Permutation City

arisen. Babette and Larry Unclear had witnessed bank accounts being pilfered, when the relevant data trail had— inexplicably—taken solid form as an accusing tableau of ice-sculptures in their cyber-suburban backyard. She couldn’t recall exactly how the plot had turned out; ten-year-old Leroy had probably done something marginally illegal, but morally unimpeachable, to trick the thieves into giving themselves away to the authorities…

She said, “I don’t know what you expect me to tell you. Durham hasn’t defrauded me. And I don’t know anything about this scheme.”

“But you’re working on it with him.”

“I certainly am not!”

Hayden said drily, “You’re designing a planet for him. What do you think that’s for?”

Maria stared at her blankly for a second, then almost laughed. “I’m sorry, I can’t have explained things very well. I’m designing a planet that “could” exist in the Autoverse, in the broadest sense of the word. It’s a mathematical possibility. But it’s too large to be run on a real computer. It’s not some VR—”

Hayden cut her off. “I understand that perfectly. That doesn’t mean Durham’s clients would have grasped the distinction. Technical details about the Autoverse aren’t exactly general knowledge.”

True. Maria hesitated. But—

“It still makes no sense. For a start, these people would have advisers, researchers, who’d tell them that anyone promising them an Autoverse planet was full of shit. And why would Durham offer them an Autoverse planet—covered in primordial slime—when he could offer them a standard set of VR environments which would be a thousand times more attractive and a thousand times more plausible?”

“I believe he’s offering them both. He’s hired an architect in the US to work on the VR part.”

“But why both? Why not just VR? You couldn’t fit a single Copy into the Autoverse—and if you did, it would die on the spot. It would take fifty or sixty years of research to translate human biochemistry into Autoverse terms.”

“They wouldn’t know that.”

“They could find out in ten seconds flat. Forget about advisers; it would take one call to a knowledge miner, total cost five dollars. So why tell a lie that could be so easily uncovered? What’s the advantage—from a Copy’s point of view—of an Autoverse planet over patchwork VR?”

Hayden was unfazed. “You’re the Autoverse expert. So you tell me.”

“I don’t know.” Maria stood up. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic; she hated having strangers in the house. “Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

“No. But you go ahead—”

Maria shook her head and sat down again; she had a feeling that if she went into the kitchen, she wouldn’t want to return.

She couldn’t see why Durham would refuse to talk to the police, unless he was involved in something dubious enough to have him thrown out of his job, at the very least. Fuck him. He might not have intended to cheat her, but he’d screwed her nonetheless. She wouldn’t get a cent for the work she’d completed; other creditors would have no call on the trust fund if Durham merely went bankrupt—but if the money was the pro-ceeds of crime…

Lorenzo the Magnificent. Yeah.

The worst of it was, for all she knew, Hayden believed she was a willing accomplice. And if Durham intended to remain silent, she’d have to clear her own name.

How?

First, she had to find out about the scam, and untangle her role in it.

She said, “What exactly is he promising these Copies?”

“A refuge. A place where they’ll be safe from any kind of backlash—because they won’t be connected to the outside world. No telecommunications; nothing to trace. He feeds them a long spiel about the coming dark age, when the unwashed masses will no longer put up with being lorded over by rich immortals—and evil socialist governments will confiscate all the supercomputers for weather control.”

Hayden seemed to find the prospect laughable. Maria suspended judgement; what mattered was how Durham’s clients felt, and she could imagine Operation Butterfly making a lot of Copies feel threatened. “So they send their clones in, and slam the door, in case the originals don’t make it through the purges. But then what? How long is this “dark age” supposed to last?”

Hayden shrugged. “Who knows? Hundreds of years? Presumably Durham himself—or some trustworthy successor, several generations later—will decide when it’s safe to come out. The two Copies whose executors filed complaints didn’t wait to hear the whole scenario; they threw him out before he could get down to details like that.”

“He must have approached other Copies.”

“Of course. No one else has come forward, but we have a tentative list of names. All with estates incorporated overseas, unfortunately; I haven’t been able to interview any of them, yet—we’re still working on the jurisdictional red tape. But a few have made it clear already, through their lawyers, that they won’t be willing to discuss the matter—which presumably means that they’ve swallowed Durham’s line, and now they don’t want to hear a word against him.”

Maria struggled to imagine it: No communications. Cut off from reality, indefinitely. A few “Solipsist Nation” Copies might relish the prospect—but most of them had too little money to be the targets of an elaborate scam. And even if Durham’s richest, most paranoid clients seriously believed that the world was on the verge of turning against them… what if things went so badly wrong, outside, that links were never restored? The humans guarding the sanctuary could die out—or just walk away. How could any but the most radically separatist of Copies face the risk of being stranded inside a hidden computer, buried in the middle of a desert somewhere, with no means of discovering for themselves when civilization was worth rejoining—and no means of initiating contact in any case?

Radioisotope power sources could run for thousands of years; multiply redundant hardware of the highest standard could last almost as long, in theory. All these Copies would have, to remember reality by, would be the information they’d brought in with them at the start. If it turned into a one-way trip, they’d be like interstellar colonists, carrying a snapshot of Earth culture off into the void.

Except that interstellar colonists would merely face a growing radio time lag, not absolute silence. And whatever they were leaving behind, at least they’d have something to look forward to: a new world to explore.

A new world—and the possibility of new life.

So what better cure could there be for claustrophobia than the promise of dragging an entire planet into the refuge, seeded with the potential for developing its own exotic life?

Maria didn’t know whether to be outraged or impressed. If she was right, she had to admire Durham’s sheer audacity. When he had asked for a package of results which would persuade “the skeptics” about the prospects for an Autoverse biosphere, he hadn’t been thinking of academics in the artificial life scene. He’d wanted to convince his clients that, even in total isolation, they’d have everything reality could ever offer the human race—including a kind of “space exploration,” complete with the chance of alien contact. And these would be genuine aliens; not the stylish designer creatures from VR games, constructs of nothing but the human psyche; not the slick, unconvincing biomorphs of the high-level phenotype-selection models, the Darwinian equivalent of Platonic ideals. Life which had come the whole tortuous way, molecule by molecule, just like the real thing. Or, almost the whole way; with a biogenesis still poorly understood, Durham had had enough sense to start with “hand-made” microbes—otherwise his clients might never have believed that the planet would bear life at all.

Maria explained the idea, tentatively. “He’d have to have convinced these Copies that running the Autoverse is much faster than modeling real biochemistry—which it is—without being too specific about the actual figures. And I still think it’s a crazy risk to take; anyone could easily find out the truth.”

Hayden thought it over. “Would it matter if they did? If the point of this world is mainly psychological—a place to “escape to” if the worst happens, and reality becomes permanently inaccessible—then it wouldn’t matter how slowly it ran. Once they’d given up hope of reestablishing contact, slowdown would become irrelevant.”

“Yes, but there’s slow—and there’s physically impossible. Sure, they could take in