Permutation City

Durham nodded slowly. "All right. What if I showed you some of the other species? Or the evolutionary history? The paleogenetic record? We have every mutation on file since the year zero. You want to sit down with that and see if it looks authentic?"

"No. I want a terminal that works. I want you to let me call my original. I want to talk to her -- and between us, maybe we can decide what I'm going to do when I get out of this fucking madhouse and into my own JSN account."

Durham looked rattled -- and for a moment she believed she might finally be getting through to him. But he said, "I woke you for a reason. We're going to be making contact with the Lambertians soon. It might have been sooner -- but there've been complications, political delays."

He'd lost her completely now. "'Contact with the Lambertians?' What's that supposed to mean?"

He gestured at the motionless insect, backside and genitals still facing them. 'This is not some species I picked at random. This is the pinnacle of Autoverse life. They're conscious, self-aware, highly intelligent. They have almost no technology -- but their nervous system is about ten times more complex than a human's -- and they can go far beyond that for some tasks, performing a kind of parallel computing in swarms. They have chemistry, physics, astronomy. They know there are thirty-two atoms -- although they haven't figured out the underlying cellular automaton rules yet. And they're modeling the primordial cloud. These are sentient creatures, and they want to know where they came from."

Maria turned her hand in front of the screen, bringing the Lambertian's head back into view. She was beginning to suspect that Durham actually believed every word he was saying -- in which case, maybe he hadn't, personally, contrived these aliens. Maybe some other version of him -- the flesh-and-blood original? -- was deceiving both of them. If that was the case, she was arguing with the wrong person -- but what was she supposed to do instead? Start shouting pleas for freedom to the sky?

She said numbly, "Ten times more complex than a human brain?"

"Their neurons use conducting polymers to carry the signal, instead of membrane action potentials. The cells themselves are comparable in size to a human's -- but each axon and dendrite carries multiple signals." Durham moved the viewpoint behind the Lambertian's eye, and showed her. A neuron in the optic nerve, under close examination, contained thousands of molecules like elaborately knotted ropes, running the whole length of the cell body. At the far end, each polymer was joined to a kind of vesicle, the narrow molecular cable dwarfed by the tiny pouch of cell membrane pinched off from the outside world. "There are almost three thousand distinct neurotransmitters; they're all proteins, built from three sub-units, with fourteen possibilities for each sub-unit. A bit like human antibodies -- the same trick for generating a wide spectrum of shapes. And they bind to their receptors just as selectively as an antibody to an antigen; every synapse is a three-thousand-channel biochemical switchboard, with no cross-talk. That's the molecular basis of Lambertian thought." He added wryly, "Which is more than you and I possess: a molecular basis for anything. We still run the old patchwork models of the human body -- expanded and modified according to taste, but still based on the same principles as John Vines's first talking Copy. There's a long-term project to give people the choice of being implemented on an atomic level . . . but quite apart from the political complications, even the enthusiasts keep finding more pressing things to do."

Durham moved the viewpoint out through the cell wall and turned it back to face the terminal end of the neuron. He changed the color scheme from atomic to molecular, to highlight the individual neurotransmitters with their own distinctive hues. Then he unfroze the image.

Several of the grey lipid-membrane vesicles twitched open, disgorging floods of brightly colored specks; tumbling past the viewpoint, they resolved into elaborate, irregular globules with a bewildering variety of forms. Durham swung the angle of view forward again, and headed for the far side of the synapse. Eventually, Maria could make out color-coded receptors embedded in the receiving neuron's cell wall: long-chain molecules folded together into tight zig-zagged rings, with lumpy depressions on the exposed surface.