Permutation City

by Greg Egan

the curtains, each speck appearing for all the world to be conjured into,

Never inhabit the real world again … unless his cheapskate

disbelief. I can’t have done this. I can’t have been so callous.

Of course people begrudge Copies their longevity, but the PR has been handled remarkably well. A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World. There’s discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening. The legal status of Copies is being framed as a human rights issue, especially in Europe: Copies are disabled people, no more, no less – really just a kind of radical amputee – and anyone who talks about decadent rich immortals getting their hands on all the wealth is shouted down as a neo-Nazi.

It was as if he was in deep space, rushing back towards the Earth through a sea of Doppler-shifted broadcasts. The image was strangely comforting; his situation wasn’t so bizarre, after all, if flesh-and-blood humans could find themselves in much the same relationship with the world as he did. Nobody would claim that the Doppler shift could rob someone of their humanity.

But he would have denied it, whether or not it was the truth. And she wouldn’t have believed him, whether or not he was lying. Why ask the question, if the answer told you nothing?

I’ve never run a second version before. I don’t know how I’ll feel about that, after the split.’ How who will feel about it?

‘The thing is, I have my own sense – right now – of who I am … what my boundaries are … and it doesn’t include a Copy of me, run at some time in the indefinite future. Can you understand that? Being scanned wouldn’t make me feel any better about dying. Whatever a Copy of me might think, if one was ever run.’

‘The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference has no position on Copies, one way or the other.’ ‘It has no position on anything.’ ‘That’s right. So it can hardly be their fault that I don’t want to be scanned, can it?’

the screen was blank, and supposedly pure black, but as her eyes adapted to the dark she could see it glowing a faint grey. 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.

‘The practice of skimming off a percentage of a construction project has a long, honourable tradition. All the more honourable if the client’s needs aren’t seriously compromised.

It wasn’t physically impossible, it wasn’t biologically absurd, to imagine life without money.

There’d also been an offer of counselling from his scanning clinic’s Resurrection Trauma expert system – first ten subjective minutes absolutely free.

Was that kernel of invariants – and the more-or-less unbroken thread of memory – enough? Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew – or believed – that they’d once been David Hawthorne. And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough.

It didn’t matter how many supercomputers you owned, because splitting yourself between them wasted more time on communications than was saved by the additional computing power.

Paul recalled the perennial – naive and paranoid – fear that all the networked computers of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind;

If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers … then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing? ’

Being paused wouldn’t kill him, wouldn’t harm him, wouldn’t have the slightest effect. What would kill him would be not being restarted.

Authorities taking possession of computer storage media to check for simulations of the brain, body or personality of a suspected felon, dead or alive, are not violating the Fourth Amendment rights of either the next of kin or the owners of the computer hardware.

Thomas closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. Most of the room ceased being computed; he pictured himself adrift in Durham’s sea of random numbers, carrying the chair and a fragment of floor with him, the only objects granted solidity by his touch. He said, ‘I’m not in any danger.’ The room flickered half-way back into existence, subtly modified the sound of his words, then dissolved into static again.

In cellular automaton theory, it’s a state of the system that can’t be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system’s first state.’

He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously.

‘Please skip to the final question, I know exactly what I’m doing’ – but icons in legal wigs and gowns kept popping up in front of the window and declaring solemnly, ‘You must read this warning carefully. Your brain model will be directly examined for evidence of complete understanding before we proceed to the next stage.’

What duly authenticated meant revolved around a ninety-nine-digit code key which had been ‘hardwired’ into Peer’s model-of-a-brain when his Copy was generated from his scan file. He could summon it up consciously if he had to, in some unlikely emergency, but normally he made use of it by a simple act of will. He’d record a video postcard, wish it to be duly authenticated – and it was done.

Peer was the only software on the planet capable of encrypting instructions to his executor in a form compatible with her own matching key. It was the closest thing he had to a legal identity.

By law, any clone which a Copy made of itself had to be given a new key. It was up to the initial Copy, prior to the cloning, to divide up the worldly assets between the two future selves – or rather, divide them up between the executor’s two portfolios.

Peer closed his eyes. When I see my original, sitting on the porch, I’ll know who I am, and accept it. He said, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Peer felt no change. He opened his eyes. His newly made twin stood on the ground where the interface window had been, staring at him, wide-eyed.

The clone said, ‘Do you know what we should do?’ ‘Shake hands and say goodbye.’ ‘Toss a coin.’ ‘For what?’ The clone laughed. ‘What do you think?’ ‘You said you were happy to go.’ ‘I am. But so should you be. I say we toss a coin. If I win, we swap key numbers.’

As the coin went up, Peer thought about encasing it in a second object, an invisibly thin shell under his control alone – but the long list of attributes of the fair coin probably included crying foul if its true faces were concealed.

Pirandello had said it was impossible to feel any real emotion while staring into a mirror.

the fleeting electrochemistry of this dream would be lost for ever. She added cryptically, ‘Lost to whoever’s not having it.’

‘So you promised these people … immortality?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Literal immortality? Outliving the universe?’ Durham feigned innocence, but he was clearly savouring the shock he’d given her. ‘That’s what the word means. Not: dying after a very long time. Just: not dying, period.’

There was no such thing as a set of perceptions for the Copy which could prove that he inhabited a cellular automaton which obeyed all the rules which he hoped were being obeyed. It was all down to Occam’s razor in the end – and hoping that the simplest explanation for perceiving a display showing the correct results was that the correct results were actually occurring.

Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a ‘machine’ with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.

‘You could always choose to be glad you’re here. There’s no need to be dissatisfied.’

In a universe without death or scarcity, politics took strange forms. Any one of the founders who disagreed with the way Planet Lambert was managed would be perfectly free to copy the whole Autoverse into their own territory, and to do as they wished with their own private version. In inverse proportion to the ease of such a move, any faction would have a rare chance here to demonstrate their ‘influence’ and increase their ‘prestige’ by persuading the meeting to retain the ban on contact with the Lambertians – without provoking their opponents into cloning the Autoverse and pushing ahead regardless.

‘I propose that we delay contact until

Be happy, for no reason. It wouldn’t be so bad.’ Kate shook her head and faded away. Peer felt a pang of disappointment, but not for long. There’d be other times.

‘How does it feel, being seven thousand years old?’ ‘That depends.’ ‘On what?’ ‘On how I want it to feel.’

It’s difficult to translate the motivation exactly, but they have a very precise aesthetic which dictates what they’ll accept as a theory – and it’s almost physically impossible for them to contradict it. If they try to dance a theory which fails to resonate with the neural system which assesses its simplicity, the dance falls apart.’

If he’d rebuilt himself, reinvented himself … then how much of the man she’d known remained? Had he granted himself transhuman resilience, and healed himself of his terminal despair … or had he died in silence, beyond her sight, and given birth to a companion for her, a software child who’d merely inherited its father’s memories?