Distress

any particular coin? What if there really are no pre-existing laws governing the system you’re about to measure… any more than there are pre-existing answers to any of those measurements?”

I said warily, “You tell me.” I’d come here expecting a serve of the usual florid cult-speak from the very start: gibberish about archetypal warlocks and witches, or the urgent need to rediscover the lost wisdom of the alchemists. The strategy of taking quantum mechanics and distorting the boundaries of its counter-intuitive weirdness in whatever direction suited the cult philosophy was far harder to track. In the hands of a smooth-talking charlatan, QM could be blurred into just about anything—from a “scientific” basis for telepathy, to a “proof of Zen Buddhism. Still, if I couldn’t gauge the precise moment when Conroy moved from established science to Anthrocosmological fantasy, that hardly mattered; I could map it all out later, when I had my electronic teat back, giving me access to some expert guidance.

Conroy smiled at my edginess—and continued in the language of science. “What happened, historically, was that physics merged with information theory. Or at least, a lot of people explored the union, for a while. They tried to discover whether it made sense to talk about building, not just a space-time of individual microscopic events, but all of the underlying quantum mechanics, and all of the various—then, non- unified—field equations… out of nothing but a stream of yes-and-no answers. Reality from information, from an accumulation of knowledge. As Wheeler put it, ‘an it from a bit.'”

I said, “Sounds like one of those nice ideas that just didn’t pan out. No one at the conference is talking about anything of the kind.”

Conroy conceded, “Information physics pretty much vanished from serious contention when the Standard Unified Field Theory rose from the ashes of superstrings. What did the geometry of ten-dimensional total space have to do with sequences of bits? Very little. Geometry took over. And it’s been the most productive approach ever since.”

“So where do the Anthrocosmologists fit in? Do you have your own rival TOEs from ‘information physics,’ which the establishment won’t take seriously?”

Conroy laughed. “Hardly! We couldn’t begin to compete in that arena, and we have no wish to do so. Buzzo, Mosala and Nishide can fight it out between themselves. One of them will come up with a flawless TOE in the end, I'm certain of that.”

“Then—?”

“Go back to the old Wheeler model of the universe. Laws of physics emerge from patterns—consistencies—in random data. But if an event doesn’t take place unless it’s observed… then a law doesn’t exist unless it’s understood. But that begs the question, doesn’t it: understood by whom? Who decides what ‘consistent’ means? Who decides what form a ‘law’ can take—or what constitutes an ‘explanation'?

“If the universe instantly succumbed to any human explanation whatsoever… we’d be living in a world where Stone Age cosmology was literally true. Or… it would be like the old satires of the afterlife—a separate heaven for every conflicting faith—even before we died. But the world just isn’t like that. However much people disagree, we still find ourselves together, arguing about the nature of reality. We don’t float off into individual universes where our own private explanations are the ultimate truth.”

“Well, no.” I had a vivid image of the Mystical Renaissance theatre troupe following Carl Jung—dressed in a Pied Piper costume—down a psychedelic wormhole into another cosmos entirely, where no rationalists could follow.

I said, “Doesn’t that suggest to you that the universe might not be participatory, after all? That the laws just might be fixed principles, independent of the people who understand them?”

“No.” Conroy smiled gently, as if this suggestion struck her as quaintly naive. “Everything in relativity and quantum mechanics cries out against any absolute backdrop: absolute time, absolute history… absolute laws. But I think it does suggest that the whole idea of participation needs to be formulated rigorously in the mathematics of information theory, and different possibilities analyzed with great care.”

It was hard to argue with that. “To what end, though? If you’re not competing for the discovery of a successful TOE…?”

“The point is to understand the means by which TOE science can give rise to an active TOE. How knowledge of the equations can fix the reality they describe firmly in place—so firmly that we can’t even hope to see behind them, to glimpse the process which holds them there.”

I laughed. “If you admit we can’t hope to do that, you’ve just crossed right over into metaphysics.”

Conroy was unfazed. “Certainly. But we believe it can still be done in the spirit of science: applying logic, using appropriate mathematical tools. That’s what Anthrocosmology is: the old information-theoretic approach, revived as something external to physics. It may not be needed to discover the TOE itself—but I believe it can make sense of the fact that there is a TOE at all.”

I leaned forward—I think I was smiling, almost unwillingly—fascinated in spite of my skepticism. As cult pseudoscience went, at least this was high-class bullshit.

“How, exactly? Which of these possibilities you’ve ‘analyzed with great care’ can give a theory any kind of power which wasn’t already there in nature ?”

Conroy said, “Imagine this cosmology: Forget about starting the universe with just the right finely-tuned Big Bang needed to create stars, planets, intelligent life… and a culture capable of making sense of it all. Instead, take as your ’starting point’ the fact that there’s a living human being who can explain an entire universe, in terms of a single theory. Turn everything around, and take it as the only thing given that this one person exists.”

I said irritably, “How can it be the only thing? You can’t have a living human being… and nothing else. And if it’s given that this person can explain the universe, then there has to be a universe to explain.”

“Exactly.”

Conroy smiled, calmly and sanely, but the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I suddenly knew what she was going to say next.

“From this person, the universe ‘grows out’ of the power to explain it: out in all directions, and forward and backward in time. Instead of being blasted out of pre-space—instead of being ‘caused’ inexplicably at the beginning of time—it crystallizes quietly around a single human being.

“That’s why the universe obeys a single law—a Theory of Everything. It’s all explained by a single person. We call this one person the Keystone. Everyone, and everything, exists because the Keystone exists. The Big Bang model of cosmology can lead to anything at all: a universe of cold dust, a universe of black holes, a universe of dead planets. But the Keystone needs everything which the universe actually contains—stars, planets, life—in order to explain vis own existence. And not only needs them: the Keystone can account for all of them, make sense of all of them, without gaps, without flaws, without contradictions.

“That’s why it’s possible for billions of people to be wrong. That’s why we’re not living with Stone Age cosmology or even Newtonian physics. Most explanations just aren’t powerful, rich or coherent enough to bring a whole universe into being—and to explain a mind capable of holding such an explanation.”

I sat and stared at Conroy, not wishing to insult her, but at a loss for anything polite to say. This was pure cult-speak at last: she might as well have been telling me that Violet Mosala and Henry Buzzo were the incarnations of a pair of warring Hindu deities, or that Atlantis would rise from the ocean and the stars would fall from the sky when the Final Equation was written.

Except that, if she had, I doubt I would have felt the same uneasy tingling down my back and across my forearms. She’d steered close enough to the shores of science, for enough of the way, to disarm me a little.

She continued. “We can’t watch the universe emerge; we’re part of it, we’re trapped inside the space-time created by the act of explanation. All we can hope to witness, in the progression of time, is one person become the first to hold the TOE in vis mind, and grasp its consequences, and—invisibly, imperceptibly—understand us all into being.”

She laughed suddenly, breaking the spell. “It’s only a theory. The mathematics behind it makes perfect sense—but the reality is untestable, by its very nature. So of course, we could be wrong.

“But now, can you understand why someone like Akili—who believes, perhaps too passionately, that we