Грег Иган - Permutation City

For a statue or a painting, yes, it was a joke. Where was the observer who perceived the paint to be in contact with the canvas, who saw the stone figure suitably delineated by air?

If the pattern in question was not an isolated object, though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join up the dots from within . . .

There was no doubt that it was possible. He'd done it. In the final trial of the second experiment, he'd assembled himself and his surroundings -- effortlessly -- from the dust of randomly scattered moments, from apparent white noise in real time. True, what the computer had done had been contrived, guaranteed to contain his thoughts and perceptions coded into its seemingly aimless calculations. But given a large enough collection of truly random numbers, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn't include, purely by accident, hidden patterns as complex and coherent as the ones which underlay him.

And wouldn't those patterns, however scrambled they might be in real time, be conscious of themselves, just as he'd been conscious, and piece their own subjective world together, just as he had done?

Paul returned to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness and unreality. So much for forgetting himself; he felt more charged than ever with the truth of his strange nature.

Did he still want to bale out? No. No! How could he declare that he'd happily wake and forget himself -- wake and "reclaim" his life -- when he was beginning to glimpse the answers to questions which his original had never even dared to ask?

10

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

Maria arrived at the cafe fifteen minutes early -- to find Durham already there, seated at a table close to the entrance. She was surprised, but relieved; with the long wait she'd been expecting suddenly canceled, she had no time to grow nervous. Durham spotted her as she walked in; they shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, ordered coffee from the table's touch-screen menus. Seeing Durham in the flesh did nothing to contradict the impression he'd made by phone: middle-aged, quiet, conservatively dressed; not exactly the archetypical Autoverse junkie.

Maria said, "I always thought I was the only Autoverse Review subscriber living in Sydney. I've been in touch with Ian Summers in Hobart a couple of times, but I never realized there was anyone so close."

Durham was apologetic. "There's no reason why you would have heard of me. I'm afraid I've always confined myself to reading the articles; I've never contributed anything or participated in the conferences. I don't actually work in the Autoverse, myself. I don't have the time. Or the skills, to be honest."

Maria absorbed that, trying not to appear too startled. It was like hearing someone admit that they studied chess but never played the game.

"But I've followed progress in the field very closely, and I can certainly appreciate what you've done with A. lamberti. Perhaps even more so than some of your fellow practitioners. I think I see it in a rather broader context."

"You mean . . . cellular automata in general?"

"Cellular automata, artificial life."

"They're your main interests?"

"Yes."

But not as a participant? Maria tried to imagine this man as a patron of the artificial life scene, magnanimously sponsoring promising young practitioners; Lorenzo the Magnificent to the Botticellis and Michelangelos of cellular automaton theory.

It wouldn't wash. Even if the idea wasn't intrinsically ludicrous, he just didn't look that rich.

The coffee arrived. Durham started paying for both of them, but when Maria protested, he let her pay for herself without an argument -- which made her feel far more at ease. As the robot trolley slid away, she got straight to the point. "You say you're interested in funding research that builds on my results with A. lamberti. Is there any particular direction -- ?"

"Yes. I have something very specific in mind." Durham hesitated. "I still don't know the best way to put this. But I want you to help me . . . prove a point. I want you to construct a seed for a biosphere."

Maria said nothing. She wasn't even sure that she'd heard him correctly. A seed for a biosphere was terraforming jargon -- for all the plant and animal species required to render a sterile, but theoretically habitable planet ecologically stable. She'd never come across the phrase in any other context.

Durham continued. "I want you to design a pre-biotic environment -- a planetary surface, if you'd like to think of it that way -- and one simple organism which you believe would be capable, in time, of evolving into a multitude of species and filling all the potential ecological niches."

"An environment? So . . . you want a Virtual Reality landscape?" Maria tried not to look disappointed. Had she seriously expected to be paid to work in the Autoverse? "With microscopic primordial life? Some kind of . . . Precambrian theme park, where the users can shrink to the size of algae and inspect their earliest ancestors?" For all her distaste for patchwork VR, Maria found herself almost warming to the idea. If Durham was offering her the chance to supervise the whole project -- and the funds to do the job properly -- it would be a thousand times more interesting than any of the tedious VR contracts she'd had in the past. And a lot more lucrative.

But Durham said, "No, please -- forget about Virtual Reality. I want you to design an organism, and an environment -- in the Autoverse -- which would have the properties I've described. And forget about Precambrian algae. I don't expect you to recreate ancestral life on Earth, translated into Autoverse chemistry -- if such a thing would even be possible. I just want you to construct a system with . . . the same potential."

Maria was now thoroughly confused. "When you mentioned a planetary surface, I thought you meant a full-scale virtual landscape -- a few dozen square kilometers. But if you're talking about the Autoverse . . . you mean a fissure in a rock on a seabed, something like that? Something vaguely analogous to a microenvironment on the early Earth? Something a bit more 'natural' than a culture dish full of two different sugars?"

Durham said, "I'm sorry, I'm not making myself very clear. Of course you'll want to try out the seed organism in a number of microenvironments; that's the only way you'll be able to predict with any confidence that it would actually survive, mutate, adapt . . . flourish. But once that's established, I'll want you to describe the complete picture. Specify an entire planetary environment which the Autoverse could support -- and in which the seed would be likely to evolve into higher lifeforms."

Maria hesitated. She was beginning to wonder if Durham had any idea of the scale on which things were done in the Autoverse. "What exactly do you mean by a 'planetary environment'?"

"Whatever you think is reasonable. Say -- thirty million square kilometers?" He laughed. "Don't have a heart attack; I don't expect you to model the whole thing, atom by atom. I do realize that all the computers on Earth couldn't handle much more than a tide pool. I just want you to describe the essential features. You could do that in a couple of terabytes -- probably less. It wouldn't take much to sum up the topography; it doesn't matter what the specific shape of every mountain and valley and beach is -- all you need is a statistical description, a few relevant fractal dimensions. The meteorology and the geochemistry -- for want of a better word -- will be a little more complex. But I think you know what I'm getting at. You could summarize everything that matters about a pre-biotic planet with a relatively small amount of data. I don't expect you to hand over a giant Autoverse grid which contains every atom in every grain of sand."