Permutation City

'You've run this on yourself?'

She'd laughed. 'Yes. Out of curiosity. But it found nothing to change in me. I'd already made up my mind. Even on the outside, I knew this was what I wanted.'

'So . . . I press a button and there's someone new sitting here? One instant synthetic satisfied customer? I annihilate myself, just like that?'

'You're the one who jumped off a cliff.'

'No. I'm the one who didn't.'

'You won't 'annihilate yourself.' You'll only change as much as you have to. And you'll still call yourself David Hawthorne. What more can you ask for? What more have you ever done?'

They'd talked it through for hours, debating the fine philosophical and moral points; the difference between 'naturally' accepting his situation, and imposing acceptance upon himself. In the end, though, when he'd made the decision, it had seemed like just another part of the dream, just another inconsequential fiction. In that sense, the old David Hawthorne had been true to his beliefs -- even as he rewired them out of existence.

Kate had been wrong about one thing. Despite the perfect continuity of his memories, he'd felt compelled to mark the transition by choosing a new name, plucking the whimsical monosyllable out of thin air.

The 'minimum possible alteration'? Perhaps if he had ended up less radically Solipsist Nation, far more of his personality would have to have been distorted for him to have been convinced at all. A few bold necessary cuts had squared the circle, instead of a thousand finicky mutilations.

That first change, though, had cleared the way for many more, a long series of self-directed mutations. Peer (by choice) had no patience with nostalgia or sentimentality; if any part of his personality offended him, he struck it out. Some traits had (most likely) vanished forever: a horde of petty jealousies, vanities, misgivings and pointless obsessions; a tendency to irrational depression and guilt. Others came and went. Peer had acquired, removed and restored a variety of talents, mood predispositions and drives; cravings for knowledge, art and physical experience. In a few subjective days, he could change from an ascetic bodiless student of Sumerian archaeology, to a hedonistic gastronome delighting in nothing more than the preparation and consumption of lavishly simulated feasts, to a disciplined practitioner of Shotokan karate.

A core remained; certain values, certain emotional responses, certain aesthetic sensibilities had survived these transitions unscathed.

As had the will to survive itself.

Peer had once asked himself: Was that kernel of invariants -- and the more-or-less unbroken thread of memory -- enough? Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he'd paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way?

There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew -- or believed -- that they'd once been David Hawthorne.

And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough.

12

(Rip, tie, cut toy man)

JUNE 2045

Paul switched on the terminal and made contact with his old organic self. The djinn looked tired and frayed; all the begging and bribery required to set up the latest stage of the experiment must have taken its toll. Paul felt more alive than he'd ever felt, in any incarnation; his stomach was knotted with something like fear, but the electric tingling of his skin felt more like the anticipation of triumph. His body was about to be mutilated, carved up beyond recognition -- and yet he knew he would survive, suffer no harm, feel no pain.

Squeak. 'Experiment three, trial zero. Baseline data. All computations performed by processor cluster number four six two, Hitachi Supercomputer Facility, Tokyo.'

'One. Two. Three.' It was nice to be told where he was, at last; Paul had never visited Japan before. 'Four. Five. Six.' And on his own terms, he still hadn't. The view out the window was Sydney, not Tokyo; why defer to the external geography, when it made no difference at all? 'Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.'

Squeak. 'Trial number one. Model partitioned into five hundred sections, run on five hundred processor clusters, distributed globally.'

Paul counted. Five hundred clusters. Five only for the crudely modeled external world; all the rest were allocated to his body -- and most to the brain. He lifted his hand to his eyes -- and the information flow that granted him motor control and sight traversed tens of thousands of kilometers of optical cable. There was no (perceptible) delay; each part of him simply hibernated when necessary, waiting for the requisite feedback from around the world.

It was, of course, pure lunacy, computationally and economically; Paul guessed that he was costing at least a hundred times as much as usual -- not quite five hundred, since each cluster's capacity was only being partly used -- and his slow-down factor had probably risen from seventeen to as much as fifty. Once, it had been hoped that devoting hundreds of computers to each Copy might improve the slowdown problem, not worsen it -- but the bottlenecks in shifting data between processor clusters kept even the richest Copies from reducing the factor below seventeen. It didn't matter how many supercomputers you owned, because splitting yourself between them wasted more time on communications than was saved by the additional computing power.

Squeak. 'Trial number two. One thousand sections, one thousand clusters.'

Brain the size of a planet -- and here I am, counting to ten. Paul recalled the perennial -- naive and paranoid -- fear that all the networked computers of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind; but he was, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on Earth. He didn't feel much like a digital Gaia, though. He felt exactly like an ordinary human being sitting in a room a few meters wide.

Squeak. 'Trial number three. Model partitioned into fifty sections and twenty time sets, implemented on one thousand clusters.'

'One. Two. Three.' Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull -- and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called 'the present'?

Maybe not -- although in the eyes of some hypothetical space traveler the whole planet was virtually frozen in time, and flat as a pancake. Relativity declared that this point of view was perfectly valid -- but Paul's was not. Relativity permitted continuous deformation, but no cutting and pasting. Why not? Because it had to allow for cause and effect. Influences had to be localized, traveling from point to point at a finite velocity; chop up space-time and rearrange it, and the causal structure would fall apart.

What if you were an observer, though, who had no causal structure? A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forth through causally respectable 'real time'? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with no right to see the universe your way? Ultimately, what difference was there between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern?