Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  Peer steadied himself against the desk, and struggled to fill the gap. He’d been playing some kind of memory game, that much was obvious – but surely he would have set things up so he’d understand what had happened, in the end? When Kate made contact, breaking the spell, his exoself should have granted him a full explanation. He mentally invoked its records; the last event shown was his most recent random transition. Whatever he’d done since, there was no trace of it.

  He said dully, “The name means nothing to me.”

  Stranger still, the thought of spending twenty-nine days sketching beetles left him cold. Any passion he’d felt for insect taxonomy had vanished along with his memories – as if the whole package had belonged to someone else entirely, who’d now claimed it, and departed.

  Chapter 28

  As the City slowly imprinted itself upon her brain – every dazzling sunset leaving its golden afterimage burning on her nonexistent retinas, every journey she made wiring maps of the nonexistent streets into her nonexistent synapses – Maria felt herself drifting apart from her memories of the old world. The details were as sharp as ever, but her history was losing its potency, its meaning. Having banished the idea of grieving for people who had not died – and who had not lost her – all she seemed to have left to feel was nostalgia … and even that was undermined by contradictions.

  She missed rooms, streets, smells. Sometimes it was so painful it was comical. She lay awake thinking about the shabbiest abandoned buildings of Pyrmont, or the cardboard stench of ersatz popcorn wafting out of the VR parlors on George Street. And she knew that she could reconstruct her old house, all of its surroundings, all of Sydney, and more, in as much detail as she wished; she knew that every last idiot ache she felt for the amputated past could be dealt with in an instant. Understanding exactly how far she could go was more than enough to rid her of any desire to take a single step in that direction.

  But having chosen to make no effort to relieve the pangs of homesickness, she seemed to have forfeited her right to the emotion. How could she claim to long for something which she could so easily possess – while continuing to deny it to herself?

  So she tried to set the past aside. She studied the Lambertians diligently, preparing for the day when contact would be permitted. She tried to immerse herself in the role of the legendary eighteenth founder, roused from her millennia of sleep to share the triumphant moment when the people of Elysium would finally come face to face with an alien culture.

  Lambertian communities – despite some similarities to those of terrestrial social insects – were far more complex, and much less hierarchical, than the nests of ants or the hives of bees. For a start, all Lambertians were equally fertile; there was no queen, no workers, no drones. The young were conceived in plants at the periphery of the local territory, and upon hatching usually migrated hundreds of kilometers to become members of distant communities. There, they joined teams and learned their speciality – be it herding, defense against predators, or modeling the formation of planetary systems. Specialization was usually for life, but team members occasionally changed professions if the need arose.

  Lambertian group behavior had a long evolutionary history, and it remained the driving force in cultural development – because individual Lambertians were physically incapable of inventing, testing, or communicating the models by which the most sophisticated ideas were expressed. An individual could learn enough about a model while taking part in a successful dance to enable it to exchange roles with any other individual the next time the dance was performed – but it could never ponder the implications of the idea itself, in solitude. The language of the dance was like human writing, formal logic, mathematical notation, and computing, all rolled into one – but the basic skills were innate, not cultural. And it was so successful – and so much in tune with other aspects of their social behavior – that the Lambertians had never had reason to develop a self-contained alternative.

  Individuals were far from unthinking components, though. They were fully conscious in their own right; groups performed many roles, but they did not comprise “communal minds.” The language of sounds, movements and scents used by individuals was far simpler than the group language of the dance, but it could still express most of the concepts which pre-literate humans had dealt with: intentions, past experience, the lives of others.

  And individual Lambertians spoke of individual death. They knew that they would die.

  Maria searched the literature for some clue to the way they dealt with their mortality. Corpses were left where they dropped; there was no ritual to mark the event, and no evidence of anything like grief. There were no clear Lambertian analogs for any of the human emotions – not even physical pain. When injured, they were acutely aware of the fact, and took steps to minimize damage to themselves – but it was a matter of specific instinctive responses coming into play, rather than the widespread biochemical shifts involved in human mood changes. The Lambertian nervous system was “tighter” than a human’s; there was no flooding of regions of the brain with large doses of endogenous stimulants or depressants – everything was mediated within the enclosed synapses.

  No grief. No pain. No happiness? Maria retreated from the question. The Lambertians possessed their own spectrum of thoughts and behavior; any attempt to render it in human terms would be as false as the colors of the Autoverse atoms themselves.

  The more she learned, the more the role she’d played in bringing the Lambertians into existence seemed to recede into insignificance. Fine-tuning their single-celled ancestor had seemed like a matter of the utmost importance, at the time – if only for the sake of persuading the skeptics that Autoverse life could flourish. Now – although a few of her biochemical tricks had been conserved over three billion years of evolution – it was hard to attribute any real significance to the choices she’d made. Even though the whole Lambertian biosphere might have been transformed beyond recognition if she’d selected a different shape for a single enzyme in A. hydrophila, she couldn’t think of the Lambertians as being dependent on her actions. The decisions she’d made controlled what she was witnessing on her terminal, nothing more; had she made other choices, she would have seen another biosphere, another civilization – but she could not believe that the Lambertians themselves would have failed to have lived the very same lives without her. Somehow, they still would have found a way to assemble themselves from the dust.

