Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Still, the joke had to be carried through. She popped up a word processor on the JSN – the terminal’s local one wouldn’t have shown up to an eavesdropper tapping the fiber – and typed:

  Whoever you are, be warned: I’m about to display the Langford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk, so

  The doorbell rang. Maria checked the peephole camera’s view. There was a woman on the front step, nobody she knew. Early forties, conservatively dressed. The not-so-subtle giveaway was clearly visible behind her: one compact two-seater Mitsubishi “Avalon” electric car. The New South Wales Police Department were probably the only people in the world who’d bought that model, before the Bankstown factory closed down in forty-six. Maria had often wondered why they didn’t give in and fit blue flashing lights to all their supposedly unmarked cars; acknowledging the situation would have been more dignified than carrying on as if nobody knew.

  Dredging her memory for recent misdemeanors – but finding none – she hurried downstairs.

  “Maria Deluca?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective-Sergeant Hayden. Computer Fraud Squad. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s convenient.”

  Maria rescanned for guilty secrets; still no trace – but she would have preferred a visitor from Homicide or Armed Robbery, someone who’d clearly come to the wrong house. She said, “Yes, of course. Come in.” Then, as she backed away from the door, “Ah – I nearly forgot, I suppose I should verify…?”

  Hayden, with a thin smile of blatantly insincere approval, let Maria plug her notepad into the socket of her Police Department badge. The notepad beeped cheerfully; the badge knew the private code which matched the current public key being broadcast by the Department.

  Seated in the living room, Hayden got straight to the point. She displayed a picture on her notepad.

  “Do you know this man?”

  Maria cleared her throat. “Yes. His name’s Paul Durham. I’m … working for him. He’s given me some contract programming.” She felt no surprise, just the jolt of being brought down to earth. Of course the Fraud Squad were interested in Durham. Of course the whole fantasy of the last three months was about to unravel before her eyes. Aden had warned her. She’d known it herself. It was a dream contract, too good to be true.

  An instant later, though, she backed away from that reaction, furious with herself. Durham had paid the money into the trust fund, hadn’t he? He’d met the costs of her new JSN account. He hadn’t cheated her. Too good to be true was idiot fatalism. Two consenting adults had kept all their promises to each other; the fact that no outsider would understand the transaction didn’t make it a crime. And after all he’d done for her, at the very least she owed him the benefit of the doubt.

  Hayden said, “What kind of ‘contract programming’?”

  Maria did her best to explain without taking all night. Hayden was – not surprisingly – reasonably computer literate, and even knew what a cellular automaton was, but either she hadn’t heard of the Autoverse, or she wanted to hear it all again from Maria.

  “So you believe this man’s paying you thirty thousand dollars … to help him state his position on a purely theoretical question about artificial life?”

  Maria tried not to sound defensive. “I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on the Autoverse, myself. It’s like a lot of other hobbies; it’s a world unto itself. People can get obsessive, extravagant. It’s no stranger than … building model airplanes. Or reenacting battles from the American Civil War.”

  Hayden didn’t argue the point, but she seemed unmoved by the comparisons. “Did you know that Paul Durham sold insurance to Copies?”

  “I knew he was an insurance salesman. He told me that himself. Just because he’s not a professional programmer doesn’t mean he can’t—”

  “Did you know he was also trying to sell his clients shares in some kind of sanctuary? A place to go – or to send a clone – in case the political climate turned against them?”

  Maria blinked. “No. What do you mean – a sanctuary? A privately owned supercomputer? He’s been trying to raise money, form a consortium…?”

  Hayden said flatly, “He’s certainly raising money – but I doubt he’ll ever raise enough to purchase the kind of hardware he’d need for the kind of service he’s offering.”

  “So, what are you accusing him of doing? Embarking on a business venture which you don’t happen to believe will be successful?” Hayden said nothing. “Have you spoken to him about this? There might be some simple explanation for whatever you’ve been told. Some senile Copy might have taken his sales pitch for a perpetuity fund the wrong way.” Senile Copy? Well … some post-dementia scan file might have proved resistant to the cognitive repair algorithms.

  Hayden said, “Of course we’ve spoken to him. He’s refused to cooperate, he won’t discuss the matter. That’s why we’re hoping you’ll be able to assist us.”

  Maria’s defiant optimism wavered. If Durham had nothing to hide, why would he refuse to defend himself?

  She said, “I don’t see how I can help you. If you think he’s been misleading his clients, go talk to his clients. It’s their testimony you need, not mine.”

  There was an awkward pause, then Hayden said, “The testimony of a Copy has no standing; legally, they’re just another kind of computer software.”

  Maria opened her mouth to reply, then realized that any excuse she offered would only make her sound more foolish. She salvaged some pride with the silent observation that the legal position of Copies was so farcical that any sane person could have trouble keeping it in mind.

