Egan, Greg - Permutation City

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Greg Egan
PERMUTATION
CITY
Harper Prism
Copyright (c) 1994 by Greg Egan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parts of this novel are adapted from a story called "Dust," which was first published in Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1992.
Thanks to Deborah Beale, Charon Wood, Peter Robinson, David Pringle, Lee Montgomerie, Gardner
Dozois and Sheila Williams.
Into a mute crypt, I
Can't pity our time
Turn amity poetic
Ciao, tiny trumpet!
Manic piety tutor
Tame purity tonic
Up, meiotic tyrant!
I taint my top cure
To it, my true panic
Put at my nice riot
To trace impunity
I tempt an outcry, I
Pin my taut erotic
Art to epic mutiny
Can't you permit it
To cite my apt ruin?
My true icon: tap it
Copy time, turn it; a
Rite to cut my pain
Atomic putty? Rien!
Found in the memory of a discarded notepad in
the Common Room of the Psychiatric Ward,
Blacktown Hospital, June 6, 2045.
1 (Note: numeration of pages has been maintained according to Harper Prism edition; page numbers
indicate the upper part of the page)
PROLOGUE
(Rip, tie, cut toy man)
June 2045
Paul Durham opened his eyes, blinking at the room's unexpected brightness, then lazily reached out
to place one hand in a patch of sunlight at the edge of the bed. Dust motes drifted across the
shaft of light which slanted down from a gap between the curtains, each speck appearing for all
the world to be conjured into, and out of, existence-evoking a childhood memory of the last time
he'd found this illusion so compelling, so hypnotic: He stood in the kitchen doorway, afternoon
light slicing the room; dust, flour and steam swirling in the plane of bright air. For one sleep-
addled moment, still trying to wake, to collect himself, to order his life, it seemed to make as
much sense to place these two fragments side by side-watching sunlit dust motes, forty years apart-
as it did to follow the ordinary flow of time from one instant to the next. Then he woke a little
more, and the confusion passed.
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Paul felt utterly refreshed-and utterly disinclined to give up his present state of comfort. He
couldn't think why he'd slept so late, but he didn't much care. He spread his fingers on the sun-
warmed sheet, and thought about drifting back to sleep.
He closed his eyes and let his mind grow blank-and then caught himself, suddenly uneasy, without
knowing why. He 'd done something foolish, something insane, something he was going to regret,
badly . . . but the details remained elusive, and he began to suspect that it was nothing more
than the lingering mood of a dream. He tried to recall exactly what he'd dreamed, without much
hope; unless he was catapulted awake
2
by a nightmare, his dreams were usually evanescent. And yet-
He leaped out of bed and crouched down on the carpet, fists to his eyes, face against his knees,
lips moving soundlessly. The shock of realization was a palpable thing: a red lesion behind his
eyes, pulsing with blood ... like the aftermath of a hammer blow to the thumb-and tinged with the
very same mixture of surprise, anger, humiliation and idiot bewilderment. Another childhood
memory: He held a nail to the wood, yes-but only to camouflage his true intentions. He 'd seen his
father injure himself this way-but he knew that he needed first-hand experience to understand the
mystery of pain. And he was sure that it would be worth it, right up to the moment when he swung
the hammer down-
He rocked back and forth, on the verge of laughter, trying to keep his mind blank, waiting for the
panic to subside. And eventually, it did-to be replaced by one simple, perfectly coherent thought:
/ don't want to be here.
What he'd done to himself was insane-and it had to be undone, as swiftly and painlessly as
possible. How could he have ever imagined reaching any other conclusion?
Then he began to remember the details of his preparations. He'd anticipated feeling this way. He'd
planned for it. However bad he felt, it was all part of the expected progression of responses.
Panic. Regret. Analysis. Acceptance.
Two out of four, so far, so good.
Paul uncovered his eyes. and looked around the room. Away from a few dazzling patches of direct
sunshine, everything glowed softly in the diffuse light: the matte white brick walls, the
imitation (imitation) mahogany furniture; even the posters-Bosch, Dali, Ernst, and Giger-looked
harmless, domesticated. Wherever he turned his gaze (if nowhere else), the simulation was utterly
convincing; the spotlight of his attention made it so. Hypothetical light rays were being traced
backward from individual rod and cone cells on his simulated retinas, and projected out into the
virtual environment to determine exactly what needed to be computed: a lot of detail near the
center of his vision, much less toward the periphery.
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Objects out of sight didn't 'vanish' entirely, if they influenced the ambient light, but Paul knew
that the calculations would rarely be pursued beyond the crudest first-order approximations:
Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights reduced to an average reflectance value, a single gray
rectangle-because once his back was turned, any more detail would have been wasted. Everything in
the room was as finely resolved, at any given moment, as it needed to be to fool him-no more, no
less.
