Permutation City

"I accept that. I just --"

"Then accept the payment. Finish the work. Whatever the police have told you, you have every right to the money, and I have every right to give it to you. Nobody's going to take you to court, nobody's going to throw you into prison."

Maria was flustered. "Just, hold on. Will you give me a chance to think?" Durham's sheer reasonableness was beginning to be as exhausting as the impassioned rhetoric of any obvious fanatic. And so much ground had shifted in the last half-hour that she hadn't had a chance to even start to reappraise her own situation: legally, financially . . . and morally.

She said, "Why don't your backers tell the police all this? If they can confirm your story for me, why can't they do the same for the cops? By refusing to talk, they're just fueling suspicion."

Durham agreed. "Tell me about it. It makes everything ten times harder -- but I'm just going to have to keep on living with that. Do you think they'd risk the truth becoming public knowledge? There have already been some embarrassing leaks -- but so far we've been able to muddy the water by putting out our own misinformation. Copies with de facto control of billion-dollar business empires would much rather have people linking them to some dubious salesman and his breakthrough supercomputer -- and have the rumors fizzle out from lack of substantiation -- than let the world know that they plan to send a clone into an artificial universe which runs without hardware. The share markets can get nervous enough when people start wondering if a certain board of directors have all taken up playing virtual Caligula in their spare time. If word got out that a Copy in a position of power had done something which might be construed as a sign that they no longer felt obliged to give a shit about their corporate responsibilities, their personal wealth, or the continued existence of Planet Earth . . . "

Maria walked over to the window. It was open, but the air outside was still; standing by the insect screen she might as well have been standing by a solid brick wall. People were arguing loudly in the flat above; she'd only just noticed.

When Durham had first approached her, she'd wondered, half seriously, if she'd be taking advantage of a man who'd taken leave of his senses. Now, she couldn't just shrug that off as a hypocritical insult to a fellow eccentric. This wasn't a matter of an artificial life fanatic with more money than sense. An ex-psychiatric patient was planning to spend thirty million dollars of other people's money to "prove" his own sanity -- and lead the clones of his followers into a cybernetic paradise which would last for about twenty seconds. Taking a cut seemed just a tiny bit like doing the catering for the Jonestown massacre.

Durham said, "If you don't agree to finish the biosphere seed, who would I get to replace you? There's nobody else who could even begin to grasp what's involved."

Maria eyed him sharply. "Don't start flattering me. And don't kid yourself about the seed, either. You asked for a package of persuasive data, and that's all you'll be getting -- even if I finish the work. If you're counting on Planet Lambert's inhabitants rising up on their hind legs and talking to you . . . I can't guarantee that happening if you ran the whole thing a billion times. You should have simulated real-world biochemistry. At least it's been shown that intelligent life can arise within that system . . . and you'd supposedly have the computing power to do it."

Durham said reasonably, "A. lamberti seemed simpler, surer. Any real-world organism -- modeled subatomically -- would be too big a program to test out in advance on any physical computer. And it'd be too late to change my mind and try another approach if I failed to get it to work -- stuck in the TVC universe, with plenty of books and journals, but no pool of expertise."

Maria felt a deep chill pass through her; every time she thought she'd accepted just how seriously Durham took this lunacy, he gave an answer like that which drove it home to her anew.

She said, "Well, Autoverse life might turn out just as useless. You might have A. hydrophila spewing out useless mutations, generation after generation, with nothing you can do to fix it."

Durham seemed about to reply, but then stopped himself. Maria felt the chill return, at first without knowing why. A second later, she glared at him, outraged, as furious as if he'd come right out and asked her.

"I will not be there to fix it for you!"

Durham had the grace to look cowed, momentarily -- but instead of denying that the thought had ever crossed his mind, he said, "If you don't believe in the dust theory, what difference would it make if there's a scan file of you in the Garden-of-Eden data?"