Permutation City

by Greg Egan

For one sleep-addled moment, still trying to wake, to collect himself, to order his life, it seemed to make as much sense to place these two fragments side-by-side – watching sunlit dust motes, forty years apart – as it did to follow the ordinary flow of time from one instant to the next. Then he woke a little more, and the confusion passed.

His model-of-a-brain ran seventeen times slower than the real thing.

telepresence robots might actually be worth inhabiting.

masks were orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Copies; they had about as many neurons as the average goldfish

Meteorologists envisage dotting the waters of the tropical western Pacific and the South China Sea with a grid of hundreds of thousands of “weather-control” rigs – solar powered devices designed to alter the local temperature on demand by pumping water between different depths. Theoretical models suggest that a sufficient number of rigs, under elaborate computer control, could be used to influence large-scale weather patterns, “nudging” them toward the least harmful of a number of finely balanced possible outcomes.

she’d probably been busy on some shitty contract to improve the tactile qualities of beach sand for visitors to the Virtual Gold Coast – either that, or tinkering with the genome of A. lamberti, trying to become the first person in the world to bludgeon a simulated bacterium into exhibiting natural selection.

He believed that anyone willing to slow down their brain by a factor of seventeen, solely for the privilege of talking to him face-to-face, deserved a hearing – and he wasn’t immune to the intrinsic flattery of the process, the unequal sacrifice of time.

telepresence robots will let Copies interact with the physical world as fully as if they were human.

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.”

And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same?

“The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference.”

now that we’ve created an artificial world, intentionally or not, we’d better learn to control it. Because if we stand back and leave it all to chance, it’s just going to collapse around us in some random fashion that isn’t likely to be any better than our worst well-intentioned mistakes.”

Omniaveritas, her knowledge miner, had picked up no news reports of a typhoon in the region;

Remember Intelligent agents?

Durham had fooled his doctors into believing that they’d cured him – and then, with typical paranoid ingenuity and tenacity, he’d set about getting himself into a position where he could meet Copies, share the Great Truth that had been revealed to him … and try to extract a little money in the process.

you want to present the strongest possible case that deterministic systems like the Autoverse can generate a biology as complex as real-world biology – that all the subtleties of real-world physics and quantum indeterminacy aren’t essential. And to deal with the objection that a complex biology might only arise in a complex environment, you want a description of a suitable ‘planet’ that could exist in the Autoverse – if not for the minor inconvenience that the hardware that could run it will almost certainly never be built.”

Babbage had designed the Analytical Engine with no real prospect of seeing it constructed in his lifetime. Space travel enthusiasts had been designing interstellar craft, down to every last nut and bolt, since the nineteen sixties. Terraforming advocates were constantly churning out comprehensive feasibility studies for schemes unlikely to be attempted for a hundred years or more. Why? As aids to thought experiments. As sketches of proofs.

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.

“You can change your perspective. Change your attitudes. Stop viewing your experiences here as less than real.”

Characters as vehicles for exploring, or explaining, ideas.

She’d summoned up a control panel, shown him the software he could use: a program which would analyze his model-of-a-brain, identify his qualms and misgivings about turning his back on the world – and remove them.

In a few subjective days, he could change from an ascetic bodiless student of Sumerian archaeology, to a hedonistic gastronome delighting in nothing more than the preparation and consumption of lavishly simulated feasts, to a disciplined practitioner of Shotokan karate. A core remained; certain values, certain emotional responses, certain esthetic sensibilities had survived these transitions unscathed.

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.

he was, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on Earth. He didn’t feel much like a digital Gaia, though. He felt exactly like an ordinary human being sitting in a room a few meters wide.

“artist’s impressions”,

Comma placement.

The Autoverse was meant to provide a compromise between real-world chemistry – difficult and expensive to manipulate and monitor in test-tube experiments, and hideously slow to compute in faithful simulations – and the tantalizing abstractions of the earliest “artificial life”: computer viruses, genetic algorithms, self-replicating machines embedded in simple cellular automaton worlds; all trivially easy to compute, but unable to throw much light on the genesis of real-world molecular biology. Lambert had spent a decade trying to find conditions which would lead to the spontaneous appearance of Autoverse life, without success. He’d constructed A. lamberti – a twelve-year project – to reassure himself that his goal wasn’t absurd; to demonstrate that a living organism could at least function in the Autoverse, however it had come to be there. A. lamberti had permanently side-tracked him; he’d never returned to his original research.

