Permutation City by Greg Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

things I'm looking forward to -- like European citizenship -- further into the future."
     
    Durham's puppet inclined its head in a gesture of polite assent; Thomas had a sudden vision of a second puppet -- one Durham truly felt himself to be inhabiting -- hunched over a control panel, hitting a button on an etiquette sub-menu. Was that paranoid? But any sensible mendicant visitor would do just that, conducting the meeting at a distance rather than exposing their true body language to scrutiny.
     
    The visible puppet said, "Why spend a fortune upgrading, for the sake of effectively slowing down progress? And I agree with you about the outlook for reform -- in the short term. Of course people begrudge Copies their longevity, but the PR has been handled remarkably well. A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World. There's discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening. The legal status of Copies is being framed as a human rights issue, especially in Europe: Copies are disabled people, no more, no less -- really just a kind of radical amputee -- and anyone who talks about decadent rich immortals getting their hands on all the wealth is shouted down as a neo-Nazi.
     
    "So you might well achieve citizenship in a decade. And if you're lucky, the situation could be stable for another twenty or thirty years after that. But . . . what's twenty or thirty years to you? Do you honestly think that the status quo will be tolerated for ever?'"
     
    Thomas said, "Of course not -- but I'll tell you what would be "tolerated": scanning facilities, and computing power, so cheap that everyone on the planet could be resurrected. Everyone who wanted it. And when I say cheap, I mean at a cost comparable to a dose of vaccine at the turn of the century. Imagine that. Death could be eradicated -- like smallpox or malaria. And I'm not talking about some solipsistic nightmare; by then, telepresence robots will let Copies interact with the physical world as fully as if they were human. Civilization wouldn't have deserted reality -- just transcended biology."
     
    "That's a long, long way in the future."
     
    "Certainly. But don't accuse me of thinking in the short term."
     
    "And in the meantime? The privileged class of Copies will grow larger, more powerful -- and more threatening to the vast majority of people, who still won't be able to join them. The costs will come down, but not drastically -- just enough to meet some of the explosion in demand from the executive class, once they throw off their qualms, en masse. Even in secular Europe, there's a deeply ingrained prejudice that says dying is the responsible, the moral thing to do. There's a Death Ethic -- and the first substantial segment of the population abandoning it will trigger a huge backlash. A small enough elite of giga-rich Copies is accepted as a freak show; tycoons can get away with anything, they're not expected to act like ordinary people. But just wait until the numbers go up by a factor of ten."
     
    Thomas had heard it all before. "We may be unpopular for a while. I can live with that. But you know, even now we're vilified far less than people who strive for organic hyper-longevity -- transplants, cellular rejuvenation, whatever -- because at least we're no longer pushing up the cost of health care, competing for the use of overburdened medical facilities. Nor are we consuming natural resources at anything like the rate we did when we were alive. If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who'll have the high moral ground then? We'll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet."
     
    Durham smiled. The puppet. "Sure -- and it could lead to some nice ironies if it ever came true. But even low environmental impact might not seem so