Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Violating the whole esthetic, an interface window hovered in front of him, a meter above the chicken-feed-scattered dirt. The cloning utility insisted on following an elaborate confirmation sequence; Peer kept saying, “Please skip to the final question, I know exactly what I’m doing” – but icons in legal wigs and gowns kept popping up in front of the window and declaring solemnly, “You must read this warning carefully. Your brain model will be directly examined for evidence of complete understanding before we proceed to the next stage.”

  It was a thousand times more trouble than baling out – he knew that for certain, having almost done it – but then, baling out entailed fewer legal complications for the people outside. Peer’s estate was controlled by an executor, who’d signed a contract obliging her to act according to “any duly authenticated communications – including, but not limited to, visual and/or auditory simulations of a human being appearing to proffer instructions or advice.” What duly authenticated meant revolved around a ninety-nine-digit code key which had been “hardwired” into Peer’s model-of-a-brain when his Copy was generated from his scan file. He could summon it up consciously if he had to, in some unlikely emergency, but normally he made use of it by a simple act of will. He’d record a video postcard, wish it to be duly authenticated – and it was done. Unless the key was stolen – plucked right out of the computer memory which contained the data representing his brain – Peer was the only software on the planet capable of encrypting instructions to his executor in a form compatible with her own matching key. It was the closest thing he had to a legal identity.

  By law, any clone which a Copy made of itself had to be given a new key. It was up to the initial Copy, prior to the cloning, to divide up the worldly assets between the two future selves – or rather, divide them up between the executor’s two portfolios.

  Peer fought his way through the process of assuring the cloning utility that he really had meant what he’d told it from the start: The clone would require no assets of its own. Peer would run it on sufferance, paying for its running time himself. He didn’t plan on keeping it conscious for more than a minute or two; just long enough to reassure himself that he was doing the right thing.

  He almost wished that Kate was with him, now. She’d offered to be here, but he’d turned her down. He would have been glad of her support, but this had to be done in private.

  Finally, the utility said, “This is your last chance to cancel. Are you sure you wish to proceed?”

  Peer closed his eyes. When I see my original, sitting on the porch, I’ll know who I am, and accept it.

  He said, “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Peer felt no change. He opened his eyes. His newly made twin stood on the ground where the interface window had been, staring at him, wide-eyed. Peer shivered. He recognized the boy as himself, and not just intellectually – Kate’s piece included adjustments to every part of his brain which dealt with his body image, so he’d be no more shocked by catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror than he was by the way his limbs felt as he walked. But the effect wasn’t so much to see through the “disguise” of the ten-year-old body, as to find himself thinking of the clone – and himself – as if the two of them really were that young. How could he send this child into exile?

  Peer brushed the absurd notion aside. “Well?”

  The clone seemed dazed. “I—”

  Peer prompted him. “You know what I want to hear. Are you ready for this? Are you happy with your fate? Did I make the right decision? You’re the one who knows, now.”

  “But I don’t know.” He looked at Peer pleadingly, as if hoping for guidance. “Why am I doing this? Remind me.”

  Peer was taken aback, but some disorientation was only to be expected. His own voice sounded “normal” to him – thanks to the neural adjustments – but the clone still sounded like a frightened child. He said gently, “Kate. We want to be with her. Both of her—”

  The clone nodded fervently. “Of course.” He laughed nervously. “And of course I’m ready. Everything’s fine.” His eyes darted around the yard, as if he was searching for an escape route.

  Peer felt his chest tighten. He said evenly, “You don’t have to go ahead if you don’t want to. You know that. You can bale out right now, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

  The clone looked more alarmed than ever. “I don’t want that! I want to stow away with Kate.” He hesitated, then added, “She’ll be happier in there, more secure. And I do want to be with her; I want to know that side of her.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  The clone sank to his knees in the dirt. For a second, Peer thought he was sobbing, then he realized that the noise was laughter.

  The clone recovered his composure and said, “Nothing’s wrong – but how do you expect me to take it? The two of us, cut off from everything else. Not just the real world, but all the other Copies.”

  Peer said, “If you get lonely, you can always generate new people. You’ll have access to ontogenesis software – and no reason to care about the slowdown.”

  The clone started laughing again. Tears streamed down his face. Hugging himself, he tumbled sideways onto the ground. Peer looked on, bemused. The clone said, “Here I am trying to steel myself for the wedding, and already you’re threatening me with children.”

  Suddenly, he reached out and grabbed Peer by one ankle, then dragged him off the step. Peer hit the ground on his arse with a jarring thud. His first instinct was to freeze the clone’s power to interact with him, but he stopped himself. He was in no danger – and if his twin wanted to burn off some aggression on his brother-creator, he could take it. They were evenly matched, after all.

  Two minutes later, Peer was lying with his face in the dirt and his arms pinned behind his back. The clone kneeled over him, breathless but triumphant.

  Peer said, “All right, you win. Now get off me – or I’ll double my height, put on forty kilograms, and get up and flatten you.”

  The clone said, “Do you know what we should do?”

  “Shake hands and say goodbye.”

