Permutation City (16 page)

"A burning question of our time."

Maria felt herself flush with anger, but she said evenly, "Maybe not. I just happen to find it interesting. And apparently Paul Durham does too. And maybe it's too abstract a question to qualify as
science . . .
maybe working in the Autoverse is nothing but pure mathematics. Or philosophy. Or art. But you don't seem to have any qualms about spending a year in Seoul, practicing your own useless artform at the Korean taxpayers' expense."

"It's a private university."

"Korean students' expense, then."

"I never said there was anything wrong with you taking the job -- I just don't want to see you get screwed if this man turns out to be lying."

"What could he possibly have to gain by lying?"

"I don't know -- but I still don't see what he has to gain if he's telling the truth." He shrugged. "But if you're happy, I'm happy. Maybe it'll all be okay. And I know, the way things are going, you can't afford to be picky."

Picky?
Maria started laughing. Discussing this on Aden's terms was ridiculous. Durham wasn't stringing her along, wasting her time; he was absolutely serious -- his notes proved that. Three hundred pages -- months of work. He'd taken the plan as far as he could, short of learning the intricacies of the Autoverse himself.

And maybe she still didn't understand his motives -- but maybe there was nothing to be "understood." When she'd been immersed in his notes, there'd been no mystery at all. On its own terms, Durham's plan was . . . natural, obvious. An end in itself, requiring no dreary explanation rooted in the world of academic glory and monetary gain.

Aden said, "What's so funny?"

"Never mind."

He shifted in the chair, and looked at her oddly. "Well, at least you won't have to spend all your time in Seoul looking for work, now. That would have been a bore."

"I'm not going to Seoul."

"You're joking."

She shook her head.

"What's the problem? You can do this job anywhere, can't you?"

"Probably. Yes. I just --"

Maria felt a twinge of uncertainty. He seemed genuinely hurt. He'd made it clear that he'd go without her, if he had to -- but that was understandable. Composer-in-residence was
his
perfect job -- and she had nothing to weigh against that, nothing to lose by accompanying him. He might have put his position more diplomatically, instead of making her feel like optional baggage -- but that was neither proof that he was trying to drive her away, nor an unforgivable crime in itself. He was tactless sometimes. She could live with that.

"What's wrong with you? You'd love it in Seoul. You know you would."

She said, "I'd love it too much. There'd be too many distractions. This project is going to be hard work, the hardest thing I've ever done, and if I can't give it all my attention, it's going to be impossible." It had started as an
ad lib
excuse, but it was true. She had six months, if not to build a world, at least to sketch one; if she didn't eat, sleep and breathe it, it would never come together, it would never come to life.

Aden snorted. "That's ludicrous! You don't even have to write a program that
runs.
You said yourself, as long as you make a reasonable effort, whatever you hand over will be good enough. What's Durham going to say? 'Sorry, but I don't think this slime mould would ever invent the wheel'?"

"Getting it right matters to me."

Aden said nothing. Then, "If you want to stay behind because of your mother, why can't you just say so?"

Maria was startled. "Because it's not true."

He stared at her angrily. "You know, I was going to offer to stay here with you. But you didn't want to talk about it."

Maria untangled that. "That's what you came here to tell me? That if I planned to stay in Sydney because of Francesca, you'd turn down the job in Seoul?"

"Yes." He said it as if it should have been obvious to her all along. "She's dying. Do you think I'd walk off and leave you to cope with that alone? What kind of shit do you think I am?"

She's not dying; she's going to be scanned.

But she didn't say that. "Francesca doesn't care if I go or stay. I offered to move in with her, but she doesn't want to be looked after by anyone. Let alone by me."

"Then come to Seoul."

"Why, exactly? So you won't feel bad about leaving me? That's what it all comes down to, isn't it? Your peace of mind."

Aden thought about that for a while. Then he said, "All right. Fuck you. Stay."

He got to his feet and walked out of the room. Maria listened to him fumbling with his cycle, then opening the front door, slamming it closed.

She tidied up in the kitchen, checked the locks, switched off the lights. Then she went upstairs and lay on her bed, leaving the room in darkness, trying to picture the likely course of events over the next few weeks. Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn't upset, or relieved -- just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life.

She'd left the terminal switched on after reading Durham's ROM; the screen was blank, and supposedly pure black, but as her eyes adapted to the dark she could see it glowing a faint gray. Every now and then there was a brief flash at a random point on the screen -- a pixel activated by background radiation, struck by a cosmic ray. She watched the flashes, like a slow rain falling on a window to another world, until she fell asleep.

11

(Remit not paucity)

JANUARY 2051

Malcolm Carter presented as a tall, solid, vigorous-looking man in late middle age -- and in fact he was fifty-eight, so his visitor's body might easily have been styled directly on his real one. Peer remembered seeing photographs of Carter in the early thirties, when he rose to prominence as one of the first architect-programmers to concentrate on the needs of Copies, rather than catering to the human visitors who used virtual environments merely for work or entertainment. Visitors had ended up hiring him too, though -- visitors like Kate who were on their way in. And Kate had moved in a similar orbit then, a young computer artist snatched out of obscurity in Oregon and adopted by the San Francisco glitterati at about the same time as Carter's own ascent from a small Arizona software house. Peer wasn't sure he would have recognized the man from those old magazine shots -- but then, nobody continued to look the way they'd looked in the thirties, if they could possibly help it.

Carter shook hands with Peer, and nodded at Kate; Peer wondered, curious but not really jealous, if they were greeting each other a little more warmly in a private detour from the version of the meeting he was seeing. They were standing in a spacious reception area, the walls and high ceiling decorated with a motif of tiered concentric circles moulded into the cream-colored plaster, the floor tiled in black-and-white diamonds. This was Carter's publicly listed VR address; anyone at all could call the number and "come here." The room spawned separate versions for separate callers, though; Peer and Kate had taken steps to arrive together, but there had been no risk of them accidentally bumping into one of Carter's -- or Durham's -- wealthy clients.

Carter said, "I hope you don't mind if we keep this brief and to the point. I don't like to use inducers for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch."

Peer said, "It's good of you to make the time to see us at all." He cursed himself silently; he was contemplating paying this man a substantial portion of his entire wealth -- and trusting him with the fate of an autonomous version of his own consciousness. He had a right to an audience.
Still, at a slow-down of sixty . . .

Carter -- if it really was Carter, and not just a convincing mask -- pointed out a door at the end of the room. "There's a rough sketch of the city through there, if you want to take the tour later on; just call out for a guide if you need one. But I expect the city itself's not your main concern. What you really want to know is, can I fit you safely into the cracks?"

Peer glanced at Kate. She remained silent. She was already convinced; this was all for his benefit.

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 bum 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?"