Permutation City

She started laughing and shivering at the same time. Durham placed one palm flat against the screen; she was still angry with him, but she let him reach through the terminal from his daylit room and put his hand on hers.

She said, "Why do you have to act in secret? Can't you persuade the others to agree to stop running the Autoverse? They must realize that it wouldn't harm the Lambertians; it would launch them as surely as it launched Elysium. There's no question of genocide. All right, it would be a loss to the Autoverse scholars -- but how many of those can there be? What does Planet Lambert mean to the average Elysian? It's just one more kind of entertainment."

"I've already tried to shut it down. I'm authorized to set the running speed relative to Standard Time -- and to freeze the whole Autoverse, temporarily, if I see the need to stem the information flow, to let us catch up with rapid developments."

"So what happened? They made you restart it?"

"No. I never managed to freeze it. It can't be done anymore. The clock rate can't be slowed past a certain point; the software ignores the instructions. Nothing happens."

Maria felt a deep chill spread out from the base of her spine. "Ignores them how? That's impossible."

"It would be impossible if everything was working -- so, obviously, something's failed. The question is, at what level? I can't believe that the control software is suddenly revealing a hidden bug after all this time. If it's not responding the way it should, then the processors running it aren't behaving correctly. So either they've been damaged somehow . . . or the cellular automaton itself has changed. I think the JVC rules are being undermined -- or subsumed into something larger."

"Do you have any hard evidence?"

"No. I've rerun the old validation experiments, the ones I ran during the launch, and they still work -- wherever I've tried them -- but I can't even instruct the processors running the Autoverse to diagnose themselves, let alone probe what's happening there at the lowest level. I don't even know if the problem is confined to the region, or if it's spreading out slowly . . . or if it's already happening everywhere, but the effects are too subtle to pick up. You know the only way to validate the rules is with special apparatus. So what do I do? Disassemble half the processors in Elysium, and build test chambers in their place? And even if I could prove that the rules were being broken, how would that help?"

"Who else knows about this?"

"Only Repetto and Zemansky. If it became public knowledge, I don't know what would happen."

Maria was outraged. "What gives you the right to keep this to yourselves? Some people might panic . . . but what are you afraid of? Riots? Looting? The more people who know about the problem, the more likely it is that someone will come up with a solution."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps the mere fact that more people know would make things worse."

Maria absorbed that in silence. The sunlight spilling through the terminal cast radial shadows around her; the room looked like a medieval woodcut of an alchemist discovering the philosopher's stone.

Durham said, "Do you know why I chose the Autoverse in the first place -- instead of real-world physics?"

"Less computation. Easier to seed with life. My brilliant work with A. lamberti."

"No nuclear processes. No explanation for the origins of the elements. I thought: In the unlikely event that the planet yielded intelligent life, they'd still only be able to make sense of themselves on our terms. It all seemed so remote and improbable, then. It never occurred to me that they might miss the laws that we know are laws, and circumvent the whole problem."

"They haven't settled on any kind of theory, yet. They might still come up with a cellular automaton model -- complete with the need for a creator."

"They might. But what if they don't?"

Maria's throat was dry. The numbing abstractions were losing their hypnotic power; she was beginning to feel all too real: too corporeal, too vulnerable. Good timing: finally embracing the illusion of possessing solid flesh and blood -- just as the foundations of this universe seemed ready to turn to quicksand.

She said, "You tell me. I'm tired of guessing what's going on in your head."

"We can't shut them down. I think that proves that they're already affecting Elysium. If they successfully explain their origins in a way which contradicts the Autoverse rules, then that may distort the JVC rules. Perhaps only in the region where the Autoverse is run -- or perhaps everywhere. And if the TVC rules are pulled out from under us --"