Permutation City (28 page)

Maria threaded her way through the crowd, greeting people she'd never known existed. Handsome, dark-eyed seventh cousins kissed her hand and whispered compliments in a beautiful dialect she didn't understand. Veiled widows in elegant black dresses stood arm-in-arm with their resurrected husbands. Children weaved between the adults' legs, stealing food by the handful and cramming it into their mouths on the run.

The clinic's neurologist turned out to be a distant relative. Maria cupped her hands to the woman's ear and shouted over the noise of the party: "Have I been scanned yet? Will my Copy remember any of this?" The neurologist explained that the scan only captured memories laid down permanently as changes in synaptic strengths; the fleeting electrochemistry of this dream would be lost forever. She added cryptically, "Lost to whoever's not having it."

Maria felt herself waking. Suddenly afraid that she might be the Copy, she struggled to remain in the dream -- as if she could force her way back through the crowd, back through the plot, and leave by a different exit. But the scene grew vague and unconvincing; she could feel the heavy presence of her waking body: her aching shoulders, her swollen tongue.

She opened her eyes. She was alone in the Landau Clinic's cheerfully decorated recovery room; she'd been wheeled through for a patient's-eye view before being given the anesthetic, so she'd know exactly what to expect. It took a few seconds for the truths of the dream to fade, though.
Her father was dead. Her grandparents were dead. There'd been no grand reunion. There never would be.

As for the Copy . . . her scan file didn't even exist, yet; the raw tomographic data would take hours to be processed into a high-resolution anatomical map. And she could still change her mind and keep the results out of Durham's hands altogether. He'd paid the clinic for the scan, but if she refused to hand over the file there'd be nothing he could do about it.

The recovery room was softly lit, lined with odorless blue and orange flowers. Maria closed her eyes. If Durham's logic meant anything, raw
tomographic data
could probably process itself,
find itself conscious,
as easily as any Copy who'd been chopped up and run at random. There was no need for a finished scan file.

No need even to be scanned; the very same data surely existed, scattered about the universe, whether or not it was ever plucked from her brain and assembled in what she thought of as
one place.

In fact, if Durham was right -- if the events he believed would take place in his TVC universe
could find themselves
in the dust -- then those events
would
happen, regardless. It could make no difference what anyone did in this world. The whole Garden-of-Eden project was superfluous. Every permutation of the dust which was capable of perceiving itself, making sense of itself, would do just that. And all she would have achieved by refusing to be scanned would have been to deny the Maria of that permutation a history which seemed to overlap with her own particular life. While a third woman -- in another world, another permutation -- would have taken her place in that role.

Maria opened her eyes. She'd just recalled the first thing she'd meant to do on waking. Every scanner was programmed to recognize -- in real time, before all the arduous data processing that followed -- the magnetic resonance spectrum of four or five special dyes, which could be used for alignment and identification. The scanning technician had obligingly loaned her a "number three" marker pen -- and instructed the scanner to blind itself to that particular dye.

She pulled her hands out from under the sheets. Her left palm still read:
you are not the copy.

She licked her fingers and started rubbing the unnecessary words away.

+ + +

Maria arrived at the north Sydney flat around half past twelve. Two terminals were set up side by side on Durham's kitchen table; other than that, the place was as bare as it had been the last time she'd called.

Although it wasn't, technically, necessary, Maria had insisted that she and Durham be in the same physical location throughout what he called the "launch" -- the running of the first moments of the TVC universe as software on a real computer, the act which would supposedly seed an independent, self-sustaining universe, taking up where the version relying on real-world hardware left off. At least this way she could monitor the keys he pressed and the words he spoke, without having to wonder if she was being shown what was really going on at that level. She had no idea what she was guarding against -- but Durham was a highly intelligent man with some very strange beliefs, and she had no reason to feel confident that he'd revealed the full extent of his delusions. His clients had confirmed part of his story -- and they would have had the resources to check much more of it than she had -- but Durham might still have lied to them about what was going on inside his head.

She wanted to trust him, she wanted to believe that she'd finally reached the truth -- but it was hard to put any limits on how wrong she might yet be. She felt she'd known him too long to seriously fear for her physical safety -- but the possibility remained that everything she thought she'd understood about the man would turn out, once again, to have been utterly misconceived. If he came away from the kitchen sink brandishing a carving knife, calmly announcing his intention to sacrifice her to the Spirit of the New Moon, she'd have no right to feel betrayed, or surprised. She couldn't expect to live off the proceeds of insanity, and also take for granted the usual parameters of civilized behavior.

The flesh-and-blood Durham was only half the problem. Once the program simulating a TVC cellular automaton was started, the plan was that neither she nor Durham would intervene at all. Any external tinkering would violate the automaton's rules -- the fundamental laws of the new universe -- making a mockery of the whole endeavor. Only
Durham's Copy,
being run on the simulated TVC computers, could act in harmony with those laws. They would always have the option of aborting the project, pulling the plug -- but in every other respect, the Copy would be in control.

(Of course, aborting the simulation if something went wrong would not -- in Durham's eyes -- prevent the spawning of an independent universe beyond their control . . . but it might leave them with enough unspent computer time for a second attempt.)

