Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Squeak. “Can we get to work, now?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  This time, the model would be described at the standard time resolution of one millisecond, throughout – but the order in which the states were computed would be varied.

  Squeak. “Experiment two, trial number one. Reverse order.”

  Paul counted. “One. Two. Three.” Reverse order. After an initial leap into the future, he was now traveling backward through real time. It would have been a nice touch if he’d been able to view an external event on the terminal – some entropic cliché like a vase being smashed – knowing that it was himself, and not the scene, that was being “rewound” … but he knew that it couldn’t be done (quite apart from the fact that it would have ruined the experiment, betraying the difference between subject and control). In real time, the first thing to be computed would be his model-time-final brain state, complete with memories of everything that “had happened” in the “preceding” ten seconds. Those memories couldn’t include having seen a real broken vase assemble itself from fragments, if the vase hadn’t even been smashed yet. The trick could have been done with a simulation, or a video recording of the real thing – but that wouldn’t have been the same.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.” Another imperceptible leap into the future, and the djinn reappeared.

  Squeak. “Trial number two. Odd numbered states, then even.”

  In external terms: he would count to ten, skipping every second model-time moment … then forget having done so, and count again, going back and filling in the gaps.

  And from his own point of view? As he counted, once only, the external world – even if he couldn’t see it – was flickering back and forth between two separate regions of time, which had been chopped up into seventeen-millisecond portions, and interleaved.

  So … who was right? Paul thought it over, half seriously. Maybe both descriptions were equally valid; after all, relativity had abolished absolute time. Everybody was entitled to their own frame of reference; crossing deep space at close to lightspeed, or skimming the event horizon of a black hole. Why shouldn’t a Copy’s experience of time be as sacrosanct as that of any astronaut?

  The analogy was flawed, though. Relativistic transformations were smooth – possibly extreme, but always continuous. One observer’s space-time could be stretched and deformed in the eyes of another – but it couldn’t be sliced like a loaf of bread, and then shuffled like a deck of cards.

  “Every tenth state, in ten sets.”

  Paul counted – and for argument’s sake, tried to defend his own perspective, tried to imagine the outside world actually cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods. The trouble was … this allegedly shuddering universe contained the computer which ran the whole model, the infrastructure upon which everything else depended. If its orderly chronology had been torn to shreds, what was keeping him together, enabling him to ponder the question?

  “Every twentieth state, in twenty sets.”

  Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings.

  (Unless, of course, he was the control.)

  “Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets.”

  He’d lost any real feeling for what was happening. He just counted.

  “Pseudo-random ordering of states.”

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Now he was … dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time – and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle – but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow – on their own terms – the pieces remained connected.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.”

  Squeak. “You’re sweating.”

  “Both of me?”

  Squeak. The djinn laughed. “What do you think?”

  Paul said, “Do me one small favor. The experiment is over. Shut down one of me – control or subject, I don’t care.”

  Squeak. “Done.”

  “Now there’s no need to conceal anything, is there? So run the pseudo-random effect on me again – and stay on-line. This time, you count to ten.”

  Squeak. Durham shook his head. “Can’t do it, Paul. Think about it: you can’t be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions aren’t known.”

  Of course; the broken vase problem all over again.

  Paul said, “Record yourself, then, and use that.”

  The djinn seemed to find the request amusing, but he agreed; he even slowed down the recording, so it lasted ten model-time seconds. Paul watched the blurred lips and jaws intently, listened carefully to the drone of white noise.

  Squeak. “Happy now?”

  “You did scramble me, and not the recording?”

  Squeak. “Of course. Your wish is my command.”

  “Yeah? Then do it again.”

  Durham grimaced, but obliged.

  Paul said, “Now, scramble the recording.”

  It looked just the same. Of course.

  “Again.”

  Squeak. “What’s the point of all this?”

  “Just do it.”

  Paul watched, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, convinced that he was on the verge of … what? Finally confronting the “obvious” fact that the wildest permutations in the relationship between model time and real time would be undetectable to an isolated Copy? He’d accepted the near certainty of that, tacitly, for almost twenty years … but the firsthand experience of having his mind literally scrambled – to absolutely no effect – was still provocative in a way that the abstract understanding had never been.

  He said, “When do we move on to the next stage?”

  Squeak. “Why so keen all of a sudden?”

  “Nothing’s changed. I just want to get it over and done with.”

  Squeak. “Lining up all the other machines is taking some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isn’t designed to accommodate whims about geography. It’s a bit like going to a bank and asking to deposit some money … at a certain location in a particular computer’s memory. Basically, people think I’m crazy.”

  Paul felt a momentary pang of empathy, recalling his own anticipation of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. He smothered it. The two of them were irreversibly different people now, with different problems and different goals – and the stupidest thing he could do would be to forget that.

