Permutation City

Home, Maria unpacked the day’s food, then lifted her cycle and hooked it into its frame on the livingroom 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 some bizarre piece of heritage legislation, and Maria had bought it for a quarter of the price of the cheapest modern 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 interactives.

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 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.

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—skeptically, 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.”

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—paying 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—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 the 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 tetravalent greens, with two bonds left over for other attachments. Each green was joined to a small, monovalent red—on the top side 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 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