Permutation City

Durham replied without hesitation. "Finish the whole set of fifty experiments. Start Planet Lambert unfolding. Celebrate for about a week. Stroll down the main street of Permutation City. Wait for your little locking device to disengage. Wake up my passengers in their own private worlds -- and hope that some of them are willing to talk to me, now and then. Start catching up on Dostoyevsky. In the original --"

"Yeah, very funny. I said you, not him."

"I'd like to think of us as inseparable."

"Seriously."

He shrugged. "What will you do?"

Maria put her empty plate down, and stretched. "Oh . . . sleep in until noon, for a week. Lie in bed wondering exactly how I'm going to break the news to my mother that she can now afford to be scanned -- without making it sound like I'm telling her what to do."

"Perish the thought."

Maria said simply, "She's dying. And she can save herself -- without hurting anyone. Without stealing food from the mouths of the next generation, or whatever it is she thinks makes being scanned such a crime. Do you really think she -- honestly -- doesn't want to stay alive? Or wouldn't want to, if she could think it through clearly, without all the guilt and moralizing bullshit her generation saddled her with?"

Durham wasn't taking sides. "I don't know her, I can't answer that."

"She was a child of the nineties. Her kindergarten teachers probably told her that the pinnacle of her existence would be fertilizing a rainforest when she died." Maria thought it over. "And the beauty of it is . . . she can still do that. Scan her, put her through a meat grinder . . . scatter the results over the Daintree."

"You're a sick woman."

"I'll have the money soon. I can afford to joke."

Their terminals chimed simultaneously; the first fourteen seconds of life inside were ready to be viewed. Maria felt the food she'd just swallowed harden into a lump like a closed fist in her gut. Durham told the program to proceed.

The Copy sat in a simple, stylized control room, surrounded by floating interface windows. One window showed a representation of a small part of the TVC lattice. The Copy couldn't take the same God's-eye view of the lattice as they had; the software they'd used could only function on a level right outside his universe. There was no simple way he could discover the state of any given automaton cell; instead, a system of construction and sensor wires (all joined to specialized processors) had been built around a small region in the center of the lattice. Durham had christened this apparatus "the Chamber." What went on deep inside the Chamber could be deduced, indirectly, from the data which ended up flowing down the sensor wires. It wasn't as complicated as working out what had happened in a particle accelerator collision, based on the information registered by surrounding detectors -- but the principle was the same, and so was the purpose. The Copy had to conduct experiments to test his own fundamental "laws of physics" -- the TVC automaton's rules. And the (simulated) modern computers running his VR environment had a (simulated) link to the Chamber, like the real-world computers linked to any real-world accelerator.

The Copy said, "Setting up the first experiment." He deftly typed a sequence of code letters on his keyboard. Durham had rehearsed the whole thing before his scan, until he could perform each of fifty experiments in ten seconds flat, but Maria was still astonished that the Copy -- who had woken abruptly to find himself seated in the control room, without any preliminaries, any chance to grow accustomed to his identity, and his fate -- had had the presence of mind to leap straight into the task. She'd entertained visions of this first version of Durham to wake inside a computer finally realizing that "the other twenty-three times" were nothing at all like the real experience -- and telling his original about it in no uncertain terms. But there didn't seem to be much chance of that; the Copy just sat there typing as if his life depended on it.

The experimental setups could have been automated. The checking of the results could have been automated, too. The Copy could have spent two minutes sitting and watching a flashing green sign which said everything is just what you would have expected, don't worry about the messy details. There was no such thing as a set of perceptions for the Copy which could prove that he inhabited a cellular automaton which obeyed all the rules which he hoped were being obeyed. It was all down to Occam's razor in the end -- and hoping that the simplest explanation for perceiving a diplay showing the correct results was that the correct results were actually occurring.