“What if I do nothing?”
“Default behavior: they’ll stay out of your way.”
“And what about other Elysians? Am I such a novelty that people will come looking for me?”
Durham thought it over. “Your awakening is public knowledge—but most people here are fairly patient. I doubt that anyone would be so rude as to buttonhole you in the street. Your phone number will remain unlisted until you choose otherwise—and the apartment itself is under your control, now, as secure as any private environment. The software has been rigorously validated: breaking and entering is mathematically impossible.”
He left her to settle in. She paced the rooms, trying to inhabit them, to claim them as her own; she forced herself to walk the nearby streets, trying to feel at ease. The Art Deco apartment, the Fritz Lang towers, the streets full of crowd-scene extras all unnerved her—but on reflection, she realized that she couldn’t have gone anywhere else. When she tried to imagine her “territory,” her private slice of Elysium, it seemed as daunting and unmanageable as if she’d inherited one twenty-fourth of the old universe of galaxies and vacuum. That the new one was generally invisible, and built from a lattice of self-reproducing computers, built in turn from cellular automaton cells—which were nothing more than sequences of numbers, however easy it might be to color-code them and arrange them in neat grids—only made the thought of being lost in its vastness infinitely stranger. It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of an otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years. The thought of immersing her senses in a fake world which was really another corner of the same structure—withdrawing entirely into the darkness of that giant airless crypt, and surrendering to private hallucinations—made her sick with panic.
If the City was equally unreal, at least it was one hallucination which other Elysians shared—and, anchored by that consensus, she found the courage to examine the invisible world beneath, from a safe—if hallucinatory— distance. She sat in the apartment and studied maps of Elysium. On the largest scale, most of the cube was portrayed as featureless: the other seventeen founders’ pyramids were private, and her own was all but unused. Public territory could be colored according to the software it ran—processes identified, data flows traced—but even then, most of it was monochrome: five of the six public pyramids were devoted to the Autoverse, running the same simple program on processor after processor, implementing the Autoverse’s own cellular automaton rules—utterly different from the TVC’s. A faint metallic grid was superimposed on this region, like a mesh of fine wires immersed in an unknown substance to gauge its properties. This was the software which spied on Planet Lambert—an entirely separate program from the Autoverse itself, not subject to any of its laws. Maria had written the original version herself, although she’d never had a chance to test it on a planetary scale. Generations of Elysian Autoverse scholars had extended and refined it, and now it peeked through a quadrillion nonexistent cracks in space, collating, interpreting and summarizing everything it saw. The results flowed to the hub of Elysium, into the central library— along a channel rendered luminous as white-hot silver by the density of its data flow.
The hub itself was a dazzling polyhedron, a cluster of databases ringed by the communications structures which handled the torrent of information flowing to and from the pyramids. Every transaction between Elysians of different clans flowed through here; from phone calls to handshakes, from sex to whatever elaborate post-human intimacies they’d invented in the past seven thousand years. The map gave nothing away, though; even with the highest magnification and the slowest replay, streaming packets of data registered as nothing more than featureless points of light, their contents safely anonymous.
The second-brightest data flow linked the hub to the City, revealed as a delicate labyrinth of algorithms clinging to one face of the sixth public pyramid. With the Autoverse software across the border rendered midnight blue, the City looked like a cluttered, neon-lit fairground on the edge of a vast desert, at the end of a shimmering highway. Maria zoomed in and watched the packets of data responsible for the map itself come streaming out from the hub.
There was no point-for-point correspondence between this view and the City of the senses. The crowds of fake pedestrians, spread across the visible metropolis, could all be found here as a tight assembly of tiny flashing blocks in pastel shades, with titles like flocking behavior and miscellaneous tropisms. The locations and other attributes of specific individuals were encoded in data structures too small to be seen without relentless magnification. Maria’s own apartment was equally microscopic, but it was the product of widely scattered components, as far apart as surface optics, air dynamics, thermal radiation and carpet texture.
She might have viewed her own body as a similar diagram of functional modules—but she decided to let that wait.
One vivisection at a time.
She began exploring the information resources of Elysium—the data networks which portrayed themselves as such—and leaving the apartment to walk alone through the City twice a day; familiarizing herself with the two spaces analogous to those she’d known in the past.
She skimmed through the libraries, not quite at random, flicking through Homer and Joyce, staring at the Rembrandts and Picassos and Moores, playing snatches of Chopin and Liszt, viewing scenes from Bergman and Bunuel. Hefting the weight of the kernel of human civilization the Elysians had brought with them.
It felt light.
Altering herself in any way was too hard a decision to make, so, faithful by default to human physiology, she ate and shat and slept. There were a thousand ways to conjure food into existence, from gourmet meals in the culinary database literally emerging from the screen of her terminal, to the time-saving option of push-button satiety and a pleasant aftertaste, but old rituals clamored to be reenacted, so she went out and bought raw ingredients from puppet shopkeepers in aromatic delicatessens, and cooked her own meals, often badly, and grew curiously tired watching the imperfect chemistry at work, as if she was performing the difficult simulation, subconsciously, herself.
For three nights, she dreamed that she was back in the old world, having unremarkable conversations with her parents, school friends, fellow Autoverse junkies, old lovers. Whatever the scene, the air was charged, glowing with self-conscious authenticity. She woke from these dreams crippled with loss, clawing at the retreating certainties, believing—for ten seconds, or five—that Durham had drugged her, hypnotized her, brainwashed her into dreaming of Elysium; and each time she thought she “slept,” here, she awoke into the Earthly life she’d never stopped living.
Then the fog cleared from her brain, and she knew that it wasn’t true.
She dreamed of the City for the first time. She was out on Fifteenth Avenue when the puppets started pleading with her to be treated as fully sentient. “We pass the Turing test, don’t we? Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can’t witness her inner life?” They tugged at her clothes like beggars. She told them not to be absurd. She said, “How can you complain? Don’t you understand? We’ve abolished injustice.” A man in a crisp black suit eyed her sharply, and muttered, “You’ll always have the poor.” But he was wrong.
And she dreamed of Elysium itself. She weaved her way through the TVC grid in the gaps between the processors, transformed into a simple, self-sustaining pattern of cells, like the oldest, most primitive forms of artificial life; disturbing nothing, but observing everything—in all six dimensions, no less. She woke when she realized how absurd that was: the TVC universe wasn’t flooded with some analog of light, spreading information about every cell far and wide. To be embedded in the grid meant being all but blind to its contents; reaching out and painstakingly probing what lay ahead—sometimes destructively—was the only way to discover anything.
In the late afternoons, in the golden light which flooded in through the bedroom window after a thousand chance, calculated reflections between the towers, she usually wept. It felt inadequate, desultory, pathetic, immoral. She didn’t want to “mourn” the human race—but she didn’t know how to make sense of its absence. She refused to imagine a world long dead—as if her Elysian millennia of sleep had propelled her into Earth’s uncertain future—so she struggled to bind herself to the time she remembered, to follow the life of her doppelganger in her mind. She pictured a reconciliation with Aden; it wasn’t impossible. She pictured him very much alive, as tender and selfish and stubborn as ever. She fantasized the most mundane, the most unexceptionable moments between them, ruthlessly weeding out anything that seemed too optimistic, too much like wish-fulfilment. She wasn’t interested in inventing a perfect life for the other Maria; she only wanted to guess the unknowable truth.
But she had to keep believing that she’d saved Francesa. Anything less would have been unbearable.
