Permutation City (21 page)

An instant later, though, she backed away from that reaction, furious with herself. Durham had paid the money into the trust fund, hadn't he? He'd met the costs of her new JSN account. He hadn't cheated her.
Too good to be true
was idiot fatalism. Two consenting adults had kept all their promises to each other; the fact that no outsider would understand the transaction didn't make it a crime. And after all he'd done for her, at the very least she owed him the benefit of the doubt.

Hayden said, "What kind of 'contract programming'?"

Maria did her best to explain without taking all night. Hayden was -- not surprisingly -- reasonably computer literate, and even knew what a cellular automaton was, but either she hadn't heard of the Autoverse, or she wanted to hear it all again from Maria.

"So you believe this man's paying you thirty thousand dollars . . . to help him state his position on a purely theoretical question about artificial life?"

Maria tried not to sound defensive. "I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on the Autoverse, myself. It's like a lot of other hobbies; it's a world unto itself. People can get obsessive, extravagant. It's no stranger than . . . building model airplanes. Or reenacting battles from the American Civil War."

Hayden didn't argue the point, but she seemed unmoved by the comparisons. "Did you know that Paul Durham sold insurance to Copies?"

"I knew he was an insurance salesman. He told me that himself. Just because he's not a professional programmer doesn't mean he can't --"

"Did you know he was also trying to sell his clients shares in some kind of sanctuary? A place to go -- or to send a clone -- in case the political climate turned against them?"

Maria blinked. "No. What do you mean -- a sanctuary? A privately owned supercomputer? He's been trying to raise money, form a consortium . . . ?"

Hayden said flatly, "He's certainly raising money -- but I doubt he'll ever raise enough to purchase the kind of hardware he'd need for the kind of service he's offering."

"So, what are you accusing him of doing? Embarking on a business venture which you don't happen to believe will be successful?" Hayden said nothing. "Have you spoken to him about this? There might be a simple explanation for whatever you've been told. Some senile Copy might have taken his sales pitch for a perpetuity fund the wrong way." Senile
Copy?
Well . . . some postdementia scan file might have proved resistant to the cognitive repair algorithms.

Hayden said, "Of course we've spoken to him. He's refused to cooperate, he won't discuss the matter. That's why we're hoping you'll be able to assist us."

Maria's defiant optimism wavered.
If Durham had nothing to hide, why would he refuse to defend himself?

She said, "I don't see how I can help you. If you think he's been misleading his clients, go talk to his clients. It's their testimony you need, not mine."

There was an awkward pause, then Hayden said, "The testimony of a Copy has no standing; legally, they're just another kind of computer software."

Maria opened her mouth, then realized that any excuse she offered would only make her sound more foolish. She salvaged some pride with the silent observation that the legal position of Copies was so farcical that any sane person could have trouble keeping it in mind.

Hayden continued. "Durham could be charged with defrauding the executors of the estates, by means of supplying misleading data to the software they use to advise them. There are precedents for that; it's like publishing false prospectus information that causes automated share-buying programs to buy your stock. But there's still the question of evidence. We can interview Copies as an informal source of information, to guide an investigation, but nothing they say will stand up in court."

Maria recalled an episode of
The Unclear Family
where a similar problem had arisen. Babette and Larry Unclear had witnessed bank accounts being pilfered, when the relevant data trail had -- inexplicably -- taken solid form as an accusing tableau of ice-sculptures in their cyber-suburban backyard. She couldn't recall exactly how the plot had turned out; ten-year-old Leroy had probably done something marginally illegal, but morally unimpeachable, to trick the thieves into giving themselves away to the authorities . . .

She said, "I don't know what you expect me to tell you. Durham hasn't defrauded
me.
And I don't know anything about this scheme."

"But you're working on it with him."

"I certainly am not!"

Hayden said drily, "You're designing a planet for him. What do you think that's for?"

Maria stared at her blankly for a second, then almost laughed. "I'm sorry, I can't have explained things very well. I'm designing a planet that "could" exist in the Autoverse, in the broadest sense of the word. It's a
mathematical possibility.
But it's too large to be run on a real computer. It's not some VR --"

Hayden cut her off. "I understand that perfectly. That doesn't mean Durham's clients would have grasped the distinction. Technical details about the Autoverse aren't exactly general knowledge."

True.
Maria hesitated. But --

"It still makes no sense. For a start, these people would have advisers, researchers, who'd tell them that anyone promising them an Autoverse planet was full of shit. And why would Durham
offer them
an Autoverse planet -- covered in primordial slime -- when he could offer them a standard set of VR environments which would be a thousand times more attractive and a thousand times more plausible?"

"I believe he's offering them both. He's hired an architect in the US to work on the VR part."

"But why
both?
Why not just VR? You couldn't fit a single Copy into the Autoverse -- and if you did, it would die on the spot. It would take fifty or sixty years of research to translate human biochemistry into Autoverse terms."

"They wouldn't know that."

"They could find out in ten seconds flat. Forget about advisers; it would take one call to a knowledge miner, total cost five dollars. So why tell a lie that could be so easily uncovered? What's the advantage -- from a Copy's point of view -- of an Autoverse planet over patchwork VR?"

Hayden was unfazed. "You're the Autoverse expert. So you tell me."

"I don't know." Maria stood up. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic; she hated having strangers in the house. "Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?"

"No. But you go ahead --"

Maria shook her head and sat down again; she had a feeling that if she went into the kitchen, she wouldn't want to return.