  “Toss a coin.”

  “For what?”

  The clone laughed. “What do you think?”

  “You said you were happy to go.”

  “I am. But so should you be. I say we toss a coin. If I win, we swap key numbers.”

  “That’s illegal!”

  “Illegal!” The clone was contemptuous. “Listen to the Solipsist Nation Copy invoke the laws of the world! It’s easily done. The software exists. All you have to do is agree.”

  Talking was difficult; Peer spat out sand, but there was a seed of some kind caught between his teeth which he couldn’t dislodge. He felt a curious reluctance to “cheat”, though – to remove the seed from his mouth, or the clone from his back. It had been so long since he’d been forced to endure the slightest discomfort that the novelty seemed to outweigh the inconvenience.

  He said, “All right. I’ll do it.”

  And if he lost? But why should he fear that? Five minutes ago, he’d been prepared to give rise to – to become – the clone who’d stow away.

  They created the coin together, the only way to ensure that it was subject to no hidden influences. The reality editor they jointly invoked offered a standard object ready-made for their purpose, which they decorated as a one pound coin. The physics of flipping a real coin wouldn’t come into it; any Copy could easily calculate and execute a flick of the thumb leading to a predetermined outcome. The result would be controlled by a random number generator deep in the hidden layers of the operating system.

  Peer said, “I toss, you call” – at exactly the same time as the clone. He laughed. The clone smiled faintly. Peer was about to defer, then decided to wait. A few seconds later, he said, alone, “All right, you toss.”

  As the coin went up, Peer thought about encasing it in a second object, an invisibly thin shell under his control alone – but the long list of attributes of the fair coin probably incl
uded crying foul if its true faces were concealed. He shouted “Heads!” just before the thing hit the dirt.

  The two of them fell to their hands and knees, almost bumping heads. A hen approached; Peer shooed it away with a backward kick.

  President Kinnock, in profile, glinted in the dust.

  The clone met his eyes. Peer did his best not to look relieved – short of severing ties with his body. He tried to read the clone’s expression, and failed; all he saw was a reflection of his own growing numbness. Pirandello had said it was impossible to feel any real emotion while staring into a mirror. Peer decided to take that as a good sign. They were still one person, after all – and that was the whole point.

  The clone rose to his feet, dusting off his knees and elbows. Peer took a hologram-embossed library card from the back pocket of his jeans and handed it over; it was an icon for a copy of all the environments, customized utilities, bodies, memories, and other data he’d accumulated since his resurrection.

  The clone said, “Don’t worry about me – or Kate. We’ll look after each other. We’ll be happy.” As he spoke, he morphed smoothly into an older body.

  Peer said, “Ditto.” He reached up and shook the young man’s hand. Then he summoned one of his control windows and froze the clone, leaving the motionless body visible as an icon for the snapshot file. He shrunk it to a height of a few centimeters, flattened it into a two-dimensional postcard, and wrote on the back: TO MALCOM CARTER.

  Then he walked down the road a kilometer to one of Kate’s little touches, a postbox marked U.S. MAIL, and dropped the postcard in.

  Chapter 19

  (Remit not paucity)

  June 2051

  The anesthetist said, “Count backward from ten.”

  Maria said, “Ten.”

  She dreamed of arriving on Francesca’s doorstep with a suitcase full of money. As she walked down the hall behind her mother, the case fell open, and hundred-dollar bills fluttered out and filled the air like confetti.

  Francesca turned to her, radiant with health. She said tenderly, “You shouldn’t have, my darling. But I understand. You can’t take it with you.”

  Maria laughed. “You can’t take you with you.”

  Her father was in the living room, dressed for his wedding day, although not as young. He beamed and held out his arms to Maria. His parents, and Francesca’s parents, stood behind him – and as Maria approached, she saw from on high that behind her grandparents were cousins and aunts, great-grandparents and great-aunts, row after row of relatives and ancestors, stretching back into the depths of the house, laughing and chattering. The money had brought them all back to life. How could she have been so selfish as to think of denying them this grand reunion?

  Maria threaded her way through the crowd, greeting people she’d never known existed. Handsome, dark-eyed seventh cousins kissed her hand and whispered compliments in a beautiful dialect she didn’t understand. Veiled widows in elegant black dresses stood arm-in-arm with their resurrected husbands. Children weaved between the adults’ legs, stealing food by the handful and cramming it into their mouths on the run.

  The clinic’s neurologist turned out to be a distant relative. Maria cupped her hands to the woman’s ear and shouted over the noise of the party: “Have I been scanned yet? Will my Copy remember any of this?” The neurologist explained that the scan only captured memories laid down permanently as changes in synaptic strengths; the fleeting electrochemistry of this dream would be lost forever. She added cryptically, “Lost to whoever’s not having it.”

  Maria felt herself waking. Suddenly afraid that she might be the Copy, she struggled to remain in the dream – as if she could force her way back through the crowd, back through the plot, and leave by a different exit. But the scene grew vague and unconvincing; she could feel the heavy presence of her waking body: her aching shoulders, her swollen tongue.

