Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,163

accelerated until the whole brain was depicted on the screen. Below it was a window showing all of the lines of data coming out of all the teletypes at once; the information was zooming by so quickly that it was just a blur.

“We’d have a hell of a lot of data. But would we really know what the brain was thinking? Would we know that it was seeing red, or doing arithmetic, or feeling sad? Despite some recent advances in pattern recognition on neural networks, the answer is basically no. But we can still perform traffic analysis and try to draw conclusions about what sorts of activities are going on within the Process. Just as the Allies were able to sift through mountains of gibberish to get an idea of what the Germans were doing and where, we may be able to analyze what we know about Process-related message traffic to make some guesses about what the Process is doing. There are various ways of attacking that problem. Matilda is going to talk about one of them. She’s drawing on some of the foundational mathematical techniques of physics to detect what appears to be spatial thinking inside of the Process. Matilda?”

Dr. Matilda Napolitano stepped forward and waited for a buzz to die down. Many of the attendees weren’t quite sure they’d heard Sophia correctly. Spatial thinking? Even the word “thinking” was controversial here, and usually deployed in scare quotes, as many skeptics doubted whether the Process’s activities could be classified as such. To talk about a particular type of thinking was a bold move.

Matilda was forty-five, stylishly dressed, and a little nervous. Her English, though accented, was perfect—she’d spent half of her life in the big English universities before landing a prestigious appointment at Turin.

“In order to do physics,” she began, “we have to deal with space and time. I’m here to talk about space. In the old days, we took the existence of space as a given and we didn’t do a lot of hard thinking about its structure. What space actually was. How it behaved. By the time Einstein came on the scene, the groundwork had already been laid by Minkowski and Lorentz for a reappraisal of the fundamental nature of space, and new mathematical notations and techniques were in place, ready for him to apply them to the problem of curvature of space-time.” As she spoke, still images of Newton and the others appeared on the screen, interspersed with pictures of geometrical proofs from Euclid, mathematical formulas, and ending with Einstein, superimposed on a graphic of a black hole bending space like a ball bearing on a rubber sheet.

“I’m not here to give you all a modern physics seminar,” Matilda said, “but my point is that we do have ways of representing space now, and thinking about it with mathematics. Starting with an idea that is so simple that most of you won’t even consider it to be an idea. Namely that each point in space has something to do with the other points that are nearby to it, but progressively less to do with points that are farther away from it.” She backed this up with an arrestingly simple image consisting of a piece of graph paper, with dots marked in ink where some of the lines intersected. “If we oversimplify the situation by likening space to a sheet of graph paper, then each point is connected immediately to four neighbors, north, south, east, and west of it. A little bit farther away are the corner points in the northwest, the southeast, and so on.” The image was slowly zooming back to show more and more of the graph-paper universe. “Let’s imagine we have a creature that is moving around on the graph paper.” A cartoon penguin appeared at the center point. “It goes north, then northwest, then back east a little bit, and so on.” The penguin had gone into movement, waddling around on the graph paper just as she described it. “One moment it is here, the next moment it is there, and so on. This is all so obvious that we don’t even think about it. But what if we scramble the points?”

In the animation, the points went into motion and moved all over the place, each going to a new position, like cards in a deck being shuffled.

“We have encrypted the map—lost track of which point is supposed to go where. Disaster! First the penguin is here.” The penguin popped up in