Permutation City

Maria said, 'Ten.'

She dreamed of arriving on Francesca's doorstep with a suitcase full of money. As she walked down the hall behind her mother, the case fell open, and hundred-dollar bills fluttered out and filled the air like confetti.

Francesca turned to her, radiant with health. She said tenderly, 'You shouldn't have, my darling. But I understand. You can't take it with you.'

Maria laughed. 'You can't take it with you.'

Her father was in the living room, dressed for his wedding day, although not as young. He beamed and held out his arms to Maria. His parents, and Francesca's parents, stood behind him -- and as Maria approached, she saw from on high that behind her grandparents were cousins and aunts, great-grandparents and great-aunts, row after row of relatives and ancestors, stretching back into the depths of the house, laughing and chattering. The money had brought them all back to life. How could she have been so selfish as to think of denying them this grand reunion?

Maria threaded her way through the crowd, greeting people she'd never known existed. Handsome, dark- eyed seventh cousins kissed her hand and whispered compliments in a beautiful dialect she didn't understand. Veiled widows in elegant black dresses stood arm-in-arm with their resurrected husbands. Children weaved between the adults' legs, stealing food by the handful and cramming it into their mouths on the run.

The clinic's neurologist turned out to be a distant relative. Maria cupped her hands to the woman's ear and shouted over the noise of the party: 'Have I been scanned yet? Will my Copy remember any of this?' The neurologist explained that the scan only captured memories laid down permanently as changes in synaptic strengths; the fleeting electrochemistry of this dream would be lost forever. She added cryptically, 'Lost to whoever's not having it.'

Maria felt herself waking. Suddenly afraid that she might be the Copy, she struggled to remain in the dream -- as if she could force her way back through the crowd, back through the plot, and leave by a different exit. But the scene grew vague and unconvincing; she could feel the heavy presence of her waking body: her aching shoulders, her swollen tongue.

She opened her eyes. She was alone in the Landau Clinic's cheerfully decorated recovery room; she'd been wheeled through for a patient's-eye view before being given the anesthetic, so she'd know exactly what to expect. It took a few seconds for the truths of the dream to fade, though. Her father was dead. Her grandparents were dead. There'd been no grand reunion. There never would be.

As for the Copy . . . her scan file didn't even exist, yet; the raw tomographic data would take hours to be processed into a high-resolution anatomical map. And she could still change her mind and keep the results out of Durham's hands altogether. He'd paid the clinic for the scan, but if she refused to hand over the file there'd be nothing he could do about it.

The recovery room was softly lit, lined with odorless blue and orange flowers. Maria closed her eyes. If Durham's logic meant anything, raw tomographic data could probably process itself, find itself conscious, as easily as any Copy who'd been chopped up and run at random. There was no need for a finished scan file.

No need even to be scanned; the very same data surely existed, scattered about the universe, whether or not it was ever plucked from her brain and assembled in what she thought of as one place.

In fact, if Durham was right -- if the events he believed would take place in his TVC universe could find themselves in the dust -- then those events would happen, regardless. It could make no difference what anyone did in this world. The whole Garden- of-Eden project was superfluous. Every permutation of the dust which was capable of perceiving itself, making sense of itself, would do just that. And all she would have achieved by refusing to be scanned would have been to deny the Maria of that permutation a history which seemed to overlap with her own particular life. While a third woman -- in another world, another permutation -- would have taken her place in that role.

Maria opened her eyes. She'd just recalled the first thing she'd meant to do on waking. Every scanner was programmed to recognize -- in real time, before all the arduous data processing that followed -- the magnetic resonance spectrum of four or five special dyes, which could be used for alignment and identification. The scanning technician had obligingly loaned her a 'number three' marker pen -- and instructed the scanner to blind itself to that particular dye.

She pulled her hands out from under the sheets. Her left palm still read: you are not the copy.

She licked her fingers and started rubbing the unnecessary words away.

+ + +

Maria arrived at the north Sydney flat around half past twelve. Two terminals were set up side by side on Durham's kitchen table; other than that, the place was as bare as it had been the last time she'd called.

Although it wasn't, technically, necessary, Maria had insisted that she and Durham be in the same physical location throughout what he called the 'launch' -- the running of the first moments of the TVC universe as software on a real computer, the act which would supposedly seed an independent, self-sustaining universe, taking up where the version relying on real-world hardware left off. At least this way she could monitor the keys he pressed and the words he spoke, without having to wonder if she was being shown what was really going on at that level. She had no idea what she was guarding against -- but Durham was a highly intelligent man with some very strange beliefs, and she had no reason to feel confident that he'd revealed the full extent of his delusions. His clients had confirmed part of his story -- and they would have had the resources to check much more of it than she had -- but Durham might still have lied to them about what was going on inside his head.

She wanted to trust him, she wanted to believe that she'd finally reached the truth -- but it was hard to put any limits on how wrong she might yet be. She felt she'd known him too long to seriously fear for her physical safety -- but the possibility remained that everything she thought she'd understood about the man would turn out, once again, to have been utterly misconceived. If he came away from the kitchen sink brandishing a carving knife, calmly announcing his intention to sacrifice her to the Spirit of the New Moon, she'd have no right to feel betrayed, or surprised. She couldn't expect to live off the proceeds of insanity, and also take for granted the usual parameters of civilized behavior.

The flesh-and-blood Durham was only half the problem. Once the program simulating a TVC cellular automaton was started, the plan was that neither she nor Durham would intervene at all. Any external tinkering would violate the automaton's rules -- the fundamental laws of the new universe -- making a mockery of the whole endeavor. Only Durham's Copy, being run on the simulated TVC computers, could act in harmony with those laws. They would always have the option of aborting the project, pulling the plug -- but in every other respect, the Copy would be in control.

(Of course, aborting the simulation if something went wrong would not -- in Durham's eyes -- prevent the spawning of an independent universe beyond their control . . . but it might leave them with enough unspent computer time for a second attempt.)

With her hands tied once the universe was running, her only way to influence what did or didn't happen was through the Garden-of-Eden configuration -- which included all the programs the TVC lattice would initially run. Maria had written part of this internal launch software herself; Durham had written, or commissioned, the rest, but she'd checked it all personally. And she'd built in a safeguard: all the Copies but Durham's would be blocked from running until the TVC processors had solved a suitably intractable mathematical equation. Maria had estimated that the world's combined computing resources couldn't have cracked the problem in under a decade; thirty million dollars' worth, minus overheads, wouldn't come close. That was no obstacle in the eyes of Durham and his followers; the ever-growing resources of the burgeoning TVC universe would make light work of it, solving the equation within a week or two of the launch. But short of any such universe coming into existence -- and so long as the test wasn't circumvented -- there was no chance of a second Maria Deluca, or anyone else, waking. It was her guarantee that there'd be no virtual Jonestown. Just one lone prophet flickering in and out of existence.

Durham made instant coffee. Maria surveyed the spartan room. She said, 'This isn't good enough, you know. We should have two hundred people wearing headsets, and a giant screen taking up an entire wall. Like one of the old NASA missions.'

Durham spoke over the sound of boiling water. 'Don't worry; we'll be using more computing power per