Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  As the shock of the news diminished, slightly, Maria began to see things more clearly. It was really all about money, not religion. She wants to be a martyr, to save me from spending a cent. All the rest is rationalization. She must have picked up a load of archaic bullshit from her own parents about the virtues of not being a “burden” – not imposing too much on the next generation, not “ruining the best years of their lives.”

  She’d left her cycle in a locker at Central Station. She rode home slowly through the leisurely Sunday evening traffic, still feeling drained and shaky, but a little more confident, now that she’d had a chance to think it through. Twelve to eighteen months? She’d raise the money in less than a year. Somehow. She’d show Francesca that she could shoulder the burden – and once that was done, her mother could stop inventing excuses.

  Home, she started some vegetables boiling, then went upstairs and checked for mail. There were six items under “Junk”, four under “Autoverse” – and nothing under “Boring But Lucrative.” Since her letter in Autoverse Review, almost every subscriber had been in touch, with congratulations, requests for more data, offers of collaboration, and a few borderline crank calls full of misunderstandings and complaints. Her success with A. lamberti had even made the big time – a slightly less specialized journal, Cellular Automaton World. It was all strangely anticlimactic – and in a way, she was glad of that; it put things in perspective.

  She trashed all the junk mail with a sweep of her hand across the touch screen, then sat for a moment gazing at the icons for the Autoverse messages, contemplating doing the same to them. I have to get my act together. Concentrate on earning money, and stop wasting time on this shit.

  She ran the first message. A teenage girl in Kansas City complained that she couldn’t duplicate Maria’s results, and proceeded to describe her own tortuous version of the experiment. Maria stopped and deleted the file after viewing twenty seconds; she’d already replied at length to half a dozen like it, and any sense of obligation she’d felt to the “Autoverse community” had vanished in the process.

  As she started the second message running, she smelled something burning downstairs, and suddenly remembered that the stove had been brain-dead since Friday – everything had to be watched, and she couldn’t even switch off the hotplates remotely. She turned up the volume on the terminal, and headed for the kitchen.

  The spinach was a blackened mess. She threw the saucepan across the narrow room; it rebounded, almost to her feet. She picked it up again and started smashing it against the wall beside the stove, until the tiles began to crack and fall to the floor. Damaging the house was more satisfying than she’d ever imagined; it felt like rending her clothes, like tearing out her hair, like self-mutilation. She pounded the wall relentlessly, until she was breathless, giddy, running with sweat, her face flushed with a strange heat she hadn’t felt since childhood tantrums. Her mother touched her cheek with the back of her hand, brushing away tears of anger. The cool skin, the wedding ring. “Sssh. Look at the state you’re in. You’re burning up!”

  After a while, she calmed down, and noticed that the message was still playing upstairs; the sender must have programmed it to repeat indefinitely until she acknowledged it. She sat on the floor and listened.

  “My name is Paul Durham. I read your article in Autoverse Review. I was very impressed by what you’ve done with A. lamberti – and if you think you might be interested in being funded to take it further, call me back on this number and we can talk about it.”

  Maria had to listen three more times before she was certain she’d understood the message. Being funded to take it further. The phrasing seemed deliberately coy and ambiguous, but in the end it could only really mean one thing.

  Some idiot was offering her a job.

  #

  When Durham asked to meet her in person, Maria was too surprised to do anything but agree. Durham said he lived in North Sydney, and suggested that they meet the next morning in the city, at the Market Street Café. Maria, unable to think of a plausible excuse on the spot, just nodded – thankful that she’d made the call through a software filter which would erase any trace of anxiety from her face and tone of voice. Most programming contracts did not involve interviews, even by phone – the tendering process was usually fully automated, based entirely on the quotes submitted, and the tenderer’s audited performance record. Maria hadn’t faced an interview in the flesh since she’d applied for part-time cleaning jobs as a student.

