Entoverse

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Langerif, the new deputy chief of police, had applied himself to continuing his late predecessor’s policy of cooperation with the Ganymean administration. He became a regular visitor to PAC, and in particular showed much interest in learning more from the security people that Cullen had imported from Earth. He even arranged for a three-day training class to be held in PAC for a picked group of his own officers. At the same time, a firm of contractors that the Ganymeans had been vainly pressuring to start work on remodeling and redecorating parts of the complex at last responded, zealously sending in a legion of workers as if anxious to make up for the lost time. So, for the last few days, PAC had been swarming with all kinds of Jevlenese.

The scientists, however, had become too engrossed in a completely new explanation of Phantasmagoria that Hunt had suddenly produced from nowhere to take much notice.

The practical usefulness of mathematics arises from the fortuitous ability of some mathematical constructs to approximate real physical processes. There is no obvious reason why such correspondence should exist; luckily for engineers and others, it just does. This makes it a lot easier and cheaper to test a design for, say, a bridge, by making a mathematical model of it and seeing what happens when mathematical trains roll over and mathematical winds blow-than having to actually build the bridge. But as science probes successively deeper and more refined levels of reality, things change. Complexity and nonlinearities become more important in their effects, making mathematical representation more intractable, until the real thing becomes a better model of the model: a daffodil, a single cell of it, or even one DNA molecule from the cell is a far more concise and comprehensible statement of what’s going on than the reams of equations that would be necessary to express it analytically in symbols.

Accordingly, the computer techniques used for modeling reality developed from the simple mechanized solving of analytical equations to progressively more elaborate methods of simulation. The trend was reflected in system architectures, where, to accommodate demands for ever greater speed and precision, earlier design philosophies based on bringing passive data to a few centralized processing bottlenecks gave way to connecting large numbers of simpler units in parallel to provide on-the-spot processing of large arrays of data simultaneously.

Ganymean technology had long before taken this trend to its ultimate. Their systems consisted of enormous numbers of microscopic cells arranged in three-dimensional arrays. Individually, each cell possessed only a limited capability that combined the rudiments of processing, memory, and communication; but ensembles of them working in conjunction could handle staggering throughputs of information. ZORAC exemplified a relatively early phase of development; VISAR’s astounding ability to cope with the full virtual-travel traffic of the entire, interstellar Thurien civilization in real time was the culmination.

Each cell in a Thurien computing complex was thus an elementary processing unit that exchanged information with its immediate neighbors in every direction according to a very simple set of programming rules.

“Fundamental entities defined by a small set of attributes, like quantum numbers, interacting according to a few basic rules. You could almost think of them,” Hunt said to Danchekker, Shilohin, and Duncan Watt, whom he had called together in the UNSA labs, “as energy quanta forces.”

He went on. “You could think of a cell that’s in an ‘active’ state in the matrix of ‘data space’ as having properties analogous to those of a basic particle in our ordinary physical space. You see what I mean. It doesn’t matter all that much what the quanta ‘really’ are. They exhibit the same kind of behavior.”

He waited, flicking his eyes around the group for a reaction. Danchekker and Shilohin stared in silence, obviously needing a moment to take it in. Duncan looked immediately taken with the idea and was the first to speak. He had worked with Hunt long enough to be used to propositions coming like this, from totally unexpected directions.

“So there are cells everywhere. But only the ones in a particular state are, sort of… ‘real,’ in this space you’re talking about?” he said.

Hunt nodded. “Right. If a cell’s not active, it isn’t exchanging information with anything. If a particle isn’t exchanging any field quanta, then it isn’t interacting with anything. So for all the difference it makes, it might as well not exist.”

“Hmm.” Duncan rubbed his chin and thought about the proposition. “That would make the matrix like Dirac’s ‘sea’ of negative energy states, filling all of space. ‘Particles’ are simply localized regions raised to positive energies… Yes, I can see your point. They can move. What we call ‘antiparticles’ are the holes they leave behind.”

“Like holes in semiconductors,” Hunt said, nodding. “Exactly.” Danchekker blinked several times, sat back in his chair, and emitted a long breath in the manner of somebody not quite sure where to begin. “Let me be quite clear,” he said. “This isn’t anything that comes into being by virtue of the processing operations taking place in the matrix: It isn’t a construct of the software?”

