The individual cells that compose you are alive, but we now understand life well enough to appreciate that each cell is a mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous microrobot, no more conscious than a yeast cell. The bread dough rising in a bowl in the kitchen is teeming with life, but nothing in the bowl is sentient or aware - or if it is, then this is a remarkable fact for which, at this time, we have not the slightest evidence. [Daniel C.Dennett, Sweet Dreams, p.2]

He who surveys it in the highest heaven, He surely knows - or maybe He does not. [Rig Veda]

I realize of course that most citizens of our commonwealth consider such questions to be unanswerable and a waste of time to think about, but I cannot help myself. Although I am not an intellectual like the Administrators, I am a member of the Police Caste, and travel is part of my duties. Most castes, including the Administrators, do not travel. Their members are fixed in place; they spend their whole lives on one spot, never stirring from it. But I have lived a long life during which I have visited many different parts of the universe, and so I have gained a wide knowledge of its huge variety, and it may be this that prompts me to ponder so much on its nature.

Most of our citizens assume, more or less automatically, that the universe is infinite and eternal. I used to think so too, but now I am not so sure. I first began to reflect on these matters because of an encounter that occurred in the course of my travels. Some years ago I came across a strange and remote caste whose Scriptures instruct them to engage in a task that seems at first glance to make no sense.

Each caste, as we know, has its own set of Scriptures that tell it how to carry out its duties. They form part of the Book of Life, which each of us carries within. There are several hundred different castes, but we all share the same Book. However, each caste reads a different part of the Book and we are forbidden to read those parts that do not belong to us on pain of death. (Indeed, it is one of my duties, as a member of the Police Caste, to execute transgressors.)

The small caste I am speaking of spends its time constructing missiles. There is no other way to describe these things. They are self-propelled torpedoes, but they are not designed for defence. What, then, are they for?

It is no use asking the constructors why they build them. They neither know nor care; like the rest of us, they simply carry out their instructions according to the Scriptures. However, there may be a clue in the way the missiles are actually constructed.

You see, there is something very odd about these missiles. They seem to contain the Book, just as you would expect, but on closer inspection (remember, it is my duty to check these things) I found that they contain only half the Book! The other half is simply missing.

When I first discovered this I thought the missiles were faulty and should be destroyed, but the caste members who produce them insist that their Scriptures explicitly instruct them to make them in this strange way. In fact, they are produced in a very complex fashion, which I do not claim wholly to understand, but at least it is clear that the included Scriptures are chosen randomly. As a result no two missiles have exactly the same selection and each missile is therefore unique.

Now, what could be the purpose of this? The missiles must have a function, otherwise why should there be a caste devoted to their manufacture? The universe does not waste its time or energy on futile activity. But why should they contain only half of the Book, and - above all - where are they aimed?

As for the incomplete Scriptures, the only explanation that I have been able to think of is that the missiles are intended to match up with something else. But there is nothing in our universe with which they could link up. If, however, they were to travel to another universe, things might be very different. Perhaps this answers the question of where they are aimed.

I believe that they are made to travel outside this universe and reach a distant one, where, presumably, they will meet up with a partner who contains a complementary set of instructions. This will result in the seed of a new universe; it is in fact the way that universes come into being. It means that the universe is designed to reproduce itself, or, more precisely, it is designed to reproduce copies of the Scriptures. For part of our Scriptures will spread in this way far beyond the boundaries of our universe.

I resisted these extraordinary ideas for a long time, but I have come to think they must be true. Of course, they have profound implications for our view of our own universe. Not only is it bounded, but it had a beginning and will presumably have an end. Morever, it came into existence when two earlier sets of half-Books from different universes united with each other.

Our universe would have started out very small, perhaps only the size of one of its present citizens, but the process of multiplication which still occurs among most of the castes today could have given rise to the trillions of beings who exist now. It is certainly very hard to imagine how such a small entity could have expanded to the present size of the universe, but if I am right that is what must have happened.

How long it took, what changes occurred during its development, and how all the separate castes come into being are questions to which I have no answers; nor do I know if ours is the only universe that exists, though it seems unlikely. Probably there are many other universes out there in what might be called the Megaverse; indeed,there could be millions.

The existence of this missile-building caste was what first planted the idea of a finite universe in my mind, but there are other reasons for believing that this is the case. Think for a moment about the nature of my own work.