  If that was true, though – if the internal logic of their experience would have been enough to bring them into existence – then there was no reason to believe that they would ever be forced to conclude that their universe required a creator.

  She tried to reconcile this growing conviction with the Contact Group’s optimism. They’d studied the Lambertians for thousands of years – who was she to doubt their expertise? Then it occurred to her that Durham and his colleagues might have decided to feign satisfaction with the political restrictions imposed upon them, until they knew where she stood on the issue. Until she reached the same conclusions, independently? Durham might have guessed that she’d resist being pressured into taking their side; it would be far more diplomatic to leave her to form her own opinions – even applying a little reverse psychology to aim her in the right direction.

  Or was that sheer paranoia?

  After five days of studying the Lambertians, tracing the history of their increasingly successful attempts to explain their world – and five nights trying to convince herself that they’d soon give it all up and recognize their status as artificial life – she could no longer hold the contradictions in her head.

  She phoned Durham.

  It was three in the morning, but he must have been out of the City; Standard Time set a rate, but no diurnal cycle, and behind him was a dazzling sunlit room.

  She said bluntly, “I think I’d like to hear the truth now. Why did you wake me?”

  He seemed unsurprised by the question, but he replied guardedly. “Why do you think?”r />
  “You want my support for an early expedition to Planet Lambert. You want me to declare – with all the dubious authority of the ‘mother’ of the Lambertians – that there’s no point waiting for them to invent the idea of us. Because we both know it’s never going to happen. Not until they’ve seen us with their own eyes.”

  Durham said, “You’re right about the Lambertians – but forget the politics. I woke you because your territory adjoins the region where the Autoverse is run. I want you to let me use it to break through to Planet Lambert.” He looked like a child, solemnly confessing some childish crime. “Access through the hub is strictly controlled, and visible to everyone. There’s plenty of unused space in the sixth public wedge, so I could try to get in from there – but again, it’s potentially visible. Your territory is private.”

  Maria felt a surge of anger. She could scarcely believe that she’d ever swallowed the line about being woken to share in the glory of contact – and being used by Durham was no great shock; it was just like old times – but having been resurrected, not for her expertise, not for her status, but so he could dig a tunnel through her back yard—

  She said bitterly, “Why do you need to break into the Autoverse? Is there a race going on that nobody’s bothered to tell me about? Bored fucking immortals battling it out to make the first unauthorized contact with the Lambertians? Have you turned xenobiology into a new Olympian sport?”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “No? What, then? I’m dying to know.” Maria tried to read his face, for what it was worth. He allowed himself to appear ashamed – but he also looked grimly determined, as if he really did believe that he’d had no choice.

  It hit her suddenly. “You think … there’s some kind of risk to Elysium, from the Autoverse?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. So you woke me in time to share the danger? How thoughtful.”

  “Maria, I’m sorry. If there’d been another way, I would have let you sleep forever—”

  She started laughing, and shivering at the same time. Durham placed one palm flat against the screen; she was still angry with him, but she let him reach through the terminal from his day-lit room, and put his hand on hers.

  She said, “Why do you have to act in secret? Can’t you persuade the others to agree to stop running the Autoverse? They must realize that it wouldn’t harm the Lambertians; it would launch them as surely as it launched Elysium. There’s no question of genocide. All right, it would be a loss to the Autoverse scholars – but how many of those can there be? What does Planet Lambert mean to the average Elysian? It’s just one more kind of entertainment.”

  “I’ve already tried to shut it down. I’m authorized to set the running speed relative to Standard Time – and to freeze the whole Autoverse, temporarily, if I see the need to stem the information flow, to let us catch up with rapid developments.”

  “So what happened? They made you restart it?”

  “No. I never managed to freeze it. It can’t be done anymore. The clock rate can’t be slowed past a certain point; the software ignores the instructions. Nothing happens.”

  Maria felt a deep chill spread out from the base of her spine. “Ignores them how? That’s impossible.”

  “It would be impossible if everything was working – so obviously, something’s failed. The question is, at what level? I can’t believe that the control software is suddenly revealing a hidden bug after all this time. If it’s not responding the way it should, then the processors running it aren’t behaving correctly. So either they’ve been damaged somehow … or the cellular automaton itself has changed. I think the TVC rules are being undermined – or subsumed into something larger.”

  “Do you have any hard evidence—?”

