Permutation City

Maria ran the interactive. A man's face appeared on the terminal; "he" met her gaze and smiled warmly, and she suddenly realized that "he" bore a slight resemblance to Aden. Close enough to elicit a flicker of recognition which the mask of herself she'd set up for Camel's Eye would not have exhibited? Maria felt a mixture of annoyance and grudging admiration. She'd never shared an address with Aden -- but no doubt the data analysis agencies correlated credit card use in restaurants, or whatever, to pick up relationships which didn't involve cohabitation. Mapping useful connections between consumers had been going on for decades -- but employing the data in this way, as a reality test, was a new twist.

The junk mail, now rightly convinced that it was talking to a human being, began the spiel it had refused to waste on her digital proxy. "Maria, I know your time is valuable, but I hope you can spare a few seconds to hear me out." It paused for a moment, to make her feel that her silence was some kind of assent. "I also know that you're a highly intelligent, discerning woman, with no interest whatsoever in the muddled, irrational superstitions of the past, the fairy tales that comforted humanity in its infancy." Maria guessed what was coming next; the interactive saw it on her face -- she hadn't bothered to hide behind any kind of filter -- and it rushed to get a hook in. "No truly intelligent person, though, ever dismisses an idea without taking the trouble to evaluate it -- skeptically, but fairly -- and here at the Church of the God Who Makes No Difference -- "

Maria pointed two fingers at the interactive, and it died. She wondered if it was her mother who'd set the Church onto her, but that was unlikely. They must have targeted their new member's family automatically; if consulted, Francesca would have told them that they'd be wasting their time.

Maria invoked Camel's Eye and told it, "Update my mask so it reacts as I did in that exchange."

A brief silence followed. Maria imagined the synaptic weighting parameters being juggled in the mask's neural net, as the training algorithm hunted for values which would guarantee the required response. She thought: If I keep on doing this, the mask is going to end up as much like me as a fully fledged Copy. And what's the point of saving yourself from the tedium of talking to junk mail if . . . you're not? It was a deeply unpleasant notion . . . but masks were orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Copies; they had about as many neurons as the average goldfish -- organized in a far less human fashion. Worrying about their "experience" would be as ludicrous as feeling guilty about terminating junk mail.

Camel's Eye said, "Done."

It was only 8:15. The whole day loomed ahead, promising nothing but bills. With no contract work coming in for the past two months, Maria had written half a dozen pieces of consumer software -- mostly home-security upgrades, supposedly in high demand. So far, she'd sold none of them; a few thousand people had read the catalogue entries, but nobody had been persuaded to download. The prospect of embarking on another such project wasn't exactly electrifying -- but she had no real alternative. And once the recession was over and people started buying again, it would have been time well spent.

First, though, she needed to cheer herself up. If she worked in the Autoverse, just for half an hour or so -- until nine o'clock at the latest -- then she'd be able to face the rest of the day . . .

Then again, she could always try to face the rest of the day without bribing herself, just once. The Autoverse was a waste of money, and a waste of time -- a hobby she could justify when things were going well, but an indulgence she could ill afford right now.

Maria put an end to her indecision in the usual way. She logged on to her Joint Supercomputer Network account -- paying a fifty-dollar fee for the privilege, which she now had to make worthwhile. She slipped on her force gloves and prodded an icon, a wireframe of a cube, on the terminal's flatscreen -- and the three-dimensional workspace in front of the screen came to life, borders outlined by a faint holographic grid. For a second, it felt like she'd plunged her hand into some kind of invisible vortex: magnetic fields gripped and twisted her glove, as start-up surges tugged at the coils in each joint at random -- until the electronics settled into equilibrium, and a message flashed up in the middle of the workspace: you may now put on your gloves.