Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  “That’s only half the truth. The more we’re marginalized, the more we’re at risk.”

  Peer tried to sigh; the sound that emerged was plausible enough, but the lack of sensation was annoying.

  “Is there any reason to stay in emergency mode? Is there some snap decision I’m going to have to make? Are there missiles heading for —” He checked a display. “ – Dallas?” Dallas? The US dollar must have fallen sharply against the yen.

  Kate said nothing, so Peer glanced at icons for a body and a room, and willed them to be active. His disembodied consciousness, and the floating screens of the Bunker, fleshed out into a young man, barefoot in blue jeans and a T-shirt, sitting in a windowless control room – what might have been the operations center for a medium-sized office building.

  The body’s physiological state continued directly from its last moments on the wall of the skyscraper – and it felt good: loose-limbed, invigorated. Peer recorded a snapshot, so he could get the feeling back again at will. He looked at Kate imploringly; she relented and joined him, vanishing from the screen and appearing on a chair beside him.

  She said, “I am Solipsist Nation. What happens outside doesn’t matter to me … but we still need certain guarantees, certain minimum standards.”

  Peer laughed. “So what are you going to do? Become a lobbyist now? Spend all your time petitioning Brussels and Geneva? ‘Human rights’ are for people who want to play at being human. I know who I am. I am not human.” He plunged his fist into his chest, effortlessly penetrating shirt, skin and ribs, and tore his heart out. He felt the parting of his flesh, and the aftermath – but although aspects of the pain were “realistic”, preprogrammed barriers kept it isolated within his brain, a perception without any emotional, or even metabolic, consequences. And his heart kept beating in his hand as if nothing had happened; the blood passed straight between the ragged ends of each broken artery, ignoring the “intervening distance.”

  Kate said, “Blink and ten hours are gone. That’s no disaster – but where is it heading? State-of-emergency decrees, nationalizing all the computing power in Tokyo for weather control?”

  “Tokyo?”

  “Some models show Greenhouse Typhoons reaching the Japanese islands in the next thirty years.”

  “Fuck Tokyo. We’re in Dallas.”

  “Not any more.” She pointed to the status display; exchange rate fluctuations, and the hunt for the cheapest QIPS, had flung them back across the Pacific. “Not that it matters. There are plans for the Gulf of Mexico, too.”

  Peer put his heart on the floor and shrugged, then groped around in his chest cavity in search of other organs. He finally settled on a handful of lung. Torn free, the pink tissue continued to expand and contract in time with his breathing; functionally, it was still inside his rib cage. “Start looking for security, and you end up controlled by the demands of the old world. Are you Solipsist Nation, or not?”

  Kate eyed his bloodless wound, and said quietly, “Solipsist Nation doesn’t mean dying of stupidity. You take your body apart, and you think it proves you’re invulnerable? You plant a few forced-perspective memories, and you think you’ve already lived forever? I don’t want some cheap illusion of immortality. I want the real thing.”

  Peer frowned, and started paying attention to her latest choice of body. It was still recognizably “Kate” – albeit the most severe variation on the theme he’d seen. Short-haired, sharp-boned, with piercing gray eyes; leaner than ever, plainly dressed in loose-fitting white. She looked ascetic, functional, determined.

  She said – mock-casually, as if changing the subject – “Interesting news: there’s a man – a visitor – approaching the richest Copies, selling prime real estate for second versions at a ludicrous rate.”

  “How much?”

  “Two million euros.”

  “What – per month?”

  “No. Forever.”

  Peer snorted. “It’s a con.”

  “And outside, he’s been contracting programmers, designers, architects. Commissioning – and paying for – work that will need at least a few dozen processor clusters to run on.”

  “Good move. That might actually persuade a few of the doddering old farts that he can deliver what he’s promising. Not many, though. Who’s going to pay without getting the hardware on-line and running performance tests? How’s he going to fake that? He can show them simulations of glossy machines, but if the things aren’t real, they won’t crunch. End of scam.”

  “Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid. The last word I had was he’d talked to Riemann.”

  “I don’t believe any of this. They all have their own hardware – why would they bother?”

  “They all have a high profile. People know that they have their own hardware. If things get ugly, it can be confiscated. Whereas this man, Paul Durham, is nobody. He’s a broker for someone else, obviously – but whoever it is, they’re acting like they have access to more computing power than Fujitsu, at about a thousandth of the cost. And none of it is on the open market. Nobody officially knows it exists.”

  “Or unofficially. Because it doesn’t. Two million euros!”

  “Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid.”

  “According to your sources.”

  “Durham’s getting money from somewhere. I spoke to Malcolm Carter myself. Durham’s commissioned a city from him, thousands of square kilometers – and none of it passive. Architectural detail everywhere down to visual acuity, or better. Pseudo-autonomous crowds – hundreds of thousands of people. Zoos and wildlife parks with the latest behavioral algorithms. A waterfall the size of nothing on Earth.”