  Hayden continued. “Durham could be charged with defrauding the executors of the estates, by means of supplying misleading data to the software they use to advise them. There are precedents for that; it’s like publishing false prospectus information that causes automated share-buying programs to buy your stock. But there’s still the question of evidence. We can interview Copies as an informal source of information, to guide an investigation, but nothing they say will stand up in court.”

  Maria recalled an episode of The Unclear Family where a similar problem had arisen. Babette and Larry Unclear had witnessed bank accounts being pilfered, when the relevant data trail had – inexplicably – taken solid form as an accusing tableau of ice-sculptures in their cyber-suburban backyard. She couldn’t recall exactly how the plot had turned out; ten-year-old Leroy had probably done something marginally illegal, but morally unimpeachable, to trick the thieves into giving themselves away to the authorities…

  She said, “I don’t know what you expect me to tell you. Durham hasn’t defrauded me. And I don’t know anything about this scheme.”

  “But you’re working on it with him.”

  “I certainly am not!”

  Hayden said dryly, “You’re designing a planet for him. What do you think that’s for?”

  Maria stared at her blankly for a second, then almost laughed. “I’m sorry, I can’t have explained things very well. I’m designing a planet that ‘could’ exist in the Autoverse, in the broadest sense of the word. It’s a mathematical possibility. But it’s too large to be run on a real computer. It’s not some VR—”

  Hayden cut her off. “I understand that perfectly. That doesn’t mean Durham’s clients would have grasped the distinction. Technical details about the Autoverse aren’t exactly general knowledge.”

  True. Maria hesitated. But—

  “It still makes no sense. For a start, these people would have advisers, researchers, who’d tell them that anyone promising them an Autoverse planet was full of shit. And why would Durham offer them an Autoverse planet – covered in primordial slime – when he could offer them a standard set of VR environments which would be a thousand times more attractive and a thousand times more plausible?”

  “I believe he’s offering them both. He’s hired an architect in the US to work on the VR part.”

  “But why both? Why not just VR? You couldn’t fi
t a single Copy into the Autoverse – and if you did, it would die on the spot. It would take fifty or sixty years of research to translate human biochemistry into Autoverse terms.”

  “They wouldn’t know that.”

  “They could find out in ten seconds flat. Forget about advisers; it would take one call to a knowledge miner, total cost five dollars. So why tell a lie that could be so easily uncovered? What’s the advantage – from a Copy’s point of view – of an Autoverse planet over patchwork VR?”

  Hayden was unfazed. “You’re the Autoverse expect. So you tell me.”

  “I don’t know.” Maria stood up. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic; she hated having strangers in the house. “Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

  “No. But you go ahead—”

  Maria shook her head and sat down again; she had a feeling that if she went into the kitchen, she wouldn’t want to return.

  She couldn’t see why Durham would refuse to talk to the police, unless he was involved in something dubious enough to have him thrown out of his job, at the very least. Fuck him. He might not have intended to cheat her, but he’d screwed her nonetheless. She wouldn’t get a cent for the work she’d completed; other creditors would have no call on the trust fund if Durham merely went bankrupt – but if the money was the proceeds of crime…

  Lorenzo the Magnificent. Yeah.

  The worst of it was, for all she knew, Hayden believed she was a willing accomplice. And if Durham intended to remain silent, she’d have to clear her own name.

  How?

  First, she had to find out about the scam, and untangle her role in it.

  She said, “What exactly is he promising these Copies?”

  “A refuge. A place where they’ll be safe from any kind of backlash – because they won’t be connected to the outside world. No telecommunications; nothing to trace. He feeds them a long spiel about the coming dark age, when the unwashed masses will no longer put up with being lorded over by rich immortals – and evil socialist governments will confiscate all the supercomputers for weather control.”

  Hayden seemed to find the prospect laughable. Maria suspended judgment; what mattered was how Durham’s clients felt, and she could imagine Operation Butterfly making a lot of Copies feel threatened. “So they send their clones in, and slam the door, in case the originals don’t make it through the purges. But then what? How long is this ‘dark age’ supposed to last?”

  Hayden shrugged. “Who knows? Hundreds of years? Presumably Durham himself – or some trustworthy successor, several generations later – will decide when it’s safe to come out. The two Copies whose executors filed complaints didn’t wait to hear the whole scenario; they threw him out before he could get down to details like that.”

  “He must have approached other Copies.”

  “Of course. No one else has come forward, but we have a tentative list of names. All with estates incorporated overseas, unfortunately; I haven’t been able to interview any of them, yet – we’re still working on the jurisdictional red tape. But a few have made it clear already, through their lawyers, that they won’t be willing to discuss the matter – which presumably means that they’ve swallowed Durham’s line, and now they don’t want to hear a word against him.”

