Permutation City

"The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren't describing me? Well . . . it's a big universe. Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of events -- nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch -- out of which to construct ten seconds of experience."

Squeak, The djinn looked seriously worried now. "You're a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space and time is invariant. That's exactly what we always expected -- remember? Come down to Earth. Your states are computed, your memories have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You haven't visited any other worlds, you haven't built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies."

Paul laughed. "Your stupidity is . . . surreal. What did you create me for, if you're not even going to listen to what I have to say? I've had a glimpse of the truth behind . . . everything: space, time, the laws of physics. You can't shrug that off by saying that what happened to me was inevitable."

Squeak. "Control and subject are still identical."

"Of course they are! That's the whole point! Like . . . gravity and acceleration in General Relativity -- it all depends on what you can't tell apart. This is a new Principle of Equivalence, a new symmetry between observers. Relativity threw out absolute space and time -- but it didn't go far enough. We have to throw out absolute cause and effect!"

Squeak. The djinn muttered, dismayed, "Elizabeth said this would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before you'd lose touch."

Paul stared at him, jolted back to the mundane. "Elizabeth? You said you hadn't even told her."

Squeak. "Well, I have now. I didn't tell you, because I didn't think you'd want to hear her reaction."

"Which was?"

Squeak. "I was up all night arguing with her. She wanted me to shut you down. She said I was . . . seriously disturbed, to even think about doing this."

Paul was stung. "What would she know? Ignore her."

Squeak. Durham frowned apologetically -- an expression Paul recognized at once, and his guts turned to ice. "Maybe I should pause you, while I think things over. Elizabeth raised some . . . valid ethical questions. I think I should talk it through with her again."

"Fuck that! I'm not here for you to put on ice every time you have a change of heart. And if Elizabeth wants to have a say in my life, she can damn well talk it through with me."

Paul could see exactly what would happen. If he was paused, Durham wouldn't restart him -- he'd go back to the original scan file and start again from scratch, handling his prisoner differently, hoping to end up with a more cooperative subject. Maybe he wouldn't even perform the first set of experiments at all.

The ones which had given him this insight.

The ones which had made him who he was.

Squeak. "I need time to think. It would only be temporary. I promise."

"No! You have no right!"

Durham hesitated. Paul felt numb, disbelieving. Some part of him refused to acknowledge any danger -- refused to accept that it could be this easy to die. Being paused wouldn't kill him, wouldn't harm him, wouldn't have the slightest effect. What would kill him would be not being restarted. He'd be passively annihilated, ignored out of existence. The fate that befell his own shit.

Durham reached offscreen.

13

(Remit not paucity)

FEBRUARY 2051

Maria said, "Recalculate everything up to epoch five, then show me sunrise on Lambert. Latitude zero, longitude zero, altitude one."

She waited, staring into the blank workspace, fighting the temptation to change her instructions and have the software display every stage of the simulation, which would have slowed things down considerably. After several minutes, a fissured dark plain appeared, raked with silver light. The unnamed sun -- dazzling and swollen, and, so low in the sky, too white by far -- turned a chain of extinct volcanoes on the horizon into black silhouettes like a row of pointed teeth. In the foreground, the surface looked glassy, inhospitable.