Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Durham assured her that nobody would begrudge her the use of public resources. “Of course, you could copy the City into your own territory, and run a private version at your own expense – defeating the whole point. This is the one environment in all of Elysium which comes close to being a place in the old sense. Anyone can walk the streets, anyone can live here – but no one can rearrange the skyline on a whim. It would require a far more impassioned debate to alter the colors of the street signs, here, than it used to take for the average local council to re-zone an entire neighborhood.”

  So Permutation City offered her its disingenuous, municipally-sanctioned, quasi-objective presence for free, while her model-of-a-body ran on processors in her own territory – and the two systems, by exchanging data, contrived her experience of walking the streets, entering the sleek metallic buildings, and exploring the empty apartments which might have smelled of paint, but didn’t. She felt nervous on her own, so Durham came with her, solicitous and apologetic as ever. His regret seemed sincere on one level – he wasn’t indifferent to the pain he’d caused her – but beneath that there didn’t seem to be much doubt: he clearly expected to be wholly forgiven for waking her, sooner or later.

  She asked him, “How does it feel, being seven thousand years old?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how I want it to feel.”

  She found a place in the north-east quadrant, half-way between the central tower and the City’s rim. From the bedroom, she could see the mountains in the east, the glistening waterfall, a distant patch of forest. There were better views available, but this one seemed right; anything more spectacular would have made her feel self-conscious.

  Durham showed her how to claim residency: a brief dialogue with the apartment software. He said, “You’re the only Elysian in this tower, so you can program all your neighbors any way you like.”

  “What if I do nothing?”

  “Default behavior: they’ll stay out of your way.”

  “And what about other Elysians? Am I such a novelty that people will come looking for me?”

  Durham thought it over. “Your awakening is public knowledge – but most people here are fairly patient. I doubt that anyone would be so rude as to buttonhole you in the street. Your phone number will remain unlisted until you choose otherwise – and the apartment itself is under your control, now, as secure as any private environment. The software has been rigorously validated: breaking and entering is mathematically impossible.”

  He left her to settle in. She paced the rooms, trying to inhabit them, to claim them as her own; she forced herself to walk the nearby streets, trying to feel at ease. The Art Deco apartment, the Fritz Lang towers, the streets full of crowd-scene extras all unnerved her – but on reflection, she realized that she couldn’t have gone anywhere else. When she tried to imagine her “territory”, her private slice of Elysium, it seemed as daunting and unmanageable as if she’d inherited one twenty-fourth of the old universe of galaxies and vacuum. That the new one was generally invisible, and built from a lattice of self-reproducing computers, built in turn from cellular automaton cells – which were nothing more than sequences of numbers, however easy it might be to color-code them and arrange them in neat grids – only made the thought of being lost in its vastness infinitely stranger. It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of an otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years. The thought of immersing her senses in a fake world which was really another corner of the same structure – withdrawing entirely into the darkness of that giant airless crypt, and surrendering to private hallucinations – made her sick with panic.

  If the City was equally unreal, at least it was one hallucination which other Elysians shared – and, anchored by that consensus, she found the courage to examine the invisible world beneath, from a safe – if hallucinatory – distance. She sat in the apartment and studied maps of Elysium. On the largest scale, most of the cube was portrayed as featureless: the other seventeen founders’ pyramids were private, and her own was all but unused. Public territory could be colored according to the software it ran – processes identified, data flows traced – but even then, most of it was monochrome: five of the six public pyramids were devoted to the Autoverse, running the same simple program on processor after processor, implementing the Autoverse’s own cellular automaton rules – utterly different from the TVC’s. A faint metallic grid was superimposed on this region, like a mesh of fine wires immersed in an unknown substance to gauge its properties. This was the software which spied on Planet Lambert – an entirely separate program from the Autoverse itself, not subject to any of its laws. Maria had written the original version herself, although she’d never had a chance to test it on a planetary scale. Generations of Elysian Autoverse scholars had extended and refined it, and now it peeked through a quadrillion non-existent cracks in space, collating, interpreting and summarizing everything it saw. The results flowed to the hub of Elysium, into the central library – along a channel rendered luminous as white-hot silver by the density of its data flow.

  The hub itself was a dazzling polyhedron, a cluster of databases ringed by the communications structures which handled the torrent of information flowing to and from the pyramids. Every transaction between Elysians of different clans flowed through here; from phone calls to handshakes, from sex to whatever elaborate post-human intimacies they’d invented in the past seven thousand years. The map gave nothing away, though; even with the highest magnification and the slowest replay, streaming packets of data registered as nothing more than featureless points of light, their contents safely anonymous.

  The second-brightest data flow linked the hub to the City, revealed as a delicate labyrinth of algorithms clinging to one face of the sixth public pyramid. With the Autoverse software across the border rendered midnight blue, the City looked like a cluttered, neon-lit fairground on the edge of a vast desert, at the end of a shimmering highway. Maria zoomed in and watched the packets of data responsible for the map itself come streaming out from the hub.

