Permutation City

far beyond that for some tasks, performing a kind of parallel computing in swarms. They have chemistry, physics, astronomy. They know there are thirty-two atoms—although they haven’t figured out the underlying cellular automaton rules yet. And they’re modeling the primordial cloud. These are sentient creatures, and they want to know where they came from.”

Maria turned her hand in front of the screen, bringing the Lambertian’s head back into view. She was beginning to suspect that Durham actually believed every word he was saying—in which case, maybe he hadn’t, personally, contrived these aliens. Maybe some other version of him—the flesh-and-blood original?—was deceiving both of them. If that was the case, she was arguing with the wrong person—but what was she supposed to do instead? Start shouting pleas for freedom to the sky?

She said numbly, “Ten times more complex than a human brain?”

“Their neurons use conducting polymers to carry the signal, instead of membrane action potentials. The cells themselves are comparable in size to a human’s—but each axon and dendrite carries multiple signals.” Durham moved the viewpoint behind the Lambertian’s eye, and showed her. A neuron in the optic nerve, under close examination, contained thousands of molecules like elaborately knotted ropes, running the whole length of the cell body. At the far end, each polymer was joined to a kind of vesicle, the narrow molecular cable dwarfed by the tiny pouch of cell membrane pinched off from the outside world. “There are almost three thousand distinct neurotransmitters; they’re all proteins, built from three sub-units, with fourteen possibilities for each sub-unit. A bit like human antibodies—the same trick for generating a wide spectrum of shapes. And they bind to their receptors just as selectively as an antibody to an antigen; every synapse is a three-thousand-channel biochemical switchboard, with no cross-talk. That’s the molecular basis of Lambertian thought.” He added wryly, “Which is more than you and I possess: a molecular basis for anything. We still run the old patchwork models of the human body— expanded and modified according to taste, but still based on the same principles as John Vines’s first talking Copy. There’s a long-term project to give people the choice of being implemented on an atomic level… but quite apart from the political complications, even the enthusiasts keep finding more pressing things to do.”

Durham moved the viewpoint out through the cell wall and turned it back to face the terminal end of the neuron. He changed the color scheme from atomic to molecular, to highlight the individual neurotransmitters with their own distinctive hues. Then he unfroze the image.

Several of the grey lipid-membrane vesicles twitched open, disgorging floods of brightly colored specks; tumbling past the viewpoint, they resolved into elaborate, irregular globules with a bewildering variety of forms. Durham swung the angle of view forward again, and headed for the far side of the synapse. Eventually, Maria could make out color-coded receptors embedded in the receiving neuron’s cell wall: long-chain molecules folded together into tight zig-zagged rings, with lumpy depressions on the exposed surface.

For several minutes, they watched thousands of mismatched neurotransmitters bounce off one receptor, until Durham became bored and pleaded with the software, “Show us a fit.” The image blurred for a second, and then returned to the original speed as a correctly shaped molecule finally stumbled onto its target. It hit the receptor and locked into place; Durham plunged the viewpoint through the cell membrane in time to show the immersed tail section of the receptor changing its configuration in response. He said, “That will now catalyze the activation of a second messenger, which will feed energy into the appropriate polymer—unless there’s an inhibiting messenger already bound there, blocking access.” He spoke to the software again; it took control of the viewpoint, and showed them each of the events he’d described.

Maria shook her head, bedazzled. “Tell me the truth—who orchestrated this? Three thousand neurotransmitters, three thousand receptors, three thousand second messengers? No doubt you can show me the individual structures of all of them—and no doubt they really would behave the way you claim they do. Even writing the software to fake this would have been an enormous job. Who did you commission? There can’t be many people who’d take it on.”

Durham said gently, “I commissioned you. You can’t have forgotten. A seed for a biosphere? A demonstration that life in the Autoverse could be as diverse and elaborate as life on Earth?”