He had been aware of the technique for decades. It was something else to experience it. He
resisted the urge to wheel around suddenly, in a futile attempt to catch the process out- but for
a moment it was almost unbearable, just knowing what was happening at the edge of his vision. The
fact that his view of the room remained flawless only made it worse, an irrefutable paranoid
fixation: No matter how fast you turn your head, you'll never even catch a glimpse of what's going
on all around you...
He closed his eyes again for a few seconds. When he opened them, the feeling was already less
oppressive. No doubt it would pass; it seemed too bizarre a state of mind to be sustained for
long. Certainly, none of the other Copies had reported anything similar ... but then, none of them
had volunteered much useful data at all. They'd just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and
then terminated themselves-all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining consciousness.
And this one? How was he different from Copy number four? Three years older. More stubborn? More
determined? More desperate for success? He'd believed so. If he hadn't felt more committed than
ever-if he hadn't been convinced that he was, finally, prepared to see the whole thing through- he
would never have gone ahead with the scan.
But now that he was "no longer" the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham-"no longer" the one who'd sit
outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance-all of that determination seemed to
have evaporated.
Suddenly he wondered: What makes me so sure that I'm not still flesh and blood? He laughed weakly,
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hardly daring to
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take the possibility seriously. His most recent memories seemed to be of lying on a trolley in the
Landau Clinic, while technicians prepared him for the scan-on the face of it, a bad sign-but he'd
been overwrought, and he'd spent so long psyching himself up for "this," that perhaps he'd
forgotten coming home, still hazy from the anesthetic, crashing into bed, dreaming...
He muttered the password, "Abulafia"-and his last faint hope vanished, as a black-on-white square
about a meter wide, covered in icons, appeared in midair in front of him.
He gave the interface window an angry thump; it resisted him as if it was solid, and firmly
anchored. As if he was solid, too. He didn't really need any more convincing, but he gripped the
top edge and lifted himself off the floor. He instantly regretted this; the realistic cluster of
effects of exertion-down to the plausible twinge in his right elbow- pinned him to this "body,"
anchored him to this "place," in exactly the way he knew he should be doing everything he could to
avoid.
He lowered himself to the floor with a grunt. He was the Copy. Whatever his inherited memories
told him, he was "no longer" human; he would never inhabit his real body "again." Never inhabit
the real world again . . . unless his cheapskate original scraped up the money for a telepresence
robot-in which case he could spend his time blundering around in a daze, trying to make sense of
the lightning-fast blur of human activity. His model-of-a-brain ran seventeen times slower than
the real thing. Yeah, sure, if he hung around, the technology would catch up, eventually-and
seventeen times faster for him than for his original. And in the meantime? He'd rot in this
prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out Durham's precious research-while the man lived in his
apartment, spent his money, slept with Elizabeth ...
Paul leant against the cool surface of the interface, dizzy and confused. Whose precious research?
He'd wanted this so badly-and he'd done this to himself with his eyes wide open. Nobody had forced
him, nobody had deceived him. He'd known exactly what the drawbacks would be-but he'd hoped
5
that he would have the strength of will (this time, at last) to transcend them: to devote himself,
monk-like, to the purpose for which he'd been brought into being, content in the knowledge that
his other self was as unconstrained as ever.
Looking back, that hope seemed ludicrous. Yes, he'd made the decision freely-for the fifth time-
but it was mercilessly clear, now, that he'd never really faced up to the consequences. . All the
time he'd spent, supposedly "preparing himself" to be a Copy, his greatest source of resolve had
been to focus on the outlook for the man who'd remain flesh and blood. He'd told himself that he
was rehearsing "making do with vicarious freedom"-and no doubt he had been genuinely struggling to
do just that... but he'd also been taking secret comfort in the knowledge that he would "remain"
on the outside-that his future, then, still included a version with absolutely nothing to fear.
And as long as he'd clung to that happy truth, he'd never really swallowed the fate of the Copy at
all.
People reacted badly to waking up as Copies. Paul knew the statistics. Ninety-eight percent of
Copies made were of the very old, and the terminally ill. People for whom it was the last resort-
most of whom had spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options; some
of whom had even died between the taking of the scan and the time the Copy itself was run. Despite
this, fifteen percent decided on awakening-usually in a matter of hours-that they couldn't face
living this way.
And of those who were young and healthy, those who were merely curious, those who knew they had a
perfectly viable, living, breathing body outside?