  It was only after she’d broken the connection that she realized she still had no idea what Durham wanted from her. A real Autoverse fanatic might, just conceivably, part with money for the privilege of collaborating with her – perhaps footing the bills for computer time, for the sake of sharing the kudos of any further results. It was hard to think of any other explanation. Maria lay awake half the night, looking back on the brief conversation, wondering if she was missing something blindingly obvious – wondering if it could be some kind of hoax. Just before two, she got up and did a hasty literature search of Autoverse Review, and a handful of other cellular automaton journals. There were no articles by anyone named Durham.

  Around three o’clock, she gave up pondering the question and managed to force herself to sleep. She dreamed that she was still awake, distraught at the news of her mother’s illness – and then, realizing that she was only dreaming, cursed herself angrily because this proof of her love was nothing but an illusion.

  Chapter 8

  (Remit not paucity)

  November 2050

  Thomas took the elevator from his office to his home. In life, the journey had been a ten-minute ride on the S-Bahn, but after almost four subjective months he was gradually becoming accustomed to the short-cut. Today, he began the ascent without giving it a second thought – admiring the oak panelling, lulled by the faint hum of the motor – but half-way up, for no good reason, he suffered a moment of vertigo, as if the elegant coffin had gone into free fall.

  When first resurrected, he’d worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty. A window with a view of the city seemed harmless enough – but to walk, and ride, through an artificial crowd scene struck him as grotesque, and the few times he’d tried it, he’d found it acutely distressing. It was too much like life – and too much like his dream of one day being among people again. He had no doubt that he would have become desensitized to the illusion with time, but he didn’t want that. When he finally inhabited a telepresence robot as lifelike as his lost body – when he finally rode a real train again, and walked down a real street – he didn’t want the joy of the experience dulled by years of perfect imitation.

  He had no wish to delude himself – but apart from declining to mimic his corporeal life to the point of parody, it was hard to define exactly what that meant. He balked at the prospect of the nearest door always opening magically onto his chosen destination, and he had no desire to snap his fingers and teleport. Acknowledging – and exploiting – the unlimited plasticity of Virtual Reality might have been the most “honest” thing to do … but Thomas needed a world with a permanent structure, not a dream city which reconfigured itself to his every whim.

  Eventually, he’d found a compromise. He’d constructed an auxiliary geography – or architecture – for his private version of Frankfurt; an alternative topology for the city, in which all the buildings he moved between were treated as being stacked one on top of the other, allowing a single elevator shaft to link them all. His house “in the suburbs” began sixteen stories “above” his city office; in between were board rooms, restaurants, galleries and museums. Having decided upon the arrangement, he now regarded it as immutable – and if the view from each place, once he arrived, blatantly contradicted the relationship, he could live with that degree of paradox.

  Thomas stepped out of the elevator into the ground floor entrance hall of his home. The two-story building, s
et in a modest ten hectares of garden, was his alone – as the real-world original had been from the time of his divorce until his terminal illness, when a medical team had moved in. At first, he’d had cleaning robots gliding redundantly through the corridors, and gardening robots at work in the flower beds – viewing them as part of the architecture, as much as the drain pipes, the air conditioning grilles, and countless other “unnecessary” fixtures. He’d banished the robots after the first week. The drain pipes remained.

  His dizziness had passed, but he strode into the library and poured himself a drink from two cut-glass decanters, a bracing mixture of Confidence and Optimism. With a word, he could have summoned up a full mood-control panel – an apparition which always reminded him of a recording studio’s mixing desk – and adjusted the parameters of his state of mind, until he reached a point where he no longer wished to change the settings … but he’d become disenchanted with that nakedly technological metaphor. Mood-altering “drugs”, here, could function with a precision, and a lack of side-effects, which no real chemical could ever have achieved – pharmacological accuracy was possible, but hardly mandatory – and it felt more natural to gulp down a mouthful of “spirits” for fortification, than it did to make adjustments via a hovering bank of sliding potentiometers.

