Distress

After Helen Wu entered the cabin, I recorded everything. Not for SeeNet. For Interpol.

'I've done all I can to try to steer her onto safer ground,' Wu insisted solemnly. 'I thought, if she understood where she was heading, she'd change her methods—for conventional scientific reasons. For the sake of a theory with physical content—which is what most of her peers expect of a TOE.' She raised her hands in a gesture of despair. 'Nothing stops Violet! You know that. She absorbed every criticism I offered—and turned it into a virtue. I've only made things worse.'

Twenty said, 'I don't expect Amanda Conroy even began to convey a true picture of the richness of information cosmology. What did she describe to you? One model only: a Keystone creating a perfect, seamless universe—with no observable effects, ever, violating the TOE? No prospect of seeing through to the metaphysics beneath?'

'That's right.' I'd given up expressing outrage; the best strategy I could think of was to play along, let them incriminate themselves as much as they wanted, and cling to the hope that I might still have a chance to warn Mosala.

'That's only one possibility, among millions. And it's about as simplistic as the earliest cosmological models of General Relativity from the nineteen twenties: perfectly homogeneous universes, bland and empty as giant toy balloons. They were only studied because anything more plausible was too difficult to analyze, mathematically. Nobody ever believed that they described reality.'

Wu took up the thread. 'Conroy and her friends are not scientists; they're enthusiastic dilettantes. They seized hold of the very first solution that came along, and decided it was everything they wanted.' I didn't know about the others, but Wu had a career, a comfortable life, which she was tearing to shreds before my eyes. Maybe the intellectual energy she'd devoted to Anthrocosmology had already cost her any success she might have had with ATMs—but now she was sacrificing everything.

'That kind of perfect, stable cosmos isn't impossible—but it depends entirely on the structure of the theory. The observable physics, and the information metaphysics underlying it, can only be guaranteed independent and separable under certain rigorous constraints. Mosala's work shows every sign of violating those constraints in the most dangerous manner possible.'

Wu stared at me for a moment longer, as if trying to judge whether or not she'd hammered home the gravity of the situation. Nothing in her manner betrayed any hint of paranoia or fanaticism; however mistaken she was, she seemed as sober to me as a Manhattan Project scientist, terrified that the first A-bomb test might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would engulf the world.

I must have looked suitably dismayed; she turned to Five, and said, 'Show him.' Then she left the room.

My heart sank. I said, 'Where's she going?' Back to Stateless, in another boat! No one here had a better chance of getting close to Mosala than Wu. I remembered the two of them walking through the hotel lobby, laughing, almost arm in arm.

'Helen already knows too much about Mosala's TOE—and too much information cosmology,' Nineteen explained. 'Pushing that any further could make a dangerous combination, so she no longer attends sessions where we discuss new results. There's no point taking risks.'

I absorbed that in silence. The ACs' obsessive secrecy went far beyond Conroy's fear of media ridicule, or the need to plot assassinations unobserved. They really did believe that their ideas alone were as perilous as any physical weapon.

I could hear the ocean moving gently around us, but the windows only mirrored the scene within. My reflection looked like someone else: hair sticking out oddly, eyes sunken, context all wrong. I pictured the boat perfectly becalmed, the cabin a tiny island of light fixed in the darkness. I forced my wrists apart experimentally, gauging the strength of the polymer, the topology of the knot. There was no give, no slippage. Since I'd been woken and hauled above the deck, I'd been sick with dread, wired and ragged—but for a moment I felt something like the clarity of the hospital ward returning. The world lost all pretense of meaning: no comfort, no mystery, no threat.

Five—a middle-aged Italian man—finished tinkering with the electronics. He addressed me as self- consciously as if I was pointing a thousand-watt floodlight and a nineteen-fifties movie camera in his face.

'This is our latest supercomputer run, based on everything Mosala has published so far. We've deliberately avoided trying to extrapolate to a TOE, for obvious reasons—but it's still possible to approximate the effects which might result if the work was ever completed.'

The largest display screen in the cabin, some five meters wide and three high, suddenly lit up. The image it showed resembled an elaborately interwoven mass of fine, multicolored thread. I'd seen nothing like it at the conference; this wasn't the writhing, anarchic foam of the quantum vacuum. It looked more like a compact ball of neon-luminous twine, which had been wound by Escher and Mandelbrot in turn, with exquisite care, over several centuries. There were symmetries within symmetries, knots within knots, details and patterns which seized the eye, but were too intricate and convoluted to follow to any kind of closure.

I said, 'That's not pre-space, is it?'

'Hardly.' Five regarded me dubiously, as if he suspected that my ignorance would prove insurmountable. 'It's a very crude map of information space, at the instant the Keystone 'becomes' the Keystone. We call this initial configuration 'Aleph,' for short.' I didn't respond, so he added with distaste, as if forced to resort to baby-talk, 'Think of it as a snapshot of the Explanatory Big Bang.'

'This is the starting point of… everything? The premise for an entire universe?'

'Yes. Why are you surprised? The physical, primordial Big Bang is orders of magnitude simpler; it can be characterized by just ten numbers. Aleph contains a hundred million times more information; the idea of creating galaxies and DNA out of this is far less outlandish.'

That remained a matter of opinion. 'If this is meant to be the contents of Violet Mosala's skull, it doesn't look like any kind of brain map I've ever seen.'

Five said drily, 'I should hope not. It's not an anatomical scan—or a functional neural map, or even a cognitive symbolic network. The Keystone's neurons—let alone vis skull—don't even exist, 'yet.' This is the pure information which logically precedes the existence of all physical objects. The Keystone's 'knowledge' and 'memory' come first. The brain which encodes them follows.'

He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. 'The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE, and aware of both vis own existence, and a canonical body of observations of experimental results—whether vis own, or 'second hand'— which need to be accounted for. If ve lacked either the information density or the organizational schema to explain vis own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-critical: there'd be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won't stop until an entire physical cosmos is created.

'Of course, the process never 'starts' or 'stops' in the conventional sense—it doesn't take place in time at all. Successive frames in this simulation simply correspond to increments in logical extension—like steps in a mathematical proof, adding successive layers of consequences to an initial set of premises. The history of the universe is embedded in those consequences like… the sequence of a murder, pieced together by pure deduction from evidence at the scene of the crime.'

As he spoke, the patterns I'd glimpsed on the surface of 'Aleph' were woven and re-woven in the surrounding 'information vacuum.' It was like watching a dazzling new tapestry being created every second from the one beneath—threads picked loose enough to drag a little further, and then re-combined by a million invisible hands. A thousand subtle variations echoed the original canon, but there were also startling new themes emerging, apparently from nowhere. Intermeshing fractal islands, red and white, drifted apart and recombined, struggled to engulf each other, then melted into an archipelago of hybrids. Hurricanes within hurricanes, violet and gold, spun the thread ever tighter—and then the tiniest vortices counter-rotated, and the whole hierarchy dissolved. Tiny jagged shards of crystalline silver slowly diffused through all the chaos and regularity, infiltrating and interacting with everything.

I said, 'This is beautiful technoporn—but what exactly is it meant to be showing?'

Five hesitated, but then condescended to point out a few features. 'This is the age of the Earth, being refined toward a definite value, as various geophysical and biological conclusions feed into it. This is the commonality of the genetic code, on the way toward giving rise to a sharp set of possibilities for the origins of life. Here, the underlying regularity in the chemistry of the elements—'