Permutation City - Story - Part Two

Part Two

Maria wakes in Permutation City seven thousand years of subjective time after the launch, furious at Durham for being awoken and refusing to believe that the launch was successful. Durham eventually persuades her, however, by showing her the complexity of the Autoverse planet she had designed, Planet Lambert, which had then been running on a suitably large chunk of the TVC universe for several billion subjective years. Intelligent life in the form of complex swarms of insect-like eusocial beings had evolved on Lambert from Maria's original Autobacterium hydrophilus, and the citizens of Permutation City were on the verge of making contact with the creatures. However, a town hall vote restricted the Autoverse scholars from making contact until the creatures had independently hypothesized the existence of a creator. Meanwhile, Permutation City had flourished in the TVC universe, and the original inhabitants of a few hundred had exploded to a population of tens of thousands, with the descendants of the various founders sharing their founders' ever growing chunks of the TVC universe, with Permutation City acting as the central locus for interaction between populations located in different contiguous blocks of the universe.

Durham, however, confides in Maria that he does not believe the insectoid creatures will ever seriously consider the concept of a creator and intends to use Maria's slice of the universe's processing power (as a founder of the world she was given de facto control of a continuously-growing zone of the processor network as well) to make forbidden first contact with the life of Planet Lambert. He believes this is necessary because he has seemingly lost the ability to pause the Autoverse simulation or slow it down past a constant multiple of the size of the processor network it occupies. Durham is worried that the rules of their simulated universe are breaking down.

What they discover together is that the growing and intellectually voracious population of Planet Lambert has exceeded the combined intelligence of the inhabitants of the remainder of the TVC universe, and that Lambert in its Autoverse has ceased to be defined as the TVC universe's simulation. Rather, the Lambertians have been considering a new set of hypotheses, interpretations of the evidence present to them, which do not require their universe to have been created in Maria's original Garden of Eden configuration. As such, the TVC universe's processor networks, which had previously done the work of simulating the Autoverse for the inhabitants of Permutation City, were now progressively being redefined in ways which prevented them from interfering with the existence of the Autoverse in ways unprecedented under these newly self-consistent interpretations of its terms of existence – the TVC universe was being overwritten into a system existing solely as a byproduct of the self-perpetuation of the Autoverse, and its inhabitants on Planet Lambert had interpreted it to be so. Durham, Maria, and some other companions quickly launch an emergency expedition into the Autoverse to attempt to convince the Lambertians of the validity of the creator hypothesis and its methodological perferentiality over their own newly formulated theory.

Unfortunately, the Lambertians reject their presentation of the creator theory of the Autoverse on the grounds that a system such as the TVC universe, capable of simulating their own universe, would have to be infinitely sized or infinitely expanding, which they consider to be unparsimonious. Shortly after failing to convince Planet Lambert of the creator theory, the Lambertians inform them of the discovery a set of field equations with a stable solution for each of their universe's elements; furthermore, initial studies on the equations show that they predict the spontaneous instantiation of matter at high temperatures, enabling their world to come into existence without requiring the Garden of Eden Maria had initially designed.

To the alarm of its citizens, Permutation City and eventually the entire TVC processor-network begins to collapse into nothingness, interpreted out of existence by the Lambertians whose reality no longer requires a maker, there being a 'better' solution that has superseded its possibility. As Permutation City becomes corrupted and the TVC universe begins to suffer spontaneous systemic failures, Durham and Maria inform the inhabitants of the various founders' computing blocks of the situation while preparing a new TVC Garden of Eden based on the original to launch in their universe's final moments, though Durham initially declines to board it himself, saying he has become exhausted with the number of times he was awoken in new realities and would be unable to cope with experiencing it again. Ultimately, however, Maria convinces him to change his mind (literally reconfiguring it to desire escape) and together they leave, pledging to discover the underlying rules that governed the Autoverse's takeover of Permutation City.