Permutation City (20 page)

There were also some fundamental differences. Since the Autoverse had no nuclear forces, the sun would be heated solely by gravitational energy -- the velocity its molecules acquired as the diffuse primordial gas cloud fell in on itself. In the real universe, stars unable to ignite fusion reactions ended up as cold, short-lived brown dwarfs -- but under Autoverse physics, gravitational heating could power a large enough star for billions of years. (Units of space and time were not strictly translatable -- but everybody but the purists did it. If a
red
atom's width was taken to be that of hydrogen, and one grid-spacing per clock-tick was taken as the speed of light, a more or less sensible correspondence emerged.) Similarly, although Planet Lambert would lack internal heating from radioisotope decay, its own gravitational heat of formation would be great enough to drive tectonic activity for almost as long as the sun shone.

Without nuclear fusion to synthesize the elements, their origin remained a mystery, and a convenient gas cloud with traces of all thirty-two -- and the right mass and rotational velocity -- had to be taken for granted. Maria would have liked to have explored the cloud's possible origins, but she knew the project would never be finished if she kept lobbying Durham to expand the terms of reference. The point was to explore the potential diversity of Autoverse life, not to invent an entire cosmology.

Gravity in the Autoverse came as close as real-world gravity to the classical, Newtonian inverse-square law for the range of conditions that mattered, so all the usual real-world orbital dynamics applied. At extreme densities, the cellular automaton's discrete nature would cause it to deviate wildly from Newton -- and Einstein, and Chu -- but Maria had no intention of peppering her universe with black holes, or other exotica.

In fact, gravity had been seen as an irrelevant side effect of Lambert's original choice of automaton rules -- since running an Autoverse large enough for it to make the slightest difference was blatantly impossible -- and several people had tried to remove the redundancy, while leaving everything else intact. Nobody had succeeded, though; their "rationalized" versions had always failed to generate anything remotely like the rich chemistry of the original. A Peruvian mathematician, Ricardo Salazar, had eventually proved that they shouldn't have bothered: the Autoverse rules were poised on the border between two radically different levels of algorithmic complexity, and any tinkering in the hope of improved efficiency was necessarily self-defeating. The presence or absence of gravity, in itself, had no bearing on Autoverse chemistry -- but the roots of both phenomena in the simple automaton rules seemed to be inextricably entwined.

Maria was aiming for a star with four planets. Three small worlds, one giant. The seed-world, Lambert, second from the sun -- with a decent-sized moon if possible. Whether or not tidal pools had been a driving force in real-world evolution, life's bridge from sea to land (and even though the sun itself would cause small tides, regardless), it couldn't hurt to make Lambert as generally Earth-like as possible, since Earth was still the only example to turn to for inspiration. With so much about terrestrial evolution still in dispute, the safest policy was to cover every factor which might have been significant. The gravitational effects of the other planets would ensure a reasonably complex set of Milankovitch cycles: minor orbital changes and axis wobbles, providing long-term climate variations, ice ages and interglacials. A belt of comets and other debris would complete the picture; not merely supplying an atmosphere, early on, but also offering the chance of occasional mass-extinctions for billions of years to come.

The trick was to ensure that all of these supposedly evolution-enhancing features coincided with a version of Lambert which could support the seed organism in the first place. Maria had half a dozen possible modifications to
A.
lamberti
in mind, to render it self-sufficient, but she was waiting to see what kind of environments were available before making a final decision.

That still left unanswered the question of whether the seed organism -- or life of any kind -- could have
arisen
on Lambert, rather than being placed there by human hands. Max Lambert's original reason for designing the Autoverse had been the hope of observing self-replicating molecular systems -- primitive life -- arising from simple chemical mixtures. The Autoverse was meant to provide a compromise between real-world chemistry -- difficult and expensive to manipulate and monitor in test-tube experiments, and hideously slow to compute in faithful simulations -- and the tantalizing abstractions of the earliest "artificial life": computer viruses, genetic algorithms, self-replicating machines embedded in simple cellular automaton worlds; all trivially easy to compute, but unable to throw much light on the genesis of real-world molecular biology.

Lambert had spent a decade trying to find conditions which would lead to the spontaneous appearance of Autoverse life, without success. He'd constructed
A.
lamberti
-- a twelve-year project -- to reassure himself that his goal wasn't absurd; to demonstrate that a living organism could at least
function
in the Autoverse, however it had come to be there.
A.
lamberti
had permanently side-tracked him; he'd never returned to his original research.

Maria had daydreamed about embarking on her own attempt at abiogenesis, but she'd never done anything about it. That kind of work was open-ended; in comparison, any problems with mutation in
A.
lamberti
seemed utterly tractable and well-defined. And although, in a sense, it went to the heart of what Durham was trying to prove, she was glad he'd chosen to compromise; if he'd insisted on starting his "thought experiment" with a totally sterile world, the uncertainties in the transition from inanimate matter to the simplest Autoverse life would have overwhelmed every other aspect of the project.

She scrapped the desert Planet Lambert and returned to the primordial gas cloud. She popped up a gadget full of slider controls and adjusted the cloud's composition, taking back half the increases she'd made in the proportions of
blue
and
yellow.
Planetology by trial and error. The starting conditions for real-world systems with Earth-like planets had been mapped out long ago, but nobody had ever done the equivalent for the Autoverse. Nobody had ever had a reason.

