Permutation City

Decorative crowds filled the streets and walkways: mindless puppets obeying the simplest rules, but looking as purposeful and busy as any human throng. A strange adornment, perhaps -- but not much stranger than having buildings and streets at all. Most Elysians merely visited this place, but last time Peer had concerned himself with such things, a few hundred of them -- mainly third-generation -- had taken up inhabiting the City full-time: adopting every detail of its architecture and geography as fixed parameters, swearing fidelity to its Euclidian distances. Others -- mainly first-generation -- had been appalled by the behavior of this sect. It was strange how "reversion" was the greatest taboo amongst the oldest Elysians, who were so conservative in most other ways. Maybe they were afraid of becoming homesick.

Kate said, "Town Hall."

He followed her down through the darkening air. The City always smelled sweet to Peer; sweet but artificial, like a newly unwrapped electronic toy, all microchips and plastic, from David Hawthorne's childhood. They spiraled around the central golden tower, the City's tallest, weaving their way between the transparent walkways. Playing Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Peer had long ago given up arguing with Kate about the elaborate routes she chose for entering the reconstruction; she ran this peephole on the City out of her own time, and she controlled access to the environment completely. He could either put up with her rules, or stay away altogether. And the whole point of being here was to please her.

They alighted on the paved square outside the Town Hall's main entrance. Peer was startled to recognize one of the fountains as a scaled-up version of Malcolm Carter's demonstration for his algorithmic piggy-back tricks: a cherub wrestling a snake. He must have noticed it before -- he'd stood on this spot a hundred times -- but if so, he'd forgotten. His memory was due for maintenance; it was a while since he'd increased the size of the relevant networks, and they were probably close to saturation. Simply adding new neurons slowed down recall -- relative to other brain functions -- making some modes of thought seem like swimming through molasses; a whole host of further adjustments were necessary to make the timing feel right. The Elysians had written software to automate this tuning process, but he disliked the results of the versions they'd shared with each other (and hence made accessible to him), so he'd written his own -- but he'd yet to perfect it. Things like table legs kept getting in the way.

The square wasn't empty, but the people around them all looked like puppets, merely strolling past. The City's owners were already inside -- and so Kate's software, which spied on the true City and reconstructed it for the two of them, was carrying most of the burden of computing the appearance of their surroundings, now officially unobserved. He took Kate's hand -- and she allowed it, though she made her skin feel as cold as marble -- and they walked into the hall.

The cavernous room was about half-full, so some eight thousand Elysians had turned up for the meeting. Peer granted himself a brief bird's-eye view of the crowd. A variety of fashions in clothing -- or lack of it -- and body type were represented, certainly spanning the generations, but most people had chosen to present in more or less traditional human form. The exceptions stood out. One clique of fourth-generation Elysians displayed themselves as modified Babbage engines; the entire hall couldn't have held one of them "to scale," so portions of the mechanism poked through into their seating allocation from some hidden dimension. Ditto for those who'd turned up as "Searle's Chinese Rooms": huge troupes of individual humans (or human-shaped automatons), each carrying out a few simple tasks, which together amounted to a complete working computer. The "components" seated in the hall were Kali-armed blurs, gesticulating at invisible colleagues with coded hand movements so rapid that they seemed to merge into a static multiple exposure.

Peer had no idea how either type of system collected sound and vision from its surroundings to feed to the perfectly normal Elysians these unwieldy computers were (presumably) simulating, as the end result of all their spinning cogs and frantic hand movements -- or whether the people in question experienced anything much different than they would have if they'd simply shown that standard physiological model to the world.