The bale-out rate so far had been one hundred percent.
Paul stood in the middle of the room, swearing softly for several minutes, acutely aware of the
passage of time. He didn't feel ready-but the longer the other Copies had waited, the more
traumatic they seemed to have found the decision. He stared at the floating interface; its
dreamlike, hallucinatory quality helped, slightly. He rarely remembered his dreams, and he
wouldn't remember this one-but there was no tragedy in that.
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He suddenly realized that he was still stark naked. Habit-if no conceivable propriety-nagged at
him to put on some clothes, but he resisted the urge. One or two perfectly innocent, perfectly
ordinary actions like that, and he'd find he was taking himself seriously, thinking of himself as
real, making it even harder...
He paced the bedroom, grasped the cool metal of the door-knob a couple of times, but managed to
keep himself from turning it. There was no point even starting to explore this world.
He couldn't resist peeking out the window, though. The view of north Sydney was flawless; every
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building, every cyclist, every tree, was utterly convincing-but that was no great feat; it was a
recording, not a simulation. Essentially photographic-give or take some computerized touching up
and filling in-and totally predetermined. To cut costs even further, only a tiny part of it was
"physically" accessible to him; he could see the harbor in the distance, but he knew that if he
tried to go for a stroll down to the water's edge...
Enough. Just get it over with.
Paul turned back to the interface and touched a menu icon labelled UTILITIES; it spawned another
window in front of the first. The function he was seeking was buried several menus deep-but he
knew exactly where to look for it. He'd watched this, from the outside, too many times to have
forgotten.
He finally reached the EMERGENCIES menu-which included a cheerful icon of a cartoon figure
suspended from a parachute. Baling out was what everyone called it-but he didn't find that too
cloyingly euphemistic; after all, he could hardly commit "suicide" when he wasn't legally human.
The fact that a bale-out option was compulsory had nothing to do with anything so troublesome as
the "rights" of the Copy; the requirement arose solely from the ratification of certain, purely
technical, international software standards.
Paul prodded the icon; it came to life, and recited a warning spiel. He scarcely paid attention.
Then it said, "Are you absolutely sure that you wish to shut down this Copy of Paul Durham?"
7
Nothing to it. Program A asks Program ? to confirm its request for orderly termination. Packets of
data are exchanged.
"Yes, I'm sure."
A metal box, painted red, appeared at his feet. He opened it, took out the parachute, strapped it
on.
Then he closed his eyes and said, "Listen to me. Just listen! How many times do you need to be
told? I'll skip the personal angst; you've heard it all before-and ignored it all before. It
doesn't matter how I feel. But... when are you going to stop wasting your time, your money, your
energy-when are you going to stop wasting your life-on something which you just don't have the
strength to carry through?"
Paul hesitated, trying to put himself in the place of his original, hearing those words-and almost
wept with frustration. He still didn't know what he could say that would make a difference. He'd
shrugged off the testimony of all the earlier Copies himself; he'd never been able to accept their
claims to know his own mind better than he did. Just because they'd lost their nerve and chosen to
bale out, who were they to proclaim mat he'd never give rise to a Copy who'd choose otherwise? All
he had to do was strengthen his resolve, and try again...
He shook his head. "It's been ten years, and nothing's changed. What's wrong with you? Do you
honestly still believe that you're brave enough-or crazy enough-to be your own guinea pig? Do you
?"
He paused again, but only for a moment; he didn't expect a reply.
He'd argued long and hard with the first Copy, but after that, he'd never had the stomach for it.
"Well, I've got news for you: You 're not."
With his eyes still closed, he gripped the release lever.
I'm nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.
His fingernails needed cutting; they dug painfully into the skin of his palm.
Had he never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking? Maybe he had-but a dream was not a
life. If the only way he
8
could "reclaim" his body, "reclaim" his world, was to wake and forget -
He pulled the lever.
After a few seconds, he emitted a constricted sob-a sound more of confusion than any kind of
emotion-and opened his
eyes.
The lever had come away in his hand.
He stared dumbly at this metaphor for ... what? A bug in the termination software? Some kind of
hardware glitch?
Feeling-at last-truly dreamlike, he unstrapped the parachute, and unfastened the neatly packaged
bundle.
Inside, there was no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever else there might plausibly have
been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.
Dear Paul,
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The night after the scan was completed, I looked back over the whole preparatory stage of the
project, and did a great deal of soul-searching. And I came to the conclusion that-right up to the
very last moment- my attitude had been poisoned with ambivalence.
With hindsight, I realized just how foolish my qualms were-but that was too late/or you. I
couldn't afford to ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?
