Permutation City

away had granted them, not a few hundred years in a billionaires’ sanctuary, but a descent into the abyss of immortality. The Copy who had persuaded David Hawthorne to turn his back on the physical world; the committed follower—even before her death—of the Solipsist Nation philosophy; the woman who had needed no brain rewiring or elaborate external contrivances to accept her software incarnation… now acted more and more like a flesh-and- blood-wannabe—or rather, Elysian-wannabe—year by year. And there was no need for it. Their tiny slice of infinity was as infinite as the whole; ultimately, there was nothing the Elysians could do that Kate couldn’t.

Except walk among them as an equal, and that was what she seemed to covet the most.

True, the Elysians had deliberately set out to achieve the logical endpoint of everything she’d ever believed Copies should be striving for—while she’d merely hitched a ride by mistake. Their world would “always” (Elysian instant compared to Elysian instant) be bigger and faster than her own. So “naturally”—according to archaic human values which she hadn’t had the sense to erase—she wanted to be part of the main game. But Peer still found it absurd that she spent her life envying them, when she could have generated—or even launched—her own equally complex, equally populous society, and turned her back on the Elysians as thoroughly as they’d turned their back on Earth.

It was her choice. Peer took it in his stride, along with all their other disagreements. If they were going to spend eternity together, he believed they’d resolve their problems eventually—if they could be resolved at all. It was early days yet. As it always would be.

He rolled over and looked down at the City—or the strange recursive map of the City which they made do with, buried as they were in the walls and foundations of the real thing. Malcolm Carter’s secret parasitic software wasn’t blind to its host; they could spy on what was going on in the higher levels of the program which surreptitiously ran them, even though they couldn’t affect anything which happened there. They could snatch brief, partial recordings of activity in the real City, and play them back in a limited duplicate environment. It was a bit like… being the widely separated letters in the text of Ulysses which read: Peer and Kate read, “Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin.” If not quite so crude an abridgment.

Certainly, the view from the air was still breathtaking; Peer had to concede that it was probably indistinguishable from the real thing. The sun was setting over the ocean as they descended, and the Ulam Falls glistened in the east like a sheet of amber set in the granite face of Mount Vine. In the foothills, a dozen silver needles and obsidian prisms, fanciful watchtowers, caught the light and scattered it between them. Peer followed the river down, through lush tropical forests, across dark plains of grassland, into the City itself.

The buildings on the outskirts were low and sprawling, becoming gradually taller and narrower; the profile swept up in a curve which echoed the shape of Mount Vine. Closer to the centre, a thousand crystalline walkways linked the City’s towers at every level, connections so dense and stellated as to make it seem possible that every building was joined, directly, to all the rest. That wasn’t true—but the sense that it might have been was still compelling.

Decorative crowds filled the streets and walkways: mindless puppets obeying the simplest rules, but looking as purposeful and busy as any human throng. A strange adornment, perhaps—but not much stranger than having buildings and streets at all. Most Elysians merely visited this place, but last time Peer had concerned himself with such things, a few hundred of them—mainly third-generation—had taken up inhabiting the City full-time: adopting every detail of its architecture and geography as fixed parameters, swearing fidelity to its Euclidian distances. Others—mainly first-generation—had been appalled by the behavior of this sect. It was strange how “reversion” was the greatest taboo amongst the oldest Elysians, who were so conservative in most other ways. Maybe they were afraid of becoming homesick.

Kate said, “Town Hall.”

He followed her down through the darkening air. The City always smelled sweet to Peer; sweet but artificial, like a newly unwrapped electronic toy, all microchips and plastic, from David Hawthorne’s childhood. They spiraled around the central golden tower, the City’s tallest, weaving their way between the transparent walkways. Playing Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Peer had long ago given up arguing with Kate about the elaborate routes she chose for entering the reconstruction; she ran this peephole on the City out of her own time, and she controlled access to the environment completely. He could either put up with her rules, or stay away altogether. And the whole point of being here was to please her.

They alighted on the paved square outside the Town Hall’s main entrance. Peer was startled to recognize one of the fountains as a scaled-up version of Malcolm Carter’s demonstration for his algorithmic piggy-back tricks: a cherub wrestling a snake. He must have noticed it before—he’d stood on this spot a hundred times—but if so, he’d forgotten. His memory was due for maintenance; it was a while since he’d increased the size of the relevant networks, and they were probably close to saturation. Simply adding new neurons slowed down recall—relative to other brain functions—making some modes of thought seem like swimming through molasses; a whole host of further adjustments were necessary to make the timing feel right. The Elysians had written software to automate this tuning process, but he disliked the results of the versions they’d shared with each other (and hence made accessible to him), so he’d written his own—but he’d yet to perfect it. Things like table legs kept getting in the way.

The square wasn’t empty, but the people around them all looked like puppets, merely strolling past. The City’s owners were already inside—and so Kate’s software, which spied on the true City and reconstructed it for the two of them, was carrying most of the burden of computing the appearance of their surroundings, now officially unobserved. He took Kate’s hand—and she allowed it, though she made her skin feel as cold as marble—and they walked into the hall.

The cavernous room was about half-full, so some eight thousand Elysians had turned up for the meeting. Peer granted himself a brief bird’s-eye view of the crowd. A variety of fashions in clothing—or lack of it—and body type were represented, certainly spanning the generations, but most people had chosen to present in more or less traditional human form. The exceptions stood out. One clique of fourth-generation Elysians displayed themselves as modified Babbage engines; the entire hall couldn’t have held one of them “to scale,” so portions of the mechanism poked through into their seating allocation from some hidden dimension. Ditto for those who’d turned up as “Searle’s Chinese Rooms”: huge troupes of individual humans (or human-shaped automatons), each carrying out a few simple tasks, which together amounted to a complete working computer. The “components” seated in the hall were Kali-armed blurs, gesticulating at invisible colleagues with coded hand movements so rapid that they seemed to merge into a static multiple exposure.

Peer had no idea how either type of system collected sound and vision from its surroundings to feed to the perfectly normal Elysians these unwieldy computers were (presumably) simulating, as the end result of all their spinning cogs and frantic hand movements—or whether the people in question experienced anything much different than they would have if they’d simply shown that standard physiological model to the world.

Pretentious fancy dress aside, there were a smattering of animal bodies visible—which may or may not have reflected their inhabitants’ true models. It could be remarkably comfortable being a lion, or even a snake—if your brain had been suitably adapted for the change. Peer had spent some time inhabiting the bodies of animals, both historical and mythical, and he’d enjoyed them all—but when the phase was over, he’d found that with very little rewiring, he could make the human form feel every bit as good. It seemed more elegant to be comfortable with his ancestral physiology. The majority of Elysians apparently agreed.

Eight thousand was a typical attendance figure—but Peer could not have said what fraction of the total population it represented. Even leaving out Callas, Shaw and Riemann—the three founders who’d remained in their own private worlds, never making contact with anyone—there might have been hundreds or thousands of members of the later generations who’d opted out of the core community without ever announcing their existence.

The ever-expanding cube of Elysium had been divided up from the outset into twenty-four everexpanding oblique pyramids; one for each of the eighteen founders and their offspring, and six for common ventures (such as Permutation City itself—but mostly Planet Lambert). Most Elysians—or at least most who used the City—had chosen to synch themselves to a common objective time rate. This Standard Time grew steadily faster against Absolute Time—the ticking of the TVC cellular automaton’s clock—so every Elysian needed a constantly growing allocation of processors to keep up; but Elysium itself was growing even faster, leaving everyone with an ever-larger surplus of computing power.

Each founder’s territory was autonomous, subdivided on his or her own terms. By now, each one could have