  Peer pulled out a coil of intestine and playfully wrapped it around his neck. “You could have a city like that, all to yourself, if you really wanted it – if you were willing to live with the slowdown. Why are you so interested in this con-man Durham? Even if he’s genuine, you can’t afford his price. Face it: you’re stuck here in the slums with me – and it doesn’t matter.” Peer indulged in a brief flashback to the last time they’d made love. He merged it with the current scene, so he saw both Kates, and the new lean gray-eyed one seemed to look on as he lay on the floor gasping beneath his tangible memory of her earlier body – although in truth she saw him still sitting in the chair, smiling faintly.

  All memory is theft, Daniel Lebesgue had written. Peer felt a sudden pang of postcoital guilt. But what was he guilty of? Perfect recollection, nothing more.

  Kate said, “I can’t afford Durham’s price – but I can afford Carter’s.”

  Peer was caught off guard for a second, but then he grinned at her admiringly. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  She nodded soberly. “Yes. I’ve been thinking about it for some time, but after being flatlined for ten hours—”

  “Are you sure Carter is serious? How do you know he really has something to sell?”

  She hesitated. “I hired him myself, when I was outside. I used to spend a lot of time in VR, as a visitor, and he made some of my favorite places: the winter beach; that cottage I took you to. And others. He was one of the people I talked it over with, before I made up my mind to come in for good.” Peer regarded her uneasily – she rarely talked about the past, which suited him fine – and mercifully, she returned to the point. “With slowdown, filters, masks, it’s hard to judge anyone … but I don’t think he’s changed that much. I still trust him.”

  Peer nodded slowly, absentmindedly sliding his intestine back and forth across his shoulders. “But how much does Durham trust him? How thoroughly will he check the city for stowaways?”

  “Carter’s sure he can hide me. He has software that can break up my model and bury it deep in the city’s algorithms – as a few billion trivial redundancies and inefficiencies.”

  “Inefficiencies can get optimized out. If Durham—”

  Kate cut him off impatiently. “Carter’s not stupid. He knows how optimizers work – and he knows how to keep them from touching his
stuff.”

  “Okay. But … once you’re in there, what sort of communications will you have?”

  “Not much. Only limited powers to eavesdrop on what the legitimate inhabitants choose to access – and if the whole point of this place is secrecy, that may not be much. I get the impression from Carter that they’re planning to drag in everything they need, then pull up the drawbridge.”

  Peer let that sink in, but chose not to ask the obvious question, or to show that he’d even thought of it. “So what do you get to take with you?”

  “All the software and all the environments I’ve been using here – which doesn’t amount to all that much data, compared to me. And once I’m in, I’ll have read-only access to all of the city’s public facilities: all the information, all the entertainment, all the shared environments. I’ll be able to walk down the main street – invisible and intangible – staring at the trillionaires. But my presence won’t affect anything – except to slow it all down by a negligible amount – so even the most rigorous verification should pass the total package as contamination-free.”

  “What rate will you run at?”

  Kate snorted. “I should refuse to answer that. You’re the champion of one computation per year.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “It depends how many QIPS are allocated to the city.” She hesitated. “Carter has no real evidence for this – but he thinks there’s a good chance that Durham’s employers have got their hands on some kind of new high-powered hardware—”

  Peer groaned. “Please, this whole deal is already suspect enough – don’t start invoking the mythical breakthrough. What makes people think that anyone could keep that a secret? Or that anyone would even want to?”

  “They might not want to, in the long run. But the best way to exploit the technology might be to sell the first of the new generation of processors to the richest Copies – before they hit the open market and the QIPS rate crashes.”

  Peer laughed. “Then why stow away at all? If that happens, there’ll be nothing to fear from weather control.”

  “Because there might not have been any breakthrough. The only thing that’s certain is that some of the wealthiest – and best-informed – Copies have decided that it’s worth going into this … sanctuary. And I’ve got the chance to go with them.”

  Peer was silent for a while. Finally, he asked, “So are you moving – or cloning yourself?”

  “Cloning.”

  He could have concealed his relief, easily – but he didn’t. He said, “I’m glad. I would have missed you.”

  “And I’d have missed you. I want you to come with me.”

  “You want—?”

  Kate leaned toward him. “Carter has said he’ll include you – and your baggage – for another fifty per cent. Clone yourself and come with me. I don’t want to lose you – either of me.”

  Peer felt a rush of excitement – and fear. He took a snapshot of the emotion, then said, “I don’t know. I’ve never—”

  “A second version, running on the most secure hardware on the planet. That’s not surrendering to outside – it’s just finally gaining some true independence.”

  “Independence? What if these Copies get bored with Carter’s city, and decide to trash it – trade it in for something new?”

  Kate was unfazed. “That’s not impossible. But there are no guarantees on the public networks, either. This way, at least you have a greater chance that one version will survive.”

  Peer tried to imagine it. “Stowaways. No communications. Just us, and whatever software we bring.”

  “You’re Solipsist Nation, aren’t you?”

  “You know I am. But … I’ve never run a second version before. I don’t know how I’ll feel about that, after the split.”

  How who will feel about it?

