Distress

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 The terminology was different—Kaspar had innocently coined new jargon, unaware of the unpublished precedents—but the concepts were unmistakable.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.

The reality could not have been more different. Like the coded markings of the reef-rock, the surface of the world began to speak of its depths, and its hidden connections. It was like learning to read a new language, in seconds, and seeing the beautiful but hitherto merely decorative calligraphy of a foreign alphabet transformed before my eyes—acquiring meaning, without changing its appearance in any way. The fading stars described their fusion fires, the crush of gravity held in check by the liberation of binding energy. The pale air, reddened in the east, deftly portrayed its own biased scatter of photons. The lightly rippled water hinted at the play of intermolecular forces, the strength of the hydrogen bond, the gentle elasticity of a surface trying to minimize its contact with air.

And all of these messages were written in a common language. It was clear at a glance that they belonged together.

No wheels within wheels, no dazzling cosmic technoporn, no infernal diagrams.

No visions. Just understanding.

I pocketed the notepad and spun around, laughing. There was no overload, no crippling flood of information. The messages were always there—but I could take them or leave them. At first, it was like skipping over text with glazed eyes, requiring a conscious shift of focus—but with a few moments’ practice, it became second nature.

This was the world as I’d always strived to see it: majestically beautiful, intricate and strange—but at its core harmonious, and hence ultimately comprehensible.

It was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe.

The mixing began to cut deeper.

I grew aware of my own physicality, my own nature written in the TOE. The connections I’d seen in the world reached into me, and bound me to everything in sight. There was, still, no X-ray vision, no double-helix dream—but I felt the immutable grammar of the TOE in my limbs, in my blood, in the dark glide of consciousness.

It was the lesson of the cholera—only starker and clearer. I was matter, like everything else.

I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelled out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.

I inhaled deeply, studying the events which followed the inrush of air. And I could trace the sweetness of the odor and the cooling of the nasal membranes, the satisfying fullness of the lungs, the surge of blood, the clarity delivered to the brain… all back to the TOE.

My claustrophobia evaporated. To inhabit this universe—to coexist with anything—I had to be matter. Physics was not a cage; its delineation between the possible and the impossible was the bare minimum that existence required. And the broken symmetry of the TOE—hacked out of the infinite paralyzing choices of pre-space—was the bedrock on which I stood.

I was a dying machine of cells and molecules; I would never be able to doubt that again.

But it was not a path into madness.

The mixing had still more to show me; the messages of introspection grew richer. I’d read the explanatory threads fanning out from the TOE, binding me to the world—but now the threads which explained my thoughts began to turn back toward their source. So I followed them down, and I understood what my own mind was creating through understanding:

Interacting symbols coded as firing patterns in neural pathways. Rules of dendritic growth and connection, synoptic weight adjustment, neurotransmitter diffusion. A chemistry of membranes, ion pumps, proteins, amines. All the detailed behavior of molecules and atoms, all the laws governing their necessary constituents. Layer after layer of converging regularity—

—right down to the TOE.

There was no arena of disinterested physics. There was no solid layer of objective laws. Just a deep circulating convection current of explanation, a causal magma upwelling from the underworld and then plunging down again into darkness, churning from TOE to body to mind to TOE—held up by nothing but the engine of