Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Maria couldn’t argue with any of that – but who handed out research grants on the basis of what was evocative? “So … which university—?”

  Durham cut her off. “I’m not an academic. This is just an interest of mine. A hobby, like it is with you. I’m an insurance salesman, in real life.”

  “But how could you get funding without—?”

  “I’m paying for this myself.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, I can afford it; if you take me up on this, you’re not going to be shortchanged, I can promise you that. And I know, it’s unusual for an amateur to … subcontract. But like I said, I don’t work in the Autoverse. It would take me five years to learn to do, myself, what I’m asking of you. You’ll be free to publish all of this under your own name, of course – all I ask is a footnote acknowledging financial support.”

  Maria didn’t know what to say. Lorenzo the insurance salesman? A private citizen – not even an Autoverse junkie – was offering to pay her to carry out the most abstract piece of programming imaginable: not simulating a non-existent world, but “preparing” a simulation that would never be performed. She could hardly be disdainful of anyone for throwing their hard-earned money away on “pointless” Autoverse research – but everything that had driven her to do that, herself, revolved around first-hand experience. However much intellectual pleasure it had given her, the real obsession, the real addiction, was a matter of putting on the gloves and reaching into that artificial space.

  Durham handed her a ROM chip. “There are some detailed notes here – including a few ideas of mine, but don’t feel obliged to follow any of them. What I want is whatever you think is most likely to work, not what’s closest to my preconceptions. And there’s a contract, of course. Have your legal expert system look it over; if you’re not happy with anything, I’m pretty flexible.”

  “Thank you.”

  Durham stood. “I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’m afraid I have another appointment. Please – read the notes, think it all through. Call me when you’ve made a decision.”

  After he’d left, Maria sat at the table, staring at the black epoxy rectangle in her palm, trying to make sense of what had happened.

  Babbage had designed the Analytical Engine with no real prospect of seeing it constructed in his lifetime. Space travel enthusiasts had been designing interstellar craft, down to every last nut and bolt, since the nineteen sixties. Terraforming advocates were constantly churning out comprehensive feasibility studies for schemes unlikely to be attempted for a hundred years or more. Why? As aids to thought experiments. As sketches of proofs.

  And if Durham, who’d never even worked in the Autoverse, had an infinitely grander vision of its long-term possibilities than she had, then maybe she’d always been too close to it, too wrapped up in the tedious contingencies, to see what he’d seen…

  Except that this wasn’t about long-term possibilities. The computer that could run an Autoverse world would be far bigger than the planet it was modeling. If such a device was ever to be constructed, however far into the future, there’d have to be far better reasons for building it than this. It wasn’t a question of a visionary born a generation or two before his time; Autoverse ecology was an entirely theoretical notion, and it always would be. The project was a thought experiment in the purest sense.

  It was also too good to be true. The Autoverse addict’s dream contract. But short of some senseless, capricious hoax, why should Durham lie to her?

  Maria pocketed the chip and left the café, not knowing whether to feel skeptical and pessimistic, or elated – and guilty. Guilty, because Durham – if he was genuine, if he honestly planned to pay her real money for this glorious, senseless exercise – had to be a little insane. If she took this job, she’d be taking advantage of him, exploiting his strange madness.

  #

  Maria let Aden into the house reluctantly; they usually met at his place, or on neutral ground, but he’d been visiting a friend nearby, and she could think of no excuse to turn him away. She caught a glimpse of the red cloudless sunset behind him, and the open doorway let in the hot concrete smell of dusk, the whirr of evening traffic. After seven hours cloistered in her room, reading Durham’s notes for his Autoverse Garden of Eden, the street outside seemed strange, almost shocking – charged with the two-billion-year gulf between Earth’s equivalent moment of primordial fecundity, and all the bizarre consequences.

  She walked ahead of Aden down the entrance hall, and switched on the light in the living room, while he propped his cycle against the stairs. Alone, the house suited her perfectly, but it took only one more person to make it seem cramped.

  He caught up with her and said, “I heard about your mother.”

  “How? Who told you?”

  “Joe knows one of your cousins in Newcastle. Angela? Is that her name?”

  He was leaning sideways against the doorframe, arms folded. Maria said, “Why don’t you come right in if you’re coming in?”

  He said, “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

  She shook her head. She’d been planning to ask him how much he could lend her to help with the scan, but she couldn’t raise the subject, not yet. He’d ask, innocently, if Francesca was certain that she wanted to be scanned – and the whole thing would degenerate into an argument about her right to choose a natural death. As if there was any real choice, without the money for a scan.

  Maria said, “I saw her yesterday. She’s handling it pretty well. But I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  Aden nodded, then detached himself from the doorway and walked up to her. They kissed for a while, which was comforting in a way, but Aden soon had an erection, and Maria was in no mood for sex. Even at the best of times, it took a willing suspension of disbelief, a conscious decision to bury her awareness of the biological clockwork driving her emotions – and right now, her head was still buzzing with Durham’s suggestion for building a kind of latent diploidism into A. lamberti, a propensity to “mistakenly” make extra copies of chromosomes, which might eventually pave the way to sexual reproduction and all of its evolutionary advantages. Aden pulled free and went and sat in one of the armchairs.