  Maria struggled to imagine it. No communications. Cut off from reality, indefinitely. A few “Solipsist Nation” Copies might relish the prospect – but most of them had too little money to be the targets of an elaborate scam. And even if Durham’s richest, most paranoid clients seriously believed that the world was on the verge of turning against them … what if things went so badly wrong, outside, that links were never restored? The humans guarding the sanctuary could die out – or just walk away. How could any but the most radically separatist of Copies face the risk of being stranded inside a hidden computer, buried in the middle of a desert somewhere, with no means of discovering for themselves when civilization was worth rejoining – and no means of initiating contact in any case?

  Radioisotope power sources could run for thousands of years; multiply redundant hardware of the highest standard could last almost as long, in theory. All these Copies would have, to remember reality by, would be the information they’d brought in with them at the start. If it turned into a one-way trip, they’d be like interstellar colonists, carrying a snapshot of Earth culture off into the void.

  Except that interstellar colonists would merely face a growing radio time lag, not absolute silence. And whatever they were leaving behind, at least they’d have something to look forward to: a new world to explore.

  A new world – and the possibility of new life.

  So what better cure for claustrophobia than the promise of dragging an entire planet into the refuge, seeded with the potential for developing its own exotic life?

  Maria didn’t know whether to be outraged or impressed. If she was right, she had to admire Durham’s sheer audacity. When he had asked for a package of results that would persuade “the skeptics” about the prospects for an Autoverse biosphere, he hadn’t been thinking of academics in the artificial life scene. He’d wanted to convince his clients that, even in total isolation, they’d have everything reality could ever offer the human race – including a kind of “space exploration”, complete with the chance of alien contact. And these would be genuine aliens; not the stylish designer creatures from VR games, constructs of nothing but the human psyche; not the slick, unconvincing biomorphs of the high-level phenotype-selection models, the Darwinian equivalent of Platonic ideals. Life which had come the whole tortuous way, molecule by molecule, just like the real thing. Or, almost the whole way; with abiogenesis still poorly understood, Durham had had enough sense to start with “handmade” microbes – otherwise his clients might never have believed that the planet would bear life at all.

  Maria explained the idea, tentatively. “He’d have to have convinced these Copies that running the Autoverse is much faster than modeling real biochemistry – which it is – without being too specific about the actual figures. And I still think it’s a crazy risk to take; anyone could easily find out the truth.”

  Hayden thought it over. “Would it matter if they did? If the point of this world is mainly psychological – a place to ‘escape to’ if the worst happens, and reality becomes permanently inaccessible – then it wouldn’t matter how slowly it ran. Once they’d given up hope of reestablishing contact, slowdown would become irrelevant.”

  “Yes, but there’s slow – and there’s physically impossible. Sure, they could take in a crude sketch of the planet – which is what Durham’s asked me to provide – but they wouldn’t have a fraction of the memory needed to bring it to life. And even if they found a way around that, it could take a billion years of Autoverse time before the seed organism turned into anything more exciting than blue-green algae. Multiply that by a slowdown of a trillion … I think you get the picture.”

  “Flat batteries?”

  “Flat universe.”

  Hayden said, “Still … if they don’t want to think too seriously about the prospect of ending up permanently trapped, they might not want to look too closely at any of this. Thanks to you, Durham will have a thick pile of impressive technical details that he can wave in their faces, convincing enough to take the edge of their fear of cabin fever. Maybe that’s all they want. The only part that matters, if everything goes smoothly, is the conventional VR – good enough to keep them amused for a couple of real-time centuries – and that checks out perfectly.”

  Maria thought this sounded too glib by far, but she let it pass. “What about the hardware? How does that check out?”

  “It doesn’t. There’ll never be any hardware. Durham will vanish long before he has to produce it.”

  “Vanish with what? Money handed over with no questions asked – no safeguards, no guarantees?”

  Hayden smiled knowingly. “Money handed over, mostly, for legitimate purposes. He’s commissioned a VR city. He’s commissioned an Auto
verse planet. He’s entitled to take a percentage of the fees – there’s no crime in that, so long as it’s disclosed. For the first few months, everything he does will be scrupulously honest. Then at some point, he’ll ask his backers to pay for a consultants’ report – say, a study of suitably robust hardware configurations. Tenders will be called for. Some of them will be genuine – but the most attractive one will be forged. Later, Durham will claim to have received the report, the ‘consultants’ will be paid … and he’ll never be seen again.”

  Maria said, “You’re guessing. You have no idea what his plans are.”

  “We don’t know the specifics – but it will be something along those lines.”

  Maria slumped back in her chair. “So, what now? What do I do? Call Durham and tell him the whole thing’s off?”

  “Absolutely not! Keep working as if nothing had happened – but try to make contact with him more often. Find excuses to talk to him. See if you can gain his trust. See if you can get him to talk about his work. His clients. The refuge.”

  Maria was indignant. “I don’t remember volunteering to be your informant.”

  Hayden said coolly, “It’s up to you, but if you’re not willing to cooperate, that makes our job very difficult…”

  “There’s a difference between cooperation and playing unpaid spy!”

  Hayden almost smiled. “If you’re worried about money, you’ll have a far better chance of being paid if you help us to convict Durham.”