Permutation City

PART TWO

Permutation City

23

Maria woke from dreamless sleep, clearheaded, tranquil. She opened her eyes and looked around. The bed, the room, were unfamiliar; both were large and luxurious. Everything appeared unnaturally pristine, unsullied by human habitation, like an expensive hotel room. She was puzzled, but unperturbed; an explanation seemed to be on the verge of surfacing. She was wearing a nightdress she'd never seen before in her life.

She suddenly remembered the Landau Clinic. Chatting with the technicians. Borrowing the marker pen. The tour of the recovery rooms. The anesthetist asking her to count.

She pulled her hands out from beneath the sheet. Her left palm was blank; the comforting message she'd written there was gone. She felt the blood drain from her face.

Before she had a chance to think, Durham stepped into the room. For a moment, she was too shocked to make a sound -- then she screamed at him, 'What have you done to me? I'm the Copy, aren't I? You're running the Copy!' Trapped in the launch software, with two minutes to live?

Durham said quietly, 'Yes, you're the Copy.'

'How? How did you do it? How could I let it happen?' She stared at him, desperate for a reply, enraged more than anything else by the thought that they might both vanish before she'd heard the explanation, before she understood how he'd broken through all of her elaborate safeguards. But Durham just stood by the doorway looking bemused and embarrassed -- as if he'd anticipated a reaction like this, but couldn't quite credit it now that it was happening.

Finally, she said, 'This isn't the launch, is it? This is later. You're another version. You stole me, you're running me later.'

'I didn't steal you.' He hesitated, then added cautiously, 'I think you know exactly where you are. And I agonized about waking you -- but I had to do it. There's too much going on here that you'll want to see, want to be a part of; I couldn't let you sleep through it all. That would have been unforgivable.'

Maria disregarded everything he'd said. 'You kept my scan file after the launch. You duplicated it, somehow.'

'No. The only place your scan file data ever went was the Garden-of-Eden configuration. As agreed. And now you're in Permutation City. In the TVC universe -- now commonly known as Elysium. Running on nothing but its own laws.'

Maria sat up in bed slowly, bringing her knees up to her chest, trying to accept the situation without panicking, without falling apart. Durham was insane, unpredictable. Dangerous. When was she going to get that into her skull? In the flesh, she could probably have broken his fucking neck if she had to, to defend herself -- but if he controlled this environment, she was powerless: he could rape her, torture her, do anything at all. The very idea of him attacking her still seemed ludicrous -- but she couldn't rely on the way he'd treated her in the past to count for anything. He was a liar and a kidnapper. She didn't know him at all.

Right now, though, he was being as civilized as ever; he seemed intent on keeping up the charade. She was afraid to test this veneer of hospitality -- but she forced herself to say evenly, 'I want to use a terminal.'

Durham gestured at the space above the bed, and a terminal appeared. Maria's heart sank; she realized that she'd been hanging on to the slender hope that she might have been human. And that was still possible. Durham himself had once been memory-wiped and fooled into thinking he was a Copy, when he was merely a visitor. Or at least he'd claimed that it had happened, in another world.

She tried half a dozen numbers, starting with Francesca's, ending with Aden's. The terminal declared them all invalid. She couldn't bring herself to try her own. Durham watched in silence. He seemed to be caught between genuine sympathy and a kind of clinical fascination -- as if an attempt to make a few phone calls cast doubt on her sanity; as if she was engaged in some bizarre, psychotic behavior worthy of the closest scrutiny: peering behind a mirror in search of the objects seen in the reflection; talking back to a television program . . . or making calls on a toy phone.

Maria pushed the floating machine away angrily; it moved easily, but came to a halt as soon as she took her hands off it. Patchwork VR and its physics-of-convenience seemed like the final insult.

She said, 'Do you think I'm stupid? What does a dummy terminal prove?'

'Nothing. So why don't you apply your own criteria?' He said, 'Central computer,' and the terminal flashed up an icon-studded menu, headed permutation city computing facility. 'Not many people use this interface, these days; it's the original version, designed before the launch. But it still plugs you into as much computing power as the latest co-personality links.'

He showed Maria a text file. She recognized it immediately; it was a program she'd written herself, to solve a large, intentionally difficult, set of Diophantine equations. The output of this program was the key they'd agreed upon to unlock Durham's access to the other Copies, 'after' the launch.

He ran it. It spat out its results immediately: a screenful of numbers, the smallest of which was twenty digits long. On any real-world computer, it should have taken years.

Maria was unimpressed. 'You could have frozen us while the program was running, making it seem like no time had passed. Or you could have generated the answers in advance.' She gestured at the terminal. 'I expect you're faking all of this: you're not talking to a genuine operating system, you're not really running the program at all.'

'Feel free to alter some parameters in the equations, and try again.'

She did. The modified program 'ran' just as quickly, churning out a new set of answers. She laughed sourly. 'So what am I supposed to do now? Verify all this in my head? You could put any bullshit you liked on the screen; I wouldn't know the difference. And if I wrote another program to check the results, you could fake its operation, too. You control this whole environment, don't you? So I can't trust anything. Whatever I do to try to test your claims, you can intervene and make it go your way. Is that why you wanted my scan file, all along? So you could lock me in here and bombard me with lies -- finally 'prove' all your mad ideas to someone?'

'You're being paranoid now.'

'Am I? You're the expert.'

She looked around the luxurious prison cell. Red velvet curtains stirred in a faint breeze. She slipped out of bed and crossed the room, ignoring Durham; the more she argued with him, the harder it was to be physically afraid of him. He'd chosen his form of torture, and he was sticking to it.

The window looked out on a forest of glistening towers -- no doubt correctly rendered according to all the laws of optics, but still too slick to be real . . . like some nineteen twenties Expressionist film set. She'd seen the sketches; this was Permutation City -- whatever hardware it was running on. She looked down. They were seventy or eighty stories up, the street was all but invisible, but just below the window, a dozen meters to the right, a walkway stretched across to an adjacent building, and she could see the puppet citizens, chatting together in twos and threes as they strode toward their imaginary destinations. All of this looked expensive -- but slowdown could buy a lot of subjective computing power, if that was the trade-off you wanted to make. How much time had passed in the outside world? Years? Decades?

Had she managed to save Francesca?

Durham said, 'You think I've kidnapped your scan file, and run this whole city, solely for the pleasure of deceiving you?'

'It's the simplest explanation.'