Permutation City

Maria shook her head, amused. It had to be a bug in the software, not a bug on the line. Juno was a public-domain program (free, but all donations welcome) which she'd downloaded purely as a gesture of solidarity with the US privacy lobby. Federal laws there still made bug-detection software, and any half-decent encryption algorithms, illegal for personal use -- lest the FBI be inconvenienced -- so Maria had sent Juno's authors a donation to help them fight the good fight. Actually installing the program had been a joke; the idea of anyone going to the trouble of listening in to her conversations with her mother, her tedious VR contract work, or her self-indulgent excursions into the Autoverse, was ludicrous.

Still, the joke had to be carried through. She popped up a word processor on the JSN -- the terminal's local one wouldn't have shown up to an eavesdropper tapping the fiber -- and typed:

Whoever you are, be warned: I'm about to display the Longford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk, so

The doorbell rang. Maria checked the peephole camera's view. There was a woman on the front step, nobody she knew. Early forties, conservatively dressed. The not-so-subtle give-away was clearly visible behind her: one compact two-seater Mitsubishi "Avalon" electric car. The New South Wales Police Department were probably the only people in the world who'd bought that model, before the Bankstown factory closed down in forty-six. Maria had often wondered why they didn't give in and fit blue flashing lights to all their supposedly unmarked cars; acknowledging the situation would have been more dignified than carrying on as if nobody knew.

Dredging her memory for recent misdemeanors -- but finding none -- she hurried downstairs.

"Maria Deluca?"

"Yes."

"I'm Detective-Sergeant Hayden. Computer Fraud Squad. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if that's convenient."

Maria rescanned for guilty secrets; still no trace -- but she would have preferred a visitor from Homicide or Armed Robbery, someone who'd clearly come to the wrong house. She said, "Yes, of course. Come in." Then, as she backed away from the door, "Ah -- I nearly forgot, I suppose I should verify . . . ?"

Hayden, with a thin smile of blatantly insincere approval, let Maria plug her notepad into the socket of her Police Department badge. The notepad beeped cheerfully; the badge knew the private code which matched the current public key being broadcast by the Department.

Seated in the living room, Hayden got straight to the point. She displayed a picture on her notepad.

"Do you know this man?"

Maria cleared her throat. "Yes. His name's Paul Durham. I'm . . . working for him. He's given me some contract programming." She felt no surprise; just the jolt of being brought down to earth. Of course the Fraud Squad were interested in Durham. Of course the whole fantasy of the last three months was about to unravel before her eyes. Aden had warned her. She'd known it herself. It was a dream contract, too good to be true.

An instant later, though, she backed away from that reaction, furious with herself. Durham had paid the money into the trust fund, hadn't he? He'd met the costs of her new JSN account. He hadn't cheated her. Too good to be true was idiot fatalism. Two consenting adults had kept all their promises to each other; the fact that no outsider would understand the transaction didn't make it a crime. And after all he'd done for her, at the very least she owed him the benefit of the doubt.

Hayden said, "What kind of 'contract programming'?"

Maria did her best to explain without taking all night. Hayden was -- not surprisingly -- reasonably computer literate, and even knew what a cellular automaton was, but either she hadn't heard of the Autoverse, or she wanted to hear it all again from Maria.

"So you believe this man's paying you thirty thousand dollars . . . to help him state his position on a purely theoretical question about artificial life?"

Maria tried not to sound defensive. "I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on the Autoverse, myself. It's like a lot of other hobbies; it's a world unto itself. People can get obsessive, extravagant. It's no stranger than . . . building model airplanes. Or reenacting battles from the American Civil War."

Hayden didn't argue the point, but she seemed unmoved by the comparisons. "Did you know that Paul Durham sold insurance to Copies?"

"I knew he was an insurance salesman. He told me that himself. Just because he's not a professional programmer doesn't mean he can't --"

"Did you know he was also trying to sell his clients shares in some kind of sanctuary? A place to go -- or to send a clone -- in case the political climate turned against them?"