  Even if the end result was exactly the same.

  Thomas sank into a chair as the drink started to take effect – as a matter of choice, it worked gradually, a pleasant warmth diffusing out from his stomach before his brain itself was gently manipulated – and began trying to make sense of his encounter with Paul Durham.

  You have to let me show you exactly what you are.

  There was a terminal beside the chair. He hit a button, and one of his personal assistants, Hans Löhr, appeared on the screen.

  Thomas said casually, “Find out what you can about my visitor, will you?”

  Löhr replied at once, “Yes, sir.”

  Thomas had six assistants, on duty in shifts around the clock. All flesh-and-blood humans – but so thoroughly wired that they were able to switch their mental processes back and forth between normal speed and slowdown at will. Thomas kept them at a distance, communicating with them only by terminal; the distinction between a visitor “in the flesh” and a “mere image” on a screen didn’t bear much scrutiny, but in practice it could still be rigorously enforced. He sometimes thought of his staff as working in Munich or Berlin … “far enough away” to “explain” the fact that he never met them in person, and yet “near enough” to make a kind of metaphorical sense of their ability to act as go-betweens with the outside world. He’d never bothered to find out where they really were, in case the facts contradicted this convenient mental image.

  He sighed, and took another swig of C & O. It was a balancing act, a tightrope walk. A Copy could go insane, either way. Caring too much about the truth could lead to a pathological obsession with the infrastructure – the algorithms and optical processors, the machinery of “deception” which lay beneath every surface. Caring too little, you could find yourself gradually surrendering to a complacent fantasy in which life had gone on as normal, and everything which contradicted the illusion of ordinary physical existence was avoided, or explained away.

  Was that Durham’s real intention? To drive him mad?

  Thomas had ordered the usual cursory screening before letting Durham in, revealing only that the man worked as a salesman for Gryphon Financial Products – a moderately successful Anglo-Australian company – and that he possessed no criminal record. Elaborate precautions were hardly warranted; visitors could do no harm. Thomas’s VR consultants had assured him that nothing short of tampering with the hardware in situ could ever damage or corrupt the system; no mere signal coming down the fiber from the outside world could penetrate the protected layers of the software. Visitors who wreaked havoc, introducing viruses by the fiendishly clever binary-modulated snapping of their fingers, were the stuff of fiction. (Literally; Thomas had seen it happen once on The Unclear Family.)

  Durham had said: “I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve spent time in a mental institution. Ten years. I suffered delusions. Bizarre, elaborate delusions. And I realize, now, that I was seriously ill. I can look back and understand that.

  “But at the very same time, I can look back and remember what it was that I believed was happening, when I was insane. And without for one moment ceasing to acknowledge my condition, I still find those memories so convincing…”

  Thomas’s skin crawled. He raised his glass … and then put it down. He knew that if he kept on drinking, nothing the man had said would unsettle him in the least – but he hadn’t drunk enough, yet, to be absolutely sure that that was what he wanted.

  “If you’re not prepared to perform the experiment yourself, at least think about the implications. Imagine that you’ve modified the way in which you’re computed – and imagine what the consequences would be. A gedanken experiment – is that too much to ask for? In a sense, that’s all I ever performed myself.”

  The terminal chimed. Thomas took the call. Löhr said, “I have a preliminary report on Paul Durham. Would you like me to read it?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I’ll view the file.”

  He skimmed it, at level one detail. Paul Kingsley Durham. Born in Sydney on June 6, 2000. Parents: Elizabeth Anne Maddox and John Arthur Durham … joint owners of a delicatessen in the Sydney suburb of Concord, from 1996 to 2032 … retired to Mackay, Queensland … now both deceased by natural causes.

