Permutation City (12 page)

"Eight. Nine. Ten." Another imperceptible leap into the future, and the
djinn
reappeared.

Squeak.
"Trial number two. Odd numbered states, then even."

In external terms: he would count to ten, skipping every second model-time moment . . . then forget having done so, and count again, going back and filling in the gaps.

And from his own point of view? As he counted, once only, the external world -- even if he couldn't see it -- was flickering back and forth between two separate regions of time, which had been chopped up into seventeen-millisecond portions, and interleaved.

So . . . who was right?
Paul thought it over, half seriously. Maybe both, descriptions were equally valid; after all, relativity had abolished absolute time. Everybody was entitled to their own frame of reference; crossing deep space at close to lightspeed, or skimming the event horizon of a black hole. Why shouldn't a Copy's experience of time be as sacrosanct as that of any astronaut?

The analogy was flawed, though. Relativistic transformations were smooth -- possibly extreme, but always continuous. One observer's space-time could be stretched and deformed in the eyes of another -- but it couldn't be sliced like a loaf of bread and then shuffled like a deck of cards.

"Every tenth state, in ten sets."

Paul counted -- and for argument's sake, tried to defend his own perspective, tried to imagine the outside world actually cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods. The trouble was . . . this allegedly shuddering universe contained the computer which ran the whole model, the infrastructure upon which everything else depended. If its orderly chronology had been torn to shreds, what was keeping
him
together, enabling him to ponder the question?

"Every twentieth state, in twenty sets."

Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings.

(Unless, of course, he was the control.)

"Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets."

He'd lost any real feeling for what was happening. He just counted.

"Pseudo-random ordering of states."

"One. Two. Three."

Now he was . . . dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time -- and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, "assembled himself from these scrambled fragments. He'd been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle -- but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow -- on their own terms -- the pieces remained connected.

"Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak.
"You're sweating."

"Both of me?"

Squeak.
The
djinn
laughed. "What do you think?"

Paul said, "Do me one small favor. The experiment is over. Shut down one of me -- control or subject, I don't care."

Squeak.
"Done."

"Now there's no need to conceal anything, is there? So run the pseudo-random effect on me again -- and stay on-line. This time,
you
count to ten."

Squeak.
Durham shook his head. "Can't do it, Paul. Think about it: you can't be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions aren't known."

Of course; the broken vase problem all over again.

Paul said, "Record yourself, then, and use that."

The
djinn
seemed to find the request amusing, but he agreed; he even slowed down the recording so it lasted ten model-time seconds. Paul watched the blurred lips and jaws intently, listened carefully to the drone of white noise.

Squeak.
"Happy now?"

"You did scramble
me,
and not the recording?"

Squeak.
"Of course. Your wish is my command."

"Yeah? Then do it again."

Durham grimaced, but obliged.

Paul said, "Now, scramble
the recording."

It looked just the same. Of course.

"Again."

Squeak.
"What's the point of all this?"

"Just do it."

Paul watched, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, convinced that he was on the verge of . . .
what?
Finally confronting the "obvious" fact that the wildest permutations in the relationship between model time and real time would be undetectable to an isolated Copy? He'd accepted the near certainty of that, tacitly, for almost twenty years . . . but the firsthand experience of having his mind literally scrambled --
to absolutely no effect
-- was still provocative in a way that the abstract understanding had never been.

He said, "When do we move on to the next stage?"

Squeak.
"Why so keen all of a sudden?"

"Nothing's changed. I just want to get it over and done with."

Squeak.
"Lining up all the other machines is taking some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isn't designed to accommodate whims about geography. It's a bit like going to a bank and asking to deposit some money . . . at a certain location in a particular computer's memory. Basically, people think I'm crazy."

Paul felt a momentary pang of empathy, recalling his own anticipation of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. He smothered it. The two of them were irreversibly different people now, with different problems and different goals -- and the stupidest thing he could do would be to forget that.

Squeak.
"I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements, save you the boredom -- if that's what you want."

"You're too kind. But I'd rather stay conscious. I've got a lot to think about."

7

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

"Twelve to eighteen months? Are they sure?"

Francesca Deluca said drily, "What can I say? They modeled it."

Maria did her best to sound calm. "That's plenty of time. We'll get you scanned. We'll get the money together. I can sell the house, and borrow some from Aden --"

Francesca smiled but shook her head. "No, darling." Her hair had grayed a little since Maria had last really looked at her, last consciously gauged her appearance, but she showed no obvious signs of ill health. "What's the point? Even if I wanted that -- and I don't -- what's the use of a scan that will never be run?"

