Permutation City

by Greg Egan

Objects out of sight didn’t “vanish” entirely, if they influenced the ambient light, but Paul knew that the calculations would rarely be pursued beyond the crudest first-order approximations: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights reduced to an average reflectance value, a single gray rectangle – because once his back was turned, any more detail would have been wasted. Everything in the room was as finely resolved, at any given moment, as it needed to be to fool him – no more, no less.

There were pedestrians and cyclists on the street – all purely recorded. They were solid rather than ghostly, but it was an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they were like infinitely strong, infinitely disinterested robots. Paul hitched a ride on one frail old woman’s back for a while; she carried him down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all felt the same: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.

He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back – and it felt like he was reaching out from the “self” in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim.

At the same time, Maria couldn’t help feeling cheated. She didn’t mind having been taken in, briefly; what she resented was not being able to be fooled again. She could stand there admiring the artistry of the illusion for as long as she liked, but nothing could bring back the surge of elation she’d felt when she’d been deceived.

Upstairs, in the bedroom that doubled as an office, Maria switched on her terminal and glanced at a summary of the twenty-one items of mail which had arrived since she’d last checked. All were classified as “Junk”; there was nothing from anyone she knew – and nothing remotely like an offer of paid work. Camel’s Eye, her screening software, had identified six pleas for donations from charities (all worthy causes, but Maria hardened her heart); five invitations to enter lotteries and competitions; seven retail catalogs (all of which boasted that they’d been tailored to her personality and “current lifestyle requirements” – but Camel’s Eye had assessed their contents and found nothing of interest); and three interactives.

Maria ran the interactive. A man’s face appeared on the terminal; “he” met her gaze and smiled warmly, and she suddenly realized that “he” bore a slight resemblance to Aden. Close enough to elicit a flicker of recognition which the mask of herself she’d set up for Camel’s Eye would not have exhibited? Maria felt a mixture of annoyance and grudging admiration. She’d never shared an address with Aden – but no doubt the data analysis agencies correlated credit card use in restaurants, or whatever, to pick up relationships which didn’t involve cohabitation. Mapping useful connections between consumers had been going on for decades – but employing the data in this way, as a reality test, was a new twist.

Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms – a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers? All of the above?

Paul scanned the old news reports rapidly, skimming over articles and fast-forwarding scenes which he felt sure he would have studied scrupulously, had they been fresh. He felt a curious sense of resentment, at having “missed” so much – it was all there in front of him, now, but that wasn’t the same at all.

And yet, he wondered, shouldn’t he be relieved that he hadn’t wasted his time on so much ephemeral detail? The very fact that he was now less than enthralled only proved how little of it had really mattered, in the long run. Then again, what did? People didn’t inhabit geological time. People inhabited hours and days; they had to care about things on that time scale. People.

The climax of Glass’s Mishima still seized him like a grappling hook through the heart.

And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it – but the answer had to be yes.

Besides, she never much liked using nerve current inducers; although physically unable to damage the eardrums (sparing the management any risk of litigation), they always seemed to leave her ears – or her auditory pathways – ringing, regardless of the volume setting she chose.

All memory is theft, Daniel Lebesgue had written.

And as Daniel Lebesgue, founder of Solipsist Nation, had written: “My goal is to take everything which might be revered as quintessentially human … and grind it into dust.”

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.

But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he’d actually signed up for.

Watching the screens of his Bunker, he’d looked back on that trite but comforting understanding with a dizzying sense of loss – because it was no longer in his power to distance himself, however briefly, from the mass hallucination of commerce-as-reality, no longer possible to wrench some half-self-mocking sense of dignity and independence out of his hypothetical ability to live naked in the woods. Money had ceased to be a convenient fiction to be viewed with appropriate irony – because the computerized financial transactions which flowed from his investments to the network’s QIPS providers now underpinned everything he thought, everything he perceived, everything he was.

And if he couldn’t accept that kind of separatist existence? He always had the choice of suspending himself, in the hope that the economics of ontology would eventually shift in his favor – albeit at the risk of waking to find that he’d matched speeds with a world far stranger, far harder to relate to, than the present in fast motion.

Maria had day-dreamed about embarking on her own attempt at abiogenesis, but she’d never done anything about it.

“She was a child of the nineties. Her kindergarten teachers probably told her that the pinnacle of her existence would be fertilizing a rainforest when she died.”

Bridges here did not collapse from unanticipated vibrations. Perspex tubes did not hurtle to the ground, spilling corpses onto the pavement. It made no difference whether or not Malcolm Carter had known the first thing about structural engineering; the City was hardly going to bother laboriously modeling stresses and loads just to discover whether or not parts of itself should fail, for the sake of realism. Everything was perfectly safe, by decree.

Maria still chose to do everything manually, via her “solid” terminal; no interface windows floating in midair, no telepathic links to her exoself.

Kate gripped him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. “You can’t become the Solipsist Nation. That’s nonsense. It’s rhetoric from an old play. All it would mean is … dying. The people the software creates when you’re gone won’t be you in any way.” “They’ll be happy, won’t they? From time to time? For their own strange reasons?” “Yes. But—” “That’s all I am, now. That’s all that defines me. So when they’re happy, they’ll be me.”

The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust … or it doesn’t. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole … or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.”