Permutation City

seriously consider blowing her one real chance to have Francesca scanned—after all the work, all the anxiety—for no better reason than a laughable, microscopic fear that this artificial universe might actually blossom into self-contained existence.

Durham’s terminal beeped. Maria glanced at his screen; a message box said PRIORITY COMMUNICATION. She looked away as he viewed the text.

“Speaking of last-minute qualms, Riemann’s changed his mind. He wants in.”

Maria said irritably, “Well, tell him it’s too late. Tell him he’s missed the boat.” She wasn’t serious; from what she knew of the project’s finances, Durham had been set to barely break even by the end of the day. The price of one more ticket would transform his fortunes completely.

He said, “Relax—it will take half an hour at the most to fit him in. And his fee will cover much more than the increase in data; we’ll be able to run the whole launch a bit longer.”

Maria had to pause to let that sink in. Then she said, “You’re going to blow most of two million ecus on stretching out something that—”

Durham smiled. “That what? That would have worked anyway?”

“That you believe would have worked anyway!”

“The longer I get to see my Copy observing the TVC universe, the happier I’ll be. I don’t know what it will take to anchor the automaton rules—but if ten watertight experiments sounds good, then eleven sounds better.”

Maria pushed her chair back and walked away from her terminal. Durham tapped at his keyboard, first invoking the programs which would recompute the Garden-of-Eden configuration to include the new passenger and his luggage—then directing the windfall from Riemann straight into the project’s JSN account.

She said, “What’s wrong with you? Two million ecus is more than two million dollars! You could have lived on that for the rest of your life!”

Durham kept typing, passing Riemann’s documents through a series of legal checks. “I’ll get by.”

“Given it to a charity, then!”

Durham frowned, but said patiently, “I gather that Thomas Riemann gives generously to famine relief and crop research every year. He chose to spend this money on a place in my sanctuary; it’s hardly my role to channel his funds into whatever you or I decide is the worthiest cause.” He glanced at her and added, mock-solemnly, “That’s called fraud, Ms. Deluca. You can go to prison for that.”

Maria was unmoved. “You could have kept something for yourself. For this life, this world. I don’t imagine any of your clients expected you to do all this for nothing.”

Durham finished at the terminal and turned to her. “I don’t expect you to understand. You treat the whole project as a joke—and that’s fine. But you can hardly expect me to run it on that basis.”

Maria didn’t even know what she was angry about anymore: the delayed launch, the obscene waste of money—or just Durham sitting there making perfect sense to himself, as always.

She said, “The project is a joke. Three hundred million people are living in refugee camps, and you’re offering sanctuary to sixteen billionaires! What do they need protection from? There’s never going to be an anti-Copy revolution! They’re never going to be shut down! You know as well as I do that they’ll just sit there getting richer for the next ten thousand years!”

“Possibly.”

“So you are a fraud then, aren’t you? Even if your ’sanctu-ary’ really does come into existence—even if you prove your precious theory right—what have your backers gained? You’ve sent their clones into solitary confinement, that’s all. You might as well have put them in a black box at the bottom of a mineshaft.”

Durham said mildly, “That’s not quite true. You talk about Copies surviving ten thousand years. What about ten billion? A hundred billion?”

She scowled. “Nothing’s going to last that long. Haven’t you heard? They’ve found enough dark matter to reverse the expansion of the universe in less than forty billion years—”

“Exactly. This universe isn’t going to last.”

Maria nodded sarcastically, and tried to say something belittling, but the words stuck in her throat.

Durham continued blithely, “The TVC universe will never collapse. Never. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion; it makes no difference, it will always be expanding.”

Maria said weakly, “Entropy—”

“Is not a problem. Actually, ‘expanding’ is the wrong word; the TVC universe grows like a crystal, it doesn’t stretch like a balloon. Think about it. Stretching ordinary space increases entropy; everything becomes more spread out, more disordered. Building more of a TVC cellular automaton just gives you more room for data, more computing power, more order. Ordinary matter would eventually decay, but these computers aren’t made out of matter. There’s nothing in the cellular automaton’s rules to prevent them from lasting for ever.”

Maria wasn’t sure what she’d imagined before; Durham’s universe—being made of the same “dust” as the real one, merely rearranged—suffering the same fate? She couldn’t have given the question much thought, because that verdict was nonsensical. The rearrangement was in time as well as space; Durham’s universe could take a point of space-time from just before the Big Crunch, and follow it with another from ten million years b.c. And even if there was only a limited total amount of “dust” to work with, there was no reason why it couldn’t be reused in different combinations, again and again. The fate of the TVC automaton would only have to make internal sense—and the thing would have no reason, ever, to come to an end.

She said, “So you promised these people… immortality?”

“Of course.”

“Literal immortality? Outliving the universe?”

Durham feigned innocence, but he was clearly savoring the shock he’d given her. “That’s what the word means. Not dying after a very long time. Just not dying, period.”

Maria leaned back against the wall, arms folded, trying to cast aside the feeling that the whole conversation was as insubstantial as anything Durham had hallucinated in the Blacktown psychiatric ward. She thought: When Francesca’s been scanned I’m going to take a holiday. Visit Aden in Seoul, if I have to. Anything to get away from this city, this man.

She said, “Ideas like that are powerful things. One of these days you’re going to hurt someone.”

Durham looked wounded himself, at that. He said, “All I’ve tried to do is be honest. I know: I lied to you, at first—and I’m sorry. I had no right to do that. But what was I supposed to do with the truth? Keep it locked up in my head? Hide it from the world? Give no one else the chance to believe, or disbelieve?” He fixed his eyes on her, calm and sane as ever; she looked away.

He said, “When I first came out of hospital, I wanted to publish everything. And I tried… but nobody reputable was interested—and publishing in the junk-science journals would have been nothing but an admission that it was all bullshit. So what else could I do, except look for private backers?”

Maria said, “I understand. Forget it. You’ve done what you thought you had to—I don’t blame you for that.” The cliches nearly made her gag, but all she could think about was shutting him up. She was sick of being reminded that the ideas which were nothing but a means to an end, for her—the ideas she could turn her back on forever, in eight hours’ time—were this man’s entire life.

He looked at her searchingly, as if genuinely seeking guidance. “If you’d believed everything I believe, would you have kept it all to yourself? Would you have lived out your life pretending to the world that you’d merely been insane?”

Maria was saved from answering by a beep from Durham’s terminal. The Garden-of-Eden configuration had been recomputed; Thomas Riemann’s snapshot was now built into their cellular automaton equivalent of the Big Bang.

Durham swung his chair around to face the screen. He said cheerfully, “All aboard the ship of fools!”

Maria took her place beside him. She reached over and tentatively touched his shoulder. Without looking at her, he reached up and squeezed her hand gently, then removed it.

Following a long cellular automaton tradition, the program which would bootstrap the TVC universe into existence was called FIAT. Durham hit a key, and a starburst icon appeared on both of their screens.

He turned to Maria. “You do the honors.”