She couldn't see why Durham would refuse to talk to the police, unless he was involved in something dubious enough to have him thrown out of his job, at the very least.
Fuck him.
He might not have intended to cheat her, but he'd screwed her nonetheless. She wouldn't get a cent for the work she'd completed; other creditors would have no call on the trust fund if Durham merely went bankrupt -- but if the money was the pro-ceeds of crime . . .

Lorenzo the Magnificent. Yeah.

The worst of it was, for all she knew, Hayden believed she was a willing accomplice. And if Durham intended to remain silent, she'd have to clear her own name.

How?

First, she had to find out about the scam, and untangle her role in it.

She said, "What exactly is he promising these Copies?"

"A refuge. A place where they'll be safe from any kind of backlash -- because they won't be connected to the outside world. No telecommunications; nothing to trace. He feeds them a long spiel about the coming dark age, when the unwashed masses will no longer put up with being lorded over by rich immortals -- and evil socialist governments will confiscate all the supercomputers for weather control."

Hayden seemed to find the prospect laughable. Maria suspended judgement; what mattered was how Durham's clients felt, and she could imagine Operation Butterfly making a lot of Copies feel threatened. "So they send their clones in, and slam the door, in case the originals don't make it through the purges. But then what? How long is this "dark age" supposed to last?"

Hayden shrugged. "Who knows? Hundreds of years? Presumably Durham himself -- or some trustworthy successor, several generations later -- will decide when it's safe to come out. The two Copies whose executors filed complaints didn't wait to hear the whole scenario; they threw him out before he could get down to details like that."

"He must have approached other Copies."

"Of course. No one else has come forward, but we have a tentative list of names. All with estates incorporated overseas, unfortunately; I haven't been able to interview any of them, yet -- we're still working on the jurisdictional red tape. But a few have made it clear already, through their lawyers, that they won't be willing to discuss the matter -- which presumably means that they've swallowed Durham's line, and now they don't want to hear a word against him."

Maria struggled to imagine
it: No communications. Cut off from reality, indefinitely. A
few "Solipsist Nation" Copies might relish the prospect -- but most of them had too little money to be the targets of an elaborate scam. And even if Durham's richest, most paranoid clients seriously believed that the world was on the verge of turning against them . . . what if things went so badly wrong, outside, that links were
never
restored? The humans guarding the sanctuary could die out -- or just walk away. How could any but the most radically separatist of Copies face the risk of being stranded inside a hidden computer, buried in the middle of a desert somewhere, with no means of discovering for themselves when civilization was worth rejoining -- and no means of initiating contact in any case?

Radioisotope power sources could run for thousands of years; multiply redundant hardware of the highest standard could last almost as long, in theory. All these Copies would have, to remember reality by, would be the information they'd brought in with them at the start. If it turned into a one-way trip, they'd be like interstellar colonists, carrying a snapshot of Earth culture off into the void.

Except that
interstellar colonists
would merely face a growing radio time lag, not absolute silence. And whatever they were leaving behind, at least they'd have something to look forward to: a new world to explore.

A new world -- and the possibility of new life.

So what better cure could there be for claustrophobia than the promise of dragging an entire planet into the refuge, seeded with the potential for developing its own exotic life?

Maria didn't know whether to be outraged or impressed. If she was right, she had to admire Durham's sheer audacity. When he had asked for a package of results which would persuade "the skeptics" about the prospects for an Autoverse biosphere, he hadn't been thinking of academics in the artificial life scene. He'd wanted to convince
his clients
that, even in total isolation, they'd have everything reality could ever offer the human race -- including a kind of "space exploration," complete with the chance of alien contact. And these would be genuine
aliens;
not the stylish designer creatures from VR games, constructs of nothing but the human psyche; not the slick, unconvincing biomorphs of the high-level phenotype-selection models, the Darwinian equivalent of Platonic ideals. Life which had come the whole tortuous way, molecule by molecule, just like the real thing. Or, almost the whole way; with a biogenesis still poorly understood, Durham had had enough sense to start with "hand-made" microbes -- otherwise his clients might never have believed that the planet would bear life at all.

Maria explained the idea, tentatively. "He'd have to have convinced these Copies that running the Autoverse is much faster than modeling real biochemistry -- which it is -- without being too specific about the actual figures. And I still think it's a crazy risk to take; anyone could easily find out the truth."

Hayden thought it over. "Would it matter if they did? If the point of this world is mainly psychological -- a place to "escape to" if the worst happens, and reality becomes permanently inaccessible -- then it wouldn't matter how slowly it ran. Once they'd given up hope of reestablishing contact, slowdown would become irrelevant."

"Yes, but there's
slow
-- and there's physically impossible. Sure, they could take in a crude sketch of the planet -- which is what Durham's asked me to provide -- but they wouldn't have a fraction of the memory needed to bring it to life. And even if they found a way around that, it could take a billion years of
Autoverse time
before the seed organism turned into anything more exciting than blue-green algae. Multiply that by a slow-down of a trillion . . . I think you get the picture."

"Flat batteries?"

"Flat universe."

Hayden said, "Still . . . if they don't want to think too seriously about the prospect of ending up permanently trapped, they might not want to look too closely at any of this. Thanks to you, Durham will have a thick pile of impressive technical details that he can wave in their faces, convincing enough to take the edge off their fear of cabin fever. Maybe that's all they want. The only part that matters, if everything goes smoothly, is the conventional VR -- good enough to keep them amused for a couple of real-time centuries -- and
that
checks out perfectly."