“No. From A. hydrophila to this would take—”

“Billions of years of Autoverse time? Computing power orders of magnitude beyond the resources of twenty- first century Earth? That’s what Planet Lambert needed—and that’s exactly what it’s been given.”

Maria backed away from the screen until she could go no further, then slid down against the wall beside the red-draped window and sat on the plushly carpeted floor. She put her face in her hands, and tried to breathe slowly. She felt like she’d been buried alive.

Did she believe him? It hardly seemed to matter anymore. Whatever she did, he was going to keep on bombarding her with “evidence” like this, consistent with his claims. Whether he was deliberately lying or not—and whether he was being fooled by another version of himself, or whether the “dust hypothesis” was right after all—he was never going to let her out of here, back into the real world. Psychotic liar, fellow victim or calm purveyor of the truth, he was incapable of setting her free.

Her original was still out there—with the money to save Francesca. That was the point of the whole insane gamble, the payoff for risking her soul. If she could remember that, cling to that, maybe she could keep herself sane.

Durham pressed on—oblivious to her distress, or intent on delivering the coup de grace. He said, “Who could have engineered this? You know how long it took Max Lambert to translate a real-world bacterium. Do you honestly believe that I found someone who could manufacture a functioning—novel—pseudo-insect out of thin air… let alone an intelligent one?

“All right: you can’t personally check macroscopic behavior against the Autoverse rules. But you can study all the biochemical pathways, trace them back to the ancestral species. You can watch an embryo grow, cell by cell— following the gradients of control hormones, the differentiating tissue layers, the formation of the organs.

“The whole planet is an open book to us; you can examine whatever you like, scrutinize it on any scale, from viruses to ecosystems, from the activation of a molecule of retinal pigment to the geochemical cycles.

“There are six hundred and ninety million species currently living on Planet Lambert. All obeying the laws of the Autoverse. All demonstrably descended from a single organism which lived three billion years ago—and whose characteristics I expect you know by heart. Do you honestly believe that anyone could have designed all that?”

Maria looked up at him angrily. “No. Of course it evolved; it must have evolved. You can shut up now—you’ve won; I believe you. But why did you have to wake me? I’m going to lose my mind.”

Durham squatted down and put a hand on her shoulder. She started sobbing drily as she attempted to dissect her loss into parts she could begin to comprehend. Francesca was gone. Aden was gone. All her friends. All the people she’d ever met: in the flesh, on the networks. All the people she’d ever heard of: musicians and writers, philosophers and movie stars, politicians and serial killers. They weren’t even dead; their lives didn’t lie in her past, whole and comprehensible. They were scattered around her like dust: meaningless, disconnected.

Everything she’d ever known had been ground down into random noise.

Durham hesitated, then put his arms around her clumsily. She wanted to hurt him, but instead she clung to him and wept, teeth clenched, fists tight, shuddering with rage and grief.

He said, “You’re not going to lose your mind. You can live any life you want to, here. Seven thousand years means nothing; we haven’t lost the old culture—we still have all the libraries, the archives, the databases. And there are thousands of people who’ll want to meet you; people who respect you for what you’ve done. You’re a myth; you’re a hero of Elysium; you’re the sleeping eighteenth founder. We’ll hold a festival in honor of your awakening.”

Maria pushed him away. “I don’t want that. I don’t want any of that.”

“All right. It’s up to you.”

She closed her eyes and huddled against the wall. She knew she must have looked like a petulant child, but she didn’t care. She said fiercely, “You’ve had the last word. The last laugh. You’ve brought me to life just to rub my nose in the proof of your precious beliefs. And now I want to go back to sleep. Forever. I want all of this to vanish.”

Durham was silent for a while. Then he said, “You can do that, if you really want to. Once I’ve shown you what you’ve inherited, once I’ve shown you how to control it, you’ll have the power to seal yourself off from the rest of Elysium. If you choose sleep, then nobody will ever be able to wake you.