This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked down someone who could make a few
alterations to the virtual-environment utilities. I know that wasn't strictly legal... but you
know how important it is to me that you-that we-succeed this time.
I trust you 41 understand, and I'm confident that you 'II accept the situation with dignity and
equanimity.
Best wishes,
Paul
He sank to his knees, still holding the note, staring at it with disbelief. I can't have done
this. I can't have been so callous. No?
9
He could never have done it to anyone else. He was sure of that. He wasn't a monster, a torturer,
a sadist.
And he would never have gone ahead himself without the bale-out option as a last resort. Between
his ludicrous fantasies of stoicism, and the sanity-preserving cop-out of relating only to the
flesh-and-blood version, he must have had moments of clarity when the bottom line had been: If
it's that bad, I can always put an end to it.
But as for making a Copy, and then-once its future was no longer his future, no longer anything
for him to fear-taking away its power to escape . . . and rationalizing this hijacking as nothing
more than an over-literal act of self-control...
It rang so true that he hung his head in shame.
Then he dropped the note, raised his head, and bellowed with all the strength in his non-existent
lungs: "DURHAM! YOU ?????
Paul thought about smashing furniture. Instead, he took a long, hot shower. In part, to calm
himself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic
calculations would annoy the cheapskate no end. He scrutinized the droplets and rivulets of water
on his skin, searching for some small but visible anomaly at the boundary between his body-
computed down to subcellular resolution-and the rest of the simulation, which was modelled much
more crudely. If there were any discrepancies, though, they were too subtle to detect.
He dressed, and ate a late breakfast, shrugging off the surrender to normality. What was he meant
to do? Go on a hunger strike? Walk around naked, smeared in excrement? He was ravenous, having
fasted before the scan, and the kitchen was stocked with a-literally-inexhaustible supply of
provisions. The muesli tasted exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast, but he knew there
was a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and aroma. The detailed effects of
chewing, and the actions of saliva, were being faked from a patchwork of empirical rules, not
generated from first
10
principles; there -were no individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by
enzymes-just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated with each
microscopic "parcel" of saliva. Eventually, these would lead to plausible increases in the
concentrations of amino acids, various carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to
humble sodium and chloride ions, in similar 'parcels' of gastric juices . . . which in turn would
act as input data to the models of his intestinal villus cells. From there, into the bloodstream.
Urine and feces production were optional-some Copies wished to retain every possible aspect of
corporeal life-but Paul had chosen to do without. (So much for smearing himself in excrement.) His
bodily wastes would be magicked out of existence long before reaching bladder or bowel. Ignored
out of existence; passively annihilated. All that it took to destroy something, here, was to fail
to keep track of it.
Coffee made him feel alert, but also slightly detached-as always. Neurons were modeled in the
greatest detail, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites had been present on each
individual neuron in his original's brain at the time of the scan, his own model-of-a-brain
incorporated every one of them-in a simplified, but functionally equivalent, form.
And the physical reality behind it all? A cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal,
configured as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred identical
units in a basement vault . . . somewhere on the planet. Paul didn't even know what city he was
in; the scan had been made in Sydney, but the model's implementation would have been contracted
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out by the local node to the lowest bidder at the time.
He took a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and made a shallow cut across his left
forearm. He flicked a few drops of blood onto the sink-and wondered exactly which software was now
responsible for the stuff. Would the blood cells 'die off slowly-or had they already been
surrendered to the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too
11
unsophisticated to represent them, let alone keep them "alive"?
If he tried to slit his wrists, when exactly would Durham intervene? He gazed at his distorted
reflection in the blade. Most likely, his original would let him die, and then run the whole model
again from scratch, simply leaving out the knife. He'd rerun all the earlier Copies hundreds of
times, tampering with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap
trick, some distraction which would keep them from wanting to bale out. It was a measure of sheer
stubbornness that it had taken him so long to admit defeat and rewrite the rules.
Paul put down the knife. He didn't want to perform that experiment. Not yet.
Outside his own apartment, everything was slightly less than convincing; the architecture of the
building was reproduced faithfully enough, down to the ugly plastic potted plants, but every
corridor was deserted, and every door to every other apartment was sealed shut-concealing,
literally, nothing. He kicked one door, as hard as he could; the wood seemed to give slightly, but
when he examined the surface, the paint wasn't even marked. The model would admit to no damage
here, and the laws of physics could screw themselves.
There were pedestrians and cyclists on the street-all purely recorded. They were solid rather than
ghostly, but it was an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they were like infinitely
strong, infinitely disinterested robots. Paul hitched a ride on one frail old woman's back for a
while; she carried him down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all felt
the same: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.