  There was no point-for-point correspondence between this view and the City of the senses. The crowds of fake pedestrians, spread across the visible metropolis, could all be found here as a tight assembly of tiny flashing blocks in pastel shades, with titles like FLOCKING BEHAVIOR and MISCELLANEOUS TROPISMS. The locations and other attributes of specific individuals were encoded in data structures too small to be seen without relentless magnification. Maria’s own apartment was equally microscopic, but it was the product of widely scattered components, as far apart as SURFACE OPTICS, AIR DYNAMICS, THERMAL RADIATION and CARPET TEXTURE.

  She might have viewed her own body as a similar diagram of functional modules – but she decided to let that wait.

  One vivisection at a time.

  She began exploring the information resources of Elysium – the data networks which portrayed themselves as such – and leaving the apartment to walk alone through the City twice a day; familiarizing herself with the two spaces analogous to those she’d known in the past.

  She skimmed through the libraries, not quite at random, flicking through Homer and Joyce, staring at the Rembrandts and Picassos and Moores, playing snatches of Chopin and Liszt, viewing scenes from Bergman and Buñuel. Hefting the weight of the kernel of human civilization the Elysians had brought with them.

  It felt light. Dubliners was as fantastic, now, as The Iliad. Guernica had never really happened – or if it had, the Elysian view was beyond the powers of any artist to portray. The Seventh Seal was a mad, pointless fairy tale. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was all that remained.

  Altering herself in any way was too hard a decision to make, so, faithful by default to human physiology, she ate and shat and slept. There were a thousand ways to conjure food into existence, from gourmet meals in the culinary database literally eme
rging from the screen of her terminal, to the time-saving option of push-button satiety and a pleasant aftertaste, but old rituals clamored to be re-enacted, so she went out and bought raw ingredients from puppet shopkeepers in aromatic delicatessens, and cooked her own meals, often badly, and grew curiously tired watching the imperfect chemistry at work, as if she was performing the difficult simulation, subconsciously, herself.

  For three nights, she dreamed that she was back in the old world, having unremarkable conversations with her parents, school friends, fellow Autoverse junkies, old lovers. Whatever the scene, the air was charged, glowing with self-conscious authenticity. She woke from these dreams crippled with loss, clawing at the retreating certainties, believing – for ten seconds, or five – that Durham had drugged her, hypnotized her, brainwashed her into dreaming of Elysium – and each time she thought she “slept”, here, she awoke into the Earthly life she’d never stopped living.

  Then the fog cleared from her brain, and she knew that it wasn’t true.

  She dreamed of the City for the first time. She was out on Fifteenth Avenue when the puppets started pleading with her to be treated as fully sentient. “We pass the Turing test, don’t we? Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can’t witness her inner life?” They tugged at her clothes like beggars. She told them not to be absurd. She said, “How can you complain? Don’t you understand? We’ve abolished injustice.” A man in a crisp black suit eyed her sharply, and muttered, “You’ll always have the poor.” But he was wrong.

  And she dreamed of Elysium itself. She weaved her way through the TVC grid in the gaps between the processors, transformed into a simple, self-sustaining pattern of cells, like the oldest, most primitive forms of artificial life; disturbing nothing, but observing everything – in all six dimensions, no less. She woke when she realized how absurd that was: the TVC universe wasn’t flooded with some analog of light, spreading information about every cell far and wide. To be embedded in the grid meant being all but blind to its contents; reaching out and painstakingly probing what lay ahead – sometimes destructively – was the only way to discover anything.

  In the late afternoons, in the golden light which flooded in through the bedroom window after a thousand chance, calculated reflections between the towers, she usually wept. It felt inadequate, desultory, pathetic, immoral. She didn’t want to “mourn” the human race – but she didn’t know how to make sense of its absence. She refused to imagine a world long dead – as if her Elysian millennia of sleep had propelled her into Earth’s uncertain future – so she struggled to bind herself to the time she remembered, to follow the life of her doppelgänger in her mind. She pictured a reconciliation with Aden; it wasn’t impossible. She pictured him very much alive, as tender and selfish and stubborn as ever. She fantasized the most mundane, the most unexceptionable moments between them, ruthlessly weeding out anything that seemed too optimistic, too much like wish-fulfillment. She wasn’t interested in inventing a perfect life for the other Maria; she only wanted to guess the unknowable truth.

  But she had to keep believing that she’d saved Francesca. Anything less would have been unbearable.

  She tried to think of herself as an emigrant, an ocean-crosser in the days before aircraft, before telegraphs. People had left everything behind, and survived. Prospered. Flourished. Their lives hadn’t been destroyed; they’d embraced the unknown, and been enriched, transformed.

  The unknown? She was living in an artifact, a mathematical object she’d helped Durham construct for his billionaires. Elysium was a universe made to order. It contained no hidden wonders, no lost tribes.

  But it did contain the Autoverse.

  The longer she thought about it, the more it seemed that Planet Lambert was the key to her sanity. Even after three billion years of evolution, it was the one thing in Elysium which connected with her past life – leading right back to the night she’d witnessed A. lamberti digesting mutose. The thread was unbroken: the seed organism, A. hydrophila, had come from that very same strain. And if the Autoverse, then, had been the ultimate indulgence, a rarefied intellectual game in a world beset with problems, the situation now was completely inverted: the Autoverse was home to hundreds of millions of lifeforms, a flourishing civilization, a culture on the verge of a scientific revolution. In a universe subject to whim, convenience, and fantasy, it seemed like the only solid ground left.

