Permutation City by Greg Egan
Carter held out a hand toward the middle of the room. “See that fountain?” A ten-meter-wide marble wedding cake, topped with a winged cherub wrestling a serpent, duly appeared. Water cascaded down from a gushing wound in the cherub’s neck. Carter said, “It’s being computed by redundancies in the sketch of the city. I can extract the results, because I know exactly where to look for them – but nobody else would have a hope in hell of picking them out.”
Peer walked up to the fountain. Even as he approached, he noticed that the spray was intangible; when he dipped his hand in the water around the base he felt nothing, and the motion he made with his fingers left the foaming surface unchanged. They were spying on the calculations, not interacting with them; the fountain was a closed system.
Carter said, “In your case, of course, nobody will need to know the results. Except you – and you’ll know them because you’ll be them.”
Peer replied, almost without thinking, “Not me. My clone.”
“Whatever.” Carter clapped his hands, and a multicolored, three-dimensional lattice appeared, floating in the air above the fountain. “This is a schematic of part of the software running the sketch of the city. Each cube represents a process. Packets of data – those blips of colored light – flow between them.
“There’s nothing so crude as a subset of processes dedicated to the fountain. Every individual process – and every individual packet of data – is involved with some aspect of the city. But there are some slightly inefficient calculations going on here and there, and some ‘redundant’ pieces of information being exchanged.” Pin-pricks in a smattering of the cubes, and some of the data, glowed bright blue. “One of the simplest tricks is to use a vector when only a direction is needed – when the magnitude of the vector is irrelevant. Perfectly reasonable operations on the vector, entirely justified in their own context, incidentally perform arithmetic on the magnitude. But that’s just one technique; there are dozens of others.” He clapped his hands again, and everything but the blue highlights vanished. The diagram re-formed, the scattered processes coming together into a compact grid. “The point is, the fountain gets computed along with the city, without any of the software explicitly stealing time for a parasitic task. Every line of every program makes sense in terms of computing the city.”
Peer said, “And if Durham runs your code through an optimizer, which rescales all the unnecessary vectors, trims away all the inefficiencies—?”
Carter shook his head. “I don’t believe he’d meddle with the code at all, but even if he does, optimizers can only track things so far. In the full version of the city, the results of your calculations will propagate so widely that it would take months for any program to deduce that the data’s not actually needed somewhere – that it ultimately makes no difference to the legitimate inhabitants.” He grinned. “Optimizing anything to do with Copies is a subtle business. You must have heard about the billionaire recluse who wanted to run as fast as possible – even though he never made contact with the outside world – so he fed his own code into an optimizer. After analyzing it for a year, the optimizer reported THIS PROGRAM WILL PRODUCE NO OUTPUT, and spat out the optimized version – which did precisely nothing.”
Peer laughed, although he’d heard the joke before.
Carter said, “The fact is, the city is so complex, there’s so much going on, that even if it had all been left to chance, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some quite sophisticated secondary computations taking place, purely by accident. I haven’t gone looking for them, though – it would burn up far too much processor time. And the same applies to anyone searching for you. It’s just not a practical proposition. Why would anyone spend millions of dollars scanning for something which can do no harm?”
Peer gazed up at the blue schematic skeptically. Carter came across as if he knew what he was talking about, but a few plausible-looking graphics proved nothing.
Carter seemed to read his mind. “If you have any doubts, take a look at the software I used.” A large, fat book appeared, floating in front of Peer. “This modifies program A to surreptitiously carry out program B, given A is sufficiently more algorithmically complex than B. What that means, exactly, is in the technical appendix. Try it out, show it to your favorite expert system … verify it any way you like.”
Peer took hold of the book, squeezed it down to credit-card size, and slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans. He said, “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do everything you claim: piggyback us onto the city, hide us from searches, protect us from optimization. But … why? What do you get out of this? What you’re asking for is nothing, compared to what Durham must be paying you. So why take the risk? Or do you screw all your clients as a matter of principle?”
Carter chose to seem amused, not offended. “The practice of skimming off a percentage of a construction project has a long, honorable tradition. All the more honorable if the client’s needs aren’t seriously compromised. In this case, there’s also some elegant programming involving – worth doing for its own sake. As for the money, I’m charging you enough to cover my costs.” He exchanged a look with Kate – for Peer’s benefit, or he wouldn’t have seen it. “But in the end, I’m only making the offer as a favor. So if you think I’m going to cheat you, you’re welcome to decline.”
Peer changed tack. “What if Durham is cheating his clients? You’re only screwing them out of a few QIPS – but what if Durham doesn’t plan to run the city at all – just vanish with the money? Have you ever seen his hardware? Have you used it?”
