Permutation City

Maria leaned back against the wall, arms folded, trying to cast aside the feeling that the whole conversation was as insubstantial as anything Durham had hallucinated in the Blacktown psychiatric ward. She thought: When Francesca's been scanned I'm going to take a holiday. Visit Aden in Seoul, if I have to. Anything to get away from this city, this man.

She said, "Ideas like that are powerful things. One of these days you're going to hurt someone."

Durham looked wounded himself, at that. He said, "All I've tried to do is be honest. I know: I lied to you, at first -- and I'm sorry. I had no right to do that. But what was I supposed to do with the truth? Keep it locked up in my head? Hide it from the world? Give no one else the chance to believe, or disbelieve?" He fixed his eyes on her, calm and sane as ever; she looked away.

He said, "When I first came out of hospital, I wanted to publish everything. And I tried . . . but nobody reputable was interested -- and publishing in the junk-science journals would have been nothing but an admission that it was all bullshit. So what else could I do, except look for private backers?"

Maria said, "I understand. Forget it. You've done what you thought you had to -- I don't blame you for that." The cliches nearly made her gag, but all she could think about was shutting him up. She was sick of being reminded that the ideas which were nothing but a means to an end, for her -- the ideas she could turn her back on forever, in eight hours' time -- were this man's entire life.

He looked at her searchingly, as if genuinely seeking guidance. "If you'd believed everything I believe, would you have kept it all to yourself? Would you have lived out your life pretending to the world that you'd merely been insane?"

Maria was saved from answering by a beep from Durham's terminal. The Garden-of-Eden configuration had been recomputed; Thomas Riemann's snapshot was now built into their cellular automaton equivalent of the Big Bang.

Durham swung his chair around to face the screen. He said cheerfully, "All aboard the ship of fools!"

Maria took her place beside him. She reached over and tentatively touched his shoulder. Without looking at her, he reached up and squeezed her hand gently, then removed it.

Following a long cellular automaton tradition, the program which would bootstrap the TVC universe into existence was called FIAT. Durham hit a key, and a starburst icon appeared on both of their screens.

He turned to Maria. "You do the honors."

She was about to object, but then it didn't seem worth arguing. She'd done half the work, but this was Durham's creation, whoever cut the ribbon.

She prodded the icon; it exploded like a cheap flashy fire-work, leaving a pincushion of red and green trails glowing on the screen.

"Very tacky."

Durham grinned. "I thought you'd like it."

The decorative flourish faded, and a shimmering blue-white cube appeared: a representation of the TVC universe. The Garden-of-Eden state had contained a billion ready-made processors, a thousand along each edge of the cube -- but that precise census was already out of date. Maria could just make out the individual machines, like tiny crystals; each speck comprised sixty million automaton cells -- not counting the memory array, which stretched into the three extra dimensions, hidden in this view. The data preloaded into most of the processors was measured in terabytes: scan files, libraries, databases; the seed for Planet Lambert -- and its sun, and its three barren sibling planets. Everything had been assembled, if not on one physical computer -- the TVC automaton was probably spread over fif-teen or twenty processor clusters -- at least as one logical whole. One pattern.

Durham reduced the clock rate until the blue-white shimmer slowed to a stroboscopic flickering, then a steady alternation of distinct colors. The outermost processors were building copies of themselves; in this view, blue coded for complete, working processors, and white coded for half-finished machines. Each layer of blue grew a layer of white, which abruptly turned blue, and so on. The skin of this universe came with instructions to build one more layer exactly like itself (including a copy of the same instructions), and then wait for further commands to be passed out from the hub.

Durham zoomed in by a factor of two hundred, slowed down the clock rate further, and then changed the representation to show individual automaton cells as color-coded symbols. The processors were transformed from featureless blue or white boxes into elaborate, multicolored, three-dimensional mazes, rectilinear filigree alive with sparks of light.