Distress - A Novel Part 21

"Both."

I said, "Some people need both. Not just biologically-I know, you can switch that off. But... for ident.i.ty. For self-esteem."

Kuwale snorted, highly amused. "Self-esteem is a commodity invented by twentieth-century personal growth cults. If you want self-esteem-or an emotional center-go to Los Angeles and buy it." Ve added, more sym-pathetically, "What is it with you Westerners? Sometimes it sounds to me like all the pre-scientific psychology of Freud and Jung-and all its market-driven US regurgitations-has hijacked your language and culture so completely that you can't even think about yourselves anymore, except in cult-speak. And it's so ingrained now, you don't even know when you're doing it."

"Maybe you're right." I was beginning to feel unspeakably old and tra-ditionalist myself. If Kuwale was the future, the generation after ver was going to be entirely beyond my comprehension. Which was probably no bad thing, but it was still a painful realization. "But what do you put in place of Western psychobabble? As.e.x and technoliberation I can almost understand-but what's the great attraction ofAnthrocosmology? If you want a dose of cosmic rea.s.surance, why not at least choose a religion with an afterlife?"

"You should join the murderers up on deck, if you think you can choose what's true and what isn't."

I stared out across the dark hold. The faint strip of light was fading rapidly; it looked like we were going to spend a freezing night here. My bladder felt close to bursting but I was having trouble forcing myself to let go. Every time I thought I'd finally accepted my body and all it could do to me, the underworld tugged the leash again. I'd accepted nothing. I'd had one brief glimpse beneath the surface, and now I wanted to bury everything I'd learned, to carry on as if nothing had changed.

I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."

"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."

232.

I was woken by torchlight in my face, and someone jagging an enzyme-coated knife through the polymer net which bound me to Kuwale. It was so cold it had to be early morning. I blinked and shivered, blinded by the glare. I couldn't see how many people there were, let alone what weapons they carried, but I sat perfectly still while they cut me free, working on the a.s.sumption that anything less could earn me a bullet through the brain.

I was winched up in a crude sling, then left suspended in midair while three people clambered out of the hold on a rope ladder, leaving Kuwale behind. I looked around at the moonlit deck and-so far as I could see- open ocean. The thought of leaving Stateless behind chilled my blood; if there was any chance of help, it was surely back on the island.

They slammed the hatch closed, lowered me and untied my feet, then starred hustling me toward a cabin at the far end of the boat. After some pleading, I was allowed to stop and p.i.s.s over the side; for several seconds afterward, I was so overcome with grat.i.tude that I would have been willing to despatch Violet Mosala personally with my bare hands, if anyone had asked.

The cabin was packed with display screens and electronic equipment. I'd never been on a fishing boat before in my life, but this looked distinctly like overkill, when the average fleet could probably be run by a single microchip.

I was tied to a chair in the middle of the cabin. There were four people present; Witness had already matched two of them-numbered three and five in Kuwale's gallery-but it came up blank on the others, two women about my age. I captured and filed their faces: nineteen and twenty.

I said, to no one in particular, "What was all the noise, before? I thought we'd run aground."

Three said, "We were rammed. You missed all the excitement." He was a Caucasian umale, heavily muscled, with Chinese characters tattooed on both forearms.

"Rammed by who?" He ignored the question, a little too coolly; he'd already said too much.

Twenty had waited in the cabin while the others fetched me; now she took charge. "I don't know what fantasies Kuwale's been feeding you. Portraying us as rabid fanatics, no doubt." She was a tall, slender black woman with a Francophone accent, "No, ve told me you were moderates. Weren't you listening?"

233.

She shook her head innocently, bemused, as if it were self-evident that eavesdropping was beneath her dignity. She had an air of calm authority which unnerved me; I could imagine her instructing the others to do just about anything, while retaining a demeanor of absolute reasonableness. " 'Moderate'-but still 'heretical,' of course."

I said wearily, "What do you expect other ACs to call you?" "Forget other ACs. You should make your own judgment-once you've heard all the facts."

"I think you blew any chance of a favorable opinion when you infected me with your home-brewed cholera." "That wasn't us." "No? Who was it, then?"

"The same people who infected Yasuko Nishide with a virulent natural strain ofpneumococcus."

A chill ran through me. I didn't know if I believed her, but it fit with Kuwale's description of the extremists.

Nineteen said, "Are you recording, now?"

"No." It was the truth; although I'd captured their faces, I'd stopped continuous filming hours before, back in the hold.

"Then start. Please." Nineteen looked and sounded Scandinavian; it seemed every faction of AC was relentlessly internationalist. Those cynics who claimed that people who forged transglobal friendships on the nets never came together in the flesh were wrong, of course. All it required was a good enough reason. "Why?"

