Brain the size of a planet -- and here I am, counting to ten. Paul recalled the perennial -- naive and paranoid -- fear that all the networked computers of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind; but he was, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on Earth. He didn't feel much like a digital Gaia, though. He felt exactly like an ordinary human being sitting in a room a few meters wide.
Squeak. "Trial number three. Model partitioned into fifty sections and twenty time sets, implemented on one thousand clusters."
"One. Two. Three." Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull -- and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called "the present"?
Maybe not -- although in the eyes of some hypothetical space traveler the whole planet was virtually frozen in time, and flat as a pancake. Relativity declared that this point of view was perfectly valid -- but Paul's was not. Relativity permitted continuous deformation, but no cutting and pasting. Why not? Because it had to allow for cause and effect. Influences had to be localized, traveling from point to point at a finite velocity; chop up space-time and rearrange it, and the causal structure would fall apart.
What if you were an observer, though, who had no causal structure? A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forth through causally respectable "real time"? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with no right to see the universe your way? Ultimately, what difference was there between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern?
Squeak. "Trial number four. Model partitioned into fifty sections and twenty time sets; sections and states randomly allocated to one thousand clusters."
"One. Two. Three."
Paul stopped counting, stretched his arms wide, stood up slowly. He wheeled around once, to examine the room, checking that it was still intact, still complete. Then he whispered, "This is dust. All dust. This room, this moment, is scattered across the planet, scattered across five hundred seconds or more -- but it still holds itself together. Don't you see what that means?"
The djinn reappeared, but Paul didn't give him a chance to speak. The words flowed out of him, unstoppable. He understood.
"Imagine . . . a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time . . . except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what's left? A cloud of random numbers.
"That's it. That's all there is. The cosmos has no shape at all -- no such thing as time or distance, no physical laws, no cause and effect.
"But . . . if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet . . . why shouldn't the pattern we think of as 'the universe' assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers . . . then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing?"
The djinn's expression hovered between alarm and irritation.
Squeak. "Paul . . . what's the point of all this? 'Space-time is a construct; the universe is really nothing but a sea of disconnected events . . .' Assertions like that are meaningless. You can believe it if you want to . . . but what difference would it make?"
"What difference? We perceive -- we inhabit -- one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There's no reason to believe that the pattern we've found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff -- just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometers and hundreds of seconds apart to be side by side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what we'd think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We're one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram . . . but it would be ludicrous to believe that we're the only one."
Squeak. Durham snorted. "A cosmic anagram? So where are all the leftover letters? If any of this were true -- and the primordial alphabet soup really is random -- don't you think it's highly unlikely that we could structure the whole thing?"
Paul thought about it. "We haven't structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty. We've swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level."
Squeak, The djinn strived visibly for patience. "Paul . . . none of this could ever be tested. How would anyone ever observe a planet whose constituent parts were scattered across the universe, let alone communicate with its hypothetical inhabitants? What you're saying might have a certain -- purely mathematical -- validity: grind the universe into fine enough dust, and maybe it could be rearranged in other ways that make as much sense as the original. If those rearranged worlds are inaccessible, though, it's all angels on the heads of pins."
"How can you say that? I've been rearranged! I've visited another world!"
Squeak. "If you did, it was an artificial world; created, not discovered."
"Found, created . . . there's no real difference."
Squeak. "What are you claiming? Some influence from this other world flowed into the computers, changed the way the model ran?"
"Of course not! Your pattern hasn't been violated; the computers did exactly what was expected of them. That doesn't invalidate my perspective. Stop thinking of explanations, causes and effects; there are only patterns. The scattered events that formed my experience had an internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the computers. And perhaps the computers didn't provide all of it."
Squeak. "What do you mean?"
"The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren't describing me? Well . . . it's a big universe. Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of events -- nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch -- out of which to construct ten seconds of experience."
Squeak, The djinn looked seriously worried now. "You're a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space and time is invariant. That's exactly what we always expected -- remember? Come down to Earth. Your states are computed, your memories have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You haven't visited any other worlds, you haven't built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies."
Paul laughed. "Your stupidity is . . . surreal. What did you create me for, if you're not even going to listen to what I have to say? I've had a glimpse of the truth behind . . . everything: space, time, the laws of physics. You can't shrug that off by saying that what happened to me was inevitable."
Squeak. "Control and subject are still identical."
"Of course they are! That's the whole point! Like . . . gravity and acceleration in General Relativity -- it all depends on what you can't tell apart. This is a new Principle of Equivalence, a new symmetry between observers. Relativity threw out absolute space and time -- but it didn't go far enough. We have to throw out absolute cause and effect!"
Squeak. The djinn muttered, dismayed, "Elizabeth said this would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before you'd lose touch."
Paul stared at him, jolted back to the mundane. "Elizabeth? You said you hadn't even told her."
Squeak. "Well, I have now. I didn't tell you, because I didn't think you'd want to hear her reaction."
"Which was?"
Squeak. "I was up all night arguing with her. She wanted me to shut you down. She said I was . . . seriously disturbed, to even think about doing this."
Paul was stung. "What would she know? Ignore her."
Squeak. Durham frowned apologetically -- an expression Paul recognized at once, and his guts turned to ice. "Maybe I should pause you, while I think things over. Elizabeth raised some . . . valid ethical questions. I think I should talk it through with her again."
"Fuck that! I'm not here for you to put on ice every time you have a change of heart. And if Elizabeth wants to have a say in my life, she can damn well talk it through with me."
Paul could see exactly what would happen. If he was paused, Durham wouldn't restart him -- he'd go back to the original scan file and start again from scratch, handling his prisoner differently, hoping to end up with a more cooperative subject. Maybe he wouldn't even perform the first set of experiments at all.
The ones which had given him this insight.
The ones which had made him who he was.
Squeak. "I need time to think. It would only be temporary. I promise."
"No! You have no right!"
Durham hesitated. Paul felt numb, disbelieving. Some part of him refused to acknowledge any danger -- refused to accept that it could be this easy to die. Being paused wouldn't kill him, wouldn't harm him, wouldn't have the slightest effect. What would kill him would be not being restarted. He'd be passively annihilated, ignored out of existence. The fate that befell his own shit.
Durham reached offscreen.
13
(Remit not paucity)
FEBRUARY 2051
Maria said, "Recalculate everything up to epoch five, then show me sunrise on Lambert. Latitude zero, longitude zero, altitude one."
She waited, staring into the blank workspace, fighting the temptation to change her instructions and have the software display every stage of the simulation, which would have slowed things down considerably. After several minutes, a fissured dark plain appeared, raked with silver light. The unnamed sun -- dazzling and swollen, and, so low in the sky, too white by far -- turned a chain of extinct volcanoes on the horizon into black silhouettes like a row of pointed teeth. In the foreground, the surface looked glassy, inhospitable.