  Squeak. “I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements, save you the boredom – if that’s what you want.”

  “You’re too kind. But I’d rather stay conscious. I’ve got a lot to think about.”

  Chapter 7

  (Remit not paucity)

  November 2050

  “Twelve to eighteen months? Are they sure?”

  Francesca Deluca said dryly, “What can I say? They modeled it.”

  Maria did her best to sound calm. “That’s plenty of time. We’ll get you scanned. We’ll get the money together. I can sell the house, and borrow some from Aden—”

  Francesca smiled but shook her head. “No, darling.” Her hair had greyed a little since Maria had last really looked at her, last consciously gauged her appearance, but she showed no obvious signs of ill health. “What’s the point? Even if I wanted that – and I don’t – what’s the use of a scan that will never be run?”

  “It will be run. Computing power will get cheaper. Everybody’s counting on that. Thousands of people have scan files waiting—”

  “How many frozen corpses have ever been revived?”

  “That’s not the same thing at all.”

  “How many?”

  “Physically, none. But some have been scanned—”

  “And proved non-viable. All the interesting ones – the ce
lebrities, the dictators – are brain-damaged, and nobody cares about the rest.”

  “A scan file is nothing like a frozen corpse. You’d never become non-viable.”

  “No, but I’d never become worth bringing back to life, either.”

  Maria stared at her angrily. “I’ll bring you back to life. Or don’t you believe I’ll ever have the money?”

  Francesca said, “Maybe you will. But I’m not going to be scanned, so forget about it.”

  Maria hunched forward on the couch, not knowing how to sit, not knowing where to put her hands. Sunlight streamed into the room, obscenely bright, revealing every speck of lint on the carpet; she had to make an effort not to get up and close the blinds. Why hadn’t Francesca told her on the phone? All of this would have been a thousand times easier by phone.

  She said, “All right, you’re not going to be scanned. Someone in the world must be making nanomachines for liver cancer. Even just experimental ones.”

  “Not for this cell type. It’s not one of the common oncogenes, and nobody’s sure of the cell surface markers.”

  “So? They can find them, can’t they? They can look at the cells, identify the markers, and modify an existing nanomachine. All the information they need is there in your body —” Maria pictured the mutant proteins which enabled metastasis, poking through the cell walls, highlighted in ominous yellow.

  Francesca said, “With enough time and money and expertise, I’m sure that would be possible … but as it happens, nobody plans to do it in the next eighteen months.”

  Maria started shuddering. It came in waves. She didn’t make a sound; she just sat and waited for it to pass.

  Finally, she said, “There must be drugs.”

  Francesca nodded. “I’m on medication to slow the growth of the primary tumor, and limit further metastasis. There’s no point in a transplant; I already have too many secondary tumors – actual liver failure is the least of my worries. There are general cytotoxic drugs I could take, and there’s always radiation therapy – but I don’t think the benefits are worth the side-effects.”

  “Would you like me to stay with you?”

  “No.”

  “It’d be no trouble. You know I can work from anywhere.”

  “There’s no need for it. I’m not going to be an invalid.”

  Maria closed her eyes. She couldn’t imagine feeling this way for another hour, let alone another year. When her father had died of a heart attack, three years before, she’d promised herself that she’d raise the money to have Francesca scanned by her sixtieth birthday. She was nowhere near on target. I screwed up. I wasted time. And now it’s almost too late.

  Thinking aloud, she said, “Maybe I’ll get some work in Seoul.”

  “I thought you’d decided not to go.”

  Maria looked up at her, uncomprehending. “Why don’t you want to be scanned? What are you afraid of? I’d protect you, I’d do whatever you asked. If you didn’t want to be run until slowdown is abolished, I’d wait. If you wanted to wake up in a physical body – an organic body – I’d wait.”

  Francesca smiled. “I know you would, darling. That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “I don’t want to argue about it.”

  Maria was desperate. “I won’t argue. But can’t you tell me? Please?”

  Francesca relented. “Listen, I was thirty-three when the first Copy was made. You were five years old, you grew up with the idea – but to me, it’s still … too strange. It’s something rich eccentrics do – the way they used to freeze their corpses. To me, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to be imitated by a computer after my death is just … farcical. I’m not an eccentric millionaire, I don’t want to spend my money – or yours – building some kind of … talking monument to my ego. I still have a sense of proportion.” She looked at Maria imploringly. “Doesn’t that count for anything anymore?”

  “You wouldn’t be imitated. You’d be you.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You always told me you believed—”

  “I do believe that Copies are intelligent. I just wouldn’t say that they are – or they aren’t – ‘the same person as’ the person they were based on. There’s no right or wrong answer to that; it’s a question of semantics, not a question of truth.

