Distress

or does it sound the same to you? Because… what kind of plague could make people believe that they're the Keystone?'

Kuwale put the notepad down on the bed and turned to face me. 'Andrew, if this is a hoax—'

'No! Why would I—?'

'To save Mosala. Because if it's a hoax, you'll never pull it off.'

I groaned. 'If I was going to invent a Keystone to get her off the hook, I would have simulated Yasuko Nishide on his deathbed having all the cosmic revelations—not some random psychiatric case.' I explained about Reynolds and the SeeNet documentary.

Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then… amusement? I couldn't tell—and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.

I said, 'Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet…' I was grasping at straws, but I couldn't make sense of this any other way.

Kuwale said flatly, 'No. I would have heard.'

'Then—?'

'It's genuine.'

'How can it be?'

Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. 'Because everything we thought was true, is true—but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different assumptions—and we were all wrong.'

'I don't understand.'

'You will. We all will.'

I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi's death. 'You think Distress comes from… mixing with information?'

'Yes.'

'If the Keystone does it, everyone else gets dragged along? Exponential growth? Just like a plague?'

'Yes.'

'But—how? Who was the Keystone? Who started it? Muteba Kazadi, all those years ago?'

Kuwale laughed crazily. 'No!' The man in the opposite bed was awake now, and listening to every word, but I was past caring. 'Miller didn't get around to telling you the strangest thing about that cosmological model.'

Miller was the umale, the one I'd thought of as 'Three.'

'Which is—?'

'If you follow through with the calculations… the effect reaches back in time. Not far: exponential growth forward means exponential decay backward. But the absolute certainty of the Keystone mixing at the Aleph moment implies a small probability of other people being 'dragged along' at random even before the event. It's a continuity condition; there's no such thing in any system as an instantaneous jump from zero to one.'

I shook my head, uncomprehending. I couldn't take this in.

Akili took my hand and squeezed it hard, unthinking, transmitting vis fear—and a vertiginous thrill of anticipation—straight into my body, from skin to skin.

'The Keystone isn't the Keystone yet. The Aleph moment hasn't even happened—but we're already feeling the shock.'

 

25

Kuwale borrowed my notepad and rapidly sketched out the details of the information flows which ve believed lay behind Distress. Ve even attempted to fit a crude computer model of the process to the epidemiological data—although ve ended up with a curve far less steep than the actual case figures (which had risen faster than exponential growth—'probably distorted by early under-reporting'), and a predicted date for the Aleph moment somewhere between February 7, 2055… and June 12, 3070. Undeterred, ve struggled to refine the model. Graphs, network diagrams, and equations flickered across the screen beneath vis fingertips; it looked as impressive as anything I'd seen Violet Mosala do—and I understood it about as well.

On one level, I couldn't help but be swept along with vis urgent logic—but as the initial shock of recognition faded, I began to wonder again if we weren't simply reading our own meaning into the four patients' bizarre soliloquies. Anthrocosmology had never before made a single testable prediction. I didn't doubt that it could provide an elegant mathematical underpinning to any TOE—but if the first distinct evidence for the theory itself consisted of the rantings of four people suffering from a new and exotic mental disease, that was a slender basis on which to throw out everything I believed about the universe.

And as for the prognosis, if Kuwale was right, of a world completely afflicted by Distress… that was a cataclysm as unthinkable as the moderates' unraveling.

I kept my doubts to myself, but by the time I left the ward—leaving Kuwale immersed in a conference with the other mainstream ACs—I had my feet back on the ground. All this talk of echoes of the future Aleph moment had to be ranked as less plausible than even the most far-fetched conventional alternatives.

Maybe a neuroactive military pathogen gone wrong, targeting a specific region of the brain, could induce the ordinary symptoms of Distress in most of its victims—plus these outbursts of manic-but-precise observations in four out of three thousand cases. Reasoning was the product of organic events in the brain, like every other mental process—and if a paranoid schizophrenic, injured by crude accidents of genetics and disease, could find personal significance in every advertising sign, every cloud, every tree… maybe the combination of the right scientific background with the highly focused damage wrought by this viral weapon could trigger an equally uncontrollable—but much more rigorous—avalanche of meaning. If the original aim of the weapon had been to impair analytical thought, it wasn't inconceivable that a wild version might end up overstimulating the very neural pathways it had been designed to destroy.

I went back to the electrical shop and bought myself another notepad. I called De Groot from the street; she seemed upset, but she didn't want to talk on the net.

We met at the hotel, in Mosala's suite. De Groot ushered me in, in silence. 'Is Violet—?' Dust motes swam beneath the skylight; when I spoke, the room sounded hollow.

'She's been admitted. I wanted to stay at the hospital, but she sent me away.' De Groot stood opposite me, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. She said quietly, 'You know, we've had crank mail from just about everyone. Every cult, every lunatic on the planet wanted to let Violet in on their amazing cosmic revelations—or let her know that she was desecrating their precious mythology, and would burn in Hell for it… or drive away all the Buddha-nature… or crush the world's great civilizations into nihilistic rubble, with her male Western reductionist hubris. The Anthrocosmologists were just… one more voice shouting noise.' She looked at me squarely. 'Would you have picked them as the threat? Not the fundamentalists. Not the racists. Not the psychotics who gave detailed descriptions of what they planned to do to her corpse. People who sent us long dissertations on information theory—and P.S., we'd be happy to see you create the universe, but certain other parties may try to stop you.'

I said, 'No one could have picked them.'

De Groot ran a hand across her temple, then stood in silence, shielding her eyes.

'Are you all right?'

She nodded, and laughed humorlessly. 'Headache, that's all.' She inhaled deeply, visibly steeling herself to push on. 'They found traces of foreign proteins in her bloodstream, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. They can't resolve the molecular structures, though—and she's showing no symptoms, so far. So they've put her on a mixture of strong antiviral drugs—and until something happens, all they can do is watch her.'

'Is security—?'