"It
will
be run. Computing power will get cheaper. Everybody's counting on that. Thousands of people have scan files waiting --"

"How many frozen corpses have ever been revived?"

"That's not the same thing at all."

"How many?"

"Physically, none. But some have been scanned --"

"And proved non-viable. All the interesting ones -- the celebrities, the dictators -- are brain-damaged, and nobody cares about the rest."

"A scan file is nothing like a frozen corpse. You'd never
become
non-viable."

"No, but I'd never become worth bringing back to life, either."

Maria stared at her angrily. "
I'll
bring you back to life. Or don't you believe I'll ever have the money?"

Francesca said, "Maybe you will. But I'm not going to be scanned, so forget about it."

Maria hunched forward on the couch, not knowing how to sit, not knowing where to put her hands. Sunlight streamed into the room, obscenely bright, revealing every speck of lint on the carpet; she had to make an effort not to get up and close the blinds.
Why hadn't Francesca told her on the phone? All of this would have been a thousand times easier by phone.

She said, "All right, you're not going to be scanned. Someone in the world must be making nanomachines for liver cancer. Even just experimental ones."

"Not for this cell type. It's not one of the common onco-genes, and nobody's sure of the cell surface markers."

"So? They can find them, can't they? They can look at the cells, identify the markers, and modify an existing nanomachine. All the information they need is there in your body." Maria pictured the mutant proteins which enabled metastasis poking through the cell walls, highlighted in ominous yellow.

Francesca said, "With enough time and money and expertise, I'm sure that would be possible . . . but as it happens, nobody plans to do it in the next eighteen months."

Maria started shuddering. It came in waves. She didn't make a sound; she just sat and waited for it to pass.

Finally, she said, "There must be drugs."

Francesca nodded. "I'm on medication to slow the growth of the primary tumor, and limit further metastasis. There's no point in a transplant; I already have too many secondary tumors -- actual liver failure is the least of my worries. There are general cytotoxic drugs I could take, and there's always radiation therapy -- but I don't think the benefits are worth the side effects."

"Would you like me to stay with you?"

"No."

"It'd be no trouble. You know I can work from anywhere."

"There's no need for it. I'm not going to be an invalid."

Maria closed her eyes. She couldn't imagine feeling this way for another hour, let alone another year. When her father had died of a heart attack, three years before, she'd promised herself that she'd raise the money to have Francesca scanned by her sixtieth birthday. She was nowhere near on target.
I
screwed up. I wasted time. And now it's almost too late.

Thinking aloud, she said, "Maybe I'll get some work in Seoul."

"I thought you'd decided not to go."

Maria looked up at her, uncomprehending.
"Why don't you want to be scanned?
What are you afraid of? I'd protect you, I'd do whatever you asked. If you didn't want to be run until slowdown is abolished, I'd wait. If you wanted to wake up in a physical body --
an organic body
-- I'd wait."

Francesca smiled. "I know you would, darling. That's not the point."

"Then what
is
the point?"

"I don't want to argue about it."

Maria was desperate. "I won't argue. But can't you tell me? Please?"

Francesca relented. "Listen, I was thirty-three when the first Copy was made. You were five years old, you grew up with the idea -- but to me, it's still . . . too strange. It's something rich eccentrics do -- the way they used to freeze their corpses. To me, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to be imitated by a computer after my death is just . . . farcical. I'm
not
an eccentric millionaire, I don't want to spend my money -- or yours -- building some kind of . . . talking monument to my ego. I still have a sense of proportion." She looked at Maria imploringly. "Doesn't that count for anything any more?"

"You wouldn't be
imitated.
You'd be you."

"Yes and no."

"What's that supposed to mean? You always told me you believed --"

"I
do
believe that Copies are intelligent. I just wouldn't say that they are -- or they aren't -- "the same person as" the person they were based on. There's no right or wrong answer to that; it's a question of semantics, not a question of truth.

"The thing is, I have my own sense -- right now -- of
who I
am . . .
what my boundaries are . . . and it doesn't include a Copy of me, run at some time in the indefinite future. Can you understand that? Being scanned wouldn't make
me
feel any better about dying. Whatever a Copy of me might think, if one was ever run."

