Permutation City

He gestured with the headset. "You should listen. Crooked Buddhist Lawyers on Crack. They're quite good."

Maria glanced at the stage, although there was no way of telling who he meant. A dozen performers -- four bands in all -- stood enclosed in individual soundproof plastic cylinders. Most of the patrons were tuned in, wearing headsets to pick up one band's sound, and liquid crystal shades, flickering in synch with one group of cylinders, to render the other bands invisible. A few people were chatting quietly -- and of the room's five possible soundtracks, Maria decided that this tranquil near-silence best suited her mood. Besides, she never much liked using nerve current inducers; although physically unable to damage the eardrums (sparing the management any risk of litigation), they always seemed to leave her ears -- or her auditory pathways -- ringing, regardless of the volume setting she chose.

"Maybe later."

She sat beside Aden, and felt him tense slightly when their shoulders brushed, then force himself to relax. Or maybe not. Often when she thought she was reading his body language, she was making signals out of noise. She said, "I got some junk mail today that looked just like you."

"How flattering. I think. What was it selling?"

"The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference."

He laughed. "Every time I hear that, I think: they've got to change the name. A God which makes no difference doesn't rate the definite article or the pronoun 'who.'"

"I'll rerun the program, and the two of you can fight it out."

"No thanks." He took a sip of his drink. "Any non-junk mail? Any contracts?"

"No."

"So . . . another day of terminal boredom?"

"Mostly." Maria hesitated. Aden usually only pressed her for news when he had something to announce himself -- and she was curious to find out what it was. But he volunteered nothing, so she went on to describe her encounter with Operation Butterfly.

Aden said, "I remember hearing something about that. But I thought it was decades away."

"The real thing probably is, but the simulations have definitely started. In a big way."

He looked pained. "Weather control? Who do they think they're kidding?"

Maria suppressed her irritation. "The theory must look promising, or they wouldn't have taken it this far. Nobody spends a few million dollars an hour on supercomputer time without a good chance of a payoff."

Aden snickered. "Oh yes they do. And it's usually called Operation something-or-other. Remember Operation Radiant Way?"

"Yes, I remember."

"They were going to seed the upper atmosphere with nanomachines which could monitor the temperature -- and supposedly do something about it."

"Manufacture particles which reflected certain wavelengths of solar radiation -- and then disassemble them, as required."

"In other words, cover the planet with a giant thermostatic blanket."

"What's so terrible about that?"

"You mean, apart from the sheer technocratic hubris? And apart from the fact that releasing any kind of replicator into the environment is -- still, thankfully -- illegal? It wouldn't have worked. There were complications nobody had predicted -- unstable mixing of air layers, wasn't it? -- which would have counteracted most of the effect."

Maria said, "Exactly. But how would anyone have known that, if they hadn't run a proper simulation?"

"Common sense. This whole idea of throwing technology at problems created by technology . . . "

Maria felt her patience desert her. "What would you rather do? Be humble in the presence of nature, and hope you'll be rewarded for it? You think Mother Gaia is going to forgive us, and put everything right -- just as soon as we throw away our wicked computers and promise to stop trying to fix things ourselves?" Should have made that "Nanny Gaia."

Aden scowled. "No -- but the only way to "fix things" is to have less impact on the planet, not more. Instead of thinking up these grandiose schemes to bludgeon everything into shape, we have to back off, leave it alone, give it a chance to heal."

Maria was bemused. "It's too late for that. If that had started a hundred years ago . . . fine. Everything might have turned out differently. But it's not enough any more; too much damage has already been done. Tip-toeing through the debris, hoping all the systems we've fucked up will magically restore themselves -- and tip-toeing twice as carefully every time the population doubles -- just won't work. The whole planetary ecosystem is as much of an artifact, now, as . . . a city's microclimate. Believe me, I wish that wasn't the case, but it is -- and now that we've created an artificial world, intentionally or not, we'd better learn to control it. Because if we stand back and leave it all to chance, it's just going to collapse around us in some random fashion that isn't likely to be any better than our worst well-intentioned mistakes."