Distress

even know what it meant—until I had to tell her who was trying to kill her daughter.”

I heard Akili, still on the floor at my feet, inhale sharply. And then I understood, too.

Free fall.

Sarah frowned, irritated by the distraction. “She’s lying.” She took out her own notepad and checked something, still holding the gun on me. “Break the connection, Andrew.” I did.

Akili said, “Sarah? Have you been following Distress?”

“No. I’ve been busy.” She examined her notepad warily, as if it were a bomb that needed defusing. Mosala’s work was all there in her hands now, and she had to be sure she destroyed it, thoroughly and irrevocably, without letting it taint her.

Akili persisted. “You’ve lost, Sarah. The Aleph moment has passed.”

She glanced up from the screen at me. “Would you shut ver up? I don’t want to hurt ver, but—”

I said, “Distress is a plague of mixing with information. I thought it was an organic virus, but Kaspar proves that it can’t be.”

Sarah scowled. “What are you saying? You think De Groot read the finished TOE paper, and became the Keystone?” She held up her notepad triumphantly, with an audit trail displayed. “Nobody’s read the paper. Nobody’s accessed the final results.”

“Except the author. Wendy sent Violet a Kaspar clonelet. It wrote the paper, it pulled all the calculations together. And it’s become the Keystone.”

Sarah was incredulous. “A piece of software?”

Akili said, “Scan the nets for lucid Distress victims. Hear what they have to say.”

“If this is some kind of ridiculous bluff, you’re wasting—”

Sisyphus interrupted cheerfully, “This pattern of information requires itself to be encoded in germanium phosphide crystals, in an artifact designed in collaboration with organic—”

Sarah screamed at me wordlessly, waving the gun above her head, casting wild belligerent shadows on the walls of the tent. I hit the MUTE button and killed the audio; the declaration continued silently, in text flowing across the screen. My mind was reeling at the implications—but I’d lost my death wish, and Sarah had my full attention.

Akili spoke calmly but urgently. “Listen to me. Distress numbers must be exploding already. And with a software Keystone—a machine world view—the mixing’s going to keep wrecking people’s minds until someone reads the TOE paper.”

Sarah was unmoved. “You’re wrong. There is no Keystone. We’ve won: we’ve left the last question unanswered.” She smiled at me suddenly, radiantly, lost in some private apotheosis. “It doesn’t matter how small the loophole is, the residue of uncertainty; in the future, we’ll know how to enlarge it. And we’ll never be brute machines, we’ll never be mere physical beings… so long as there’s still that hope of transcendence.'

I kept my expression deadpan. The music swelled. The two tall Polynesian women—militia members?— creeping in behind her raised their truncheons and struck together; she went down cold.

One of them dropped to her knees to inspect Sarah; the other eyed me curiously. “So what was her problem?”

“She was high on something.” Akili climbed to vis feet beside me.

I said, “She came in here ranting, stole vis notepad. We couldn’t get any sense out of her.”

“Is that true?”

Akili nodded meekly. The militia members looked suspicious. They took possession of the gun, with obvious distaste—but handed Akili the notepad. “Okay. We’ll take her to the first aid tent. Some people just don’t know how to enjoy themselves.”

“We should restart Mosala’s dispatch procedure. Scatter the TOE over the net.” Akili sat beside me, tense with urgency, the notepad in one hand.

I struggled to focus my thoughts. The situation eclipsed everything which had happened between us—but I still couldn’t look ver in the eye. Akili’s knowledge miner had already counted more than a hundred new cases of Distress in five minutes—via media reports of people dropping in the streets.

I said, “We can’t scatter it. Not until we know if that would make things better, or worse. All your models, all your predictions, have failed. Maybe Kaspar proves that the mixing is real—but everything else is still guesswork. Do you want to send every TOE theorist on the planet insane?”

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