With her hands tied once the universe was running, her only way to influence what did or didn't happen was through the Garden-of-Eden configuration -- which included all the programs the TVC lattice would initially run. Maria had written part of this internal launch software herself; Durham had written, or commissioned, the rest, but she'd checked it all personally. And she'd built in a safeguard: all the Copies but Durham's would be blocked from running until the TVC processors had solved a suitably intractable mathematical equation. Maria had estimated that the world's combined computing resources couldn't have cracked the problem in under a decade; thirty million dollars' worth, minus overheads, wouldn't come close. That was no obstacle in the eyes of Durham and his followers; the ever-growing resources of the burgeoning TVC universe would make light work of it, solving the equation within a week or two of the launch. But short of any such universe coming into existence -- and so long as the test wasn't circumvented -- there was no chance of a second Maria Deluca, or anyone else, waking. It was her guarantee that there'd be no virtual Jonestown. Just one lone prophet flickering in and out of existence.

Durham made instant coffee. Maria surveyed the spartan room. She said, "This isn't good enough, you know. We should have two hundred people wearing headsets, and a giant screen taking up an entire wall. Like one of the old NASA missions."

Durham spoke over the sound of boiling water. "Don't worry; we'll be using more computing power per second than NASA used for the entire Apollo program."

Computing power.
One more thing to worry about. Maria logged on to the QIPS exchange; the rate was up slightly since she'd last checked, but so far there was no sign of what she dreaded. In the event that Operation Butterfly entered the market again, today of all days, the Garden of Eden would be frozen out, postponed until the QIPS rate returned to normal levels. That wouldn't make the slightest difference to Durham or his followers -- even if the launch program was thrown off the network halfway through, and only completed days, or weeks, later. Real time was irrelevant. Maria could appreciate the logic of that -- but the thought of a delay, or an unexpected slowdown, still made her sick with anxiety. Every legal opinion she'd obtained had made it clear that neither she nor Durham were likely to face prosecution -- and if charges
were
brought against them, a conviction was highly improbable . . . and even if that happened, an appeal would almost certainly succeed. Nonetheless, every day she'd spent working with Durham as a knowing "accomplice" had made her feel more vulnerable to the whims of the authorities. Hayden had treated her icily when she'd confessed to having abandoned her laughable "undercover" role. The risk of harassment would hardly vanish the moment the project was completed -- but the relief would still be considerable.

She was beginning to regret having honored her promise not to try to record Durham's clients' statements assuring her that they were fully informed participants in the scheme. The authenticated messages she'd viewed -- on public terminals -- might not have been the equivalent of human testimony, but having them stored away on a chip somewhere would have made her feel a lot more secure. Regardless of the legal status of the Copies, she couldn't imagine being prosecuted for fraud if she could show that the
de facto
"victims of the crime" knew exactly what they were paying for.

Durham set her coffee down on the table. Maria mumbled thanks as he sat beside her. He said, "No last-minute qualms? You can still back out if you want to."

She kept her eyes on the screen, the flickering pie chart of the QIPS exchange. "Don't tempt me." As if she'd seriously consider blowing her one real chance to have Francesca scanned -- after all the work, all the anxiety -- for no better reason than a laughable, microscopic fear that this artificial universe
might actually blossom into self-contained existence.

Durham's terminal beeped. Maria glanced at his screen; a message box said PRIORITY COMMUNICATION. She looked away as he viewed the text.

"Speaking of last-minute qualms, Riemann's changed his mind. He wants in."

Maria said irritably, "Well, tell him it's too late. Tell him he's missed the boat." She wasn't serious; from what she knew of the project's finances, Durham had been set to barely break even by the end of the day. The price of one more ticket would transform his fortunes completely.

He said, "Relax -- it will take half an hour at the most to fit him in. And his fee will cover much more than the increase in data; we'll be able to run the whole launch a bit longer."

Maria had to pause to let that sink in. Then she said, "You're going to blow most of
two million ecus
on stretching out something that --"

Durham smiled. "That
what?
That would have worked anyway?"

"That
you believe
would have worked anyway!"

"The longer I get to see my Copy observing the TVC universe, the happier I'll be. I don't
know
what it will take to anchor the automaton rules -- but if ten watertight experiments sounds good, then eleven sounds better."

Maria pushed her chair back and walked away from her terminal. Durham tapped at his keyboard, first invoking the programs which would recompute the Garden-of-Eden configuration to include the new passenger and his luggage -- then directing the windfall from Riemann straight into the project's JSN account.

She said, "What's wrong with you? Two million ecus is more than two million dollars! You could have lived on that for the rest of your life!"

Durham kept typing, passing Riemann's documents through a series of legal checks. "I'll get by."

"Given it to a charity, then!"

Durham frowned, but said patiently, "I gather that Thomas Riemann gives generously to famine relief and crop research every year. He chose to spend this money on a place in my sanctuary; it's hardly my role to channel his funds into whatever you or I decide is the worthiest cause." He glanced at her and added, mock-solemnly, "That's called fraud, Ms. Deluca. You can go to prison for that."

Maria was unmoved. "You could have kept something for yourself. For this life, this world. I don't imagine any of your clients expected you to do all this for nothing."

Durham finished at the terminal and turned to her. "I don't expect you to understand. You treat the whole project as a joke -- and that's fine. But you can hardly expect me to run it on that basis."

Maria didn't even know what she was angry about anymore: the delayed launch, the obscene waste of money -- or just Durham sitting there making perfect sense to himself, as always.

She said, "The project
is
a joke. Three hundred million people are living in refugee camps, and you're offering
sanctuary
to sixteen billionaires! What do they need protection from? There's never going to be an
anti-Copy revolution!
They're never going to be
shut down!
You know as well as I do that they'll just sit there getting richer for the next ten thousand years!"