  The usual scenario in fault tolerant quantum computation involves certain
amount of qubits encoded in each code block, transversal operations between
them and destructive measurements of ancillary code blocks. We introduce a new
approach in which a single code layer is used for the entire computation, in
particular a surface code. Qubits can be created, manipulated and
non-destructively measured by code deformations that amount to `cut and paste'
operations in the surface. All the interactions between qubits remain purely
local in a two-dimensional setting.