  She opened her eyes. She was alone in the Landau Clinic’s cheerfully decorated recovery room; she’d been wheeled through for a patient’s-eye view before being given the anesthetic, so she’d know exactly what to expect. It took a few seconds for the truths of the dream to fade, though. Her father was dead. Her grandparents were dead. There’d been no grand reunion. There never would be.

  As for the Copy … her scan file didn’t even exist, yet; the raw tomographic data would take hours to be processed into a high-resolution anatomical map. And she could still change her mind and keep the results out of Durham’s hands altogether. He’d paid the clinic for the scan, but if she refused to hand over the file there’d be nothing he could do about it.

  The recovery room was softly lit, lined with odorless blue and orange flowers. Maria closed her eyes. If Durham’s logic meant anything, raw tomographic data could probably process itself, find itself conscious, as easily as any Copy who’d been chopped up and run at random. There was no need for a finished scan file.

  No need even to be scanned; the very same data surely existed, scattered about the universe, whether or not it was ever plucked from her brain and assembled in what she thought of as one place.

  In fact, if Durham was right – if the events he believed would take place in his TVC universe could find themselves in the dust – then those events would happen, regardless. It could make no difference what anyone did in this world. The whole Garden of Eden project was superfluous. Every permutation of the dust which was capable of perceiving itself, making sense of itself, would do just that. And all she would have achieved by refusing to be scanned would have been to deny the Maria of that permutation a history which seemed to overlap with her own particular life. While a third woman – in another world, another permutation – would have taken her place in that role.

  Maria opened her eyes. She’d just recalled the first thing she’d meant to do on waking. Every scanner was programmed to recognize – in real time, before all the arduous data processing that followed – the magnetic resonance spectrum of four or five special dyes, which could be used for alignment and identification. The scanning technician had obligingly loaned her a “number three” marker pen – and instructed the scanner to blind itself to that particular dye.

  She pulled her hands out from under the sheets. Her left palm still read: YOU ARE NOT THE COPY.

  She licked her fingers and started rubbing the unnecessary words away.

  #

  Maria arrived at the North Sydney flat around half past twelve. Two terminals were set up side by side on Durham’s kitchen table; other than that, the place was as bare as it had been the last time she’d called.

  Although it wasn’t, technically, necessary, Maria had insisted that she and Durham be in the same physical location throughout what he called the “launch” – the running of the first moments of the TVC universe as software on a real computer, the act which would supposedly seed an independent, self-sustaining universe, taking up where the version relying on real-world hardware left off. At least this way she could monitor the keys he pressed and the words he spoke, without having to wonder if she was being shown what was really going on at that level. She had no idea what she was guarding against – but Durham was a highly intelligent man with some very strange beliefs, and she had no reason to feel confident that he’d revealed the full extent of his delusions. His clients had confirmed part of his story – and they would have had the resources to check much more of it than she had – but Durham might still have lied to them about what was going on inside his head.

  She wanted to trust him, she wanted to believe that she’d finally reached the truth – but it was hard to put any limits on how wrong she might yet be. She felt she’d known him too long to seriously fear for her physical safety – but the possibility remained that everything she thought she’d understood about the man would turn out, once again, to have been utterly misconceived. If he came away from the kitchen sink brandishing a carving knife, calmly announcing his intention to sacrifice her to the Spirit of the New Moon, she’d have no right to feel betrayed,
or surprised. She couldn’t expect to live off the proceeds of insanity, and also take for granted the usual parameters of civilized behavior.

  The flesh-and-blood Durham was only half the problem. Once the program simulating a TVC cellular automaton was started, the plan was that neither she nor Durham would intervene at all. Any external tinkering would violate the automaton’s rules – the fundamental laws of the new universe – making a mockery of the whole endeavor. Only Durham’s Copy, being run on the simulated TVC computers, could act in harmony with those laws. They would always have the option of aborting the project, pulling the plug – but in every other respect, the Copy would be in control.

  (Of course, aborting the simulation if something went wrong would not – in Durham’s eyes – prevent the spawning of an independent universe beyond their control … but it might leave them with enough unspent computer time for a second attempt.)

  With her hands tied once the universe was running, her only way to influence what did or didn’t happen was through the Garden-of-Eden configuration – which included all the programs the TVC lattice would initially run. Maria had written part of this internal launch software herself; Durham had written, or commissioned, the rest, but she’d checked it all personally. And she’d built in a safeguard; all the Copies but Durham’s would be blocked from running until the TVC processors had solved a suitably intractable mathematical equation. Maria had estimated that the world’s combined computing resources couldn’t have cracked the problem in under a decade; thirty million dollars’ worth, minus overheads, wouldn’t come close. That was no obstacle in the eyes of Durham and his followers; the ever-growing resources of the burgeoning TVC universe would make light work of it, solving the equation within a week or two of the launch. But short of any such universe coming into existence – and so long as the test wasn’t circumvented – there was no chance of a second Maria Deluca, or anyone else, waking. It was her guarantee that there’d be no virtual Jonestown. Just one lone prophet flickering in and out of existence.