Blasphemy

“And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies . . .”

His spine seemed to contract with the chill. The passage was one of the clearest and most unambiguous references to the Antichrist in the entire Bible.

Confirmation.

43

EVEN WITH THE TENSION IN THE room, Ford thought, the run-up to the top of the power spectrum was even duller the second time around. By ten o’clock, Isabella reached 99.5 percent power. Everything was happening as before: the resonance, the hole in space-time, the strange image condensing in the center of the Visualizer. Isabella hummed; the mountain vibrated.

As if on schedule, the Visualizer went blank and the first words appeared.

We speak again.

“Go to it, Wyman,” Hazelius said.

Ford typed, Tell me all about yourself. He could feel Kate leaning over behind him, watching him work.

I can no more explain to you who I am than you could explain to a beetle who you are.

“Rae?” Hazelius asked. “Are you getting it?”

“I’m trolling.”

Try anyway, Ford wrote.

I will explain instead why you cannot understand me.

“George,” said Hazelius, “are you following this?”

“I am,” said Innes, delighted to be consulted. “It’s clever—telling us we won’t understand is a way of avoiding being tripped up by detail.”

Go ahead, typed Ford.

You inhabit a world scaled midway between the Planck length and the diameter of the universe.

“Seems to be a bot program,” said Edelstein, examining the output on a screen. “It copies itself to another location, erases the original and covers its tracks.”

“Yeah,” said Chen, “and I’ve got a bunch of hungry bot-wolves roaming Isabella, looking for it.”

Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You evolved to throw rocks, not quarks.

“I’m on its trail!” Chen cried. She hunched over the keyboard, like a chef over a hot stove, working maniacally. Code was racing by on four flat panels in front of her.

“Main computer’s crashing,” said Edelstein calmly. “Switching control of Isabella over to the backup servers.”

As a result of your evolution, you see the world in fundamentally erroneous ways. For example, you believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time. This is what you call reality.

“Switchover complete.”

“Cut the power to the main computer.”

“Wait,” said Dolby sharply. “That wasn’t the plan.”

“We want to make sure the malware isn’t in there. Pull the plug, Alan.”

Edelstein smiled coldly and turned back to the computer.

“Jesus Christ, wait—!” Dolby leapt up, but it was too late.

“Done,” Edelstein said, with a sharp rap on the keyboard.

Half the peripheral screens went blank. Dolby stood, swaying, uncertain. A moment went by. Nothing happened. Isabella continued to hum along.

“It worked,” said Edelstein. “Ken, you can relax.”

Dolby flashed him an annoyed look and settled back down to his workstation.

Are you saying, Ford typed, that our reality is an illusion?

Yes. Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality. But you do not. How could you? Do beetles understand fundamental reality? Do chimpanzees? You are an animal like them. You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures. You differ from the chimpanzee by a mere two hundred genes. How could that minuscule difference enable you to comprehend the universe when the chimpanzee cannot even comprehend a grain of sand?

“I swear,” Chen cried, “the data’s streaming out of CZero again!”

“Impossible,” said Hazelius. “The malware’s hiding in a detector. Force-quit and restart the detector processors, one at a time.”

“I’ll try.”

If our conversation is to be fruitful, you must abandon all hope of understanding me.

“More clever obfuscation,” said Innes. “It’s basically saying nothing.”

Ford felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Kate asked, “May I take over for a moment?”

He dropped his hands from the keyboard and moved over. Kate sat down.

What are our illusions? she typed.

You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects. That is not so. From the first moment of creation, all was entangled. What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper underlying reality. In that reality, there is no separateness. There is no time. There is no space. All is one.

Explain, Kate typed.

Your own theory of quantum mechanics, incorrect as it is, touches on the deep truth that the universe is unitary.

All well and good, Kate typed, but how does this matter in our own lives today?

It matters a great deal. You think of yourself as an “individual person,” with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between—these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled. Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are all illusive. They are atavisms of the evolutionary process. They do not exist in reality.

So it’s just like the Buddhists believe, that all is illusion?

Not at all. There is an absolute truth, a reality. But a mere glimpse of this reality would break a human mind.

Suddenly Edelstein, who had abandoned his computer console, appeared behind Ford and Mercer.

“Alan, why are you leaving your station—?” Hazelius began.

“If you’re God,” said Edelstein with a half smile on his face, hands clasped behind his back, strolling along in front of the Visualizer, “let’s dispense with the typing. You should be able to hear me.”

Loud and clear, came the response on the Visualizer.

“We’ve got a hidden mike in here,” said Hazelius. “Melissa, get on it. Hunt it down.”

“You bet.”

Edelstein went on, unperturbed. “You say, ‘all is unitary’? We have a numbering system: one, two, three— and in this way I refute your statement.”

One, two, three . . . Another illusion. There is no enumerability.

“This is mathematical sophistry,” said Edelstein, growing annoyed. “No enumerability—I just disproved it by counting.” He held up his hand. “An-other disproof: I give you the integer five!”

You give me a hand with five fingers, not the integer five. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor.

“I’d like to hear your proof of that ridiculous conjecture.”