The street wasn't meant to serve as anything but three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies
interacted with each other, they often used cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative
crowds. Plazas, parks, open-air cafes; all very reassuring, no doubt, when you were fighting off a
sense
12
of isolation and claustrophobia. Copies could only receive realistic external visitors if they had
friends of relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a factor of seventeen. Most
dutiful next-of-kin preferred to exchange video recordings. Who wanted to spend an afternoon with
greatgrandfather, when it burnt up half a week of your life? Paul had tried calling Elizabeth on
the terminal in his study- which should have granted him access to the outside world, via the
computer's communications links-but, not surprisingly, Durham had sabotaged that as well.
When he reached the comer of the block, the visual illusion of the city continued, far into the
distance, but when he tried to step forward onto the road, the concrete pavement under his feet
started acting like a treadmill, sliding backward at precisely the rate needed to keep him
motionless, whatever pace he adopted. He backed off and tried leaping over the affected region,
but his horizontal velocity dissipated-without the slightest pretense of any "physical"
justification-and he landed squarely in the middle of the treadmill.
The people of the recording, of course, crossed the border with ease. One man walked straight at
him; Paul stood his ground-and found himself pushed into a zone of increasing viscosity, the air
around him becoming painfully unyielding, before he slipped free to one side.
The sense that discovering a way to breach this barrier would somehow "liberate" him was
compelling-but he knew it was absurd. Even if he did find a flaw in the program which enabled him
to break through, he knew he'd gain nothing but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The recording
could only contain complete information for points of view within a certain, finite zone; all
there was to "escape to" was a region where his view of the city would be full of distortions and
omissions, and would eventually fade to black.
He stepped back from the corner, half dispirited, half amused. What had he hoped to find? A door
at the edge of the model, marked EXIT, through which he could walk out into reality? Stairs
leading metaphorically down to some boiler-room representation of the underpinnings of this world,
where
13
he could throw a few switches and blow it all apart? He had no right to be dissatisfied with his
surroundings; they were precisely what he'd ordered.
What he'd ordered was also a perfect spring day. Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the
sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his
skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back-and it felt like he was
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reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the
nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the
stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a
moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical
processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This
body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there
was another-"more real"-version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted
to endure.
And if this was a travesty of life, there was always the chance of improvement. Maybe he could
persuade Durham to restore his communications facilities; that would be a start. And when he grew
bored with libraries, news systems, databases, and-if any of them would deign to meet him-the
ghosts of the senile rich? He could always have himself suspended until processor speeds caught up
with reality-when people would be able to visit without slowdown, and telepresence robots might
actually be worth inhabiting.
He opened his eyes, and shivered in the heat. He no longer knew what he wanted-the chance to bale
out, to declare this bad dream over ... or the possibility of virtual immortality- but he had to
accept that there was only one way he could make the choice his own.
He said quietly, "I won't be your guinea pig. A collaborator, yes. An equal partner. If you want
my cooperation, then you're going to have to treat me like a colleague, not a ... piece of
apparatus. Understood?"
A window opened up in front of him. He was shaken by the
14
sight, not of his predictably smug twin, but of the room behind him. It was only his study-and
he'd wandered through the virtual equivalent, unimpressed, just minutes before-but this was still
his first glimpse of the real world, in real time. He moved closer to the window, in the hope of
seeing if there was anyone else in the room-Elizabeth? -but the image was two-dimensional, the
perspective remained unchanged as he approached.
The flesh-and-blood Durham emitted a brief, high-pitched squeak, then waited with visible
impatience while a second, smaller window gave Paul a slowed-down replay, four octaves lower:
"Of course that's understood! We're collaborators. That's exactly right. Equals. I wouldn't have
it any other way. We both want the same things out of this, don't we? We both need answers to the
same questions."
Paul was already having second thoughts. "Perhaps." But Durham wasn't interested in his qualms.
Squeak. "You know we do! We've waited ten years for this . . . and now it's finally going to
happen. And we can begin whenever you're ready."
15
Part I
The Garden-Of-Eden Configuration
16
17
1____________
(Remit not paucity)
November 2050
Maria Deluca had ridden past the stinking hole in Pyrmont Bridge Road for six days running,
certain each time, as she'd approached, that she'd be greeted by the reassuring sight of a work
team putting things right. She knew that there was no money for road works or drainage repairs
this year, but a burst sewage main was a serious health risk; she couldn't believe it would be
neglected for long.
On the seventh day, the stench was so bad from half a kilometer away that she turned into a side
street, determined to find a detour.
