Permutation City

Maria was unimpressed. “You could have frozen us while the program was running, making it seem like no time had passed. Or you could have generated the answers in advance.” She gestured at the terminal. “I expect you’re faking all of this: you’re not talking to a genuine operating system, you’re not really running the program at all.”

“Feel free to alter some parameters in the equations, and try again.”

She did. The modified program “ran” just as quickly, churning out a new set of answers. She laughed sourly. “So what am I supposed to do now? Verify all this in my head? You could put any bullshit you liked on the screen; I wouldn’t know the difference. And if I wrote another program to check the results, you could fake its operation, too. You control this whole environment, don’t you? So I can’t trust anything. Whatever I do to try to test your claims, you can intervene and make it go your way. Is that why you wanted my scan file, all along? So you could lock me in here and bombard me with lies—finally ‘prove’ all your mad ideas to someone?”

“You’re being paranoid now.”

“Am I? You’re the expert.”

She looked around the luxurious prison cell. Red velvet curtains stirred in a faint breeze. She slipped out of bed and crossed the room, ignoring Durham; the more she argued with him, the harder it was to be physically afraid of him. He’d chosen his form of torture, and he was sticking to it.

The window looked out on a forest of glistening towers—no doubt correctly rendered according to all the laws of optics, but still too slick to be real… like some nineteen twenties Expressionist film set. She’d seen the sketches; this was Permutation City—whatever hardware it was running on. She looked down. They were seventy or eighty stories up, the street was all but invisible, but just below the window, a dozen meters to the right, a walkway stretched across to an adjacent building, and she could see the puppet citizens, chatting together in twos and threes as they strode toward their imaginary destinations. All of this looked expensive—but slowdown could buy a lot of subjective computing power, if that was the trade-off you wanted to make. How much time had passed in the outside world? Years? Decades?

Had she managed to save Francesca?

Durham said, “You think I’ve kidnapped your scan file, and run this whole city, solely for the pleasure of deceiving you?”

“It’s the simplest explanation.”

“It’s ludicrous, and you know it. I’m sorry; I know this must be painful for you. But I didn’t do it lightly. It’s been seven thousand years; I’ve had a lot of time to think it over.”

She spun around to face him. “Stop lying to me!”

He threw his hands up, in a gesture of contrition—and impatience. “Maria… you are in the TVC universe. The launch worked, the dust hypothesis has been vindicated. It’s a fact, and you’d better come to terms with that, because you’re now part of a society which has been living with it for millennia.

“And I know I said I’d only wake you if Planet Lambert failed—if we needed you to work on the biosphere seed. All right, I’ve broken my word on that. But… it was the wrong promise to make. Planet Lambert hasn’t failed; it’s succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. How could I let you sleep through that?”

An interface window appeared in midair beside her, showing a half-lit blue-and-white world. “I don’t expect the continents will look familiar. We’ve given the Autoverse a lot of resources; seven thousand years, for most of us, has been about three billion for Planet Lambert.”

Maria said flatly, “You’re wasting your time. Nothing you show me is going to change my mind.” But she watched the planet, transfixed, as Durham moved the viewpoint closer.

They broke through the clouds near the east coast of a large, mountainous island, part of an archipelago straddling the equator. The bare surface rock of the peaks was the color of ochre; no mineral she’d included in the original design… but time, and geochemistry, could have thrown up something new. The vegetation, which covered almost every other scrap of land, right to the water line, came in shades of blue-green. As the viewpoint descended, and the textures resolved themselves, Maria saw only “grasses” and “shrubs”—nothing remotely like a terrestrial tree.

Durham zeroed in on a meadow not far from the coast—a few hundred meters back, according to the scale across the bottom of the image—and about what she would have guessed from cues in the landscape, unexpectedly validated. What looked at first like a cloud of wind-borne debris—seeds of some kind?—blowing above the grass resolved into a swarm of shiny black “insects.” Durham froze the image, then zoomed in on one of the creatures.

It was no insect by the terrestrial definition; there were four legs, not six, and the body was clearly divided into five segments: the head; sections bearing the forelegs, wings, and hind legs; and the tail. Durham made hand movements and rotated the view. The head was blunt, not quite flat, with two large eyes—if they were eyes: shiny bluish disks, with no apparent structure. The rest of the head was coated in fine hairs, lined up in a complex, symmetrical pattern which reminded Maria of Maori facial tattoos. Sensors for vibration—or scent?

She said, “Very pretty, but you forgot the mouth.”

“They put food into a cavity directly under the wings.” He rotated the body to show her. “It adheres to those bristles, and gets dissolved by the enzymes they secrete. You’d think it would fall out, but it doesn’t—not until they’ve finished digesting it and absorbing nutrients, and then a protein on the bristles changes shape, switching off the adhesion. Their whole stomach is nothing but this sticky droplet hanging there, open to the air.”

“You might have come up with something more plausible.”

Durham laughed. “Exactly.”

The single pair of wings were translucent brown, looking like they were made of a thin layer of the same stuff as the exoskeleton. The four legs each had a single joint, and terminated in feathery structures. The tail segment had brown-and-black markings like a bull’s-eye, but there was nothing at the center; a dark tube emerged from the bottom of the rim, narrowing to a needle-sharp point.

“The Lambertians have diploid chromosomes, but only one gender. Any two of them can inject DNA, one after the other, into certain kinds of plant cell; their genes take over the cell and turn it into a cross between a cyst and an egg. They usually choose a particular spot on the stems of certain species of shrub. I don’t know if you’d call it parasitism—or just nest-building on a molecular level. The plant nourishes the embryo, and survives the whole process in perfect health—and when the young hatch, they return the favor by scattering seeds. Their ancestors stole some of the control mechanisms from a plant virus, a billion years ago. There are a lot of genetic exchanges like that; the “kingdoms” are a lot more biochemically similar here than they were on Earth.”

Maria turned away from the screen. The stupidest thing was, she kept wanting to ask questions, press him for details. She said, “What’s next? You zoom right in and show me the fine anatomical structure, the insect’s cells, the proteins, the atoms, the Autoverse cells—and that’s supposed to convince me that the whole planet is embedded in the Autoverse? You unfreeze this thing, let it fly around—and I’m meant to conclude that no real-world computer could ever run an organism so complex, modeled at such a deep level? As if I could personally verify that every flap of its wings corresponded to a valid sequence of a few trillion cellular automaton states. It’s no different than the equation results. It wouldn’t prove a thing.”

Durham nodded slowly. “All right. What if I showed you some of the other species? Or the evolutionary history? The paleogenetic record? We have every mutation on file since the year zero. You want to sit down with that and see if it looks authentic?”

“No. I want a terminal that works. I want you to let me call my original. I want to talk to her—and between us, maybe we can decide what I’m going to do when I get out of this fucking madhouse and into my own JSN account.”

Durham looked rattled—and for a moment she believed she might finally be getting through to him. But he said, “I woke you for a reason. We’re going to be making contact with the Lambertians soon. It might have been sooner—but there’ve been complications, political delays.”

He’d lost her completely now. “‘Contact with the Lambertians?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

He gestured at the motionless insect, backside and genitals still facing them. ‘This is not some species I picked at random. This is the pinnacle of Autoverse life. They’re conscious, self-aware, highly intelligent. They have almost no technology—but their nervous system is about ten times more complex than a human’s—and they can go