“This is our latest supercomputer run, based on everything Mosala has published so far. We’ve deliberately avoided trying to extrapolate to a TOE, for obvious reasons—but it’s still possible to approximate the effects which might result if the work was ever completed.”
The largest display screen in the cabin, some five meters wide and three high, suddenly lit up. The image it showed resembled an elaborately interwoven mass of fine, multicolored thread. I’d seen nothing like it at the conference; this wasn’t the writhing, anarchic foam of the quantum vacuum. It looked more like a compact ball of neon-luminous twine, which had been wound by Escher and Mandelbrot in turn, with exquisite care, over several centuries. There were symmetries within symmetries, knots within knots, details and patterns which seized the eye, but were too intricate and convoluted to follow to any kind of closure.
I said, “That’s not pre-space, is it?”
“Hardly.” Five regarded me dubiously, as if he suspected that my ignorance would prove insurmountable. “It’s a very crude map of information space, at the instant the Keystone ‘becomes’ the Keystone. We call this initial configuration ‘Aleph,’ for short.” I didn’t respond, so he added with distaste, as if forced to resort to baby-talk, “Think of it as a snapshot of the Explanatory Big Bang."
“This is the starting point of… everything? The premise for an entire universe?”
“Yes. Why are you surprised? The physical, primordial Big Bang is orders of magnitude simpler; it can be characterized by just ten numbers. Aleph contains a hundred million times more information; the idea of creating galaxies and DNA out of this is far less outlandish.”
That remained a matter of opinion. “If this is meant to be the contents of Violet Mosala’s skull, it doesn’t look like any kind of brain map I’ve ever seen.”
Five said drily, “I should hope not. It’s not an anatomical scan—or a functional neural map, or even a cognitive symbolic network. The Keystone’s neurons—let alone vis skull—don’t even exist, ‘yet.’ This is the pure information which logically precedes the existence of all physical objects. The Keystone’s ‘knowledge’ and ‘memory’ come first. The brain which encodes them follows.”
He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. “The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE, and aware of both vis own existence, and a canonical body of observations of experimental results—whether vis own, or ’second hand'—which need to be accounted for. If ve lacked either the information density or the organizational schema to explain vis own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-criticaclass="underline" there’d be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won’t stop until an entire physical cosmos is created.
“Of course, the process never ’starts’ or ’stops’ in the conventional sense—it doesn’t take place in time at all. Successive frames in this simulation simply correspond to increments in logical extension—like steps in a mathematical proof, adding successive layers of consequences to an initial set of premises. The history of the universe is embedded in those consequences like… the sequence of a murder, pieced together by pure deduction from evidence at the scene of the crime.”
As he spoke, the patterns I’d glimpsed on the surface of “Aleph” were woven and re-woven in the surrounding “information vacuum.” It was like watching a dazzling new tapestry being created every second from the one beneath—threads picked loose enough to drag a little further, and then re-combined by a million invisible hands. A thousand subtle variations echoed the original canon, but there were also startling new themes emerging, apparently from nowhere. Intermeshing fractal islands, red and white, drifted apart and recombined, struggled to engulf each other, then melted into an archipelago of hybrids. Hurricanes within hurricanes, violet and gold, spun the thread ever tighter—and then the tiniest vortices counter-rotated, and the whole hierarchy dissolved. Tiny jagged shards of crystalline silver slowly diffused through all the chaos and regularity, infiltrating and interacting with everything.
I said, “This is beautiful technoporn—but what exactly is it meant to be showing?”
Five hesitated, but then condescended to point out a few features. “This is the age of the Earth, being refined toward a definite value, as various geophysical and biological conclusions feed into it. This is the commonality of the genetic code, on the way toward giving rise to a sharp set of possibilities for the origins of life. Here, the underlying regularity in the chemistry of the elements—”
“And you expect Violet Mosala to fall into some kind of trance, and think all these things through, right after her moment of apotheosis?”
He scowled. “No! All of this follows logically from the Keystone’s information content at the Aleph moment—it’s not a prediction of the Keystone’s thought processes. Do you imagine that… the Keystone has to count from one to a trillion—out loud—to create all the numbers in between, before arithmetic can make use of them? No. Zero, one, and addition are enough to imply all of them, and more. The universe is no different. It just grows out of a different seed.”
I glanced at the others. They were watching the screen with uneasy fascination, but no sign of anything remotely like religious terror. They might have been observing a runaway Greenhouse climate model, or a simulation of a meteor strike. Secrecy had insulated these people from any serious challenges to their ideas, but they still clung to some semblance of rationality. They hadn’t plucked the supposed need to kill Mosala out of thin air, and then invented Anthrocosmology after the fact, to justify it. They really did believe that they’d been forced to this unpalatable conclusion by reason alone.
And maybe the same relentless logic could still be used to change their minds. I was an ignorant outsider, but they’d invited my scrutiny for the sake of explaining their actions to the world. They’d brought me up here so they could argue their case for posterity, but if I accepted their terms as given, and argued back at them in their own language… maybe there was still a small chance that I could inject enough doubt to persuade them to spare Mosala.
I said carefully, “All right. Logical implication is enough; the Keystone doesn’t have to think through every last microscopic detail. But wouldn’t ve still have to sit down, eventually, and at least… map out the full extent of whatever vis TOE implies? And satisfy verself that there were no loose ends? That would still be a lifetime’s work. Maybe the race to complete the TOE is only the first step in the race to become the Keystone. How can anything be explained into being, until the Keystone knows that it’s been explained?”
Five cut me off impatiently. “A Keystone with a TOE is inexplicable without all of human history, and all prior human knowledge. And just as every biological ancestor or cousin requires their own quota of space and time to inhabit and observe—their own body, their own food and air, their own patch of ground to stand on—every intellectual predecessor or contemporary requires their own partial explanation of the universe. It all fits together, in a mosaic reaching back to the Big Bang. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
“But the Keystone’s burden is to occupy the point where all explanations converge into a kernel concise enough to be apprehended by a single mind. Not to recapitulate all of science and history—merely to encode it.”