“No. But he never claimed – to me – that he had his own hardware. The version of the story I got is that the city’s going to run on the public networks. That’s bullshit, of course; the Copies funding him wouldn’t wear that for a second – it’s just a polite way of telling me that the hardware is none of my business. And as for vanishing with the money, from what I can deduce about his cash flow, he’ll be lucky to break even on the project. Which suggests to me that someone else entirely is handling the true financial arrangements; Durham is just a front man, and the real owner of the hardware will pay him for his troubles, once the whole thing is wrapped up.”
“The owner of what? This hypothetical ‘breakthrough machine’ that nobody’s laid eyes on?”
“If he’s persuaded Sanderson and Repetto to pay him, then you can be sure he’s shown them something that he hasn’t shown me.”
Peer was about to protest, but Carter’s expression said: Take it or leave it, believe what you like. I’ve done this much for my ex-lover, but the truth is, I don’t care if you’re convinced or not.
Carter excused himself. When he turned and walked away across the room, footsteps echoing in the cavernous space, Peer couldn’t believe he would have hung around for the fifteen real-time minutes it took to reach the exit. Not a busy man like that. In fact, he’d probably conducted two or three other meetings with Copies while he’d been talking to them, dropping in and out of the conversation, leaving a mask to animate his features in his absence.
Kate said, “What’s the worst that can happen? If Durham is a con man, if the city’s a hoax, what have we lost? All money can buy us is QIPS – and you’re the one who’s so sure that it doesn’t matter how slowly we run.”
Peer scowled, still staring at the exit Carter had used, surprised to find himself reluctant to drag his gaze away. The door meant nothing to him. He said, “Half the charm of this lies in stealing a free ride. Or bribing Carter to steal it for us. There’s not much … dignity in stowing away on a ship going nowhere.”
“You could choose not to care.”
“I don’t want to do that. I don’t pretend to be human, but I still have a … core personality. And I don’t want equanimity. Equanimity is death.”
“On the skyscraper—”
“On the skyscraper I rid myself of distractions. And it’s confined to that one context. When I emerge, I still have goals. I still have desires.” He tur
Kate left the body he was touching where it was, but took a step backward in another just like it. Peer let his hand drop to his side.
She said, “Once I’m part of this billionaires’ city, I’ll happily forget about the outside world. Once I have all that money and influence devoted to my survival.”
“Do you mean, that will be enough to satisfy you – or do you intend making a conscious decision to be satisfied?”
She smiled enigmatically – and Peer made a conscious decision to be moved by the sight. She said, “I don’t know yet. You’ll have to wait and see.”
Peer said nothing. He realized that, in spite of his doubts, he’d almost certainly follow her – and not just for the shock of creating a second version, not just for the sake of undermining his last anthropomorphic delusions. The truth was, he wanted to be with her. All of her. If he backed out and she went ahead, the knowledge that he’d passed up his one opportunity to have a version of himself accompany her would drive him mad. He wasn’t sure if this was greed or affection, jealousy or loyalty – but he knew he had to be a part of whatever she experienced in there.
It was an unsettling revelation. Peer took a snapshot of his state of mind.
Kate gestured toward the door which led to the sketch of the city.
Peer said, “Why bother with that? There’ll be plenty of time to explore the real thing.”
She looked at him oddly. “Don’t you want to satisfy your curiosity? Now – and forever, for the one who’ll stay behind?”
He thought about it, then shook his head. “One clone will see the finished city. One won’t. Both will share a past when they’d never even heard of the place. The clone outside, who never sees the city, will try to guess what it’s like. The clone inside will run other environments, and sometimes he won’t think about the city at all. When he does, sometimes he’ll misremember it. And sometimes he’ll dream about wildly distorted versions of what he’s seen.
“I define all those moments as part of me. So … what is there to be curious about?”
Kate said, “I love it when you go all doctrinaire on me.” She stepped forward and kissed him – then as he reached out to hold her, she slipped away into yet another body, leaving him embracing nothing but dead weight. “Now shut up and let’s go take a look.”
#
Peer doubted that he’d ever know exactly why he’d died. No amount of agonized introspection, tortuous video-postcard interrogation of ex-friends, or even expert system analysis of his final scan file, had brought him any nearer to the truth. The gap was too wide to be bridged; the last four years of his corporeal life had been lost to him – and the events of the period seemed more like an ill-fated excursion into a parallel world than any mere episode of amnesia.
The coroner had returned an open finding. Rock climbing accidents were rare, the best technology was almost foolproof – but David Hawthorne had scornfully eschewed all the mollycoddling refinements (including the black box implants which could have recorded the actions leading up to his death, if not the motives behind them). No pitons full of microchips, which could have performed ultrasound tomography of the cliff face and computed their own load-bearing capacity; no harness packed with intelligent crash balloons, which could have cushioned his sixty-meter fall onto jagged rocks; no robot climbing partner, which could have carried him twenty kilometers over rugged terrain with a broken spine and delivered him into intensive care as if he’d floated there on a cloud of morphine.
