of the very old, and the terminally ill. People for whom it was the last resort -- most of whom had spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options; some of whom had even died between the taking of the scan and the time the Copy itself was run. Despite this, fifteen percent decided on awakening -- usually in a matter of hours -- that they couldn't face living this way.