Permutation City

culture, until a single bacterium filled the workspace. Color-coded by “health,” it was a featureless blue blob; but even when she switched to a standard chemical map there was no real structure visible, apart from the cell wall— no nucleus, no organelles, no flagella; A. lamberti wasn’t much more than a sac of protoplasm. She played with the representation, making the fine strands of the unraveled chromosomes appear; highlighting regions where protein synthesis was taking place; rendering visible the concentration gradients of nutrose and its immediate metabolites. Computationally expensive views; she cursed herself (as always) for wasting money, but failed (as always) to shut down everything but the essential analysis software (and the Autoverse itself), failed to sit gazing into thin air, waiting patiently for a result.

Instead, she zoomed in closer, switched to atomic colors (but left the pervasive aqua molecules invisible), temporarily halted time to freeze the blur of thermal motion, then zoomed in still further until the vague specks scattered throughout the workspace sharpened into the intricate tangles of long- chain lipids, polysaccharides, peptidoglycans. Names stolen unmodified from their real-world analogues—but screw it, who wanted to spend their life devising a whole new biochemical nomenclature? Maria was sufficiently impressed that Lambert had come up with distinguishable colors for all thirty-two Autoverse atoms, and unambiguous names to match.

She tracked through the sea of elaborate molecules—all of them synthesized by A. lamberti from nothing but nutrose, aqua, pneuma, and a few trace elements. Unable to spot any mutose molecules, she invoked Maxwell’s Demon and asked it to find one. The perceptible delay before the program responded always drove home to her the sheer quantity of information she was playing with—and the way in which it was organized. A traditional biochemical simulation would have been keeping track of every molecule, and could have told her the exact location of the nearest altered sugar almost instantaneously. For a traditional simulation, this catalogue of molecules would have been the “ultimate truth”—nothing would have “existed,” except by virtue of an entry in the Big List. In contrast, the “ultimate truth” of the Autoverse was a vast array of cubic cells of subatomic dimensions—and the primary software dealt only with these cells, oblivious to any larger structures. Atoms in the Autoverse were like hurricanes in an atmospheric model (only far more stable); they arose from the simple rules governing the smallest elements of the system. There was no need to explicitly calculate their behavior; the laws governing individual cells drove everything that happened at higher levels. Of course, a swarm of demons could have been used to compile and maintain a kind of census of atoms and molecules—at great computational expense, rather defeating the point. And the Autoverse itself would have churned on, regardless.

Maria locked her viewpoint to the mutose molecule, then restarted time, and everything but that one hexagonal ring smeared into translucence. The molecule itself was only slightly blurred; the current representational conventions made the average positions of the atoms clearly visible, with the deviations due to bond vibration merely suggested by faint ghostly streaks.

She zoomed in until the molecule filled the workspace. She didn’t know what she was hoping to see: a successful mutant epimerase enzyme suddenly latch onto the ring and shift the aberrant blue-red spike back into the horizontal position? Questions of probability aside, it would have been over before she even knew it had begun. That part was easily fixed: she instructed Maxwell’s Demon to keep a rolling buffer of a few million clock ticks of the molecule’s history, and to replay it at a suitable rate if any structural change occurred.

Embedded in a “living” organism, the mutose ring looked exactly the same as the prototype she’d handled minutes before: red, green and blue billiard balls, linked by thin white rods. It seemed like an insult for even a bacterium to be composed of such comic-book molecules. The viewing software was constantly inspecting this tiny region of the Autoverse, identifying the patterns that constituted atoms, checking for overlaps between them to decide which was bonded to which, and then displaying a nice, neat, stylized picture of its conclusions. Like the handling rules which took this representation at face value, it was a useful fiction, but…

Maria slowed down the Autoverse clock by a factor of ten billion, then popped up the viewing menu and hit the button marked RAW. The tidy assembly of spheres and rods melted into a jagged crown of writhing polychromatic liquid metal, waves of color boiling away from the vertices to collide, merge, flow back again, wisps licking out into space.

She slowed down time a further hundredfold, almost freezing the turmoil, and then zoomed in to the same degree. The individual cubic cells which made up the Autoverse were visible now, changing state about once a second. Each cell’s “state”—a whole number between zero and two hundred and fifty-five—was recomputed every clock cycle, according to a simple set of rules applied to its own previous state, and the states of its closest neighbors in the three-dimensional grid. The cellular automaton which was the Autoverse did nothing whatsoever but apply these rules uniformly to every cell; these were its fundamental “laws of physics.” Here, there were no daunting quantum-mechanical equations to struggle with—just a handful of trivial arithmetic operations, performed on integers. And yet the impossibly crude laws of the Autoverse still managed to give rise to “atoms” and “molecules” with a “chemistry” rich enough to sustain “life.”

Maria followed the fate of a cluster of golden cells spreading through the lattice—the cells themselves didn’t move, by definition, but the pattern advanced—infiltrating and conquering a region of metallic blue, only to be invaded and consumed in turn by a wave of magenta.

If the Autoverse had a “true” appearance, this was it. The palette which assigned a color to each state was still “false”—still completely arbitrary—but at least this view revealed the elaborate three-dimensional chess game which underpinned everything else.

Everything except the hardware, the computer itself.

Maria reverted to the standard clock rate, and a macroscopic view of her twenty-one Petri dishes—just as a message popped up in the foreground:

JSN regrets to advise you that your resources have been diverted to a higher bidder. A snapshot of your task has been preserved in mass storage, and will be available to you when you next log on. Thank you for using our services.

Maria sat and swore angrily for half a minute—then stopped abruptly, and buried her face in her hands. She shouldn’t have been logged on in the first place. It was insane, squandering her savings playing around with mutant A. lamberti—but she kept on doing it. The Autoverse was so seductive, so hypnotic… so addictive.

Whoever had elbowed her off the network had done her a favor—and she’d even have her fifty-dollar log-on fee refunded, since she’d been thrown right out, not merely slowed down to a snail’s pace.

Curious to discover the identity of her unintentional benefactor, she logged on directly to the QIPS Exchange—the marketplace where processing power was bought and sold. The connection to JSN had passed through the Exchange, transparently; her terminal was programmed to bid at the market rate automatically, up to a certain ceiling. Right now, though, some outfit calling itself Operation Butterfly was buying QIPS—quadrillions of instructions per second—at six hundred times that ceiling, and had managed to acquire one hundred percent of the planet’s traded computing power.

Maria was stunned; she’d never seen anything like it. The pie chart of successful bidders—normally a flickering kaleidoscope of thousands of needle-thin slices—was a solid, static disk of blue. Aircraft would not be dropping out of the sky, world commerce would not have ground to a halt… but tens of thousands of academic and industrial researchers relied on the Exchange every day for tasks it wasn’t worth owning the power to perform in- house. Not to mention a few thousand Copies. For one user to muscle in and outbid everyone else was unprecedented. Who needed that much computing power? Big business, big science, the military? All had their own private hardware—usually in excess of their requirements. If they traded at all, it was to sell their surplus capacity.

Operation Butterfly? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Maria logged on to a news system and searched for reports which mentioned the phrase. The most recent was three months ago:

Kuala Lumpar—Monday, August 8th, 2050: A meeting of environmental ministers from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) today agreed to proceed with the latest stage of Operation Butterfly, a controversial plan to attempt to limit the damage and loss of life caused by Greenhouse Typhoons in the