  Maria said, “I think I’ve finally got some work. If I didn’t dream the whole thing.”

  “That’s great! Who for?”

  She described her meeting with Durham. The commission, the seed.

  Aden said, “So you don’t even know what he gets out of this – except not-quite-proving some obscure intellectual point about evolution?” He laughed, incredulous. “How will you know if you’ve not-quite-proved it well enough? And what if Durham disagrees?”

  “The contract is all in my favor. He pays the money into a trust fund before I even start. All I have to do is make a genuine effort to complete the project within six months – and if there’s any dispute, he’s legally bound to accept an independent adjudicator’s decision on what constitutes a ‘genuine effort.’ The expert system I hired gave the contract a triple-A rating.”

  Aden still looked skeptical. “You should get a second opinion; half the time those things don’t even agree with each other – let alone predict what would happen in court. Anyway, if it all goes smoothly, what do you end up with?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars. Not bad, for six months’ work. Plus computing time up to another thirty thousand – billed directly to him.”

  “Yeah? How can he afford all this?”

  “He’s an insurance salesman. If he’s good, he could be making, I don’t know … two hundred grand a year?”

  “Which is one hundred and twenty, after tax. And he’s paying out sixty on this shit?”

  “Yes. You have a problem with that? It doesn’t exactly leave him poverty stricken. And he could be earning twice as much, for all I know. Not to mention savings, investments … tax dodges. His personal finances are none of my business; once the money’s in the trust fund, he can go bankrupt for all I care. I still get paid if I finish the job. That’s
good enough for me.”

  Aden shook his head. “I just can’t see why he thinks it’s worth it. There are God-knows-how-many-thousand Copies in existence, right now – running half the biggest corporations in the world, in case you hadn’t noticed – and this man wants to spend sixty thousand dollars proving that artificial life can go beyond bacteria?”

  Maria groaned. “We’ve been through this before. The Autoverse is not Virtual Reality. Copies are not the human equivalent of A. lamberti. They’re a cheat, they’re a mess. They do what they’re meant to do, very efficiently. But there’s no … underlying logic to them. Every part of their body obeys a different set of ad hoc rules. Okay, it would be insane to try to model an entire human body on a molecular level – but if you’re interested in the way fundamental physics affects biology, Copies are irrelevant, because they have no fundamental physics. The behavior of a Copy’s neurons doesn’t arise from any deeper laws, it’s just a matter of some ‘rules for neurons’ which are based directly on what’s known about neurons in the human body. But in the human body, that behavior is a consequence of the laws of physics, acting on billions of molecules. With Copies, we’ve cheated, for the sake of efficiency. There are no molecules, and no laws of physics; we’ve just put in the net results – the biology – by hand.”

  “And that offends your esthetic sensibilities?”

  “That’s not the point. Copies have their place – and when the time comes, I’d rather be a software mongrel than dead. All I’m saying is, they’re useless for telling you what kind of physics can support what kind of life.”

  “A burning question of our time.”

  Maria felt herself flush with anger, but she said evenly, “Maybe not. I just happen to find it interesting. And apparently Paul Durham does too. And maybe it’s too abstract a question to qualify as science … maybe working in the Autoverse is nothing but pure mathematics. Or philosophy. Or art. But you don’t seem to have any qualms about spending a year in Seoul, practicing your own useless artform at the Korean taxpayers’ expense.”

  “It’s a private university.”

  “Korean students’ expense, then.”

  “I never said there was anything wrong with you taking the job – I just don’t want to see you get screwed if this man turns out to be lying.”

  “What could he possibly have to gain by lying?”

  “I don’t know – but I still don’t see what he has to gain if he’s telling the truth.” He shrugged. “But if you’re happy, I’m happy. Maybe it’ll all be okay. And I know, the way things are going, you can’t afford to be picky.”

  Picky? Maria started laughing. Discussing this on Aden’s terms was ridiculous. Durham wasn’t stringing her along, wasting her time; he was absolutely serious – his notes proved that. Three hundred pages – months of work. He’d taken the plan as far as he could, short of learning the intricacies of the Autoverse himself.

  And maybe she still didn’t understand his motives – but maybe there was nothing to be “understood.” When she’d been immersed in his notes, there’d been no mystery at all. On its own terms, Durham’s plan was … natural, obvious. An end in itself, requiring no dreary explanation rooted in the world of academic glory and monetary gain.

  Aden said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Never mind.”

  He shifted in the chair, and looked at her oddly. “Well, at least you won’t have to spend all your time in Seoul looking for work, now. That would have been a bore.”

  “I’m not going to Seoul.”

  “You’re joking.”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s the problem? You can do this job anywhere, can’t you?”

