Permutation City

Maria felt a surge of anger. She could scarcely believe that she’d ever swallowed the line about being woken to share in the glory of contact—and being used by Durham was no great shock; it was just like old times—but having been resurrected, not for her expertise, not for her status, but so he could dig a tunnel through her backyard…

She said bitterly, “Why do you need to break into the Autoverse? Is there a race going on that nobody’s bothered to tell me about? Bored fucking immortals battling it out to make the first unauthorized contact with the Lambertians? Have you turned xenobiology into a new Olympian sport?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“No? What, then? I’m dying to know.” Maria tried to read his face, for what it was worth. He allowed himself to appear ashamed—but he also looked grimly determined, as if he really did believe that he’d had no choice.

It hit her suddenly. “You think… there’s some kind of risk to Elysium, from the Autoverse?”

“Yes.”

“I see. So you woke me in time to share the danger? How thoughtful.”

“Maria, I’m sorry. If there’d been another way, I would have let you sleep forever—”

She started laughing and shivering at the same time. Durham placed one palm flat against the screen; she was still angry with him, but she let him reach through the terminal from his daylit room and put his hand on hers.

She said, “Why do you have to act in secret? Can’t you persuade the others to agree to stop running the Autoverse? They must realize that it wouldn’t harm the Lambertians; it would launch them as surely as it launched Elysium. There’s no question of genocide. All right, it would be a loss to the Autoverse scholars—but how many of those can there be? What does Planet Lambert mean to the average Elysian? It’s just one more kind of entertainment.”

“I’ve already tried to shut it down. I’m authorized to set the running speed relative to Standard Time—and to freeze the whole Autoverse, temporarily, if I see the need to stem the information flow, to let us catch up with rapid developments.”

“So what happened? They made you restart it?”

“No. I never managed to freeze it. It can’t be done anymore. The clock rate can’t be slowed past a certain point; the software ignores the instructions. Nothing happens.”

Maria felt a deep chill spread out from the base of her spine. “Ignores them how? That’s impossible.”

“It would be impossible if everything was working—so, obviously, something’s failed. The question is, at what level? I can’t believe that the control software is suddenly revealing a hidden bug after all this time. If it’s not responding the way it should, then the processors running it aren’t behaving correctly. So either they’ve been damaged somehow… or the cellular automaton itself has changed. I think the JVC rules are being undermined—or subsumed into something larger.”

“Do you have any hard evidence?”

“No. I’ve rerun the old validation experiments, the ones I ran during the launch, and they still work— wherever I’ve tried them—but I can’t even instruct the processors running the Autoverse to diagnose themselves, let alone probe what’s happening there at the lowest level. I don’t even know if the problem is confined to the region, or if it’s spreading out slowly… or if it’s already happening everywhere, but the effects are too subtle to pick up. You know the only way to validate the rules is with special apparatus. So what do I do? Disassemble half the processors in Elysium, and build test chambers in their place? And even if I could prove that the rules were being broken, how would that help?”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Only Repetto and Zemansky. If it became public knowledge, I don’t know what would happen.”

Maria was outraged. “What gives you the right to keep this to yourselves? Some people might panic… but what are you afraid of? Riots? Looting? The more people who know about the problem, the more likely it is that someone will come up with a solution.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps the mere fact that more people know would make things worse.”

Maria absorbed that in silence. The sunlight spilling through the terminal cast radial shadows around her; the room looked like a medieval woodcut of an alchemist discovering the philosopher’s stone.

Durham said, “Do you know why I chose the Autoverse in the first place—instead of real-world physics?”

“Less computation. Easier to seed with life. My brilliant work with A. lamberti.”

“No nuclear processes. No explanation for the origins of the elements. I thought: In the unlikely event that the planet yielded intelligent life, they’d still only be able to make sense of themselves on our terms. It all seemed so remote and improbable, then. It never occurred to me that they might miss the laws that we know are laws, and circumvent the whole problem.”

“They haven’t settled on any kind of theory, yet. They might still come up with a cellular automaton model —complete with the need for a creator.”

“They might. But what if they don’t?”

Maria’s throat was dry. The numbing abstractions were losing their hypnotic power; she was beginning to feel all too real: too corporeal, too vulnerable. Good timing: finally embracing the illusion of possessing solid flesh and blood—just as the foundations of this universe seemed ready to turn to quicksand.

She said, “You tell me. I’m tired of guessing what’s going on in your head.”

“We can’t shut them down. I think that proves that they’re already affecting Elysium. If they successfully explain their origins in a way which contradicts the Autoverse rules, then that may distort the JVC rules. Perhaps only in the region where the Autoverse is run—or perhaps everywhere. And if the TVC rules are pulled out from under us—”

Maria baulked. “That’s… like claiming that a VR environment could alter the real-world laws of physics in order to guarantee its own internal consistency. Even with thousands of Copies in VR environments, that never happened back on Earth.”

“No—but which is most like the real world: Elysium, or the Autoverse?” Durham laughed, without bitterness. “We’re all still patchwork Copies, most of us in private fantasy lands. Our bodies are ad hoc approximations. Our cities are indestructible wallpaper. The “laws of physics” of all the environments in Elysium contradict each other—and themselves—a billion times a day. Ultimately, yes, everything runs on the TVC processors, it’s all consistent with the TVC rules—but level after level is sealed off, made invisible to the next, made irrelevant.

“On Planet Lambert, everything that happens is intimately tied to one set of physical laws, applied uniformly, everywhere. And they’ve had three billion years of that. We may not know what the deepest laws are, anymore, but every event the Lambertians experience is part of a coherent whole. If there’s any conflict between the two versions of reality, we can’t rely on our own version taking precedence.”

Maria couldn’t argue for patchwork VR holding up against the deep logic of the Autoverse. She said, “Then surely the safest thing would be to ensure that there is no conflict. Stop observing the Autoverse. Give up all plans of making contact. Isolate the two explanations. Keep them from clashing.”

Durham said flatly, “No. We’re already in conflict. Why else can’t we shut them down?”

“I don’t know.” Maria looked away. “If the worst comes to the worst… can’t we start again? Construct a new Garden-of-Eden configuration? Launch ourselves again, without the Autoverse?”

“If we have to.” He added, “If we think we can trust the TVC universe to do everything it’s programmed to do—without altering the launch process, fouling it up… or even passing on the modified laws which we think we’re escaping.”

Maria looked out at the City. Buildings were not collapsing, the illusion was not decaying. She said, “If we can’t trust in that, what’s left?”

Durham said grimly, “Nothing. If we don’t know how this universe works anymore, we’re powerless.”

She pulled her hand free. “So what do you want to do? You think if you have access to more of the Autoverse than the data channels running out from the hub, you can make the TVC rules apply? One whole face of the pyramid