Permutation City

by Greg Egan

“the Chamber”.

Punctuation placement.

She just couldn’t bear the thought that he harbored the faintest hope that he’d persuaded her to take the “dust hypothesis” seriously.

Copies, like funerals, were for the benefit of the survivors.

And now you’re in Permutation City. In the TVC universe – now commonly known as Elysium.

Durham himself had once been memory-wiped and fooled into thinking he was a Copy, when he was merely a visitor.

It’s been seven thousand years; I’ve had a lot of time to think it over.”

You can shut up now – you’ve won; I believe you. But why did you have to wake me? I’m going to lose my mind.”

My god does this woman ever quit bitching?

To the Lambertians, believing any kind of ‘myth’ – any kind of vague, untestable pseudo-explanation – would have been like … suffering hallucinations, seeing mirages, hearing voices. It would have rendered them completely dysfunctional.”

His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist. The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.

He knew why he was happy, here: his exoself had rewired his brain, yet again, as he’d programmed it to do.

Maria felt a surge of anger.

What else is new?

Maria was outraged.

Yet again.

“We’ve come to reveal ourselves as the creators of their universe. There’s not much point being shy about it.”

No longer tied to the growth of the Elysians, the City remained unchanged, at every level. And that meant, in turn, that the infrastructure which Carter had woven into the software for them had also ceased to expand. The simulated “computer” which ran them, composed of the City’s scattered redundancies, was now a finite “machine”, with a finite number of possible states. They were mortal again.

“It’s been seven thousand years. I want to live among people again.” “Then you’ll live among people.” She looked at him hopefully. “We’ll create them? Run the ontogenesis software? Adam-and-Eve a new world of our own?” Peer said, “No. I’ll become them. A thousand, a million. Whatever you want. I’ll become the Solipsist Nation.”