Permutation City
Categories: [ Books ]
In the mid-21st century, it is possible to scan people, make Copies and allow the consciousness to exist in computer simulations of virtual realities running on a world wide cloud. The Copies run at most 17 times slower than real time, and those who cannot afford it run at an even slower speed (which makes it even harder to earn money in the real world and pay for the computing power). Maria, a software developer who spends her free time in the Autoverse, a cellular automaton -based virtual world, is one day contacted by Paul Durham who had noticed her breakthrough in the Autoverse about triggering the natural evolution of a bacteria. Durham commissions her to design the plans of an evolving system that would lead to the creation of a planet in the Autoverse, where life could emerge. At the same time, Durham sells to the wealthiest Copies the possibility to run a clone of themselves forever in a simulated environment that would not run on hardware but on Dust, based on his discovery that when a simulation is shut down, it continues to exist in a parallel universe. Paul and Maria bootstrap such a simulation containing scans of themselves, their investors, and the Autoverse universe designed by Maria, then shut it down. Maria then wakes up in this simulation (called Elysium), where seven thousand virtual years have passed since the bootstrap. The included Autoverse now contains a planet inhabited by insectoid life forms who have discovered all that is to know about their universe and now wonder about its origins. This unknown planet that can be studied and with whose alien inhabitants can make first contact was one of the core points of interest of Elysium. Paul now wants to contact them and tell them that Maria and him have created their universe. When Elysium starts to malfunction, they theorized that somehow the inhabitants of the Autoverse are taking control of Elysium. First contact fails as the insectoids reject the hypothesis of having been created ex nihilo and Elysium continues to crumble. Paul organizes a backup of its inhabitants and bootstraps another Elysium that will start its existence when the current one fails for good.