The fact that his view of the room remained flawless only made it worse, an irrefutable paranoid fixation: No matter how fast you turn your head, you’ll never even catch a glimpse of what’s going on all around you…
The clone met his eyes. Peer did his best not to look relieved – short of severing ties with his body. He tried to read the clone’s expression, and failed; all he saw was a reflection of his own growing numbness. Pirandello had said it was impossible to feel any real emotion while staring into a mirror. Peer decided to take that as a good sign. They were still one person, after all – and that was the whole point.
She said, “So you promised these people … immortality?” “Of course.” “Literal immortality? Outliving the universe?” Durham feigned innocence, but he was clearly savoring the shock he’d given her. “That’s what the word means. Not: dying after a very long time. Just: not dying, period.”
“All I’ve tried to do is be honest. I know: I lied to you, at first – and I’m sorry. I had no right to do that. But what was I supposed to do with the truth? Keep it locked up in my head? Hide it from the world? Give no one else the chance to believe, or disbelieve?”
He looked at her searchingly, as if genuinely seeking guidance. “If you’d believed everything I believe, would you have kept it all to yourself? Would you have lived out your life pretending to the world that you’d merely been insane?”
Maria was becoming giddy with all the levels of reality they were transecting
“What did you do, wake him up with a brain full of amphetamines?” Durham replied in the same spirit. “No, he’s high on life. If you’ve only got two minutes of it, you might as well enjoy it.”
It was her choice. Peer took it in his stride, along with all their other disagreements. If they were going to spend eternity together, he believed they’d resolve their problems eventually – if they could be resolved at all. It was early days yet. As it always would be.
Peer didn’t much care if they were found or not; all that really mattered to him was the fact that the City’s computational infrastructure was also constantly expanding, to enable it to keep up with both the growing population, and the ever-increasing demands of Elysian Standard Time. 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.
Repetto paused; he grew perceptibly taller, and his youthful features became subtly more dignified, more mature. Most Elysians would see this as no more manipulative than a change in posture, or tone of voice.
“I believe that we should wait for the equivalent moment in Lambertian history: when the Lambertians are impatient for proof of our existence – when our continued absence becomes far harder for them to explain than our arrival would be. Once they begin to suspect that we’re eavesdropping on every conversation they hold about us, it would be dishonest to remain concealed. Until then, we owe them the opportunity to find as many answers as they can, without us.”
Bridges here did not collapse from unanticipated vibrations. Perspex tubes did not hurtle to the ground, spilling corpses onto the pavement. It made no difference whether or not Malcolm Carter had known the first thing about structural engineering; the City was hardly going to bother laboriously modeling stresses and loads just to discover whether or not parts of itself should fail, for the sake of realism. Everything was perfectly safe, by decree.
“We have to persuade them that we created them, before that’s no longer the truth.”
Durham leaned forward urgently. “We have to win back the laws. We have to go into the Autoverse and convince the Lambertians to accept our explanation of their history – before they have a clear alternative. “We have to persuade them that we created them, before that’s no longer the truth.”
“What kind of sense does that make? We can run it as fast as we like – within our capacity to give it computing resources – but if we try to slow it down, we hit a brick wall. That’s just … perverse.” Zemansky said, “Think of it from the Autoverse point of view. Slowing down the Autoverse is speeding up Elysium; it’s as if there’s a limit to how fast it can run us – a limit to the computing resources it can spare for us.”
“What are you suggesting? That Elysium is now a computer program being run somewhere in the Autoverse?” “No. But there’s a symmetry to it. A principle of relativity. Elysium was envisioned as a fixed frame of reference, a touchstone of reality – against which the Autoverse could be declared a mere simulation. The truth has turned out to be more subtle: there are no fixed points, no immovable objects, no absolute laws.”
timbre of her voice sounded odd through the robot’s ears. The
“We’ve come to reveal ourselves as the creators of their universe. There’s not much point being shy about it.”
They read the analysis together. A team of Lambertians had found a set of field equations – nothing to do with the Autoverse cellular automaton – with thirty-two stable solutions. One for each of their atoms. And at high enough temperatures, the same equations predicted the spontaneous generation of matter – in exactly the right proportions to explain the primordial cloud.