  Educated at a government high school. 2017: Higher School Certificate aggregate score in third percentile; best subjects physics and mathematics. 2018: completed one year of a science degree at Sydney University, passed all examinations but discontinued studies. 2019 to 2023: traveled in Thailand, Burma, India, Nepal. 2024: on return to Australia, diagnosed with an organic delusional syndrome, probably congenital … condition partly controlled by medication. Numerous casual laboring jobs until May, 2029. Condition deteriorating … disability pension granted January, 2031. Committed to Psychiatric Ward of Blacktown Hospital on September 4, 2035.

  Corrective nanosurgery to the hippocampus and prefrontal cerebral cortex performed on November 11, 2045 … declared a complete success.

  Thomas switched to level two, to fill in the ten-year gap, but found little more than a long list of the drugs, neural grafts, and gene-therapy vectors which had been injected into Durham’s skull during that period, to no apparent benefit. There were frequent notes that the treatments had been tested first on a set of partial brain models, but hadn’t worked in practice. Thomas wondered if Durham had been told about this – and wondered what the man imagined happened when a drug was evaluated on fifteen separate models of different regions of the brain – which, taken together, encompassed the entire organ…

  2046 to 2048: studying finance and administration at Macquarie University. 2049: graduated with first class honors, and immediately hired by Gryphon as a trainee salesman. As of January 17, 2050, working in the Artificial Intelligence Division.

  Which meant selling protection, in various guises, to Copies who were afraid that their assets were going to be pulled out from under them. Durham’s job description would certainly cover spending long hours as a visitor – if not quite stretching to matters like disclosing details of his personal psychiatric history, or suggesting metaphysical gedanken experiments to his clients. Or indeed, wasting time on Copies obviously far too secure to need Gryphon’s services.

  Thomas leaned back from the terminal. It was almost too simple: Durham had fooled his doctors into believing that they’d cured him – and then, with typical paranoid ingenuity and tenacity, he’d set about getting himself into a position where he could meet Copies, share the Great Truth that had been revealed to him … and try to extract a little money in the process.

  If Thomas contacted Gryphon and told them what their mad salesman was up to, Durham would certainly lose his job, probably end up in an institution again
– and hopefully benefit from a second attempt at nanosurgery. Durham probably wasn’t harming anybody … but ensuring that he received treatment was, surely, the kindest thing to do.

  A confident, optimistic person would make the call at once. Thomas eyed his drink, but decided to hold off a little longer before drowning the alternatives.

  Durham had said: “I understand that everything I believe I’ve experienced was ‘due to’ my illness – and I know there’s no easy way to persuade you that I’m not still insane. But even if that were true … why should it make the questions I’ve raised any less important to you?

  “Most flesh-and-blood humans live and die without knowing or caring what they are – scoffing at the very idea that it should matter. But you’re not flesh-and-blood, and you can’t afford the luxury of ignorance.”

  Thomas rose and walked over to the mirror above the fireplace. Superficially, his appearance was still based largely on his final scan; he had the same unruly, thick white hair, the same loose, mottled, translucent eighty-five-year-old skin. He had the bearing of a young man, though; the model constructed from the scan file had been thoroughly rejuvenated, internally, sweeping away sixty years’ worth of deterioration in every joint, every muscle, every vein and artery. He wondered if it was only a matter of time before vanity got the better of him, and he did the same with his appearance. Many of his business associates were un-aging gradually – but a few had leaped back twenty, thirty, fifty years, or changed their appearances completely. Which was most honest? Looking like an eighty-five-year-old flesh-and-blood human (which he was not), or looking the way he’d prefer to look … prefer to be … given the choice. And he did have the choice.

  He closed his eyes, put his fingertips to his cheek, explored the damaged skin. If he believed these ruins defined him, they defined him … and if he learned to accept a new young body, the same would be true of it. And yet, he couldn’t shake the notion that external rejuvenation would entail nothing more than constructing a youthful “mask” … while his “true face” continued to exist – and age – somewhere. Pure Dorian Gray – a stupid moralistic fable stuffed with “eternal” verities long obsolete.