“No,” Hunt said. “It’s something innate to the design. An unintended byproduct of the environment itself Like bread mold.”

“I see.” Danchekker’s voice remained even. His expression was of someone not necessarily in agreement but prepared to wait and see where things were leading. “Very well,” he said. “Go on.”

“The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that what happened in JEVEX was something like this,” Hunt continued. “Somehow, at some time in the distant past, conditions came about inside its processing space such that activated computational cells took on the role of primordial particles in our own universe.”

“The Big Wang?” ZORAC, who was following, threw in.

“ZORAC, cut it out. This is serious.” Hunt gestured across the table with a half-open hand. “And, just as happened in our own case, from those beginnings there evolved a universe. A real one, not a software imitation. And that’s your answer, Chris. That’s how Phantasmagoria exists, and where it came from.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Danchekker could contain himself no longer. He waved his hands in agitation, stood up, faced the other way for several seconds, and then turned back toward the table, still spluttering incoherently. “What is this supposed to be? I mean, we are being serious, I take it? This is analogy gone wild.”

Hunt had been prepared for it. “No, calm down…”

“Oh, I’ve never heard such twaddle. Inventing physics out of abstract data-processing concepts… Really, Vic, it-”

“Just think about it for a minute, Chris. A cell already possesses the properties of localization and position in the matrix. Now, if I’ve read it correctly about the way Thurien systems work, a a consequence of the overall programming directives imposed on the system, activated cells constantly exchange information among themselves.”

“That’s correct,” Shilohin said.

Hunt nodded. “Good. Well, I don’t know what the design philosophy was long ago when JEVEX was dreamed up. But just for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that it embodied an optimization criterion by which the paths between such communicating cells should be as short as possible.”

“Which is the kind of thing you’d expect,” Duncan observed.

“Exactly. So, if the traffic being supported on the right-hand side, say, of a given cell were heavier than that on the left, but the opposite was true of its neighbor to the right, then an improvement would be achieved if the two cells were to exchange identities. In effect, each of them could be thought of as having moved one space-quantum through the matrix.”

“A kind of Planck length,” Duncan murmured.

Hunt nodded again and went on. “Or, to take another example, if an isolated cell was communicating at different rates in different directions, it would move around in such a way as to minimize the traffic-times-distance total until it balanced all the competing ‘pulls.’ In other words, if the information-exchange process plays the part of force-carrying vector particles, then this optimization rule defines minimum-action paths: natural geodesics. I’ve played through simulations of it with ZORAC. The dynamics of gravitation follows automatically.”

Shilohin was staring fixedly at Hunt. “You’re postulating a void populated by particles capable of exerting mutual attraction,” she said slowly. “The conditions of a primordial universe.”

“Yes.”

“What about repulsions? Is there an analog of charge?” Duncan asked.

Hunt inclined his head in the direction of Danchekker, who was still on his feet. The life-sciences specialist had not yet given his blessing; but he was no longer vehemently protesting, either. “Chris has a good point: We shouldn’t get too carried away by analogies,” he said. “But I can offer a few speculations. For example, if everything were allowed to collapse to its minimum ‘energy’ state purely on the basis of attraction, it would all end up as one solid lump, with nowhere left for through traffic. Everything would be optimally close to everything, but unable to function. The system would have stifled itself. So one optimization criterion isn’t enough. You need to introduce another that competes with it-say, one that tries to maximize free space for traffic. When the two trends interact, maybe the kind of organization that emerges is a collection of ‘clumps,’ where similar kinds of processing with little to say to the outside world can get together, separated by voids in which other things happen.”

“Fascinating!” Shilohin whispered.

“It gets more interesting,” Hunt said. “The cells must have a finite switching time. So larger aggregates of cells that have accreted together will move more sluggishly than smaller ones. Hence, we have a resistance to motion, proportional to the number of cells.”

The parallel to mass was too obvious to need spelling out.

Hunt continued. “But once the mass is moving, a plausible way of improving efficiency would be to change to a pattern-switching algorithm instead of having to operate on all the constituent cells individually; so the pattern would be reluctant to slow down again.”

