His guilt about this, and the fact that he ran away instead of calling for help, informs his entire personality. Accidental Murder: As a young man, Riemann had a girlfriend from the rough part of town that his parents would not approve of, and, one day, got into an argument with her about this, which led to him throwing her against the wall, giving her a head injury, which killed her after he slammed her head into the wall repeatedly, to make sure. The metaphysical theory in the heart of the novel bears some resemblance to Max Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis, which he has proposed four years later. For a fee which is pretty meager for a billionaire but large enough to buy a whole lot of QIPS, Durham offers to relocate the copies to a sanctuary in which, if his radical metaphysical theory works, guaranteed immortality is only the tip of the iceberg. And this is where a mysterious financial service salesman named Paul Durham enters the picture. As beings who don't have legal rights, the world's governments might decide that the resources used to maintain their continued existence might better be redirected towards saving the lives of "real", fleshy human beings. Naturally, Operation Butterfly is a threat to the thanatophobic billionaire Copies. It means to do so by turning the Butterfly Effect on its head-if small perturbations in a chaotic system might have a difficult to predict, far-reaching effect, then by creating a detailed enough simulation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans, one might determine which subtle changes in the water temperature might prevent the appearance of typhoons. This initiative is meant to mitigate the devastating climate change-caused typhoons that have been hitting south-east Asia lately. It seems, however, that the Autoverse junkies would have to put their hobby on hold, since a project named Operation Butterfly is buying out virtually the entire QIPS market. The Autoverse provides diversion to a community of programmers who work on it in their spare time, their current main goal being to find a way to make the only virtual life form synthesized so far, Autobacterium lamberti, to evolve. The class differences between different Copies are manifested in the level of detail in their virtual worlds and the speed with which they're being run.Īnother endeavor which uses a large slice of the QIPS market is the Autoverse - a cellular automation designed to simulate some weird form of artificial chemistry and, through it, virtual life. While many of the Copies have originally been terminally ill people for whom being scanned was the only chance to keep on existing, others are back-up versions of rich individuals who like the idea of keeping on living indefinitely. Those Copies (with a capital C) live in various VR environments which run on a vast global cloud computing network, the processing power of which is bought and sold through an online marketplace called QIPS Exchange ("QIPS" stands for "quadrillions of instructions per second"). In mid-21st century, humanity has the technology to scan a human being's brain and create a virtual copy of them who, by virtue of containing the same information as the original brain, has subjective conscious experience and views himself/herself as a continuation of the original person. It is also one of the most influential pieces of fiction on the Transhumanist movement. For its use of a rich array of concepts from science, mathematics and computer science which paint a believable and self-consistent world, it's known as one of the hardest Sci-Fi novels associated with the Cyberpunk genre. Permutation City is a 1994 Sci-Fi novel by Greg Egan which deals with the philosophical issues surrounding Mind Uploading and the creation of artificial life in simulated universes.
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