Грег Иган - Permutation City

Maria leaned back from the screen, impressed. A computer model of the highest possible resolution. And they'd meant it, literally. They'd bought up all the number-crunching power on offer -- paying a small fortune, but only a fraction of what it would have cost to buy the same hardware outright.

Nudging typhoons! Not yet, not in reality . . . but who could begrudge Operation Butterfly their brief monopoly, for such a grand experiment? Maria felt a vicarious thrill at the sheer scale of the endeavor -- and then a mixture of guilt and resentment at being a mere bystander. She had no qualifications in atmospheric or oceanic physics, no PhD in chaos theory -- but in a project of that size, there must have been a few hundred jobs offered to mere programmers. When the tenders had gone out over the network, she'd probably been busy on some shitty contract to improve the tactile qualities of beach sand for visitors to the Virtual Gold Coast -- either that, or tinkering with the genome of A. lamberti, trying to become the first person in the world to bludgeon a simulated bacterium into exhibiting natural selection.

It wasn't clear how long Operation Butterfly would spend monitoring each typhoon -- but she could forget about returning to the Autoverse for the day.

Reluctantly, she logged off the news system -- fighting the temptation to sit and wait for the first reports of the typhoon in question, or the response of other supercomputer users to the great processing buy-out -- and began reviewing her plans for a new intruder surveillance package.

2

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

"What I'm asking for is two million ecus. What I'm offering you is immortality."

Thomas Riemann's office was compact but uncluttered, smartly furnished without being ostentatious. The single large window offered a sweeping view of Frankfurt -- looking north across the river, as if from Sachsenhausen, toward the three jet-black towers of the Siemens/Deutsche Bank Center -- which Thomas believed was as honest as any conceivable alternative. Half the offices in Frankfurt itself looked out over recorded tropical rainforests, stunning desert gorges, Antarctic ice shelves -- or wholly synthetic landscapes: rural-idyllic, futuristic, interplanetary, or simply surreal. With the freedom to choose whatever he liked, he'd selected this familiar sight from his corporeal days; sentimental, perhaps, but at least it wasn't ludicrously inappropriate.

Thomas turned away from the window, and regarded his visitor with good-natured skepticism. He replied in English; the office software could have translated for him -- and would have chosen the very same words and syntax, having been cloned from his own language centers -- but Thomas still preferred to use the version "residing inside" his own "skull."

"Two million? What's the scheme? Let me guess. Under your skillful management, my capital will grow at the highest possible rate consistent with the need for total security. The price of computation is sure to fall again, sooner or later; the fact that it's risen for the last fifteen years only makes that more likely than ever. So: it may take a decade or two -- or three, or four -- but eventually, the income from my modest investment will be enough to keep me running on the latest hardware, indefinitely . . . while also providing you with a small commission, of course." Thomas laughed, without malice. "You don't seem to have researched your prospective client very thoroughly. You people usually have immaculate intelligence -- but I'm afraid you've really missed the target with me. I'm in no danger of being shut down. The hardware we're using, right now, isn't leased from anyone; it's wholly owned by a foundation I set up before my death. My estate is being managed to my complete satisfaction. I have no problems -- financial, legal, peace of mind -- for you to solve. And the last thing in the world I need is a cheap and nasty perpetuity fund. Your offer is useless to me."

Paul Durham chose to display no sign of disappointment. He said, "I'm not talking about a perpetuity fund. I'm not selling any kind of financial service. Will you give me a chance to explain?"

Thomas nodded affably. "Go ahead. I'm listening." Durham had flatly refused to state his business in advance, but Thomas had decided to see him anyway -- anticipating a perverse satisfaction in confirming that the man's mysterious coyness hid nothing out of the ordinary. Thomas almost always agreed to meet visitors from outside -- even though experience had shown that most were simply begging for money, one way or another. He believed that anyone willing to slow down their brain by a factor of seventeen, solely for the privilege of talking to him face to face, deserved a hearing -- and he wasn't immune to the intrinsic flattery of the process, the unequal sacrifice of time.

There was more to it, though, than flattery.

When other Copies called on him in his office, or sat beside him at a boardroom table, everyone was "present" in exactly the same sense. However bizarre the algorithmic underpinnings of the encounter, it was a meeting of equals. No boundaries were crossed.

A visitor, though, who could lift and empty a coffee cup, who could sign a document and shake your hand -- but who was, indisputably, lying motionless on a couch in another (higher?) metaphysical plane -- came charged with too many implicit reminders of the nature of things to be faced with the same equanimity. Thomas valued that. He didn't want to grow complacent -- or worse. Visitors helped him to retain a clear sense of what he'd become.

Durham said, "Of course I'm aware of your situation -- you have one of the most secure arrangements I've seen. I've read the incorporation documents of the Soliton Foundation, and they're close to watertight. Under present legislation."

Thomas laughed heartily. "But you think you can do better? Soliton pays its most senior lawyers almost a million a year; you should have got yourself some forged qualifications and asked me to employ you. Under present legislation! When the laws change, believe me, they'll change for the better. I expect you know that Soliton spends a small fortune lobbying for improvement -- and it's not alone. The trend is in one direction: there are more Copies every year, and most of them have de facto control over virtually all of the wealth they owned when they were alive. I'm afraid your timing's atrocious if you're planning on using scare tactics; I received a report last week predicting full human rights -- in Europe, at least -- by the early sixties. Ten years isn't long for me to wait. I've grown used to the current slowdown factor; even if processor speeds improve, I could easily choose to keep living at the rate I'm living now, for another six or seven subjective months, rather than pushing all the things I'm looking forward to -- like European citizenship -- further into the future."

Durham's puppet inclined its head in a gesture of polite assent; Thomas had a sudden vision of a second puppet -- one Durham truly felt himself to be inhabiting -- hunched over a control panel, hitting a button on an etiquette sub-menu. Was that paranoid? But any sensible mendicant visitor would do just that, conducting the meeting at a distance rather than exposing their true body language to scrutiny.

The visible puppet said, "Why spend a fortune upgrading, for the sake of effectively slowing down progress? And I agree with you about the outlook for reform -- in the short term. Of course people begrudge Copies their longevity, but the PR has been handled remarkably well. A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World. There's discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening. The legal status of Copies is being framed as a human rights issue, especially in Europe: Copies are disabled people, no more, no less -- really just a kind of radical amputee -- and anyone who talks about decadent rich immortals getting their hands on all the wealth is shouted down as a neo-Nazi.