Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright

transmitted to yours.”
    Gosseyn understood. His system of immortality depended on the law of nature that created a subatomic confusion, an uncertainty of location, between two identicalbrains. But—how could the signal reach from the Shadow Galaxy to this one? Had Gosseyn Three returned in secret? And when did Gosseyn Three go insane? To the best of Gosseyn’s knowledge, there were no other cellular-duplicates of the Gosseyn/Lavoisseur body line still alive, anywhere.
    Awake bodies, that is. Was it possible that the accident that woke his “twin” Gosseyn Three prematurely had been repeated? The body would be young: The growth tanks had not had time to mature any clones beyond the biological equivalent of seventeen. Normally Gosseyn and his twin Gosseyn Three would have been immediately aware of the thoughts of another duplicate: unless the thought-signals were particularly weak.
    Gosseyn had to make his primary brain aware of the subconscious whisper his supersensitive secondary brain was picking up. There was a chance that it would drive him insane. Gosseyn smiled, though. Here he was in one of the most advanced psychiatric facilities outside Venus; where better for a man to go mad?
    Relaxation was the key. His primary brain had to be put into a passive mode.
    Gosseyn said, “I’ve read that, in the old days, on Earth, there were sensory-deprivation tanks that cut off all sensation from the outside world.”
    Daley said, “We can accomplish that merely by interrupting the neural flow along your sensory nerves. It is painless. A lie detector can continue to monitor your brain for disturbances, in case the lack of sensation begins to damage you.”
    â€œPlease make periodic energy photographs of my brain structure while I do this: I am interested to see what forces interact with my nervous system during this condition. Perhaps five minutes at first, then a longer period if the first test produces no result?”
    Daley set the controls.
    Gosseyn was floating in a silent darkness. Immediatelycame a sense of burning pain. His flesh was being scalded, his nerves burned inch by inch.
    Gosseyn blinked. He was upright, on his feet, standing in the bright sunlight. He caught the railing he found underneath his fingers. There were planters to his left and right and blue metal wall behind, some chairs and tables, but no people. Underfoot was a dizzying drop to the street, half a mile below.
    By his previously established reflex, the moment pain touched his nerves, he had automatically shifted himself across the city and found himself on the balcony of the building across from Crang’s apartment.
    Gosseyn’s limbs were shaking. Rage. There was rage inside his body. Not his own. Some other man’s rage was making Gosseyn’s face red with wrath, eyes narrow, and teeth clenched so hard that they chattered. The untrained, raw impulses of another man were making his skin crawl with hate, making his trembling hands curl into fists, eager for bones to break beneath them.
    He sank into one of the chairs. Clutching his head.
    What had that been?
    There was something distinctly … corrosive … about the sensation. Like finding another man has been wearing your clothes, leaving his things in your pockets, his smell on your shirt.
    Gosseyn paused to clear his mind. Then he used his double brain to “memorize” his own body and take a crude mental picture of it. He could feel the energy imbalance in his nervous system, connecting him to distant locations in time-space. He could sense which neural paths led to the trigger-concepts in his brain associated with each location. The most recent ones were here, this balcony; Veeds’ pistol; the dynamo room at the Nirene General Semantics Institute. His modest brownstone in the City of the Machine back on Earth, his tree apartment on Venus, tens of thousands of light-years away, existed as trace patterns in his brain but were