Maria felt a flicker of unease. Each time she stopped to remind herself that these worlds would never exist -- not even in the sense that a culture of
A.
lamberti
"existed" -- the whole project seemed to shift perspective, to retreat into the distance like a mirage. The work itself was exhilarating, she couldn't have asked for anything more, but each time she forced herself to put it all into context -- not in the Autoverse, but in the real world -- she found herself light-headed, disoriented. Durham's reasons for the project were so much flimsier than the watertight internal logic of the thing itself; stepping back from the work was like stepping off a rock-solid planet and seeing it turn into nothing but a lightly tethered balloon.

She stood and walked over to the window, and parted the curtains. The street below was deserted; the concrete glowed in the hyperreal glare of the midday sun.

Durham was paying her good money
--
money that would kelp get Francesco scanned.
That was reason enough to press on. And if the project was ultimately useless, at least it did no harm; it was better than working on some hedonistic VR resort or some interactive war game for psychotic children. She let the curtain fall back into place and returned to her desk.

The cloud floated in the middle of the workspace, roughly spherical, rendered visible in spite of the fact that its universe was empty of stars. That was a shame; it meant the future citizens of Lambert were destined to be alone. They'd have no prospect of ever encountering alien life -- unless they built their own computers, and modeled other planetary systems, other biospheres.

Maria said, "Recalculate. Then show me sunrise again."

She waited.

And this time --
-false colors, by definition
-- the disk of the sun was bright cherry red, beneath a thick bank of clouds streaked orange and violet, spread across the sky -- and the whole scene was repeated, stretched out before her, shimmering, inverted. Mirrored in the face of the waters.

+ + +

By a quarter to eight, Maria was thinking about logging off and grabbing some food. She was still on a high, but she could feel how close she was coming to the point where she'd be useless for the next thirty-six hours if she pushed herself any further.

She'd found a range of starting conditions for the cloud which consistently gave rise to hospitable versions of Lambert, along with all the astronomical criteria she'd been aiming for -- except for the large satellite, which would have been a nice touch but wasn't critical. Tomorrow, she could begin the task of providing
A.
lamberti
with the means of surviving alone on this world, manufacturing its own
nutrose
from thin air, with the help of sunlight. Other workers had already designed a variety of energy-trapping pigment molecules; the "literal translation" of chlorophyll lacked the right photochemical properties, but a number of useful analogues had been found, and it was a matter of determining which could be integrated into the bacteria's biochemistry with the fewest complications. Bringing photosynthesis to the Autoverse would be the hardest part of the project, but Maria felt confident; she'd studied Lambert's notes, and she'd familiarized herself with the full range of techniques he'd developed for adapting biochemical processes to the quirks of Autoverse chemistry. And even if the pigment she chose, for the sake of expediency, wasn't the most efficient molecule for the task, as long as the seed organism could survive and reproduce it would have the potential to stumble on a better solution itself, eventually.

The potential, if not the opportunity.

She was about to shut down
The Laplacian Casino
when a message appeared in the foreground of the workspace:

Juno:
Statistical analysis of response times and error rates suggests that your link to the JSN is being monitored. Would you like to switch to a more heavily encrypted protocol?

Maria shook her head, amused. It had to be a bug in the software, not a bug on the line.
Juno
was a public-domain program (free, but all donations welcome) which she'd downloaded purely as a gesture of solidarity with the US privacy lobby. Federal laws there still made bug-detection software, and any half-decent encryption algorithms, illegal for personal use -- lest the FBI be inconvenienced -- so Maria had sent Juno's authors a donation to help them fight the good fight. Actually installing the program had been a joke; the idea of anyone going to the trouble of listening in to her conversations with her mother, her tedious VR contract work, or her self-indulgent excursions into the Autoverse, was ludicrous.

Still, the joke had to be carried through. She popped up a word processor on the JSN -- the terminal's local one wouldn't have shown up to an eavesdropper tapping the fiber -- and typed:

Whoever you are, be warned: I'm about to display the Longford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk, so

The doorbell rang. Maria checked the peephole camera's view. There was a woman on the front step, nobody she knew. Early forties, conservatively dressed. The not-so-subtle give-away was clearly visible behind her: one compact two-seater Mitsubishi "Avalon" electric car. The New South Wales Police Department were probably the only people in the world who'd bought that model, before the Bankstown factory closed down in forty-six. Maria had often wondered why they didn't give in and fit blue flashing lights to all their supposedly unmarked cars; acknowledging the situation would have been more dignified than carrying on as if nobody knew.

Dredging her memory for recent misdemeanors -- but finding none -- she hurried downstairs.

"Maria Deluca?"

"Yes."

"I'm Detective-Sergeant Hayden. Computer Fraud Squad. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if that's convenient."

Maria rescanned for guilty secrets; still no trace -- but she would have preferred a visitor from Homicide or Armed Robbery, someone who'd clearly come to the wrong house. She said, "Yes, of course. Come in." Then, as she backed away from the door, "Ah -- I nearly forgot, I suppose I should verify . . . ?"

Hayden, with a thin smile of blatantly insincere approval, let Maria plug her notepad into the socket of her Police Department badge. The notepad beeped cheerfully; the badge knew the private code which matched the current public key being broadcast by the Department.

Seated in the living room, Hayden got straight to the point. She displayed a picture on her notepad.

"Do you know this man?"

Maria cleared her throat. "Yes. His name's Paul Durham. I'm . . . working for him. He's given me some contract programming." She felt no surprise; just the jolt of being brought down to earth.
Of course the Fraud Squad were interested in Durham. Of course the whole fantasy of the last three months was about to unravel before her eyes.
Aden had warned her. She'd known it herself. It was a dream contract, too good to be true.