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“Can I ask something?” I raise my hand like a schoolkid.

“Why?” says Nestor in surprise. “You’re not going to ask anything meaningful for the moment.” And he continues, “Now, each localized brane has its own physics with its values of universal constants, but some global laws remain true always and everywhere. Also, each brane has its own causality and independent time flow – that’s why, for example, here in the second life, individuals coexist whose earthly lifespan belonged to different centuries. However, no great temporal divergences have been observed – no one knows why. We cannot say when – on ‘our’ timescale – ‘your’ brane existed and images of individual human consciousness known as ‘B Objects’ were created. We also don’t know whether your brane and your civilization still exist. At least for now, none of the new arrivals have informed us of any threatening catastrophe or the like. It’s worth noting, by the way, that only human memories can help us to know anything about the first, terrestrial life. Naturally, no material entities of one brane can be accessed from any other – information can only be exchanged via B Objects. Fortunately, for many, memory is recovered almost completely, which applies to scientists as well – you can imagine how passionately they have been revising every single concept since arriving in this new world. You too, Theo, will have a contribution to make, and I must say, there are people who have been waiting impatiently for you here. Everyone believes you are the pioneer who connected consciousness with energy-matter and determined its place in the structure of space. Every physicist who lived there after you, but arrived here earlier, knows your work and that famous article of yours – and moreover, you vanished right after its appearance: intriguing, isn’t it? But even if we leave all these intrigues aside, the theory of the conscions, as we see it here, contains a number of blank spaces. You, Theo, have to help fill them in – now, once you have joined our ranks, so to speak. Fill them in – and take it further; there is no end of the work to be done. Of course, it is no easy matter restoring such a complex theory from a large number of people’s memories without its original source. The information has been collected painfully, bit by bit, and then, as luck would have it: you arrived in person. Sorry, I got carried away – of course, no one here wished for your death…”

He says all this without a pause, like a much-repeated official text – as if reading me my Miranda rights, “You have the right to remain silent…” Conscions… the word imprints itself in my brain. I know, many things were linked to it. More than Tina? It’s quite possible. What was the formula that came into my head just before I fell asleep? Hamiltonian?[4] An action integral?…

“Let’s go back to your particular brane – and take your particular life as a point of reference,” Nestor continues, looking a little sideways. “Fourteen billion earth years before your appearance on it, your brane began to expand. This is important in itself, but we also note one more peculiarity that cannot be avoided, speaking specifically about you. It was the first and most vivid occurrence of a phenomenon that you have dedicated your whole life to. I’m even a little envious: you will soon remember everything, and much of it is beautiful, harmonious, stunning. It is – here’s a clue for you – symmetrical, up to a certain point, of course. But you, Theo, are not one of those people who just admire beauty. You need to dissect it, to understand what underpins it. And in that, we have to acknowledge, you made quite a step forward!”

His voice finally betrays a flicker of emotion. Nestor transfers his gaze toward me, adjusts his glasses and nods encouragingly. His appearance changes imperceptibly; nearly all his official formality has slipped. He now looks at me as an accomplice, a partner in crime. He even seems to squint slyly and says, “Imagine a pencil standing vertically on its point – does this remind you of anything? Imagine a sphere in the center of the convex bottom of a bottle – does this image jog your memory? When it comes to symmetry, there’s only one thing you were interested in – the moment of its destruction. The end point, the instant of breakdown, the step toward imperfection. The pencil only needs to deviate by a micron and it will never be able to return to verticality – no, it will fall with a loud clatter, frightening your fellow library users. You might even be asked to leave the room – you have modeled a cataclysm, a catastrophe! The moment at which symmetry is destroyed is the transition from the improbable to the probable, from the exceptional to the commonplace, from incarceration to freedom. And there is always a price to be paid for this – the release of energy!

“Yes,” he continues, after a pause, “a huge surge, incredible power. It’s the power of geometry – it is more implacable than any other force. Back then, fourteen billion years ago, your infant cosmos was symmetrical to the uttermost limit. It existed in the form of an incredibly complex figure, intertwined in a multitude of dimensions. To create this tangled ball required all the energy of the previous brane, which had disappeared, collapsing into itself. At maximum compression, space took on an ideal shape, turning into a tiny grain of unimaginable density and temperature. This was the limit of perfection – and its life, like the life of any ideal, was utterly short. The tension of all the tangles was so great that with the first quantum of a flaw, the tiniest fluctuation, like the flicker of doubt or a reproving glance, the irreversible happened. The pencil deviated and nothing could hold it back. The fabric of space burst at the seams with a deafening crash. Part of it rolled up again – into a narrow tube – and it remained like that forever, while another began to expand at an absolutely insane speed – along its length, width and depth. Your brane was distinguished by a huge and random stroke of luck – it turned out to be three-dimensional.”

“Chance… Protein structures… Life…” I murmur quietly. Something stirs in my memory, certain equations, diagrams.

“Exactly!” Nestor exclaims, smirking – he is happy for me. Like a kindergarten teacher for her infant pupil first composing the word “Mom” from plastic letters. “It was pure chance,” he continues, “and for some, including you, Theo, three-dimensionality also became a guiding light, a shining path in the darkness, drawing you ever onward toward distant horizons. You will soon remember your childhood, your school and the lessons in the physics lab you attended with such diligence. You were a typical teenager, with a fondness for masturbation, who would listen spellbound to his teacher – a sullen man with greasy hair and a humped back. Women would give him a wide berth, and he was probably also prone to pleasuring himself, but it was not this that connected the two of you. He planted a spark in you, speaking with a fervent passion about the three dimensions of your universe as a necessary condition for the existence of life. You imagined from his stories and naive formulas on the school blackboard how in a four-dimensional cosmos, everything would fall on top of each other – planets onto stars, electrons onto atoms – while, in contrast, in a two-dimensional one, everything would inevitably fly off in all directions, without ever stopping. Only in three dimensions could life be possible – and, like your physics teacher, you were struck by the fortuitousness of nature’s choice. His words about ‘the hand of the Creator’ remained lodged in your heart forever. Then, when you got older, you began to look for the places where fortuitousness might be hiding and realized that traces of chance were always concealed in the events described as “symmetry breaking” – the disappearance of some of the universe’s symmetries. And that’s how you proceeded: first, there were quarks,[5] then bosons[6] – the bearers of the fundamental forces, then later – the quantum fields in the brain, the condensation of your specific quasiparticles, and finally – the conscions, their vortices and the ‘recording’ of our memory on the metabrane. Which is why, both in Quarantine and outside it, you are a bit of a celebrity. But we are talking too much about you; let’s get back to the chronological order of events…”

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4

In quantum theories, a Hamiltonian is an operator corresponding to the total energy of the system.

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5

An elementary subatomic particle – a fundamental constituent of matter.

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6

Particles with integer spin following Bose–Einstein statistics. Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons (quanta of light).