Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [51]
“Excuse me, boss.” His briefcase held out the phone. With a twinge of exasperation the bureaucrat took the call. Himself again. “Go ahead,” he said.
He absorbed:
Philippe was alone in his office with himself. They both looked up when the bureaucrat entered.
“How pleasant to see you again.” Philippe’s office was posh to the point of vulgarity, a lexitor’s modspace from twenty-third-century Luna. His desk was a massive chunk of volcanic rock floating a foot above the floor, with crystal-tipped rods, hanks of rooster feathers, and small fetishes scattered about its surface. French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking an antique city of brick and wrought iron, muted by the faint blue haze from a million groundcars.
“I’ll handle this,” Philippe said, and his other self returned to work. The bureaucrat had to envy the easy familiarity with which Philippe dealt with himself. Philippe was perfectly at ease with Philippe, no matter how many avatars had been spun off from his base personality.
They shook hands (Philippe was agented not in two but three, the third self off somewhere), and Philippe said, “Five agents! I was going to ask why you weren’t at the inquisition, but I see now that you must be.”
“What inquisition?”
Philippe looked up from his work and smiled sympathetically. Nearer by, he said, “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. What can I do for you?”
“There’s a traitor in Tech Trans.”
Philippe stared silently at him for a long time, both avatars motionless, all four eyes unblinking. He and the bureaucrat studied each other carefully. Finally he said, “Do you have any evidence?”
“Nothing that could force a departmental probe.”
“So what do you want from me?” Philippe’s other self poured a glass of juice and said, “Something to drink? It’ll taste a little flat, I’m afraid, all line-fed drinks do. Something about the blood sugars.”
“Yes, I know.” The bureaucrat waved off the drink. “You used to work bioscience control. I was wondering if you knew anything about cloning. Human cloning in particular.”
“Cloning. Well, no, not really. Human applications are flat out illegal, of course. That’s a can of worms that no one wants to deal with.”
“Specifically I was wondering what practical value there might be in having oneself cloned.”
“Value? Well, you know, in most cases it’s an ego thing rather than something actually functional. A desire to watch one’s Self survive death, to know that the one holy and irreplaceable Me will exist down the corridors of time to the very omega point of existence. All rooted in the tangled morass of the soul. Then there are the sexual cases. Rather a dull lot, really.”
“No, this is nothing like that, I think. I have someone who sank most of his lifetime into the project. From his behavior, I’d say he had a clear and definite end in view. Whoever he is, he’s in a very exposed situation; if he’d been acting odd, it would’ve shown sometime long ago.”
“Well,” Philippe said reluctantly, “this is highly speculative, of course. You couldn’t quote me on it. But let’s say your culprit was relatively highly placed within some governmental body or other—we shall name no names. Spook business, say. There are any number of situations where it would come in handy having two valid handcodes instead of one. Where two senior officers were required to enact an off-record operation, for example. Or an extra vote to sway a committee action. The system would know that the two handcodes were identical, but couldn’t act on it. The privacy laws would prevent that. Hell of a loophole, but there you are; it’s in the laws.”
“Yes, my own thought had been trending that way. But isn’t that unnecessarily difficult? There must be a thousand simpler ways of jiggering the machines.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Graft a patch of your skin, make it a glove, and have an accomplice wear it. Or record