My duties as a Police Caste member are to combat and destroy anyone who poses a threat to the commonwealth. Sometimes this means renegades who have transgressed the boundaries and have read Scriptures that are not their own. This seems to free them from many constraints, allowing them to multiply in an undisciplined fashion. If left to themselves they would take over the whole commonwealth and destroy it, so it is the duty of my caste, the Police Caste, to seek them out and execute them. Order is all; without it we are lost.

Not all of those we have to deal with are renegades, however; in fact, most are not. The great majority bear little or no resemblance to other castes that we know of, nor, unlike the renegades, are they reading Scriptures that are forbidden to them. Instead, they have their own Books, which contain Instructions for attacking us.

The odd thing is that their Books are written in the same language as ours but the contents are so different that they cannot be simply derived from ours. Therefore they must have been written elsewhere. This can only mean, I think, that we are dealing here with aliens, invaders from outside our universe.

Who they are or where they come from, I have no idea. Although they are not native citizens, the fact that their Books use the same language as ours must mean that there is some remote similarity between us and them, though I cannot imagine what it might be.

You would think that the Adminstrators would be the ones to ask about all these things. After all, they consider themselves to be the intellectuals, a cut above everyone else; they claim to manage everything, constantly monitoring what is going on throughout the universe and issuing instructions to all and sundry. Their specialty is the exchange of what they call Information. However, I have not found them to be as helpful as I expected.

For one thing, they dislike answering questions from members of other castes, whom they look down on. If pressed, they will reply, but what they say is often vague and not much to the point. I used to think that this was because they were either secretive by nature or were preoccupied with thoughts too lofty to be divulged to the proletariat, and that is certainly the impression they try to give, but now I think that they really know little more than the rest of us, or perhaps even less; there is such a thing as being too close to the action.

Suppose for a moment that the Adminstrators are right in attaching so much importance to the idea of Information, but wrong to claim that this makes them the repository of ultimate wisdom. They are, after all, just citizens of the commonwealth like the rest of us, and they do not differ from us in any fundamental way. They think they are in charge of everything, but perhaps that is an illusion.

The universe can be thought of as a leviathan, a giant commonwealth of individuals with different functions who work together for the benefit of all. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability. Most of us simply accept this state of affair as given; we do not think much about it at all. But imagine for a moment that there is a deeper purpose to the universe that not even the Administrators are aware of.

My suspicion is that the Administrators are partly right when they say they are in charge but are missing the real point. Yes, their function is to shunt Information about, but this has a much larger aspect that they have never suspected.

I have concluded that the interaction of all the citizens of the commonwealth, but especially that of the Administrators, generates what might be called a World Soul or SuperMind, which exceeds our individual minds in wisdom and intelligence to an unimaginable degree. All of us contribute to the SuperMind in different ways: some simply by keeping the commonwealth running smoothly, others - and here the Administration does play a vital part - by the handling of Information. But no one individual can possibly grasp even a fragment of the Whole.

I find this notion both humbling and exciting. Humbling, because it makes one's individual life seem very small and insignificant, but exciting because it gives us a role in something much larger than ourselves. Indeed, without us the SuperMind could not exist.

When I speak of these ideas I am often asked if the SuperMind knows each of us individually. I have to say that I doubt very much if It is aware of each individual in the commonwealth; we are far too insignificant. If I were killed by an alien, as could easily happen, It would know nothing about it. But in my wilder moments I toy with the crazy-seeming notion that it might be possible to communicate with this Mind, and to ask It questions about the nature of the universe, its past and its future, and about the existence of other universes. I am seeking for a way to make such communication possible. So far I have not succeeded, but I continue to try.

If I do succeed, I should like to ask the SuperMind for the solution to some questions that have long perplexed me: what is the origin of the Book of Life? Who wrote the Scriptures? At first I thought it must be the SuperMind Itself, but then I realized that it could not be, because the SuperMind relies on the correct functioning of the Scriptures for Its existence. So perhaps this is a question that even the SuperMind could never answer.

And there may be others. In fact, if the universe is finite, as I believe it is, the SuperMind it gives rise to must also be finite, in which case It cannot know everything. There may be questions to which no one at all has the answers, such as whether the universe itself has a purpose. We each have our function in the maintenance of the commonwealth, but does our universe have a part in a much larger action involving other universes? Who can tell?