This end of Pyrmont was a depressing sight; not every warehouse was empty, not every factory
abandoned, but they all displayed the same neglected look, the same peeling paint and crumbling
brickwork. Half a dozen blocks west, she turned again-to be confronted by a vista of lavish
gardens, marble statues, fountains and olive groves, stretching into the distance beneath a
cloudless azure sky.
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Maria accelerated without thinking-for a few seconds, almost believing that she'd chanced upon a
park of some kind, an impossibly well-kept secret in this decaying comer of the city. Then, as the
illusion collapsed-punctured by sheer implausibility as much as any visible flaw-she pedaled on
wilfully, as if hoping to blur the imperfections and contradictions out of existence. She braked
just in time, mounting the narrow footpath at the end of the cul-de-sac, the front wheel of her
cycle coming to a halt centimeters from the warehouse wall.
Close up, the mural was unimpressive, the brushstrokes
18
clearly visible, the perspective obviously false. Maria backed away-and she didn't have to retreat
far to see why she'd been fooled. At a distance of twenty meters or so, the painted sky suddenly
seemed to merge with the real thing; with a conscious effort, she could make the border reappear,
but it was hard work keeping the slight difference in hue from being smoothed out of existence
before her eyes-as if some subsystem deep in her visual cortex had shrugged off the unlikely
notion of a sky-blue wall and was actively collaborating in the deception. Further back, the grass
and statues began to lose their two-dimensional, painted look-and at the corner where she'd turned
into the cul-de-sac, every element of the composition fell into place, the mural's central avenue
now apparently converging toward the very same vanishing point as the interrupted road.
Having found the perfect viewing position, she stood there awhile, propping up her cycle. Sweat on
the back of her neck cooled in the faint breeze, then the morning sun began to bite. The vision
was entrancing-and it was heartening to think that the local artists had gone to so much trouble
to relieve the monotony of the neighborhood. At the same time, Maria couldn't help feeling
cheated. She didn't mind having been taken in, briefly; what she resented was not being able to be
fooled again. She could stand there admiring the artistry of the illusion for as long as she
liked, but nothing could bring back the surge of elation she'd felt when she'd been deceived.
She turned away.
Home, Maria unpacked the day's food, then lifted her cycle and hooked it into its frame on the
living-room ceiling. The terrace house, one hundred and forty years old, was shaped like a cereal
box; two stories high, but scarcely wide enough for a staircase. It had originally been part of a
row of eight;
four on one side had been gutted and remodeled into offices for a firm of architects; the other
three had been demolished at the turn of the century to make way for a road that had never been
built. The lone survivor was now untouchable under
19
some bizarre piece of heritage legislation, and Maria had bought it for a quarter of the price of
the cheapest modem flats. She liked the odd proportions-and with more space, she was certain, she
would have felt less in control. She had as clear a mental image of the layout and contents of the
house as she had of her own body, and she couldn't recall ever misplacing even the smallest
object. She couldn't have shared the place with anyone, but having it to herself seemed to strike
the right balance between her territorial and organizational needs. Besides, she believed that
houses were meant to be thought of as vehicles-physically fixed, but logically mobile-and compared
to a one-person space capsule or submarine, the size was more than generous.
Upstairs, in the bedroom that doubled as an office, Maria switched on her terminal and glanced at
a summary of the twenty-one items of mail which had arrived since she'd last checked. All were
classified as "Junk"; there was nothing from anyone she knew-and nothing remotely like an offer of
paid work. Camel's Eye, her screening software, had identified six pleas for donations from
charities (all worthy causes, but Maria hardened her heart); five invitations to enter lotteries
and competitions; seven retail catalogues (all of which boasted that they'd been tailored to her
personality and "current lifestyle requirements"-but Camel's Eye had assessed their contents and
found nothing of interest); and three inter-actives.
The "dumb" audio-visual mail was all in standard transparent data formats, but interactives were
executable programs, machine code with heavily encrypted data, intentionally designed to be easier
for a human to talk to than for screening software to examine and summarize. Camel's Eye had run
all three interactives (on a doubly quarantined virtual machine- a simulation of a computer
running a simulation of a computer) and tried to fool them into thinking that they were making
their pitch to the real Maria Deluca. Two sales programs-superannuation and health insurance-had
fallen for it, but the third had somehow deduced its true environment and clammed up before
disclosing anything. In theory, it was
20
possible for Camel's Eye to analyze the program and figure out exactly what it would have said if
it had been fooled; in practice, that could take weeks. The choice came down to trashing it blind,
or talking to it in person.
