Permutation City

Durham said nothing. Maria wished she could take back the words. What was the point of needling him and mocking him, again and again -- did she think she could ever bring him down to Earth? It was all a matter of pride; she couldn't let a second go by without reminding him that she hadn't been seduced by his ideas. Computer junkie, artificial life freak; she still had her feet planted firmly in the real world. His vision of an Autoverse biosphere had impressed her -- when she'd thought he'd understood that it could never be anything but a thought experiment. And all the work he'd done on the TVC universe was ingenious -- however ultimately pointless it was. In a way, she even admired his stubborn refusal to give in to common sense and accept his delusions for what they were.

She just couldn't bear the thought that he harbored the faintest hope that he'd persuaded her to take the "dust hypothesis" seriously.

+ + +

At three minutes past ten, the money ran out -- all but enough to pay for the final tidying-up. The TVC automaton was shut down between clock ticks; the processors and memory which had been allocated to the massive simulation were freed for other users -- the memory, as always, wiped to uniform zeroes first for the sake of security. The whole elaborate structure was dissolved in a matter of nanoseconds.

Night had turned the windows of the flat to mirrors. No lights showed in the empty office towers; if there'd been cooking fires from the squatters, they'd been extinguished long ago. Maria felt disconnected, adrift in time; the trip north across the harbor bridge in sunlight seemed like a distant memory, a dream.

The individual components of the Garden of Eden were still held in mass storage. Maria deleted her scan file, carefully checking the audit records to be sure that the data hadn't been read more often than it should have been. The numbers checked out; that was no guarantee, but it was reassuring.

Durham deleted everything else.

The recordings of the spy software remained, and they viewed the last brief scene of the Copy at work -- and then replayed the whole two-minute recording.

Maria watched with a growing sense of shame. The individual fragments had barely affected her, but viewed without interruption, the Copy took on the air of a deranged sect leader driving a bus full of frozen billionaires straight toward the edge of a cliff -- accelerating euphorically in the sure and certain knowledge that the thing would fly, carrying them all off into a land beyond the sunset. She clung to her rationalizations: the Copy's limited separate identity, his joyful demise.

When the replay stopped in mid-experiment, Durham closed his eyes and let his head hang forward. He wept silently. Maria looked away.

He said, "I'm sorry. I'm embarrassing you."

She turned back to him; he was smiling, and sniffling. She wanted to embrace him; the urge was half sisterly, half sexual. He was pale and unshaven, obviously drained -- but there was more life in his eyes than ever, as if the fulfilment of his obsession had liberated him from his past so completely that he faced the world now like a newborn child.

He said, "Champagne?"

Maria hardened her heart. She still had no reason to trust him. She said, "Let me check my bank balance first; I might not have anything to celebrate." Durham giggled, as if the very idea that he might have cheated her was preposterous. She ignored him, and used the terminal. The six hundred thousand dollars he'd promised had been deposited.

She stared at the digits on the screen for a while, numb with the strange truth that the simple pattern of data they represented, sanctified as "wealth," could travel out into the living, breathing, decaying world . . . and return, enriched beyond measure: imprinted with everything which made Francesca human.

She said, "One glass. I'm cycling."

+ + +

They emptied the bottle. Durham paced around the flat, growing increasingly hyperactive. "Twenty-three Copies! Twenty-three lives! Imagine how my successor must be feeling, right now! He has the proof, he knows he was right. All I have is the knowledge that I gave him that chance -- and even that's too much to bear." He wept again, stopped abruptly. He turned and gazed at Maria imploringly. "I did it all to myself, but it was still madness, still torture. Do you think I knew, when I started out, how much pain and confusion there'd be? Do you think I knew what it would do to me? I should have listened to Elizabeth -- but there is no Elizabeth here. I'm not alive. Do you think I'm alive! If a Copy's not human, what am I? Twenty-three times removed?"