Maria said, angrily, "That's just being perverse. That's as stupid as . . . saying when you're twenty years old, "I can't picture myself at fifty, a woman that old wouldn't really be
me.
"
And then killing yourself because there's nothing to lose but that older woman, and
she's
not inside your 'boundaries.'"

"I thought you said you weren't going to argue."

Maria looked away. "You never used to talk like this. You're the one who always told me that Copies had to be treated exactly like human beings. If you hadn't been brain-washed by that 'religion' --"

"The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference has no position on Copies, one way or the other."

"It has no
position
on anything."

"That's right. So it can hardly be their fault that I don't want to be scanned, can it?"

Maria felt physically sick. She'd held off saying anything on the subject for almost a year; she'd been astonished and appalled, but she'd struggled to respect her mother's choice -- and now she could see that
that
had been insane, irresponsible beyond belief.
You don't stand by and let someone you love
--
someone who gave you your own understanding of the world
--
have their brain turned to pulp.

She said, "It's their fault, because they've undermined your judgment. They've fed you so much bullshit that you can't think straight about anything, anymore."

Francesca just looked at her reprovingly. Maria felt a pang of guilt --
How can you make things harder for her, now? How can you start attacking her, when she's just told you that she's dying?
-- but she wasn't going to fold now, take the easy way out, be "supportive."

She said, "'God makes no difference . . . because God is the reason why everything is exactly what it is?' That's supposed to make us all feel at peace with the cosmos, is it?"

Francesca shook her head. "At peace? No. It's just a matter of clearing away, once and for all, old ideas like divine intervention -- and the need for some kind of proof, or even faith, in order to believe."

Maria said, "What
do
you need, then?
I
don't believe, so what am I missing?"

"Belief?"

"And a love of tautology."

"Don't knock tautology. Better to base a religion on tautology than fantasy."

"But it's worse than tautology. It's . . . redefining words arbitrarily, it's like something out of Lewis Carroll. Or George Orwell. "God is the reason for everything . . . whatever that reason is." So what any sane person would simply call
the laws of physics,
you've decided to rename G-O-D . . . solely because the word carries all kinds of historical resonances -- all kinds of misleading connotations. You claim to have nothing to do with the old religions -- so why keep using their terminology?"

Francesca said, "We don't deny the history of the word. We make a break from the past in a lot of ways -- but we also acknowledge our origins.
God
is a concept people have been using for millennia. The fact that we've refined the idea beyond primitive superstitions and wish-fulfilment doesn't mean we're not part of the same tradition."

"But you haven't
refined
the idea, you've made it meaningless! And rightly so -- but you don't seem to realize it. You've stripped away all the obvious stupidities -- all the anthropomorphism, the miracles, the answered prayers -- but you don't seem to have noticed that once you've done that, there's absolutely nothing left that needs to be called
religion.
Physics is
not
theology. Ethics is
not
theology. Why pretend that they are?"

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that
we still want to.
There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept -- to keep honing it, rather than discarding it -- despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago."

"And you know perfectly well where that compulsion comes from! It has nothing to do with any real divine being; it's just a product of culture and neurobiology -- a few accidents of evolution and history."

"Of course it is. What human trait isn't?"

"So why give in to it?"

Francesca laughed. "Why give in to anything? The religious impulse isn't some kind of . . . alien mind virus. It's not -- in its purest form, stripped of all content -- the product of brain-washing. It's a part of who I am."

Maria put her face in her hands. "Is it? When you talk like this, it doesn't sound like you."

Francesca said, "Don't you ever want to give thanks to God when things are going well for you? Don't you ever want to ask God for strength when you need it?"

"No."

"Well, I do. Even though I know God makes no difference. And if God is the reason for everything, then God includes the urge to use the word God. So whenever I gain some strength, or comfort, or meaning, from that urge, then God
is
the source of that strength, that comfort, that meaning.

"And if God -- while making no difference -- helps me to accept what's going to happen to me, why should that make you sad?"

+ + +

On the train home, Maria sat next to a boy of about seven, who twitched all the way to the silent rhythms of a nerve-induced PMV -- participatory music video. Nerve induction had been developed to treat epilepsy, but now its most common use seemed to bring about the symptoms it was meant to alleviate. Glancing at him sideways, she could see his eyeballs fluttering behind his mirror shades.

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 Cafe. 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.

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 shortcut. Today, he began the ascent without giving it a second thought -- admiring the oak panelling, lulled by the faint hum of the motor -- but halfway 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.