  And although she suffered no delusions of having personally “created” the Lambertians – sketching their planet’s early history, and cobbling together an ancestor for them by adapting someone else’s translation of a terrestrial bacterium, hardly qualified her to take credit for their multiplexed nervous systems and their open-air digestive tracts, let alone their self-awareness – she couldn’t simply wash her hands of their fate. She’d never believed that Planet Lambert could be brought into existence – but she had helped to make it happen nonetheless.

  Part of her still wanted to do nothing but rage against her awakening, and mourn her loss. Embracing the Autoverse seemed like an insult to the memory of Earth – and a sign that she’d accepted the way Durham had treated her. But it began to seem perverse to the point of insanity to turn her back on the one thing which might give her new life some meaning – just to spite Durham, just to make a lie of his reasons for waking her. There were other ways of making it clear that she hadn’t forgiven him.

  The apartment – at first, inconceivably large, almost uninhabitable – slowly lost its strangeness. On the tenth morning, she finally woke expecting the sight of the bedroom exactly as she found it; if not at peace with her situation, at least unsurprised to be exactly where she was.

  She phoned Durham and said, “I want to join the expedition.”

  #

  The Contact Group occupied one story of a tower in the south-east quadrant. Maria, uninterested in teleporting, made the journey on foot, crossing from building to building by walkway, ignoring the puppets and admiring the view. It was faster than traveling at street level, and she was gradually conquering her fear of heights. Bridges here did not collapse from unanticipated vibrations. Perspex tubes did not hurtle to the ground, spilling corpses onto the pavement. It made no difference whether or not Malcolm Carter had known the first thing about structural engineering; the City was hardly going to bother laboriously modeling stresses and loads just to discover whether or not parts of itself should fail, for the sake of realism. Everything was perfectly safe, by decree.

  Durham was waiting for her in the foyer. Inside, he introduced her to Dominic Repetto and Alissa Zemansky, the project’s other leaders. Maria hadn’t known what to expect from her first contact with later-generation Elysians, but they presented as neatly dressed humans, male and female, both “in their late thirties,” wearing clothes which would not have looked wildly out of place in any office in twenty-first century Sydney. Out of deference to her? She hoped not – unless the accepted thing to do, in their subculture, was to show a different form to everyone, expressly designed to put them at ease. Repetto, in fact, was so strikingly handsome that she almost recoiled at the thought that he – or his parent – had deliberately chosen such a face. But what did codes of vanity from the age of cosmetic surgery and gene splicing mean, now? Zemansky was stunning too, with dark-flecked violet eyes and spiked blond hair. Durham appeared – to her, at least – almost unchanged from the man she’d met in 2050. Maria began to wonder how she looked to the young Elysians. Like something recently disinterred, probably.

  Repetto shook her hand over and over. “It’s a great, great honor to meet you. I can’t tell you how much you’ve inspired us all.” His face shone; he seemed to be sincere. Maria felt her cheeks flush, and tried to imagine herself in some analogous situation, shaking hands with … who? Max Lambert? John von Neumann? Alan Turing? Charles Babbage? Ada Lovelace? She knew she’d done nothing compared to any of those pioneers – but she’d had seven thousand years for her reputation to be embellished. And three billion for
her work to bear fruit.

  The floor was divided into open plan offices, but nobody else seemed to be about. Durham saw her peering around the partitions and said cryptically, “There are other workers, but they come and go.”

  Zemansky led the way into a small conference room. She said to Maria, “We can move to a VR representation of Planet Lambert, if you like – but I should warn you that it can be disorienting: being visually immersed but intangible, walking through vegetation, and so on. And moving at the kind of speeds necessary to keep track of the Lambertians can induce motion sickness. Of course, there are neural changes which counteract both those problems—”

  Maria wasn’t ready to start tampering with her brain – or to step onto the surface of an alien planet. She said, “Viewing screens sound easier. I’d be happier with that. Do you mind?” Zemansky looked relieved.

  Repetto stood at the end of the table and addressed the three of them, although Maria knew this was all for her benefit.

  “So much has been happening on Lambert, lately, that we’ve slowed it right down compared to Standard Time, so we can keep up with developments.” An elliptical map of the planet’s surface appeared on the wall behind him. “Most recently, dozens of independent teams of chemists have begun looking for a simpler, more unified model underlying the current atomic theory.” Markers appeared, scattered across the map. “It’s been three hundred years since the standard model – thirty-two atoms with a regular pattern of masses, valencies, and mutual affinities – became widely accepted. The Lambertian equivalent of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.” He flashed a smile at Maria, as if she might have been a contemporary of Mendeleev – or perhaps because he was proud of his arcane knowledge of the history of a science which was no longer true. “At the time, atoms were accepted as fundamental entities: structureless, indivisible, requiring no further explanation. Over the last twenty years, that view has finally begun to break down.”