  We introduce a novel spacetime reduction procedure for the fields of a
supergravity-Yang-Mills theory in generic curved spacetime background, and with
large N flavor group, to linearized forms on an infinitesimal patch of local
tangent space at a point in the spacetime manifold. Our new prescription for
spacetime reduction preserves all of the local symmetries of the continuum
field theory Lagrangian in the resulting zero-dimensional matrix Lagrangian,
thereby obviating difficulties encountered in previous matrix proposals for
emergent spacetime in recovering the full nonlinear symmetries of Einstein
gravity. We conjecture that the zero-dimensional matrix model obtained by this
prescription for spacetime reduction of the circle-compactified type
I-I'-mIIA-IIB-heterotic supergravity-Yang-Mills theory with sixteen
supercharges and large N flavor group, and inclusive of the full spectrum of
Dpbrane charges, offers a potentially complete framework for nonperturbative
string/M theory. We explain the relationship of our conjecture for a
fundamental theory of emergent local spacetime geometry to recent
investigations of the hidden symmetry algebra of M theory, stressing insights
that are to be gained from the algebraic perspective. We conclude with a list
of open questions and directions for future work.
