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?”