Akili turned on me angrily. “It won’t do that! This is the cure as well as the cause. It just needs one last step. It just needs a human interpretation.” But ve did not sound convinced. Maybe the whole truth was even worse than the distorted glimpse which led to Distress. Maybe there was nothing ahead but madness. “Do you want me to prove that? Do you want me to read it first?”
Ve raised the notepad; I grabbed vis arm. “Don’t be stupid! There are too few people who even half understand what’s going on, to risk losing one of you.”
We sat there, frozen. I stared at my hand where it held ver; I could see where I’d broken the skin, striking vis face.
I said, “You think Kaspar’s view is too much for most people to swallow? You think someone has to step in and interpret it? To bridge the difference in perspectives?
“Then you don’t want an expert—in TOEs, or in Anthrocosmology. You want a science journalist.”
Akili let me drag the notepad from vis hand.
I thought of the hopeless screaming woman thrashing on the floor in Miami, and the briefly lucid victims who’d clung to their sanity only minutes longer. I had no wish to follow them.
If there was one remaining purpose to my life, though, this was it: to prove that the truth could always be faced—explained, demystified, accepted. This was my job, this was my vocation. I had one last chance to try to live up to it.
I stood. “I’ll have to leave the camp. I can’t concentrate with all this noise. But I’ll do it.”
Akili was huddled on the ground with vis head bowed. Ve said quietly, without looking up, “I know you will. I trust you.”
I left the tent quickly, and headed south. Stars still showed dimly in half the pale sky; the wind from the reefs was colder than ever.
A hundred meters into the desert, I stopped and raised the notepad. I said, “Show me A Tentative Theory of Everything, by Violet Mosala.”
I took off the blindfold.
30
I kept walking as I read, half-consciously retracing the steps I’d taken some eight hours before. The reef-rock hadn’t fissured in the quake, but the ground’s texture seemed to have been transformed in some subtle way. Maybe the pressure waves had realigned the polymer chains, forging a new kind of mineral; the island’s first ever geological metamorphosis.
Out in the desert, away from all the factions of Anthrocosmology, the anarchists’ heedless rejoicing, the mounting reports of Distress, I did not know what I believed. If I’d felt the weight of ten billion people slipping into madness around me, I know I would have been paralyzed. I must have been saved in part by lingering skepticism—and in part by sheer curiosity. If I’d surrendered to the appropriate human responses—blind panic and awe-struck humility—in the face of the magnitude of everything which supposedly lay in the balance, I would have thrown the poisoned chalice of the notepad away.
So I emptied my mind of everything else, and let the words and equations take over. The Kaspar clone let had done a good job; I had no trouble understanding the paper.
The first section contained no surprises at all. It summarized Mosala’s ten canonical experiments, and the way in which she’d computed their symmetry-breaking properties. It ended with the TOE equation itself, which linked the ten parameters of broken symmetry to a sum over all topologies. The measure Mosala had chosen to give weight to each topology was the simplest, the most elegant, the most obvious of all the possible choices. Her equation couldn’t grant the universe the “inevitability” of freezing out of pre-space which Buzzo and Nishide had sought to contrive, but it showed how the ten experiments—and by extension, everything from mayflies to colliding stars—were bound together, were able to coexist. In an imaginary space of great abstraction, they all occupied exactly the same point.
Past and future were bound together, too. Down to the level of quantum randomness, Mosala’s equation encoded the common order found in every process from the folding of a protein to the spreading of an eagle’s wings. It delineated the fan of probabilities linking any system, at any moment, to anything it might become.
In the second section, Kaspar had trawled the databases for other references to the same mathematics, other resonances to the same abstractions—and in this scrupulously completist search, it had found enough parallels with information theory to push the TOE one step further. Everything Mosala would have spurned—and Helen Wu would have feared to combine—Kaspar had serenely brought together.
There could be no information without physics. Knowledge always had to be encoded as something. Marks on paper, knots on a string, pockets of charge in a semiconductor.
But there could be no physics without information. A universe of purely random events would be no universe at all. Deep patterns, powerful regularities, were the whole basis of existence.
So—having determined which physical systems could share a universe—Kaspar had asked the question: which patterns of information could those systems encode?
A second, analogous equation had emerged from the same mathematics, with almost no effort at all. The informational TOE was the flipside of the physical TOE, an inevitable corollary.
Then Kaspar had unified the two, fitting them together like interlocking mirror images (in spite of everything, I had a feeling that Symmetry’s Champion would have been proud)… and all of the predictions of Anthrocosmology had come tumbling out. The terminology was different—Kaspar had innocently coined new jargon, unaware of the unpublished precedents—but the concepts were unmistakable.
The Aleph moment was as necessary as the Big Bang. The universe could never have existed without it. Kaspar had shied away from claiming the honor of being Keystone—and had even refused to grant the explanatory Big Bang primacy over the physical one—but the paper stated clearly that the TOE had to be known, had to be understood, to have ever had force.
Mixing, too, was inevitable. Latent knowledge of the TOE infected all of time and space—every system in this universe encoded it—but once it was understood explicitly, that hidden information would crystallize out wherever the possibility arose, percolating up through the foam of quantum randomness. It was more like cloud-seeding than telepathy; nobody would read the mind of the Keystone—but they’d follow the Keystone in reading the TOE which their own minds, their own flesh, already encoded.
And even before the Aleph moment, the mixing would happen, albeit imperfectly.
But not for long.
In the last section, Kaspar predicted the unraveling. The Aleph moment would be followed, on a timescale of seconds, by the degeneration of physics into pure mathematics. Just as the Big Bang implied pre-space before it—an infinitely symmetric roiling abstraction where nothing really existed or happened—the Aleph moment would bring on the informational mirror image, another infinite wasteland without time or space.
These words prophesying the end of the universe had been written half an hour before I was reading them.
Kaspar had not become the Keystone.
I lowered the notepad and looked around. The lagoon had come into view in the distance, silver gray with the hint of dawn. A few bright stars remained in the west. I could still hear the music from the celebrations, faintly: a distant tuneless hum.
The mixing took place so smoothly that I barely knew when it began. Listening to Reynolds’ Distress victims, I’d imagined them granted X-ray vision and more, assailed by images of molecules and galaxies, reeling at the universe in every grain of sand—and they were the lucky few. I’d steeled myself for the worst: the sky peeling open to reveal some Mystical Renaissance wet dream of stargate acid-trip stupefaction, the end of thought, the candied incineration of reason.