Peer could empathize, to a degree. What was the point of being scanned, only to remain enslaved by an obsolete respect for the body’s fragility? Having triumphed over mortality, how could he have gone on living as if nothing had changed? Every biological instinct, every commonsense idea about the nature of survival had been rendered absurd – and he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to dramatize the transformation.
That didn’t prove that he’d wanted to die.
But whether his death had been pure misfortune, unequivocal suicide, or the result of some insanely dangerous stunt not (consciously) intended to be fatal, the four-years-out-of-date David Hawthorne had awakened in the virtual slums to realize that, personally, he’d given the prospect about as much serious consideration as that of awakening in Purgatory. Whatever he’d come to believe in those missing years, whatever he’d imagined in his last few seconds of life on that limestone overhang, up until his final scan he’d always pictured his virtual resurrection as taking place in the distant future, when either he’d be seriously wealthy, or the cost of computing would have fallen so far that money would scarcely matter.
He’d been forty-six years old, in perfect health; a senior executive with Incite PLC – Europe’s twenty-fifth largest marketing firm – second-in-charge of the interactive targeted mail division. With care, he could have died at the age of a hundred and fifty, to become an instant member of the elite – perhaps, by then, in a cybernetic body barely distinguishable from the real thing.
But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he’d actually signed up for.
And whatever the convoluted psychological explanation for his death, in financial terms the result was very simple. He’d died too soon.
In a real-time week – a few subjective hours – he had gone from a model of flesh and blood in the lavish virtual apartment he’d bought at the time of his first scan, to a disembodied consciousness observing his Bunker. Even that hadn’t been enough to let him cling to his role in the outside world. Full life insurance was not available to people who’d been scanned – let alone those who also indulged in dangerous recreations – and the coroner’s verdict had even ruled out payment from the only over-priced watered-down substitute policy he’d been able to obtain. At a slowdown of thirty, the lowest Bunker-to-real-time factor the income from his investments could provide, communication was difficult, and productive work was impossible. Even if he’d started burning up his capital to buy the exclusive use of a processor cluster, the time-rate difference would still have rendered him unemployable. Copies whose trust funds controlled massive shareholdings, deceased company directors who sat on the unofficial boards which met twice a year and made three or four leisurely decisions, could live with the time-dilated economics of slowdown. Hawthorne had died before achieving the necessary financial critical mass – let alone the kind of director-emeritus status where he could be paid for nothing but his name on the company letterhead.
As the reality of his situation sank in, he’d spiraled into the blackest depression. Any number of expensive, disabling diseases might have dragged him from upper-middle-class comfort into comparative poverty and isolation – but dying “poor” had an extra sting. In corporeal life, he’d happily gone along with the consensus: money as the deepest level of reality, ownership records as the definition of truth … while escaping most weekends to the manicured garden of the English countryside, camping beneath the clouds, clearing his head of the City’s Byzantine fictions – reminding himself how artificial, how arbitrary, it all was. He’d never quite deluded himself that he could have lived off the land: “vanishing” into a forest mapped twice a day by EarthSat on a centimeter scale; surviving on the flesh of protected species, tearing the radio-tracking collars off foxes and badgers with his bare teeth; stoically enduring any rare diseases and parasitic infestations to which his childhood vaccinations and polyclonal T-cell boosts hadn’t granted him immunity. The truth was, he almost certainly would have starved, or gone insane – but that wasn’t
Watching the screens of his Bunker, he’d looked back on that trite but comforting understanding with a dizzying sense of loss – because it was no longer in his power to distance himself, however briefly, from the mass hallucination of commerce-as-reality, no longer possible to wrench some half-self-mocking sense of dignity and independence out of his hypothetical ability to live naked in the woods. Money had ceased to be a convenient fiction to be viewed with appropriate irony – because the computerized financial transactions which flowed from his investments to the network’s QIPS providers now underpinned everything he thought, everything he perceived, everything he was.
Friendless, bodiless, the entire world he’d once inhabited transformed into nothing but a blur of scenery glimpsed through the window of a high-speed train, David Hawthorne had prepared to bale out.
It was Kate who had interrupted him. She’d been delegated to make a “welcoming call” by a slum-dwellers’ committee, which she’d only joined in the hope that they’d sponsor one of her projects. This was before she’d made the conscious decision not to desire an audience for any of her art, rendering its quota of computing time relative to any other process irrelevant.
Hawthorne’s only contact since his death had been brief recorded messages from ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-relations and ex-colleagues, all more-or-less bidding him farewell, as if he’d embarked on a one-way voyage to a place beyond the reach of modern communications. There’d also been an offer of counseling from his scanning clinic’s Resurrection Trauma expert system – first ten subjective minutes absolutely free. When Kate had appeared on his communications screen, synched to his time rate and talking back, he’d poured out his soul to her.