Permutation City

11 hrs. 34 min.

Language Russian

Author Greg Egan

Narrator Sergey Orobchuk

Year 2050. Humanity has reached a level of development that makes it possible to accomplish immortality of the mind. Human consciousness continues to function in a virtual environment—after the death of its physical body, as a Copy. This process requires enormous computing power from computer processors connected into a network across the whole world. People who, in life, owned large corporations or other sources that brought super-profits, continued to control them after death. In the real world, the project “Operation Butterfly” is being created—capable, in the long run, of preventing natural catastrophes and saving the lives of many people. The required computing power is created by a “flattening” of Copies, which manifests as falling out of time. The threat of developing new similar projects and the likelihood that in the future the rights of Copies may be revoked make the virtual world completely dependent on the external world. Among the richest Copies is a man named Paul Durham, who offers, for a relatively small contribution, a ticket to the City of Shuffling—an ABSOLUTELY INDEPENDENT from the outside world place.

1. Quarantine (narrated by Sergey Orobchuk) 2. Permutation City 3. Distress (narrated by Sergey Orobchuk)