Distress

patch on the wall radiated gentle heat, powered by the solar energy stored in the charge-displacement polymers which were woven into every strand of the tent’s fabric.

I sat on one end of the sleeping bag. Akili sat cross-legged beside me. I looked around appreciatively; however humble, it was a vast improvement on bare rock. “Where did you find this? I don’t know if they shoot looters on Stateless… but I’d say it was worth the risk.”

Akili snorted. “I didn’t have to steal it. Where do you think I’ve been living for the past two weeks? We can’t all afford the Ritz.”

We exchanged updates. Akili had heard most of my news already, from other sources: Buzzo’s death; Mosala’s evacuation, and uncertain condition. But not her joke on the ACs: the automatic dissemination of her TOE around the world.

Akili frowned intensely, silent for a long time. Something had changed in vis face since I’d seen ver in the hospital; the deep shock of recognition at the news of the supposed mixing plague had given way to a kind of expectant gaze—as if ve was prepared, now, to be taken by Distress at any moment and was almost eager to embrace the experience, despite the anguish and horror all its victims had displayed. Even the few who’d been briefly calm and lucid in their own strange way had swiftly relapsed; if I’d believed that the syndrome was everyone’s fate, I would not have wished to go on living.

Akili confessed, “We still can’t fit our models to the data. No one I’ve been in contact with can work out what’s going on.” Ve seemed resigned to the fact that the plague would elude precise analysis, in the short term— but still confident that vis basic explanation was correct. “The new cases are appearing too rapidly, much faster than exponential growth.”

“Then maybe you’re wrong about the mixing. You made a prediction of exponential growth and now it’s failed. So maybe you’ve been reading too much Anthrocosmology into four sick people’s ranting.”

Ve shook vis head, calmly dismissing the possibility. “Seventeen people, now. Your SeeNet colleague isn’t the only one who’s seen it; other journalists have begun to report the same phenomenon. And there’s a way to explain the discrepancy in the case numbers.”

“How?”

“Multiple Keystones.”

I laughed wearily. “What’s the collective noun for that? Not an arch of Keystones, surely. A pantheon? One person, with one theory, explaining the universe into existence—isn’t that the whole premise of Anthrocosmology?”

“One theory, yes. And one person always seemed the most likely scenario. We always knew that the TOE would be broadcast to the world— but we always assumed that every last detail would be worked out in full by its discoverer, first. But if the discoverer is lying in a coma when the complete TOE is dispatched to tens of thousands of people, simultaneously… that’s like nothing we ever contemplated. And nothing we can hope to model: the mathematics becomes intractable.” Ve spread vis hands in a gesture of acceptance. “No matter. We’ll all learn the truth, soon enough.”

My skin crawled. In Akili’s presence, I didn’t know what I believed. I said, “Learn it how? Mosala’s TOE doesn’t predict telepathy with the Keystone—or Keystones—any more than it predicts the universe unraveling. If she’s right, you must be wrong.”

“It depends what she’s right about.”

“Everything? As in Theory of?”

“Everything could unravel tonight—and most TOEs would have nothing to say about it, one way or another. The rules of chess can’t tell you whether or not the board is strong enough to hold up every legal configuration of the pieces.”

“But every TOE has plenty to say about the human brain, doesn’t it? It’s a lump of ordinary matter, subject to all the ordinary laws of physics. It doesn’t start ‘mixing with information’ just because someone completes a Theory of Everything on the other side of the planet.”

Akili said, “Two days ago, I would have agreed with you. But TOEs which fail to deal with their own basis in information are as incomplete General Relativity—which required the Big Bang to take place, but then broke down completely at that point. It took the unification of all four forces to smooth away the singularity. And it looks like it’s going to take one more unification to understand the explanatory Big Bang.”

“But two days ago—?”

“I was wrong. The mainstream always assumed that an incomplete TOE was just the way things had to be. The Keystone would explain everything—except how a TOE could actually come into force. Anthrocosmology would answer that question—but that side of the equation would never be visible.” Akili held out both hands, palms pressed together horizontally. “Physics and metaphysics: we believed they’d remain separate forever. They always had, in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable premise. Like the single Keystone.” Ve interlocked vis fingers and tipped vis hands to a forty-five-degree angle. “It just happens to be wrong. Maybe because a TOE which unifies physics and information— which mixes the levels, and describes its own authority—is the very opposite of unraveling. It’s more stable than any other possibility; it affirms itself, it tightens the knot.”

I suddenly recalled the night I’d visited Amanda Conroy, when I’d concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that the separation of powers between Mosala and the Anthrocosmologists was a good thing. And later, Henry Buzzo had jokingly postulated a theory which supported itself, defended itself, ruled out all competitors, refused to be swallowed.

I said, “But whose theory is going to unify physics and information? Mosala’s TOE makes no attempt to ’describe its own authority.'”

Akili saw no obstacle. “She never intended it to. But either she failed to understand all the implications of her own work—or someone out on the net is going to get hold of her purely physical TOE, and extend it to embrace information theory. In a matter of days. Or hours.”

I stared at the ground, suddenly angry, all the mundane horrors of the day closing in on me. “How can you sit here wrapped up in this bullshit? Whatever happened to technoliberation?. Solidarity with the renegades? Smashing the boycott?” My own meager skills and connections had already come to nothing in the face of the invasion but somehow I’d imagined Akili proving to be a thousand times more resourceful: taking a vital role at the hub of the resistance, orchestrating some brilliant counter-attack.

Ve said quietly, “What do you expect me to do? I'm not a soldier; I don’t know how to win the war for Stateless. And there’ll soon be more people with Distress than there are on this whole island—and if ACs don’t try to analyze the mixing plague, no one else is going to do it.”

I laughed bitterly. “And now you’re ready to believe that understanding everything drives us insane? The Ignorance Cults were right? The TOE sends us screaming and kicking into the abyss? Just when I’d made up my mind that there was no such thing.”

Akili shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know why people are taking it so hard.” For the first time there was a hint of fear in vis voice, breaking through the determined acceptance. “But… mixing before the Aleph moment must be imperfect, distorted—because if it wasn’t flawed in some way, the first victim of Distress would have explained everything, and become the Keystone. I don’t know what the flaw is—what’s missing, what makes the partial understanding so traumatic—but once the TOE is completed…” Ve trailed off. If the Aleph moment didn’t put an end to Distress, the misery of a war on Stateless would be nothing. If the TOE could not be faced, all that lay ahead was universal madness.

We both fell silent. The camp was quiet, except for a few young children crying in the distance, and the faint clatter of cooking utensils in some of the nearby tents.

Akili said, “Andrew?”

“Yes?”

“Look at me.”

I turned and faced ver squarely, for the first time since I’d arrived. Vis dark eyes appeared more luminous than ever: intelligent, searching, compassionate. The unselfconscious beauty of vis face evoked a deep, astonished resonance inside me, a thrill of recognition which reverberated from the darkness in my skull to the base of my spine. My whole body ached at the sight of ver, every muscle fiber, every tendon. But it was welcome pain, as if I’d been beaten and left to die—and now found myself, impossibly, waking.

That was what Akili was: my last hope, my resurrection.