Permutation City

by Greg Egan

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? ’