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.”

If Durham already knows they're watching him, why would he continue with his fraudulent plan? Answered on paged 164.

“The testimony of a Copy has no standing; legally, they’re just another kind of computer software.”

“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.

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 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 that 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.

convincing enough to take the edge of their fear of cabin fever.

Error: first "of" should be "off".

Resurrected blue-collar worker Larry Unclear could turn out to have been under suspicion of murder at the time of his death.

Should copies be held liable for crimes committed by their originals?

The fraud squad, like the intelligence agencies, are jumping to absurd conclusions. I’ve told them the whole truth. They’ve chosen not to believe me.”

Durham said, “Almost six years ago – loosely speaking – a man I know made a Copy of himself. When the Copy woke up, it panicked, and tried to bail out. But the original had sabotaged the software; bailing out was impossible.” “That’s illegal.” “I know.” “So who was this man?” “His name was Paul Durham.” “You? You were the original?” “Oh, no. I was the Copy.”

Elizabeth was perched on a stool beside him. She said, “Paul. Try to listen carefully to what I’m going to say. You’ll start to reintegrate the memories gradually, on your own, but it’ll help if I talk you through it all first. To start with, you’re not a Copy. You’re flesh and blood.”

after you made the scan that was going to run as Copy number five, you finally told me what you were doing. And I persuaded you not to run it – until you’d tried another experiment: putting yourself in its place. Finding out, first hand, what it would be forced to go through. “And you agreed. You entered the virtual environment which the Copy would have inhabited – with your memories since the day of the scan suppressed, so you had no way of knowing that you were only a visitor.”

I controlled the puppet that played your ‘original’ – software provided the vocabulary signature and body language, but I pulled the strings. You briefed me, beforehand, on what to have it say and do. You’ll remember that, soon enough.”

You were sick of Copies bailing out on you. You had to come to terms with their experience. Spending a few days believing you were a Copy would make or break the project: you’d either end up psychologically prepared, at last, to give rise to a Copy who’d be able to cope with its fate – or you’d gain enough sympathy for their plight to stop creating them.

Paul had been a visitor believing he was a Copy. And he’d also been the Copy itself.

Durham said patiently, “I’ve admitted from the outset: my condition explains everything. I believed – because I was mentally ill – that I was the twenty-third generation Copy of another Paul Durham, from another world.” “Because you were mentally ill! End of story.”

“Logic of the dust theory! It’s not a theory. It can’t be tested.”

“The whole problem, so far, has been that my memories are always entirely explicable within the new world. I shut myself down as a Copy – and find myself in a flesh-and-blood body with flesh-and-blood memories which the laws of physics could have produced from earlier states of a flesh-and-blood brain. This world can explain me: only as man whose delusions are unlikely beyond belief – but there’s no denying that I do have a complete extra history, here, that’s not literally, physically impossible. So whatever I prefer to believe, I have to concede that the outcome of the experiment is still ambiguous. I could, still, be wrong.

This is getting to be a bit of the Dallas Bobby dream. Or Ahnold's Total Recall.

dust theory

The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

“There’s a cellular automaton called TVC.

I’ve commissioned Malcolm Carter, no less, to create a major city to act as a central meeting place: Permutation City, capital of the TVC universe.

Durham’s logic was impeccable; an endlessly-expanding TVC universe, with new computing power being manufactured out of nothing in all directions, “would” eventually be big enough to run an Autoverse planet – or even a whole planetary system.

How is new computing power being manufactured?

Copies with de facto control of billion-dollar business empires would much rather have people linking them to some dubious salesman and his breakthrough supercomputer – and have the rumors fizzle out from lack of substantiation – than let the world know that they plan to send a clone into an artificial universe which runs without hardware.

How is it running without hardware? Possibile explanation: each slice of the multiverse is providing hardware, with the aggregate benefitting all.

She pulled her hands out from under the sheets. Her left palm still read: YOU ARE NOT THE COPY.

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.

“The TVC universe will never collapse. Never. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion; it makes no difference, it will always be expanding.”

All the overheads of running a Copy on a system of computers which was, itself, a simulation, added up to a slowdown of about two hundred and fifty.

This all seems reminiscent of that scammy RAM Doubler for Macs in the 90s.

“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.”