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Maria ran the interactive. A man's face appeared on the terminal; "he" met her gaze and smiled
warmly, and she suddenly realized that "he" bore a slight resemblance to Aden. Close enough to
elicit a flicker of recognition which the mask of herself she'd set up for Camel's Eye would not
have exhibited? Maria felt a mixture of annoyance and grudging admiration. She'd never shared an
address with Aden-but no doubt the data analysis agencies correlated credit card use in
restaurants, or whatever, to pick up relationships which didn't involve cohabitation. Mapping
useful connections between consumers had been going on for decades-but employing the data in this
way, as a reality test, was a new twist.
The junk mail, now rightly convinced that it was talking to a human being, began the spiel it had
refused to waste on her digital proxy. "Maria, I know your time is valuable, but I hope you can
spare a few seconds to hear me out." It paused for a moment, to make her feel that her silence was
some kind of assent. "I also know that you're a highly intelligent, discerning woman, with no
interest whatsoever in the muddled, irrational superstitions of the past, the fairy tales that
comforted humanity in its infancy." Maria guessed what was coming next; the interactive saw it on
her face-she hadn't bothered to hide behind any kind of filter-and it rushed to get a hook in. "No
truly intelligent person, though, ever dismisses an idea without taking the trouble to evaluate it-
skceptically, but fairly-and here at the Church of the God Who Makes No Difference-"
Maria pointed two fingers at the interactive, and it died. She wondered if it was her mother who'd
set the Church onto her, but that was unlikely. They must have targeted their new member's family
automatically; if consulted, Francesca would have told them that they'd be wasting their time.
Maria invoked Camel's Eye and told it, "Update my mask so it reacts as I did in that exchange."
21
A brief silence followed. Maria imagined the synaptic weighting parameters being juggled in the
mask's neural net, as the training algorithm hunted for values which would guarantee the required
response. She thought: If I keep on doing this, the mask is going to end up as much like me as a
fully fledged Copy. And what's the point of saving yourself from the tedium of talking to junk
mail if... you're not? It was a deeply unpleasant notion . .. but masks were orders of magnitude
less sophisticated than Copies; they had about as many neurons as the average goldfish-organized
in a far less human fashion. Worrying about their "experience" would be as ludicrous as feeling
guilty about terminating junk mail.
Camel's Eye said, "Done."
It was only 8:15. The whole day loomed ahead, promising nothing but bills. With no contract work
coming in for the past two months, Maria had written half a dozen pieces of consumer software-
mostly home-security upgrades, supposedly in high demand. So far, she'd sold none of them; a few
thousand people had read the catalogue entries, but nobody had been persuaded to download. The
prospect of embarking on another such project wasn't exactly electrifying-but she had no real
alternative. And once the recession was over and people started buying again, it would have been
time well spent.
First, though, she needed to cheer herself up. If she worked in the Autoverse, just for half an
hour or so-until nine o'clock at the latest-then she'd be able to face the rest of the day...
Then again, she could always try to face the rest of the day without bribing herself, just once.
The Autoverse was a waste of money, and a waste of time-a hobby she could justify when things were
going well, but an indulgence she could ill afford right now.
; Maria put an end to her indecision in the usual way. She logged on to her Joint Supercomputer
Network account-pay-lag a fifty-dollar fee for the privilege, which she now had to make
worthwhile. She slipped on her force gloves and prodded an icon, a wireframe of a cube, on the
terminal's flatscreen-
22
and the three-dimensional workspace in front of the screen came to life, borders outlined by a
faint holographic grid. For a second, it felt like she'd plunged her hand into some kind of
invisible vortex: magnetic fields gripped and twisted her glove, as start-up surges tugged at the
coils in each joint at random- until the electronics settled into equilibrium, and a message
flashed up in the middle of the workspace: YOU MAY NOW PUT ON YOUR GLOVES.
She jabbed another icon, a starburst labeled FIAT. The only visible effect was the appearance of a
small menu strip hovering low in the foreground-but to the cluster of programs she'd invoked, the
cube of thin air in front of her terminal now corresponded to a small, empty universe.
Maria summoned up a single molecule of nutrose, represented as a ball-and-stick model, and, with a
flick of a gloved forefinger, imparted a slow spin. The vertices of me crimped hexagonal ring zig-
zagged above and below the molecule's average plane; one vertex was a divalent blue atom, linked
only to its neighbors in the ring; the other five were all tetrava-lent greens, with two bonds
left over for other attachments. Each green was joined to a small, monovalent red-on the top side
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if the vertex was raised, on the bottom if it was lowered- and four of them also sprouted short
horizontal spikes, built from a blue and a red, pointing away from the ring. The fifth green held
out a small cluster of atoms instead: a green with two reds, and its own blue-red spike.
