Permutation City

Durham showed her how to claim residency: a brief dialogue with the apartment software. He said, "You're the only Elysian in this tower, so you can program all your neighbors any way you like."

"What if I do nothing?"

"Default behavior: they'll stay out of your way."

"And what about other Elysians? Am I such a novelty that people will come looking for me?"

Durham thought it over. "Your awakening is public knowledge -- but most people here are fairly patient. I doubt that anyone would be so rude as to buttonhole you in the street. Your phone number will remain unlisted until you choose otherwise -- and the apartment itself is under your control, now, as secure as any private environment. The software has been rigorously validated: breaking and entering is mathematically impossible."

He left her to settle in. She paced the rooms, trying to inhabit them, to claim them as her own; she forced herself to walk the nearby streets, trying to feel at ease. The Art Deco apartment, the Fritz Lang towers, the streets full of crowd-scene extras all unnerved her -- but on reflection, she realized that she couldn't have gone anywhere else. When she tried to imagine her "territory," her private slice of Elysium, it seemed as daunting and unmanageable as if she'd inherited one twenty-fourth of the old universe of galaxies and vacuum. That the new one was generally invisible, and built from a lattice of self-reproducing computers, built in turn from cellular automaton cells -- which were nothing more than sequences of numbers, however easy it might be to color-code them and arrange them in neat grids -- only made the thought of being lost in its vastness infinitely stranger. It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of an otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years. The thought of immersing her senses in a fake world which was really another corner of the same structure -- withdrawing entirely into the darkness of that giant airless crypt, and surrendering to private hallucinations -- made her sick with panic.

If the City was equally unreal, at least it was one hallucination which other Elysians shared -- and, anchored by that consensus, she found the courage to examine the invisible world beneath, from a safe -- if hallucinatory -- distance. She sat in the apartment and studied maps of Elysium. On the largest scale, most of the cube was portrayed as featureless: the other seventeen founders' pyramids were private, and her own was all but unused. Public territory could be colored according to the software it ran -- processes identified, data flows traced -- but even then, most of it was monochrome: five of the six public pyramids were devoted to the Autoverse, running the same simple program on processor after processor, implementing the Autoverse's own cellular automaton rules -- utterly different from the TVC's. A faint metallic grid was superimposed on this region, like a mesh of fine wires immersed in an unknown substance to gauge its properties. This was the software which spied on Planet Lambert -- an entirely separate program from the Autoverse itself, not subject to any of its laws. Maria had written the original version herself, although she'd never had a chance to test it on a planetary scale. Generations of Elysian Autoverse scholars had extended and refined it, and now it peeked through a quadrillion nonexistent cracks in space, collating, interpreting and summarizing everything it saw. The results flowed to the hub of Elysium, into the central library -- along a channel rendered luminous as white-hot silver by the density of its data flow.

The hub itself was a dazzling polyhedron, a cluster of databases ringed by the communications structures which handled the torrent of information flowing to and from the pyramids. Every transaction between Elysians of different clans flowed through here; from phone calls to handshakes, from sex to whatever elaborate post-human intimacies they'd invented in the past seven thousand years. The map gave nothing away, though; even with the highest magnification and the slowest replay, streaming packets of data registered as nothing more than featureless points of light, their contents safely anonymous.

The second-brightest data flow linked the hub to the City, revealed as a delicate labyrinth of algorithms clinging to one face of the sixth public pyramid. With the Autoverse software across the border rendered midnight blue, the City looked like a cluttered, neon-lit fairground on the edge of a vast desert, at the end of a shimmering highway. Maria zoomed in and watched the packets of data responsible for the map itself come streaming out from the hub.