William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, the concluding volume to his influential Sprawl series, saw several of the main characters living within an aleph. The idea borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, an aleph is an object that contains a virtually infinite amount of knowledge. Operating as a permanent virtual reality, the surface of the idea was only touched upon by Gibson, begging another writer to fully detail the idea. Greg Egan’s 1994 Permutation City does just that. The world of 2050 Egan imagines is not so far removed from our own, and like Gibson’s, is scarily plausible. Technology advanced to the point personalities are uploadable, the rich are able to afford the computing power necessary to maintain a virtual copy of themselves in VR while the less well-to-do save in the hopes of having immortality upon death—or at least until their finances dissipate. The technology capable but not ubiquitous, it requires huge quantities of computing power to keep the system running, making competition for technical resources fierce. Public services (not unlike the “cloud” service companies are currently driving at) are rented and used as needed, home networks prohibitively expensive to operate.
