Permutation City

He might have called an ambulance. He might have saved her life. It would have taken so little strength, so little courage, so little love, that he could not imagine how a human being could have failed to possess enough of each, and still walk the Earth.

But he had. He had.

So he brought her head forward, and slammed it against the wall.

26

After a week as Durham's guest, Maria went looking for a place of her own.

Her anger had faded, the numbness of shock had faded, the fifth or sixth wave of disbelief had finally lifted. But she still felt almost paralyzed by the strangeness of the truths she'd been forced to accept: her exile from the universe of flesh-and-blood humanity; the impossible existence of Elysium; intelligent life in the Autoverse. She couldn't begin to make sense of any of these things until she had a fixed point to stand on.

She had refused to pack any luggage to accompany her scan file into the next life; it would have felt like she was humoring Durham if she'd made the slightest concession to the needs of a Copy who she'd believed would never run. No environments, no furniture, no clothes; no photographs, no diaries, no sca

Durham assured her that nobody would begrudge her the use of public resources. "Of course, you could copy the City into your own territory and run a private version at your own expense -- defeating the whole point. This is the one environment in all of Elysium which comes close to being a place in the old sense. Anyone can walk the streets, anyone can live here -- but no one can rearrange the skyline on a whim. It would require a far more impassioned debate to alter the colors of the street signs, here, than it used to take for the average local council to rezone an entire neighborhood."

So Permutation City offered her its disingenuous, municipally sanctioned, quasi-objective presence for free, while her model-of-a-body ran on processors in her own territory -- and the two systems, by exchanging data, contrived her experience of walking the streets, entering the sleek metallic buildings, and exploring the empty apartments which might have smelled of paint, but didn't. She felt nervous on her own, so Durham came with her, solicitous and apologetic as ever. His regret seemed sincere on one level -- he wasn't indifferent to the pain he'd caused her -- but beneath that there didn't seem to be much doubt: he clearly expected to be wholly forgiven for waking her, sooner or later.

She asked him, "How does it feel, being seven thousand years old?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On how I want it to feel."

She found a place in the northeast quadrant, halfway between the central tower and the City's rim. From the bedroom, she could see the mountains in the east, the glistening waterfall, a distant patch of forest. There were better views available, but this one seemed right; anything more spectacular would have made her feel self-conscious.

Durham showed her how to claim residency: a brief dialogue with the apartment software. He said, "You're the only Elysian in this tower, so you can program all your neighbors any way you like."

"What if I do nothing?"

"Default behavior: they'll stay out of your way."

"And what about other Elysians? Am I such a novelty that people will come looking for me?"

Durham thought it over. "Your awakening is public knowledge -- but most people here are fairly patient. I doubt that anyone would be so rude as to buttonhole you in the street. Your phone number will remain unlisted until you choose otherwise -- and the apartment itself is under your control, now, as secure as any private environment. The software has been rigorously validated: breaking and entering is mathematically impossible."

He left her to settle in. She paced the rooms, trying to inhabit them, to claim them as her own; she forced herself to walk the nearby streets, trying to feel at ease. The Art Deco apartment, the Fritz Lang towers, the streets full of crowd-scene extras all u

If the City was equally unreal, at least it was one hallucination which other Elysians shared -- and, anchored by that consensus, she found the courage to examine the invisible world beneath, from a safe -- if hallucinatory -- distance. She sat in the apartment and studied maps of Elysium. On the largest scale, most of the cube was portrayed as featureless: the other seventeen founders' pyramids were private, and her own was all but unused. Public territory could be colored according to the software it ran -- processes identified, data flows traced -- but even then, most of it was monochrome: five of the six public pyramids were devoted to the Autoverse, ru

The hub itself was a dazzling polyhedron, a cluster of databases ringed by the communications structures which handled the torrent of information flowing to and from the pyramids. Every transaction between Elysians of different clans flowed through here; from phone calls to handshakes, from sex to whatever elaborate post-human intimacies they'd invented in the past seven thousand years. The map gave nothing away, though; even with the highest magnification and the slowest replay, streaming packets of data registered as nothing more than featureless points of light, their contents safely anonymous.