Permutation City Read Online Free PDF

stresses induced by the alteration were redistributed from atom to atom, until a new equilibrium geometry was found.
     
    Maria watched the delayed response with a familiar sense of frustration; she could never quite resign herself to accepting the handling rules, however convenient they were. She'd thought about trying to devise a more authentic mode of interaction, offering the chance to feel what it was "really like" to grasp an Autoverse molecule, to break and re-form its bonds -- instead of everything turning to simulated plastic at the touch of a glove. The catch was, if a molecule obeyed only Autoverse physics -- the internal logic of the self-contained computer model -- then how could she, outside the model, interact with it at all? By constructing little surrogate hands in the Autoverse, to act as remote manipulators? Construct them out of what? There were no molecules small enough to build anything finely structured, at that scale; the smallest rigid polymers which could act as "fingers" would be half as thick as the entire nutrose ring. In any case, although the target molecule would be free to interact with these surrogate hands according to pure Autoverse physics, there'd be nothing authentic about the way the hands themselves magically followed the movements of her gloves. Maria could see no joy in simply shifting the point where the rules were broken -- and the rules had to be broken, somewhere. Manipulating the contents of the Autoverse meant violating its laws. That was obvious . . . but it was still frustrating.
     
    She saved the modified sugar, optimistically dubbing it mutose. Then, changing the length scale by a factor of a million, she started up twenty-one tiny cultures of Autobacterium lamberti, in solutions ranging from pure nutrose, to a fifty-fifty mixture, to one hundred percent mutose.
     
    She gazed at the array of Petri dishes floating in the workspace, their contents portrayed in colors which coded for the health of the bacteria. "False colors" . . . but that phrase was tautological. Any view of the Autoverse was necessarily stylized: a color-coded map, displaying selected attributes of the region in question. Some views were more abstract, more heavily processed than others -- in the sense that a map of the Earth, color-coded to show the health of its people, would be arguably more abstract than one displaying altitude or rain-fall -- but the real-world ideal of an unadulterated, naked-eye view was simply untranslatable.
     
    A few of the cultures were already looking decidedly sick, fading from electric blue to dull brown. Maria summoned up a three-dimensional graph, showing population versus time for the full range of nutrient mixtures. The cultures with only a trace of the new stuff were, predictably, growing at almost the pace of the control; with increasing mutose substitution the ascent gradually slowed, until, around the eighty-five percent line, the population was static. Beyond that were ever steeper trajectories into extinction. In small doses, mutose was simply irrelevant, but at high enough concentrations it was insidious: similar enough to nutrose -- A. lamberti's usual food -- to be taken part-way through the metabolic process, competing for the same enzymes, tying up valuable biochemical resources . . . but eventually reaching a step where that one stray blue-red spike formed an insurmountable barrier to the reaction geometry, leaving the bacterium with nothing but a useless byproduct and a net energy loss. A culture with ninety percent mutose was a world where ninety per cent of the food supply had no nutritional value whatsoever -- but had to be ingested indiscriminately along with the worthwhile ten percent. Consuming ten times as much for the same return wasn't a viable solution; to survive in the long term, A. lamberti would have to chance upon some means of rejecting mutose before wasting energy on it -- or, better still, find a way to turn it back into nutrose,