Permutation City Quotes
"You have to let me show you exactly what you are."
"When you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced."
"I've never mistaken what I have—a very good chance of a prolonged existence—for a guarantee of immortality."
"The truth is, it's a waste of our resources. Why not skip the bleeding obvious, and get on with the kind of experiment where the answer isn't a foregone conclusion?"
"I just deleted one of you. I couldn't afford to keep you both running, when all you're going to do is laze around."
"In a week-old report, one journalist described this, straight-faced, as 'high drama.' Paul thought: I guess you had to be there."
"Nobody would claim that the Doppler shift could rob someone of their humanity."
"He lay in bed, wondering: Do I still want to wake from this dream?"
"I got some junk mail today that looked just like you."
"The only way to 'fix things' is to have less impact on the planet, not more."
"It's too late for that. If that had started a hundred years ago... fine."
"He looked up, took off his headset, and stood to kiss her. He tasted of orange juice."
"I have a lot of trouble imagining us ever being able to afford to spend a year in Korea, any other way."
"It's just going to collapse around us in some random fashion that isn't likely to be any better than our worst well-intentioned mistakes."
"I hardly ever... Then she stopped herself, realizing that he meant the Autoverse."
"Maria suddenly wondered if Durham was someone she should have known, after all—someone who'd published in other areas of the artificial life scene."
"So what it comes down to is... you want to present the strongest possible case that deterministic systems like the Autoverse can generate a biology as complex as real-world biology."
"Natural selection is natural selection, and you've shown that it can happen in the Autoverse; maybe that should be enough."
"Don't underestimate the need to appeal to people's imaginations."
"If such a device was ever to be constructed, however far into the future, there'd have to be far better reasons for building it than this."
"Maria couldn't argue with any of that—but who handed out research grants on the basis of what was evocative?"
"The project was a thought experiment in the purest sense."
"But like I said, I don't work in the Autoverse."
"The real obsession, the real addiction, was a matter of putting on the gloves and reaching into that artificial space."
"The whole thing closed in on itself in every direction, finite but borderless, universe-as-womb."
"There's no point of being scanned, only to remain enslaved by an obsolete respect for the body's fragility."
"The truth was, he almost certainly would have starved, or gone insane."
"Watching the screens of his Bunker, he'd looked back on that trite but comforting understanding with a dizzying sense of loss."
"We've swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level."
"There's no reason to believe that the pattern we've found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust."
"Relativity threw out absolute space and time—but it didn't go far enough. We have to throw out absolute cause and effect!"
"That's exactly what we always expected—remember?"
"The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren't describing me?"
"It's a world unto itself. People can get obsessive, extravagant."
"The truth is, even in total isolation, they'd have everything reality could ever offer the human race."
"The mere fact of her presence had already improved his outlook immeasurably."
"He hadn't been able to resist the urge to dramatize the transformation."
"The software, she said, can be confiscated and examined—but it will not stand trial."
"Taking advantage of the confusion, guest-star Y smashes a bottle over the skull of guest-star X."
"The new law could see him dragged from his home and family in the dead of night for a Kafkaesque virtual interrogation."
"Most of the room ceased being computed; he pictured himself adrift in Durham's sea of random numbers."
"Who did he believe would accuse him? There was no one left to care about Anna's death."
"But the murderer had never really died. The corpse consigned to the furnace had been nothing but shed skin."
"Thomas had met Anna in Hamburg in the summer of 1983, in a railway station cafe."
"She looked him over appraisingly, then said, 'I'd kill for a shirt like that. You have expensive tastes.'"
"Thomas said, 'Maybe I'm gay. Or perhaps I have an incurable venereal disease.'"
"He said, 'I'm not a money-laundering facility for your friends.'"
"Durham said, 'If I was developing a computer, say, thirty orders of magnitude more powerful than any processor cluster in existence, don't you think people like that might take an interest?'"
"Maria felt a deep chill pass through her; every time she thought she'd accepted just how seriously Durham took this lunacy, he gave an answer like that which drove it home to her anew."
"The anaesthetist said, 'Count backward from ten.'"
"Maria felt herself waking. Suddenly afraid that she might be the Copy, she struggled to remain in the dream."
"Maria said, 'I don't care if it's six hundred million.'"
"She's dying. And she can save herself—without hurting anyone."
"The pinnacle of her existence would be fertilizing a rainforest when she died."
"The Copy had to conduct experiments to test his own fundamental 'laws of physics'."
"The only place the data had been reproduced had been inside the Garden-of-Eden configuration itself."
"And all the work he'd done on the TVC universe was ingenious—however ultimately pointless it was."
"He was pale and unshaven, obviously drained—but there was more life in his eyes than ever."
"The individual components of the Garden of Eden were still held in mass storage."