Permutation City

corruption . . . it's not just destroying the TVC rules. That world was holding together. As if its own logic had taken precedence over Elysium's. As if it no longer needed us.'

Durham said flatly, 'I don't believe that.' He crouched beside the doorway, weighed down by defeat.

Maria touched his shoulder. He shrugged free. He said, 'You'd better hurry up and launch yourself. The other Elysians will have been removed from the seed, but everything else -- all the infrastructure -- should still be there. Use it.'

'Alone?'

'Make children, if you want to. It's easy; the utility programs are all in the central library.'

'And -- what? You'll do the same?'

'No.' He looked up at her and said grimly, 'I've had enough. Twenty-five lives. I thought I'd finally discovered solid ground -- but now it's all crumbling into illusions and contradictions. I'll kill myself before the whole thing falls apart: die on my own terms, leaving nothing to be explained in another permutation.'

Maria didn't know how to respond. She walked over to the interface window, to take stock of whatever was still functioning. After a while, she said, 'The Autoverse spy software has stopped working -- and the entire hub has gone dead -- but there's some last-minute summary data in the copy of the central library you made for the seed.' She hunted through Repetto's analysis and translation systems.

Durham came and stood beside her; he pointed out a highlighted icon, a stylized image of a swarm of Lambertians.

He said, 'Activate that.'

They read the analysis together. A team of Lambertians had found a set of field equations -- nothing to do with the Autoverse cellular automaton -- with thirty-two stable solutions. One for each of their atoms. And at high enough temperatures, the same equations predicted the spontaneous generation of matter -- in exactly the right proportions to explain the primordial cloud.

The dance had been judged successful. The theory was gaining ground.

Maria was torn between resentment and pride. 'Very clever -- but how will they ever explain four humanoid robots abandoned in a meadow?'

Durham seemed bleakly amused. 'They arrived in a spaceship, didn't they? Aliens must have sent them, as emissaries. There must be other stars out there -- concealed behind a suitable dust cloud.'

'Why should aliens try to tell the Lambertians about the TVC cellular automaton?'

'Maybe they believed in it. Maybe they discovered the Autoverse rules . . . but since they still couldn't explain the origin of the elements, they decided to embed the whole thing in a larger system -- another cellular automaton -- complete with immortal beings to create the Autoverse, primordial cloud and all. But the Lambertians will put them straight: there's no need for such a convoluted hypothesis.'

'And now the Autoverse is sloughing us off like dead skin.' Maria gazed at the Lambertian field equations; they were far more complex than the Autoverse rules, but they had a strange elegance all their own. She could never have invented them herself; she was sure of that.

She said, 'It's not just a matter of the Lambertians out-explaining us. The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust . . . or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole . . . or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.'

She displayed a map of Elysium. The dark stain marking processors which had ceased responding had spread out from the six public pyramids and swallowed most of the territories of Riemann, Callas, Shaw, Sanderson, Repetto and Tsukamoto. She zoomed in on the edge of the darkness; it was still growing.

She turned to Durham and pleaded, 'Come with me!'

'No. What is there left for me to do? Descend into paranoia again? Wake up wondering if I'm really nothing but a discredited myth of Planet Lambert's humanoid alien visitors?'

Maria said angrily, 'You can keep me company. Keep me sane. After all you've done to me, you owe me that much.'

Durham was unmoved. 'You don't need me for that. You'll find better ways.'

She turned back to the map, her mind going blank with panic for a moment -- then she gestured at the growing void. 'The TVC rules are dissolving, the Lambertians are destroying Elysium -- but what's controlling that process? There must be deeper rules, governing the clash of theories: deciding which explanations hold fast, and which dissolve. We can hunt for those rules. We can try to make sense of what went on here.'

Durham said sardonically, 'Onward and upward? In search of higher order?'

Maria was close to despair. He was her one link to the old world; without him, her memories would lose all meaning.

'Please! We can argue this out in the new Elysium. But there's no time now.'

He shook his head sadly. 'Maria, I'm sorry -- but I can't follow you. I'm seven thousand years old. Everything I've struggled to build is in ruins. All my certainties have evaporated. Do you know how that feels?'

Maria met his eyes and tried to understand, tried to gauge the depth of his weariness. Could she have persisted for as long as he had? Maybe the time came, for everyone, when there was no way forward, no other choice but death. Maybe the Lambertians were right, maybe 'infinity' was meaningless . . . and 'immortality' was a mirage no human should aspire to.

No human --

Maria turned on him angrily. 'Do I know how it feels? However you want it to feel. Isn't that what you told me? You have the power to choose exactly who you are. The old human shackles are gone. If you don't want the weight of your past to crush you . . . then don't let it! If you really want to die, I can't stop you -- but don't tell me that you have no choice.'

For a moment Durham looked stricken, as if all she'd done was compound his despair, but then something in her tirade seemed to break through to him.

He said gently, 'You really do need someone, don't you, who knows the old world?'

'Yes.' Maria blinked back tears.

Durham's expression froze abruptly, as if he'd decoupled from his body. Had he left her? Maria almost pulled free of his grip -- but then his waxwork face became animated again.

He said, 'I'll come with you.'

'What -- ?'

He beamed at her, like an idiot, like a child. 'I just made a few adjustments to my mental state. And I accept your invitation. Onward and upward.'

Maria was speechless, giddy with relief. She put her arms around him; he returned the embrace. He'd done that, for her? Reshaped himself, rebuilt himself . . .

There was no time to waste. She moved toward the control panel and hurried to prepare the launch. Durham looked on, still smiling; he seemed as entranced by the flickering display as if he'd never set eyes on it before.

Maria stopped dead. If he'd rebuilt himself, reinvented himself . . . then how much of the man she'd known remained? Had he granted himself transhuman resilience, and healed himself of his terminal despair . . . or had he died in silence, beyond her sight, and given birth to a companion for her, a software child who'd merely inherited its father's memories?

Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder . . . and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new?

She searched his face for an answer, but she couldn't read him.

She said, 'You must tell me what you did. I need to understand.'

Durham promised her, 'I will. In the next life.'