Squeak. Durham snorted. "A cosmic anagram? So where are all the leftover letters? If any of this were true -- and the primordial alphabet soup really is random -- don't you think it's highly unlikely that we could structure the whole thing?"

Paul thought about it. "We haven't structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty. We've swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level."

Squeak, The djinn strived visibly for patience. "Paul . . . none of this could ever be tested. How would anyone ever observe a planet whose constituent parts were scattered across the universe, let alone communicate with its hypothetical inhabitants? What you're saying might have a certain -- purely mathematical -- validity: grind the universe into fine enough dust, and maybe it could be rearranged in other ways that make as much sense as the original. If those rearranged worlds are inaccessible, though, it's all angels on the heads of pins."

"How can you say that? I've been rearranged! I've visited another world!"

Squeak. "If you did, it was an artificial world; created, not discovered."

"Found, created . . . there's no real difference."

Squeak. "What are you claiming? Some influence from this other world flowed into the computers, changed the way the model ran?"

"Of course not! Your pattern hasn't been violated; the computers did exactly what was expected of them. That doesn't invalidate my perspective. Stop thinking of explanations, causes and effects; there are only patterns. The scattered events that formed my experience had an internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the computers. And perhaps the computers didn't provide all of it."

Squeak. "What do you mean?"

"The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren't describing me? Well . . . it's a big universe. Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of events -- nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch -- out of which to construct ten seconds of experience."

Squeak, The djinn looked seriously worried now. "You're a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space and time is invariant. That's exactly what we always expected -- remember? Come down to Earth. Your states are computed, your memories have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You haven't visited any other worlds, you haven't built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies."

Paul laughed. "Your stupidity is . . . surreal. What did you create me for, if you're not even going to listen to what I have to say? I've had a glimpse of the truth behind . . . everything: space, time, the laws of physics. You can't shrug that off by saying that what happened to me was inevitable."

Squeak. "Control and subject are still identical."

"Of course they are! That's the whole point! Like . . . gravity and acceleration in General Relativity -- it all depends on what you can't tell apart. This is a new Principle of Equivalence, a new symmetry between observers. Relativity threw out absolute space and time -- but it didn't go far enough. We have to throw out absolute cause and effect!"

Squeak. The djinn muttered, dismayed, "Elizabeth said this would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before you'd lose touch."

Paul stared at him, jolted back to the mundane. "Elizabeth? You said you hadn't even told her."

Squeak. "Well, I have now. I didn't tell you, because I didn't think you'd want to hear her reaction."

"Which was?"

Squeak. "I was up all night arguing with her. She wanted me to shut you down. She said I was . . . seriously disturbed, to even think about doing this."

Paul was stung. "What would she know? Ignore her."

Squeak. Durham frowned apologetically -- an expression Paul recognized at once, and his guts turned to ice. "Maybe I should pause you, while I think things over. Elizabeth raised some . . . valid ethical questions. I think I should talk it through with her again."

"Fuck that! I'm not here for you to put on ice every time you have a change of heart. And if Elizabeth wants to have a say in my life, she can damn well talk it through with me."

Paul could see exactly what would happen. If he was paused, Durham wouldn't restart him -- he'd go back to the original scan file and start again from scratch, handling his prisoner differently, hoping to end up with a more cooperative subject. Maybe he wouldn't even perform the first set of experiments at all.

The ones which had given him this insight.

The ones which had made him who he was.

Squeak. "I need time to think. It would only be temporary. I promise."

"No! You have no right!"

Durham hesitated. Paul felt numb, disbelieving. Some part of him refused to acknowledge any danger -- refused to accept that it could be this easy to die. Being paused wouldn't kill him, wouldn't harm him, wouldn't have the slightest effect. What would kill him would be not being restarted. He'd be passively annihilated, ignored out of existence. The fate that befell his own shit.

Durham reached offscreen.

13

(Remit not paucity)

FEBRUARY 2051

Maria said, "Recalculate everything up to epoch five, then show me sunrise on Lambert. Latitude zero, longitude zero, altitude one."

She waited, staring into the blank workspace, fighting the temptation to change her instructions and have the software display every stage of the simulation, which would have slowed things down considerably. After several minutes, a fissured dark plain appeared, raked with silver light. The unnamed sun -- dazzling and swollen, and, so low in the sky, too white by far -- turned a chain of extinct volcanoes on the horizon into black silhouettes like a row of pointed teeth. In the foreground, the surface looked glassy, inhospitable.

Maria raised her viewpoint to a thousand meters, then sent it skimming east. The terrain repeated itself, the eerily symmetric cones of dead volcanoes the only relief from the fractured igneous plains. This specific, detailed scenery was nothing more than a series of computerized "artist's impressions," manufactured on demand from purely statistical data about the planet's topography; the simulation itself hadn't dealt with anything so finicky as individual volcanoes. Touring the planet was a wasteful means of finding out anything -- but it was hard to resist playing explorer, treating this world as if its secrets had to be deduced painstakingly from its appearance . . . even when the truth was the exact opposite. Reluctantly, Maria froze the image and went straight to the underlying numerical data. The atmosphere was much too thin, again. And this time, there was almost no aqua at all.

She backtracked through the simulation's history to see when the aqua had been lost, but this version of Lambert had never possessed significant oceans -- or ice caps, or atmospheric vapor. She'd made a slight change in the composition of the primordial gas-and-dust cloud, increasing the proportion of blue and yellow atoms, in the hope that this would ultimately lead to a denser atmosphere for Lambert. Instead, she'd caused more than half of the debris in the Kuiper belt to condense into a whole new stable outer planet. As a consequence, far fewer ice-rich comets from the belt had ended up striking Lambert, robbing it of its largest source of aqua by far -- and much of its atmosphere. Gas released by volcanic eruptions provided a poor substitute; the pressure was far too low, and the chemistry was all wrong.