  “Probably. Yes. I just—”

  Maria felt a twinge of uncertainty. He seemed genuinely hurt. He’d made it clear that he’d go without her, if he had to – but that was understandable. Composer-in-residence was his perfect job – and she had nothing to weigh against that, nothing to lose by accompanying him. He might have put his position more diplomatically, instead of making her feel like optional baggage – but that was neither proof that he was trying to drive her away, nor an unforgivable crime in itself. He was tactless sometimes. She could live with that.

  “What’s wrong with you? You’d love it in Seoul. You know you would.”

  She said, “I’d love it too much. There’d be too many distractions. This project is going to be hard work, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and if I can’t give it all my attention, it’s going to be impossible.” It had started as an ad lib excuse, but it was true. She had six months, if not to build a world, at least to sketch one; if she didn’t eat, sleep and breathe it, it would never come together, it would never come to life.

  Aden snorted. “That’s ludicrous! You don’t even have to write a program that runs. You said yourself, as long as you make a reasonable effort, whatever you hand over will be good enough. What’s Durham going to say? ‘Sorry, but I don’t think this slime mold would ever invent the wheel’?”

  “Getting it right matters to me.”

  Aden said nothing. Then, “If you want to stay behind because of your mother, why can’t you just say so?”

  Maria was startled. “Because it’s not true.”

  He stared at her angrily. “You know, I was going to offer to stay here with you? But you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  Maria untangled that. “That’s what you came here to tell me? That if I planned to stay in Sydney because of Francesca, you’d turn down the job in Seoul?”

  “Yes.” He said it as if it should have been obvious to her all along. “She’s dying. Do you think I’d walk off and leave you to cope with that alone? What kind of shit do you think I am?”

  She’s not dying; she’s going to be scanned.

  But she didn’t say that. “Francesca doesn’t care if I go or stay. I offered to move in with her, but she doesn’t want to be looked after by anyone. Let alone by me.”

  “Then come to Seoul.”

  “Why, exactly? So you won’t feel bad about leaving me? That’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Your peace of mind.”

  Aden thought about that for a while. Then he said, “All right. Fuck you. Stay.”

  He got to his feet and walked out of the room. Maria listened to him fumbling with his cycle, then opening the front door, slamming it closed.

  She tidied up in the kitchen, checked the locks, switched off the lights. Then she went upstairs and lay on her bed, leaving the room in darkness, trying to picture the likely course of events over the next few weeks. Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn’t upset, or relieved – just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life.

  She’d left the terminal switched on after reading Durham’s ROM; the screen was blank, and supposedly pure black, but as her eyes adapted to the dark she could see it glowing a faint gray. Every now and then there was a brief flash at a random point on the screen – a pixel activated by background radiation, struck by a cosmic ray. She watched the flashes, like a slow rain falling on a window to another world, until she fell asleep.

  Chapter 11

  (Remit not paucity)

  January 2051

  Malcolm Carter presented as a tall, solid, vigorous-looking man in late middle age – and in fact he was fifty-eight, so his visitor’s body might easily have been styled directly on his real one. Peer remembered seeing photographs of Carter in the early thirties, when he rose to prominence as one of the first architect-programmers to concentrate on the needs of Copies, rather than catering to the human visitors who used virtual environments merely for work or entertainment. Visitors had ended up hiring him too, though – visitors like Kate who were on their way in. And Kate had moved in a similar orbit then, a young computer artist snatc
hed out of obscurity in Oregon and adopted by the San Francisco glitterati at about the same time as Carter’s own ascent from a small Arizona software house. Peer wasn’t sure he would have recognized the man from those old magazine shots – but then, nobody continued to look the way they’d looked in the thirties, if they could possibly help it.

  Carter shook hands with Peer, and nodded at Kate; Peer wondered, curious but not really jealous, if they were greeting each other a little more warmly in a private detour from the version of the meeting he was seeing. They were standing in a spacious reception area, the walls and high ceiling decorated with a motif of tiered concentric circles molded into the cream-colored plaster, the floor tiled in black-and-white diamonds. This was Carter’s publicly listed VR address; anyone at all could call the number and “come here.” The room spawned separate versions for separate callers, though; Peer and Kate had taken steps to arrive together, but there had been no risk of them accidentally bumping into one of Carter’s – or Durham’s – wealthy clients.

  Carter said, “I hope you don’t mind if we keep this brief and to the point. I don’t like to use inducers for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch.”

  Peer said, “It’s good of you to make the time to see us at all.” He cursed himself silently; he was contemplating paying this man a substantial portion of his entire wealth – and trusting him with the fate of an autonomous version of his own consciousness. He had a right to an audience. Still, at a slowdown of sixty…

  Carter – if it really was Carter, and not just a convincing mask – pointed out a door at the end of the room. “There’s a rough sketch of the city through there, if you want to take the tour later on; just call out for a guide if you need one. But I expect the city itself’s not your main concern. What you really want to know is, can I fit you safely into the cracks?”

  Peer glanced at Kate. She remained silent. She was already convinced; this was all for his benefit.