  Kate bent over and picked up his heart. “Having a second version won’t bother you.” She fixed her new gray eyes on him. “We’re running at a slowdown of sixty-seven. Carter will be delivering his city to Durham, six real-time months from now. But who knows when Operation Butterfly will flatline us again? So you don’t have long to decide.”

  Peer continued to show Kate his body sitting in the chair, thinking it over, while in truth he rose to his feet and walked across the room, escaping her formidable gaze.

  Who am I? Is this what I want?

  He couldn’t concentrate. He manually invoked a menu on one of the control screens, an array of a dozen identical images: a nineteenth-century anatomical drawing of the brain, with the surface divided into regions labeled with various emotions and skills. Each icon represented a package of mental parameters; snapshots of previous states of mind, or purely synthetic combinations.

  Peer hit the icon named CLARITY.

  In twelve short real-time years as a Copy, he’d tried to explore every possibility, map out every consequence of what he’d become. He’d transformed his surroundings, his body, his personality, his perceptions – but he’d always owned the experience himself. The tricks he’d played on his memory had added, never erased – and whatever changes he’d been through, there was always only one person, in the end, taking responsibility, picking up the pieces. One witness, unifying it all.

  The truth was, the thought of finally surrendering that unity made him dizzy with fear. It was the last vestige of his delusion of humanity. The last big lie.

  And as Daniel Lebesgue, founder of Solipsist Nation, had written: “My goal is to take everything which might be revered as quintessentially human … and grind it into dust.”

  He returned to his seated body, and said, “I’ll do it.”

  Kate smiled, raised his beating heart to her lips, and gave it a long, lingering kiss.

  Chapter 6

  (Rip, tie, cut toy man)

  June 2045

  Paul woke without any confusion. He dressed and ate, trying to feel optimistic. He’d demonstrated his willingness to cooperate; now it was time to ask for something in return. He walked into the study, switched on the terminal, and called his own number. The djinn answered at once.

  Paul said, “I’d like to talk to Elizabeth.”

  Squeak. “That’s not possible.”

  “Not possible? Why don’t you just ask her?”

  Squeak. “I can’t do that. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

  Paul stared at him coldly. “Don’t lie to me, it’s a waste of time. As soon as I had a Copy who survived, I was going to explain everything—”

  Squeak. The djinn said dryly, “Or so we thought.”

  Paul’s certainty wavered. “You’re telling me that your great ambition is finally being fulfilled – and you haven’t even mentioned it to the one woman…?”

  Squeak. Durham’s face turned to stone. “I really don’t wish to discuss it. Can we get on with the experiment, please?”

  Paul opened his mouth to protest – and then found he had nothing to say. All his anger and jealousy suddenly dissipated into … embarrassment. It was as if he’d just come to his senses from a daydream, an elaborate fantasy of a relationship with someone else’s lover. Paul and Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Paul. What happened between them was none of his business. Whatever his memories suggested, that life wasn’t his to live anymore.

  He said, “Sure, let’s get on with the experiment. Time is just rushing by. You must have turned forty-five … what, a day ago? Many happy returns.”

  Squeak. “Thanks – but you’re wrong. I took some short cuts while you were asleep: I shut down part of the model – and cheated on most of the rest. It’s only the fourth of June; you got six hours’ sleep in ten hours’ real time. Not a bad job, I thought.”

  Paul was outraged. “You had no right to do that!”

  Squeak. Durham sighed. “Be practical. Ask yourself what you’d have done in my place.”

  “It’s not a joke!”

  Squeak. “So you slept without a whole body. I cleaned a few toxins out of your blood at a non-physiological rate.
” The djinn seemed genuinely puzzled. “Compared to the experiments, that’s nothing. Why should it bother you? You’ve woken up in exactly the same condition as you’d be in if you’d slept in the normal way.”

  Paul caught himself. He didn’t want to explain how vulnerable it made him feel to have someone reach through the cracks in the universe and relieve him of unnecessary organs while he slept. And the less the bastard knew about his Copy’s insecurities, the better – he’d only exploit them.

  He said, “It bothers me because the experiments are worthless if you’re going to intervene at random. Precise, controlled changes – that’s the whole point. You have to promise me you won’t do it again.”

  Squeak. “You’re the one who was complaining about waste. Someone has to think about conserving our dwindling resources.”

  “Do you want me to keep on cooperating? Or do you want to start everything again from scratch?”

  Squeak. The djinn said mildly, “All right, you don’t have to threaten me. You have my word: no more ad hoc intervention.”

  “Thank you.”

  Conserving our dwindling resources? Paul had been trying hard not to think about money. What would the djinn do, when he could no longer afford to keep him running – if Paul chose not to bale out once the experiments were over? Store a snapshot of the model, of course, until he could raise the cash flow to start it up again. In the long term, set up a trust fund; it would only have to earn enough to run him part-time, at first: keep him in touch with the world, stave off excessive culture shock … until the technology became cheap enough to let him live continuously.

  Of course, all these reassuring plans had been made by a man with two futures. Would he really want to keep an old Copy running, when he could save his money for a death-bed scan, and “his own” immortality?