The viewing software rendered the molecule plausibly solid, taking into account the effects of
ambient light; Maria watched it spin above the desktop, admiring the not-quite-symmetrical form. A
real-world chemist, she mused, would take one look at this and say: Glucose. Green is carbon, blue
is oxygen, red is hydrogen ... no? No. They'd stare awhile; put on the gloves and give the
impostor a thorough grope; whip a protractor out of the toolbox and measure a few angles; invoke
tables of bond formation energies and vibrational modes; maybe even demand to see nuclear magnetic
resonance spectra (not available-or, to put it less coyly, not applicable). Finally, with the
realization of blasphemy dawning, they'd tear their hands
23
from the infernal machinery, and bolt from the room screaming, "There is no Periodic Table but
Mendeleev's! There is no Periodic Table but Mendeleev's!"
The Autoverse was a "toy" universe, a computer model which obeyed its own simplified "laws of
physics"-laws far easier to deal with mathematically than the equations of real-world quantum
mechanics. Atoms could exist in this stylized universe, but they were subtly different from their
real-world counterparts; the Autoverse was no more a faithful simulation of the real world than
the game of chess was a faithful simulation of medieval warfare. It was far more insidious than
chess, though, in the eyes of many real-world chemists. The false chemistry it supported was too
rich, too complex, too seductive by far.
Maria reached into the workspace again, halted the molecule's spin, deftly plucked both the lone
red and the blue-red spike from one of the greens, then reattached them, swapped, so that the
spike now pointed upward. The gloves' force and tactile feedback, the molecule's laser-painted
image, and the faint clicks that might have been plastic on plastic as she pushed the atoms into
place, combined to create a convincing impression of manipulating a tangible object built out of
solid spheres and rods.
This virtual ball-and-stick model was easy to work with- but its placid behavior in her hands had
nothing to do with . the physics of the Autoverse, temporarily held in abeyance. Only when she
released her grip was the molecule allowed to express its true dynamics, oscillating wildly as the
stresses induced by the alteration were redistributed from atom to atom, until a new equilibrium
geometry was found.
Maria watched the delayed response with a familiar sense of frustration; she could never quite
resign herself to accepting the handling rules, however convenient they were. She'd thought about
trying to devise a more authentic mode of interaction, offering the chance to feel what it was
"really like" to grasp an Autoverse molecule, to break and re-form its bonds-instead of everything
turning to simulated plastic at the touch of a glove. The catch was, if a molecule obeyed only
24
Autoverse physics-the internal logic of the self-contained computer model-then how could she,
outside the model, interact with it at all? By constructing little surrogate hands in the
Autoverse, to act as remote manipulators? Construct them out of what? There were no molecules
small enough to build anything finely structured, at that scale; the smallest rigid polymers which
could act as "fingers" would be half as thick as the entire nutrose ring. In any case, although
the target molecule would be free to interact with these surrogate hands according to pure
Autoverse physics, there'd be nothing authentic about the way the hands themselves magically
followed the movements of her gloves. Maria could see no joy in simply shifting the point where
the rules were broken-and the rules had to be broken, somewhere. Manipulating the contents of the
Autoverse meant violating its laws. That was obvious ... but it was still frustrating.
She saved the modified sugar, optimistically dubbing it mutose. Then, changing the length scale by
a factor of a million, she started up twenty-one tiny cultures of Autobacterium lamberti, in
solutions ranging from pure nutrose, to a fifty-fifty mixture, to one hundred percent mutose.
She gazed at the array of Petri dishes floating in the workspace, their contents portrayed in
colors which coded for the health of the bacteria. "False colors" . . . but that phrase was
tautological. Any view of the Autoverse was necessarily stylized: a color-coded map, displaying
selected attributes of the region in question. Some views were more abstract, more heavily
processed than others-in the sense that a map of the Earth, color-coded to show the health of its
people, would be arguably more abstract than one displaying altitude or rainfall-but the real-
world ideal of an unadulterated, naked-eye view was simply untranslatable.
A few of the cultures were already looking decidedly sick, fading from electric blue to dull
brown. Maria summoned up a three-dimensional graph, showing population versus time for the full
range of nutrient mixtures. The cultures with only a trace of the new stuff were, predictably,
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Permutation%20City.txtGregEganPERMUTATIONCITYHarperPrismCopyright(c)1994byGregEganACKNOWLEDGMENTSPartsofthisnovelareadaptedfromastorycalled"Dust,"whichwasfi\rstpublishedinIsaacAsimov'sScienceFictionMagazine,July1992.ThankstoDeborahBeale,CharonWood,PeterR...

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