Permutation City

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?"