Permutation City

Permutation City is Greg Egan's 1994 hard science fiction novel about what happens when people can be scanned and run as software Copies.

In the mid-21st century, Paul Durham, a wealthy and obsessive Sydney man, wakes as one of several Copies of himself and sets out to prove that a Copy's existence does not depend on any particular computer, or on being run in order at all.

Maria Deluca, a programmer who works on artificial-life simulations, is drawn into his project, while elsewhere other Copies live in cheap, slowed-down virtual lives that rich originals can switch off.

Durham's plan is to launch a self-sustaining virtual world, Permutation City, which will keep running with no hardware behind it. To do that he needs a simulated universe, the Autoverse, built from a simple artificial chemistry, and a starting state that cannot be reached from any other. As the experiment runs, intelligent insect-like creatures called Lambertians evolve inside the Autoverse, and the book follows what its human creators owe them.

The novel grew out of Egan's 1992 short story "Dust". It is dense, idea-driven science fiction, and it asks what a self is, whether simulated minds are conscious, and whether physical reality is only one way of arranging a pattern. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1995.