Permutation City (37 page)

He wandered from shelf to shelf, but he'd read every book a dozen or more times. They'd all become meaningless. The library was well-stocked, and he'd studied the sacred texts of every faith; those few which, by some stretch of poetic licence, might have been said to describe his condition offered no prospect for changing it. In the distant past, he'd undergone a hundred feverish conversions; he'd ranted to every deity which humanity had ever postulated. If he'd stumbled on the one which existed -- the one responsible for his damnation -- his pleas had been to no avail.

The one thing he'd never expected after death was uncertainty. It had worried him deeply, at first: being cast into Hell, without so much as a glimpse of Heaven to taunt him, and a smug I-told-you-so from the faithful on their way up -- let alone a formal trial before the God of his childhood, in which every doctrinal assertion he'd ever doubted was proclaimed as Absolute Truth, and every theological debate was resolved, once and for all.

But he'd since decided that if his condition was eternal and irreversible, it hardly mattered what the God who'd made it so was named.

Thomas sat cross-legged on the floor of the library, and tried to empty his mind.

"Think fast. Think fast."

Anna lay before him, bleeding and unconscious. Time slowed down. The moment he was approaching seemed impossible to face, impossible to traverse yet again -- but he inched toward it, and he knew that he had no power to turn away.

He'd come to understand that all the visions of his own decay and mutilation were nothing but elaborate gestures of self-loathing. When his flesh was torn from his body it was a distraction -- almost a relief. His suffering did not illuminate his crime; it drowned his thoughts in an anesthetic haze. It was a fantasy of power, a fantasy of retribution.

But here there was no balm of self-righteous pain, no pretence that his baroque tortures were working some alchemy of justice. He knelt over Anna, and could not weep, could not flinch, could not blind himself to the measure of what he'd done.

He might have called an ambulance. He might have saved her life. It would have taken so little strength, so little courage, so little love, that he could not imagine how a human being could have failed to possess enough of each, and still walk the Earth.

But he had. He had.

So he brought her head forward, and slammed it against the wall.

26

After a week as Durham's guest, Maria went looking for a place of her own.

Her anger had faded, the numbness of shock had faded, the fifth or sixth wave of disbelief had finally lifted. But she still felt almost paralyzed by the strangeness of the truths she'd been forced to accept: her exile from the universe of flesh-and-blood humanity; the impossible existence of Elysium; intelligent life in the Autoverse. She couldn't begin to make sense of any of these things until she had a fixed point to stand on.

She had refused to pack any luggage to accompany her scan file into the next life; it would have felt like she was humoring Durham if she'd made the slightest concession to the needs of a Copy who she'd believed would never run. No environments, no furniture, no clothes; no photographs, no diaries, no scanned memorabilia. No VR duplicate of her old narrow terrace to make her feel at home. She might have set about reconstructing it from memory, detail by detail -- or let architectural software pluck a perfect imitation straight out of her brain -- but she didn't feel strong enough to deal with the emotional contradictions: the tug of the old world, the taint of self-deception. Instead, she decided to choose one of the pre-defined apartments in the City itself.

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 rezone 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 northeast quadrant, halfway 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 nonexistent 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 emerging 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 reenacted, 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.