Permutation City

In a near future where climate change has ravaged Earth and vast computing power enables the creation of 'Copies' - whole brain emulations of scanned humans detailed enough to allow for subjective conscious experience, Greg Egan's Permutation City follows Paul Durham's fifth Copy waking in a simulated Sydney apartment, discovering his flesh-and-blood original has sabotaged the legally mandated bale-out function because the original believes his previous four Copies lacked the resolve to continue. The novel introduces Maria Deluca, an unemployed programmer and enthusiast of the Autoverse, a cellular automaton universe governed by simplified physics that supports its own distinct chemistry, who tends cultures of Autobacterium lamberti. Durham reveals his self-experiments convinced him there is no difference between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, a belief he refers to as 'Dust Theory' - implying that all possible universes exist and are equally real, emerging spontaneously from their own mathematical self-consistency. Parts of Permutation City were adapted from Egan's 1992 short story 'Dust' and the novel won the John W. Campbell Award and Ditmar Award in 1995.