Permutation City

pause himself, to avoid waiting—and have the whole thing unfold.

Durham said, “I’ve been working on the software which will run the first moments of the TVC universe on a real-world computer. I can probably finish that myself. But I can’t complete the Autoverse work without you, Maria.”

She laughed sharply. “You want me to keep working for you? You lie to me. You get me visited by the Fraud Squad. You confess to a history of mental illness. You tell me you’re the twenty-third incarnation of a retailing millionaire from a parallel world—”

“Whatever you think about the dust theory—and whatever you think about my psychological health—I can prove to you that I’m not a criminal. My backers will vouch for that; they all know exactly what their money’s being used for. None of them are victims of fraud.”

“I accept that. I just—”

“Then accept the payment. Finish the work. Whatever the police have told you, you have every right to the money, and I have every right to give it to you. Nobody’s going to take you to court, nobody’s going to throw you into prison.”

Maria was flustered. “Just, hold on. Will you give me a chance to think?” Durham’s sheer reasonableness was beginning to be as exhausting as the impassioned rhetoric of any obvious fanatic. And so much ground had shifted in the last half-hour that she hadn’t had a chance to even start to reappraise her own situation: legally, financially… and morally.

She said, “Why don’t your backers tell the police all this? If they can confirm your story for me, why can’t they do the same for the cops? By refusing to talk, they’re just fueling suspicion.”

Durham agreed. “Tell me about it. It makes everything ten times harder—but I’m just going to have to keep on living with that. Do you think they’d risk the truth becoming public knowledge? There have already been some embarrassing leaks—but so far we’ve been able to muddy the water by putting out our own misinformation. Copies with de facto control of billion-dollar business empires would much rather have people linking them to some dubious salesman and his breakthrough supercomputer—and have the rumors fizzle out from lack of substantiation—than let the world know that they plan to send a clone into an artificial universe which runs without hardware. The share markets can get nervous enough when people start wondering if a certain board of directors have all taken up playing virtual Caligula in their spare time. If word got out that a Copy in a position of power had done something which might be construed as a sign that they no longer felt obliged to give a shit about their corporate responsibilities, their personal wealth, or the continued existence of Planet Earth… “

Maria walked over to the window. It was open, but the air outside was still; standing by the insect screen she might as well have been standing by a solid brick wall. People were arguing loudly in the flat above; she’d only just noticed.

When Durham had first approached her, she’d wondered, half seriously, if she’d be taking advantage of a man who’d taken leave of his senses. Now, she couldn’t just shrug that off as a hypocritical insult to a fellow eccentric. This wasn’t a matter of an artificial life fanatic with more money than sense. An ex-psychiatric patient was planning to spend thirty million dollars of other people’s money to “prove” his own sanity—and lead the clones of his followers into a cybernetic paradise which would last for about twenty seconds. Taking a cut seemed just a tiny bit like doing the catering for the Jonestown massacre.

Durham said, “If you don’t agree to finish the biosphere seed, who would I get to replace you? There’s nobody else who could even begin to grasp what’s involved.”

Maria eyed him sharply. “Don’t start flattering me. And don’t kid yourself about the seed, either. You asked for a package of persuasive data, and that’s all you’ll be getting—even if I finish the work. If you’re counting on Planet Lambert’s inhabitants rising up on their hind legs and talking to you… I can’t guarantee that happening if you ran the whole thing a billion times. You should have simulated real-world biochemistry. At least it’s been shown that intelligent life can arise within that system… and you’d supposedly have the computing power to do it.”

Durham said reasonably, “A. lamberti seemed simpler, surer. Any real-world organism—modeled subatomically—would be too big a program to test out in advance on any physical computer. And it’d be too late to change my mind and try another approach if I failed to get it to work— stuck in the TVC universe, with plenty of books and journals, but no pool of expertise.”

Maria felt a deep chill pass through her; every time she thought she’d accepted just how seriously Durham took this lunacy, he gave an answer like that which drove it home to her anew.

She said, “Well, Autoverse life might turn out just as useless. You might have A. hydrophila spewing out useless mutations, generation after generation, with nothing you can do to fix it.”

Durham seemed about to reply, but then stopped himself. Maria felt the chill return, at first without knowing why. A second later, she glared at him, outraged, as furious as if he’d come right out and asked her.

“I will not be there to fix it for you!”

Durham had the grace to look cowed, momentarily—but instead of denying that the thought had ever crossed his mind, he said, “If you don’t believe in the dust theory, what difference would it make if there’s a scan file of you in the Garden-of-Eden data?”

“I don’t want a Copy of me waking up and living for a few subjective seconds, knowing that it’s going to die!”

“Who said anything about waking it? Running a Copy on a simulated TVC grid is a computer-intensive operation. We can’t afford to wake more than one Copy while we’re still running on a physical computer. Mine. As far as you’re concerned, your scan file would never even be used to build a Copy; the data would just sit there, completely inert. And you could sit outside at a terminal, overseeing the whole operation, making sure I kept my word.”

Maria was scandalized—although it took her a second to weave through Durham’s infuriating logic to find a target.

“And you—certain that I’d eventually wake—would happily take me on board under false pretences?”

Durham seemed genuinely baffled by the accusation. “False pretences? I’ve given you all the facts, and I’ve argued my case as hard as I can; it’s not my fault if you don’t believe me. Am I supposed to feel guilty for being right?”

Maria started to reply, but then the point seemed too ridiculous to pursue. She said, “Never mind. You won’t get a chance to feel anything about it, because I’m certainly not offering you a scan file.”

Durham bowed his head. “It’s your decision.”

Maria hugged herself. She was actually trembling slightly. She thought: I’m afraid of exploiting him? If what he’s doing really is legitimate… finish the job, take the money. His Copy’s going to spend a few seconds believing it’s headed for Copy Heaven—and that’s going to happen whatever I do. The fifteen clones will just sleep through it all, as if they’d never been made. That’s no Jonestown.

Durham said, “The fee would be six hundred thousand dollars.”

Maria said, “I don’t care if it’s six hundred million.” She’d meant to shout, but her words faded out into a whisper.

Six hundred thousand dollars would be enough to save Francesca’s life.

18 (Remit not paucity) MAY 2051

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate’s hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing against him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to have been left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong