Permutation City

Pretentious fancy dress aside, there were a smattering of animal bodies visible -- which may or may not have reflected their inhabitants' true models. It could be remarkably comfortable being a lion, or even a snake -- if your brain had been suitably adapted for the change. Peer had spent some time inhabiting the bodies of animals, both historical and mythical, and he'd enjoyed them all -- but when the phase was over, he'd found that with very little rewiring, he could make the human form feel every bit as good. It seemed more elegant to be comfortable with his ancestral physiology. The majority of Elysians apparently agreed.

Eight thousand was a typical attendance figure -- but Peer could not have said what fraction of the total population it represented. Even leaving out Callas, Shaw and Riemann -- the three founders who'd remained in their own private worlds, never making contact with anyone -- there might have been hundreds or thousands of members of the later generations who'd opted out of the core community without ever announcing their existence.

The ever-expanding cube of Elysium had been divided up from the outset into twenty-four everexpanding oblique pyramids; one for each of the eighteen founders and their offspring, and six for common ventures (such as Permutation City itself -- but mostly Planet Lambert). Most Elysians -- or at least most who used the City -- had chosen to synch themselves to a common objective time rate. This Standard Time grew steadily faster against Absolute Time -- the ticking of the TVC cellular automaton's clock -- so every Elysian needed a constantly growing allocation of processors to keep up; but Elysium itself was growing even faster, leaving everyone with an ever-larger surplus of computing power.

Each founder's territory was autonomous, subdivided on his or her own terms. By now, each one could have supported a population of several trillion, living by Standard Time. But Peer suspected that most of the processors were left idle -- and he had occasionally daydreamed about some fifth-generation Elysian studying the City's history, getting a curious hunch about Malcolm Carter, and browbeating one of the founders into supplying the spare computing resources of a near-empty pyramid to scan the City for stowaways. All of Carter's ingenious camouflage -- and the atom-in-a-haystack odds which had been their real guarantee against discovery -- would count for nothing under such scrutiny, and once their presence was identified, they could easily be disinterred . . . assuming that the Elysians were generous enough to do that for a couple of petty thieves.

Kate claimed to believe that this was inevitable, in the long term. Peer didn't much care if they were found or not; all that really mattered to him was the fact that the City's computational infrastructure was also constantly expanding, to enable it to keep up with both the growing population, and the ever-increasing demands of Elysian Standard Time. As long as that continued, his own tiny fraction of those resources also steadily increased. Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a "machine" with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.

Kate had timed their entrance into the replay perfectly. As they settled into empty seats near the back of the hall, Paul Durham himself took the stage.

He said, "Thank you for joining me. I've convened this meeting to discuss an important proposal concerning Planet Lambert."

Peer groaned. "I could be making table legs, and you've dragged me along to Attack of the Killer Bees. Part One Thousand and Ninety-Three."

Kate said, "You could always choose to be glad you're here. There's no need to be dissatisfied."

Peer shut up, and Durham -- frozen by the interruption -- continued. "As most of you will know, the Lambertians have been making steady progress recently in the scientific treatment of their cosmology. A number of teams of theorists have proposed dust-and-gas-cloud models for the formation of their planetary system -- models which come very close to the truth. Although no such process ever literally took place in the Autoverse, it was crudely simulated before the launch, to help design a plausible ready-made system. The Lambertians are now zeroing in on the parameters of that simulation." He gestured at a giant screen behind him, and vision appeared: several thousand of the insect-like Lambertians swarming in the air above a lush blue-green meadow.