Inertia.

“But the propagation rate through the matrix of even a single cell would ultimately be limited by the switching speed.”

Velocities in Hunt’s universe had a relativistic limit.

“We are speaking in terms of pure conjecture, I take it?” Danchekker said. His voice still had something of a rasp, but it had mollified itself noticeably. Exhibiting another kind of inertia, he was starting to come around in his own way. “We’re not talking about established fact? This isn’t science?”

“Of course not,” Hunt agreed. “But we’re getting an idea of what to look for, maybe.”

Duncan snorted. “Look where? We can’t even find where JEVEX is, let alone look inside it.”

Shilohin looked up, at last digesting the full message of what Hunt was saying. “Our physical universe evolved from huge numbers of elementary particles in space, and laws of physics and probability that contained implicit mechanisms for the self-organization of complex structures,” she said. “And out of it there emerged not only complexity sufficient to manifest intelligence, but the whole world of impressions and experiences-all far removed from the underlying quantum reality-which intelligence perceives. So, is it so inconceivable for comparable levels of complexity to have arisen in this… ‘matrix universe’? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Why not?” Hunt said. “We’re pretty sure that Nixie’s world can’t exist anywhere in the universe we know. Yet I’m convinced that it exists somewhere. And perhaps this sheds some light on how its magical properties could have arisen. Although there might be some parallels to our own universe in the kind of way I’ve suggested, which would at least give us the basis of objects moving in space as something they share in common, the ‘laws’ expressing the physics of the underlying reality will derive not from the quantum rules of our universe, but from the directive imposed by the system programmers. Therefore, there’s no reason why our notions of normality and causality should apply there at all. Which fits with all the things that Nixie has been telling us.”

“You’re not saying that the programmers intended anything like this to happen?” Duncan checked.

Hunt shook his head. “And I don’t think the Jevlenese ever twigged onto the fact that it had. The whole thing was an accident: a freak by-product of the purpose that JEVEX was built for-and, of course, the inhabitants that finally appeared as part of it had no inkling of it, either. Why should they? There was no more reason why they should be aware, intuitively, that their reality was ultimately founded upon information quanta than we are that ours is on energy quanta.”

Now visibly intrigued, since the prospect of evolution was implied, Danchekker returned to his chair and sat down. “Very well, Vic. Let us agree to entertain this fantastic hypothesis of yours for a moment… purely for the sake of argument, you understand.”

“Of course,” Hunt said, nodding solemnly.

“One thing that bothers me is the question of size. Clearly it would have to be much smaller than our universe. For it to be comparable, there would have to be the same order of magnitude of active cells in it as there are particles in existence, which would be absurd.”

“The ratio of the size of the fundamental cell to the dimensions of the universe as a whole would be much greater,” Shiohin said. “So the macrocosm would be much closer to the level of quantum granularity. Nonlinearities and curvatures would be more apparent, probably.”

“Boundary effects might play a big part,” Duncan mused, half to himself

Danchekker nodded. “Yes, I accept all that. But what I was getting at was something more fundamental. To support anything as complex as life and intelligence requires a high degree of complexity. That in turn implies a corresponding richness of structure. And you can’t build rich structures from a few elements.” He gestured to the others appealingly. “You see my point. There is no escape from the necessity of large numbers. Enormously large numbers. And my question is, where would you possibly find a sufficiently vast computational space to accommodate the processes that you’re suggesting? It’s an ingenious suggestion, Vic. I’m not disagreeing with that. But if my initial estimates are anything to go by, to give what you’re talking about even a reasonable chance of engendering a world as complex and varied as the one we’ve heard described by Nixie and VISAR, you’d need a computer the size of a pla-”

Danchekker’s voice stopped abruptly as he realized what he had been about to say. The others all saw it, too, in the same instant. Shilohin looked stunned. Duncan slammed back abruptly against the backrest of his chair.

“Christ,” Hunt breathed. They all looked at each other incredulously.

So that was what was so important about the mysterious planet, Uttan!

And why the Ganymeans weren’t having much luck locating JEVEX on Jevlen.