Permutation City

Durham smiled. "That what? That would have worked anyway?"

"That you believe would have worked anyway!"

"The longer I get to see my Copy observing the TVC universe, the happier I'll be. I don't know what it will take to anchor the automaton rules -- but if ten watertight experiments sounds good, then eleven sounds better."

Maria pushed her chair back and walked away from her terminal. Durham tapped at his keyboard, first invoking the programs which would recompute the Garden-of-Eden configuration to include the new passenger and his luggage -- then directing the windfall from Riemann straight into the project's JSN account.

She said, "What's wrong with you? Two million ecus is more than two million dollars! You could have lived on that for the rest of your life!"

Durham kept typing, passing Riemann's documents through a series of legal checks. "I'll get by."

"Given it to a charity, then!"

Durham frowned, but said patiently, "I gather that Thomas Riemann gives generously to famine relief and crop research every year. He chose to spend this money on a place in my sanctuary; it's hardly my role to channel his funds into whatever you or I decide is the worthiest cause." He glanced at her and added, mock-solemnly, "That's called fraud, Ms. Deluca. You can go to prison for that."

Maria was unmoved. "You could have kept something for yourself. For this life, this world. I don't imagine any of your clients expected you to do all this for nothing."

Durham finished at the terminal and turned to her. "I don't expect you to understand. You treat the whole project as a joke -- and that's fine. But you can hardly expect me to run it on that basis."

Maria didn't even know what she was angry about anymore: the delayed launch, the obscene waste of money -- or just Durham sitting there making perfect sense to himself, as always.

She said, "The project is a joke. Three hundred million people are living in refugee camps, and you're offering sanctuary to sixteen billionaires! What do they need protection from? There's never going to be an anti-Copy revolution! They're never going to be shut down! You know as well as I do that they'll just sit there getting richer for the next ten thousand years!"

"Possibly."

"So you are a fraud then, aren't you? Even if your 'sanctu-ary' really does come into existence -- even if you prove your precious theory right -- what have your backers gained? You've sent their clones into solitary confinement, that's all. You might as well have put them in a black box at the bottom of a mineshaft."

Durham said mildly, "That's not quite true. You talk about Copies surviving ten thousand years. What about ten billion? A hundred billion?"

She scowled. "Nothing's going to last that long. Haven't you heard? They've found enough dark matter to reverse the expansion of the universe in less than forty billion years --"

"Exactly. This universe isn't going to last."

Maria nodded sarcastically, and tried to say something belittling, but the words stuck in her throat.

Durham continued blithely, "The TVC universe will never collapse. Never. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion; it makes no difference, it will always be expanding."

Maria said weakly, "Entropy --"

"Is not a problem. Actually, 'expanding' is the wrong word; the TVC universe grows like a crystal, it doesn't stretch like a balloon. Think about it. Stretching ordinary space increases entropy; everything becomes more spread out, more disordered. Building more of a TVC cellular automaton just gives you more room for data, more computing power, more order. Ordinary matter would eventually decay, but these computers aren't made out of matter. There's nothing in the cellular automaton's rules to prevent them from lasting for ever."

Maria wasn't sure what she'd imagined before; Durham's universe -- being made of the same "dust" as the real one, merely rearranged -- suffering the same fate? She couldn't have given the question much thought, because that verdict was nonsensical. The rearrangement was in time as well as space; Durham's universe could take a point of space-time from just before the Big Crunch, and follow it with another from ten million years b.c. And even if there was only a limited total amount of "dust" to work with, there was no reason why it couldn't be reused in different combinations, again and again. The fate of the TVC automaton would only have to make internal sense -- and the thing would have no reason, ever, to come to an end.

She said, "So you promised these people . . . immortality?"

"Of course."

"Literal immortality? Outliving the universe?"

Durham feigned innocence, but he was clearly savoring the shock he'd given her. "That's what the word means. Not dying after a very long time. Just not dying, period."