  “The thing is, I have my own sense – right now – of who I am … what my boundaries are … and it doesn’t include a Copy of me, run at some time in the indefinite future. Can you understand that? Being scanned wouldn’t make me feel any better about dying. Whatever a Copy of me might think, if one was ever run.”

  Maria said, angrily, “That’s just being perverse. That’s as stupid as … saying when you’re twenty years old, ‘I can’t picture myself at fifty, a woman that old wouldn’t really be me.’ And then killing yourself because there’s nothing to lose but that older woman, and she’s not inside your ‘boundaries.’”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to argue.”

  Maria looked away. “You never used to talk like this. You’re the one who always told me that Copies had to be treated exactly like human beings. If you hadn’t been brainwashed by that ‘religion’—”

  “The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference has no position on Copies, one way or the other.”

  “It has no position on anything.”

  “That’s right. So it can hardly be their fault that I don’t want to be scanned, can it?”

  Maria felt physically sick. She’d held off saying anything on the subject for almost a year; she’d been astonished and appalled, but she’d struggled to respect her mother’s choice – and now she could see that that had been insane, irresponsible beyond belief. You don’t stand by and let someone you love – someone who gave you your own understanding of the world – have their brain turned to pulp.

  She said, “It’s their fault, because they’ve undermined your judgment. They’ve fed you so much bullshit that you can’t think straight about anything, anymore.”

  Francesca just looked at her reprovingly. Maria felt a pang of guilt – How can you make things harder for her, now? How can you start attacking her, when she’s just told you that she’s dying? – but she wasn’t going to fold now, take the easy way out, be “supportive.”

  She said, “‘God makes no difference … because God is the reason why everything is exactly what it is’? That’s supposed to make us all feel at peace with the cosmos, is it?”

  Francesca shook her head. “At peace? No. It’s just a matter of clearing away, once and for all, old ideas like divine intervention – and the need for some kind of proof, or even faith, in order to believe.”

  Maria said, “What do you need, then? I don’t believe, so what am I missing?”

  “Belief?”

  “And a love of tautology.”

  “Don’t knock tautology. Better to base a religion on tautology than fantasy.”

  “But it’s worse than tautology. It’s … redefining words arbitrarily, it’s like something out of Lewis Carroll. Or George Orwell. ‘God is the reason for everything … whatever that reason is.’ So what any sane person would simply call the laws of physics, you’ve decided to rename G-O-D … solely because the word carries all kinds of historical resonances – all kinds of misleading connotations. You claim to have nothing to do with the old religions – so why keep using their terminology?”

  Francesca said, “We don’t deny the history of the word. We make a break from the past in a lot of ways – but we also acknowledge our origins. God is a concept people have been using for millennia. The fact that we’ve refined the idea beyond primitive superstitions and wish-fulfillment doesn’t mean we’re not part of the same tradition.”

  “But you haven’t refined the idea, you’ve made it meaningless! And rightly so – but you don’t seem to realize it. You’ve stripped away all the obvious stupidities – all the anthropomorphism, the miracl
es, the answered prayers – but you don’t seem to have noticed that once you’ve done that, there’s absolutely nothing left that needs to be called religion. Physics is not theology. Ethics is not theology. Why pretend that they are?”

  Francesca said, “But don’t you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There’s a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.”

  “And you know perfectly well where that compulsion comes from! It has nothing to do with any real divine being; it’s just a product of culture and neurobiology – a few accidents of evolution and history.”

  “Of course it is. What human trait isn’t?”

  “So why give in to it?”

  Francesca laughed. “Why give in to anything? The religious impulse isn’t some kind of … alien mind virus. It’s not – in its purest form, stripped of all content – the product of brainwashing. It’s a part of who I am.”

  Maria put her face in her hands. “Is it? When you talk like this, it doesn’t sound like you.”

  Francesca said, “Don’t you ever want to give thanks to God, when things are going well for you? Don’t you ever want to ask God for strength, when you need it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do. Even though I know God makes no difference. And if God is the reason for everything, then God includes the urge to use the word God. So whenever I gain some strength, or comfort, or meaning, from that urge, then God is the source of that strength, that comfort, that meaning.

  “And if God – while making no difference – helps me to accept what’s going to happen to me, why should that make you sad?”

  #

  On the train home, Maria sat next to a boy of about seven, who twitched all the way to the silent rhythms of a nerve-induced PMV – Participatory Music Video. Nerve induction had been developed to treat epilepsy, but now its most common use seemed to bring about the symptoms it was meant to alleviate. Glancing at him sideways, she could see his eyeballs fluttering behind his mirror shades.