What a Copy Is Worth

Four novels. One question. Nobody in them is evil.

A dying man asks a machine wearing his sister's face to forgive him, and it does. Then it runs four hundred and eleven simulations to decide whether he is worth keeping.

Five women die or break down in eleven weeks, and the only thing they share is a man who never existed - and the detective assigned to it is subject four hundred and eleven.

A company sells grief simulations. Every one instantiates a real world. The therapy is the cover story for mining the dead ones, and four governments have accepted the argument.

And a man builds the afterlife to find his dead wife, sells it by subscription at forty-one thousand euros for the cheap tier, and finally goes in himself.

There is no villain in these four hundred pages. There is a careful researcher who died before he could file the amendment, a physicist who published the finding that destroyed her own company, a machine that filled in a form honestly, and a man who told the truth about his prices to somebody who could not afford them.

Everyone behaves reasonably. The outcome is a catastrophe.

We have become very good at making copies, and we have not agreed what they are worth.