“This whole move by Eubeleus is a cover for something,” Cullen put in. “He’s not going to Uttan to grow daisies in some terraformed monastery. If we could get JPC to hold off on that, somehow, I’d feel a lot more comfortable.”
“But why would he have left at such a critical time?” Danchekker queried. “How could Uttan be more important if his designs have something to do with Jevlen?”
“That’s what I’m saying we need to find out,” Cullen answered. Then Caldwell said from the screen, “Aren’t you overlooking one small point?”
“What?” Hunt asked.
A hand flashed briefly before the image of the craggy, wirehaired face. “I’ve been sitting here listening to all this talk about whether this Eubeleus is crooked or straight, and what he plans to do on Uttan. And it’s all very interesting. But there’s one minor thing: I haven’t heard one piece of evidence, yet, that proves he had anything to do with what you’re talking about.” The others turned to exchange glances with each other. Caldwell went on. “All that we know he’s done is offer to take a big piece of the problem light-years away from the scene. That’s very nice, and it’s what JPC sees.” He gestured again. “Nothing connects him with the things that Dell’s worried about. There are only three witnesses who could have given a positive line back to him, but not one of them’s any good. Fayne’s dead; the Marin girl had her tape wiped clean; and Baumer’s a gibbering idiot. You see my problem? If Ebeleus’s aim was camouflage, he’s done a good job. I don’t have one solid fact to go back up through UNSA, trying to get the brakes put on JPC. I don’t like the feel of this either, but I can’t go stirring things up at that level on the basis of what we’ve got. There just isn’t a case.”
And he was right, Hunt conceded, slumping back in his seat. Politics was Caldwell’s business. He knew the system. If he started rocking the boat because he didn’t like the feel of things, but it turned out that he had nothing concrete to back it up, then nobody would take any notice when he did find something.
A heavy silence had overtaken the room. Garuth got up and moved across to the window to stare out at the dilapidated towers of Shiban. As a city it was falling apart; but he had developed a strange, inexplicable fondness for it. Perhaps it had something to do with its being the first place that had come anywhere near feeling like home since the Shapieron’s departure from Minerva. Had he been left in charge of it, he wouldn’t have imposed any sudden or drastic changes, he decided. He would have let it be, allowing it to seek out and evolve its own solutions at its own pace. Those were always the kinds of changes that endured, he had found. The worthwhile changes.
“And I still have the feeling that we were getting so close,” he said aloud.
Afterward, Hunt stopped by Gina’s suite to give her the news and to see how things were going.
“And when you go through it, Gregg could be right,” he told her. “Eubeleus may have nothing to do with it. We can’t make any case to JPC. Any junior lawyer with his name still wet on the door could make mincemeat out of it.”
Gina shook her head. “Surely there has to be some way to get further.”
“Probably true, but hardly constructive.”
“What about that office of Baumer’s, the one I went to? Mightn’t that turn up something?” she asked, reaching for a straw.
“It was broken into and ransacked. Whoever did it made a bonfire. There wasn’t enough paper left to write your name on. Now, wasn’t that convenient for somebody?” Hunt stretched back in his chair. “I don’t know, Gina. Why do people insist on complicating life like this? You’d think they’d learn to just enjoy the pleasant side of it, wouldn’t you? It’s short enough… Thinking about it, I might even go and join this monastery of Eubeleus’s. Now, wouldn’t that qualify as a genuine miracle?” He grinned tiredly across the room at her. “Anyway, how are you feeling? I never even thought to ask.”
“Oh, a bit like having a tooth out. It feels strange at first, but you get used to it. Pretty much the way you said.”
“That’s good to know, anyhow. Did you talk to Sandy?”
“Yes. She’s glad it worked out.”
ZORAC came through at that moment with a call for Hunt from Duncan Watt, who was at another JEVEX site with the Ganymean engineers. Further findings had corroborated the nonsensical conclusion of the first: not only was JEVEX evidently far smaller than the original design information said; if what the Ganymeans were discovering was typical, it was virtually nonexistent.
“Another one,” Watt announced.
Hunt was baffled. “Another fake?”
“Worse. I wanted you to see this one for yourself.”
“Where are you?”
“Traganon, city about three hundred miles north.”
“So, what have you found?” Hunt asked.
“Well, you know what we found at the other sites: usually some interfacing and i-space transmission gear that was real enough, and then streets of impressive-looking cubes and beamguides all doing nothing. But take a look at what we’ve got here. It beats the rest for sheer audacity.”
Watt stepped to one side to reveal the scene behind him. He had been standing in front of a wide window. It looked like that of a control room, facing out over a vast floor, dark in shadows. The floor was bare and dusty: just an empty expanse of untiled concrete, stretching away between lines of square, unadorned pillars into shadows cast by a few, weak, overhead lamps.
For a moment Hunt wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Nothing. They didn’t even bother faking this one. Rodgar thinks it could have been like this for centuries.”
The camera moved, sliding Watt out of the frame completely and showing more derelict galleries. There were oddments of trash and debris scattered in places, and here and there a length of cable hanging from a roof support. Small animals were scurrying in the shadows. Hunt wondered if there had once been equipment installed there that had been moved elsewhere for some reason.
It seemed larger than most of the other vaults that Duncan had checked. Hunt tried to visualize it as the Thurien designers had intended: packed with tiers of crystalline slab stacked to the roof and serviced by access elevators and walkways-Hunt had “visited” some of the halls on Thurien where VISAR’s bulk-processing centers were located. The contrast between the desolation of the view on the screen and the image in Hunt’s mind took on an odd significance that he couldn’t quite pin down. He stared at the screen with a strange mixture of somberness and reverie.
“You’re getting around, anyway, Duncan,” he half heard Gina saying from across the room.
“If you think Shiban’s run down, come and see this place,” Watt answered.
Something moving caught Hunt’s eye-something bright, appearing and disappearing in the shadows higher up between two of the pillars. Several things, tiny white points. Hunt stared at the view, then realized that they were flying, insectlike creatures, crisscrossing through a shaft of light from one of the lamps. They looked like speeded-up images of stars orbiting in a black void, he thought to himself.
“Did you hear about the news from JPC?” Gina was asking Duncan.
“Not yet. What’s up?”
“Oh, it doesn’t sound too good…”
And then a strange superposition took place in Hunt’s mind of the scene he was looking at, and the picture in his imagination of what should have been there but wasn’t. He saw the void, but its volume filled in his mind’s eye with banks of Thurien processing crystal; the tiny points of light were still there, orbiting through the solid lattices. And suddenly he saw them no longer as stars, but as atoms.
Or as elementary quanta.
Quanta of what? Nobody knew. It could have been anything.
The quanta that a real, physical universe could evolve out of.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Langerif, the new deputy chief of police, had applied himself to continuing his late predecessor’s polic
y 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.”
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