Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew – or believed – that they’d once been David Hawthorne. And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough.

Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate.

When first resurrected, he’d worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty.

How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?’ ‘Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?’ ‘Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?

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.

He tried to dredge up the familiar, comforting truths: The Copy would survive, it would live his life for him. This body was always destined to perish; he’d accepted that long ago. Death was the irreversible dissolution of the personality; this wasn’t death, it was a shedding of skin. There was nothing to fear.

I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.

Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.

He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software’s approximations and short-cuts. This body didn’t want to evaporate. This body didn’t want to bail out. It didn’t much care that there was another – “more real” – version of itself, elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.

This was her last chance at the closest thing to freedom: her will, her actions, and the outcome in the world could all be in harmony.