Permutation City

'''Egan, Greg. Permutation City.''' London: Millennium, "an imprint of Orion Books Ltd.," 1994. New York: HarperPrism, 1994. "Parts of this novel are adapted from a story called 'Dust,' which was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine July 1992."New York: Harper Mass Market Paperbacks, 1995.

For the study of "the human/machine interface in SF," Permutation City is an important book, bringing into question our working definitions of "human," "machine," and "interface."

From Book Description on Amazon.com: "The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. […] The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy." The way out for this self-conscious copy is that it has the legal "option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. […] The bad news is that it doesn't work. […] The real you […] wants to keep you here forever." Discussed in R. Farnell's "Attempting Immortality" article. For other works using these motifs, see citation for Egan's Diaspora, and search for key words "digitalized person" and "containment." (Maly, 02/07/02)

Described on Wikipedia as "Hard science fiction, Postcyberpunk," exploring "many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality" (also called virtual reality, VR), raising the question of "whether there is a difference between a computer simulation of a person and a 'real' person" and focusing "on a model of consciousness and reality, the Dust Theory," similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark" and using the premise "that human consciousness is Turing computable," hence capable of being "produced by a computer program" that can be mathematically manipulated.

"Dust Theory" both stresses and is based in the idea "that there is no difference […] between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, among them our physics and therefore our spacetime […]"; hence all possible universes exist and are equally real, emerging spontaneously from their own mathematical self-consistency." In the fictive world of Permutation City, human beings with enough money can be scanned into "Copies": computer programs that can be uploaded and stored indefinitely; that far it is in the tradition of, e.g., the "vastened" personalities in gigabyte space in Frederik Pohl's The Annals of the Heechee (1987), the separable souls, so to speak, separated and operating freely in cyberpunk cyberspace, and the people digitalized and trapped in computers in such pessimistic works as John T. Sladek's The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970). There is also "the Autoverse": "an artificial life simulator based on a cellular automaton complex enough to represent the substratum of an artificial chemistry." Insofar as the Autoverse gives a universe within a device, it is in the tradition of David Lake's "Creator" (1978), or perhaps even Theodore Sturgeon's better-known "Microcosmic God" (1941).

Where Egan is doing something highly original, and what makes Permutation City a key work, is that within the time-line of its narrative the relevant sectors of the world-wide computer network, and the Autoverse become virtual and the indefinite lifespan of Copies becomes potentially eternal in the "Permutation City" of Elysium and perhaps in the Autoverse world of "Planet Lambert," which has evolved intelligent life (HarperPrism p. 245): literally eternal life for the Copies, immortality outlasting our universe. Elysium is "a cellular automaton called TVC," after the historical figures Alan Turing and John von Neumann, and the fictional early 21st-c. scientist Dr./Ms. Chiang. A major character knows "that John von Neumann and his students had developed a two-dimensional cellular automaton, a simple universe in which you could embed an elaborate pattern of cells — a rather Lego-like 'machine' — which acted as both a universal constructor and a universal computer. Given the right program — a string of cells to be interpreted as coded instructions rather than part of the machine — it could carry out any computation, and build anything at all. Including another copy of itself — which could build another copy, and so on. Little self-replicating toy computers could blossom into existence without end." And Chiang moved von Neumann et al.'s work into N-dimensions (pp. 182-84, quoting here from 183). Permutation City offers worlds of cybernetic Turing machines and von Neumann machines, where what sort of cybernetic mechanisms that have the word machine in quotation marks becomes an issue of definition and reference frames. Of strong relevance for the motif of humans and transhumans within machines is the thought by a stowaway Copy character that "all that really mattered to him was the fact that the City's computational infrastructure was constantly expanding […]. As long as that continued, his own tiny fraction of those resources also steadily increased. Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a 'machine' with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life" (p. 260). In the climactic sequence of the novel — SPOILER ALERT — the City of permutations stops changing: "No longer tied to the growth of the Elysians, the City remained unchanged, at every level. And that meant, in turn, that the infrastructure […] woven into the software for them had also ceased to expand. The simulated 'computer' which ran them, composed of the City's scattered redundancies, was now a finite 'machine,' with a finite number of possible states" so its denizens "were mortal again" (p. 327).

Note also that in the unfulfilled motif of First Contact, virtual and "telepresence robots" are to aid in contact with the insectoid "Lambertians" of virtual Planet Lambert (p. 310), which turns out more mathematically "real" than the world of the human Copies (pp. 336-37) and that time and timing and (by implication) clocks appear in important places throughout, plus a highly important "simple time machine" (p. 326). Last, note that there are creator gods for the Lambertians, primarily the character significantly named "Maria," who established the initial constants for their evolution (p. 294) — but the Lambertians cannot believe in gods, and perhaps gods are not possible in the world of this novel: Gazing at "the Lambertian field equations" Maria admires their "strange elegance" and realizes "She could never have invented them herself […]." And then she notes as the Lambertian world takes ontological precedence over hers, "It's not just a matter of the Lambertians out-explaining us. the whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust . . . or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole . . . or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods (p. 338): mechanical, cybernetic, or otherwise. Or at least not in the rigorous logic of the dances of the Lambertians or in the cosmoi of Permutation City (cf. and contrast the Futurama episode, "A Clockwork Origin").

For an insightful and elegant review, see "Kathleen Ann Goonan Reviews Permutation City by Greg Egan," in Science Fiction Eye, available on-line (August 2016).

For background on Egan's opus generally, see "Roundtable of Greg Egan," posted by Karen Burnham, Sunday, 4 March 2012, on Locus Online. (Erlich, 27&28/VIII/16)