  “No. I’ve re-run the old validation experiments, the ones I ran during the launch, and they still work – wherever I’ve tried them – but I can’t even instruct the processors running the Autoverse to diagnose themselves, let alone probe what’s happening there at the lowest level. I don’t even know if the problem is confined to the region, or if it’s spreading out slowly … or if it’s already happening everywhere, but the effects are too subtle to pick up. You know the only way to validate the rules is with special apparatus. So what do I do? Disassemble half the processors in Elysium, and build test chambers in their place? And even if I could prove that the rules were being broken, how would that help?”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Only Repetto and Zemansky. If it became public knowledge, I don’t know what would happen.”

  Maria was outraged. “What gives you the right to keep this to yourselves? Some people might panic … but what are you afraid of? Riots? Looting? The more people who know about the problem, the more likely it is that someone will come up with a solution.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps the mere fact that more people know would make things worse.”

  Maria absorbed that in silence. The sunlight spilling through the terminal cast radial shadows around her; the room looked like a medieval wood-cut of an alchemist discovering the philosopher’s stone.

  Durham said, “Do you know why I chose the Autoverse in the first place – instead of real-world physics?”

  “Less computation. Easier to seed with life. My brilliant work with A. lamberti.”

  “No nuclear processes. No explanation for the origins of the elements. I thought: in the unlikely event that the planet yielded intelligent life, they’d still only be able to make sense of themselves on our terms. It all seemed so remote and improbable, then. It never occurred to me that they might miss the laws that we know are laws, and circumvent the whole problem.”

  “They haven’t settled on any kind of theory, yet. They might still come up with a cellular automaton model – complete with the need for a creator.”

  “They might. But what if they don’t?”

  Maria’s throat was dry. The numbing abstractions were losing their hypnotic power; she was beginning to feel all too real: too corporeal, too vulnerable. Good timing: finally embracing the illusion of possessing solid flesh and blood – just as the foundations of this universe seemed ready to turn to quicksand.

  She said, “You tell me. I’m tired of guessing what’s going on in your head.”

  “We can’t shut them down. I think that proves that they’re already affecting Elysium. If they successfully explain their origins in a way which contradicts the Autoverse rules, then that may distort the TVC rules. Perhaps only in the region where the Autoverse is run – or perhaps everywhere. And if the TVC rules are pulled out from under us—”

  Maria balked. “That’s … like claiming that a VR environment could alter the real-world laws of physics in order to guarantee its own internal consistency. Even with thousands of Copies in VR environments, that never happened back on Earth.”

  “No – but which is most like the real world? Elysium, or the Autoverse?” Durham laughed, without bitterness. “We’re all still patchwork Copies, most of us in private fantasy lands. Our bodies are ad hoc approximations. Our cities are indestructible wallpaper. The ‘laws of physics’ of all the environments in Elysium contradict each other – and themselves – a billion times a day. Ultimately, yes, everything runs on the TVC processors, it’s all consistent with the TVC rules – but level after level is sealed off, made invisible to the next, made irrelevant.

  “On Planet Lambert, everything that happens is intimately tied to one set of physical laws, applied uniformly, everywhere. And they’ve had three billion years of that. We may not know what the deepest laws are, anymore, but every event the Lambertians experience is part of a coherent whole. If there’s any conflict between the two versions of reality, we can’t rely on our own version taking precedence.”

  Maria couldn’t argue for patchwork VR holding up against the deep logic of the Autoverse. She said, “Then surely the safest thing would be to ensure that there is no conflict. Stop observing the Autoverse. Give up all plans of ma
king contact. Isolate the two explanations. Keep them from clashing.”

  Durham said flatly, “No. We’re already in conflict. Why else can’t we shut them down?”

  “I don’t know.” Maria looked away. “If the worst comes to the worst … can’t we start again? Construct a new Garden-of-Eden configuration? Launch ourselves again, without the Autoverse?”

  “If we have to.” He added, “If we think we can trust the TVC universe to do everything it’s programmed to do – without altering the launch process, fouling it up … or even passing on the modified laws which we think we’re escaping.”

  Maria looked out at the City. Buildings were not collapsing, the illusion was not decaying. She said, “If we can’t trust in that, what’s left?”

  Durham said grimly, “Nothing. If we don’t know how this universe works anymore, we’re powerless.”

  She pulled her hand free. “So what do you want to do? You think if you have access to more of the Autoverse than the data channels running out from the hub, you can make the TVC rules apply? One whole face of the pyramid shouting stop to the neighboring processors will carry more weight than the normal chain of command?”

  “No. That might be worth trying. But I don’t believe it will work.”

  “Then … what?”

  Durham leaned forward urgently. “We have to win back the laws. We have to go into the Autoverse and convince the Lambertians to accept our explanation of their history – before they have a clear alternative.

  “We have to persuade them that we created them, before that’s no longer the truth.”

  Chapter 29

  Thomas sat in the garden, watching the robots tend the flowerbeds. Their silver limbs glinted in the sunshine as they reached between the dazzling white blossoms. Every movement they made was precise, economical; there was no faltering, no resting. They did what they had to, and moved on.