"You're here to make a doc.u.mentary about Violet Mosala, aren't you? Don't you want to tell the whole story? Right to the end?"

Twenty explained, "When Mosala's dead, there'll be an uproar, naturally, and we'll have to go into hiding. And we're not interested in martyrdom-but we're not afraid of being identified, once the mission's over. We're not ashamed of what we're doing here; we have no reason to be. And we want someone objective, non-partisan, trustworthy, to carry our side of the story to the world."

I stared at her. She sounded perfectly sincere-and even formally apologetic, as if she was asking for a slightly inconvenient favor.

I glanced at the others. Three regarded me with studied nonchalance. Five was tinkering with the electronics. Nineteen stared back, unwavering in her solidarity.

234.

I said, "Forget it. I don't do snuff movies." It was a nice line; if I hadn't recalled Daniel Cavolini's interrogation the moment the words were out, I might have had a warm inner glow for hours.

Twenty put me straight, politely. "No one expects you to film Mosala's death. That would be impractical, as well as tasteless. We only want you to be in a position to explain to your viewers why her death was necessary."

My grasp on reality was slipping. In the hold, I'd antic.i.p.ated torture. I'd imagined, in detail, the process of being made to look like a plausible victim of a shark attack.

But not this.

I forced myself to speak evenly. "I'm not interested in an exclusive interview with my subject's murderers." The thought crossed my mind that half of SeeNet's executives would never forgive those words, if they ever found out that I'd uttered them. "Why don't you take out a paid spot on TechnoLalia? I'm sure their viewers would give you an unqualified vote of support-if you pointed out that it was necessary to kill Mosala in order to preserve the possibility ofwormhole travel to other universes."

Twenty frowned, unjustly slandered. "I knew Kuwale was feeding you poisonous lies. Is that what ve told you?"

I was growing light-headed, disbelieving; her obsessive concern with exactly the wrong proprieties was surreal. I shouted, "It doesn't matter what the f.u.c.king reason is!" I tried to stretch my hands out, to implore her to see sense; they were tied firmly to the back of the chair. I said numbly, "I don't know . . . maybe you just think Henry Buzzo has more gravitas, more presidential style. A suitably Jehovian manner. Or maybe you think he has more elegant equations." I very nearly told them what Mosala had told me: Buzzo's methodology was fatally flawed; their favorite contender could never be the Keystone. I caught myself in time. "I don't care. It's still murder."

"But it's not. It's self-defense."

I turned. The voice had come from the doorway of the cabin.

Helen Wu met my eyes, and explained sadly, "Wormholes have nothing to do with it. Buzzo has nothing to do with it. But if we don't intervene, Violet will soon have the power to kill us all."

235.

22.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 h.o.m.ogeneous universes, bland and empty as giant toy balloons. They were only studied because anything more plausible was too difficult to a.n.a.lyze, mathematically. n.o.body 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, 236.

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 a.s.sa.s.sinations un.o.bserved. 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 237.

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 ma.s.s 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-s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 238.

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 technop.o.r.n-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 the239.

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-"

"And you expect Violet Mosala to fall into some kind of trance, and think all these things through, right after her moment of apotheosis?"

He scowled. "No! All of this follows logically from the Keystone's information content at the Aleph moment-it's not a prediction of the Keystone's thought processes. Do you imagine that. . . the Keystone has to count from one to a trillion-out loud-to create all the numbers in between, before arithmetic can make use of them? No. Zero, one, and addition are enough to imply all of them, and more. The universe is no different. It just grows out of a different seed."

I glanced at the others. They were watching the screen with uneasy fascination, but no sign of anything remotely like religious terror. They might have been observing a runaway Greenhouse climate model, or a simulation of a meteor strike. Secrecy had insulated these people from any serious challenges to their ideas, but they still clung to some semblance of rationality. They hadn't plucked the supposed need to kill Mosala out of thin air, and then invented Anthrocosmology after the fact, to justify it. They really did believe that they'd been forced to this unpalatable conclusion by reason alone.

And maybe the same relentless logic could still be used to change their minds. I was an ignorant outsider, but they'd invited my scrutiny for the sake of explaining their actions to the world. They'd brought me up here so they could argue their case for posterity, but if I accepted their terms as given, and argued back at them in their own language . . . maybe there was still a small chance that I could inject enough doubt to persuade them to spare Mosala.

I said carefully, "All right. Logical implication is enough; the Keystone doesn't have to think through every last microscopic detail. But wouldn't ve still have to sit down, eventually, and at least . . . map out the full extent of whatever vis TOE implies? And satisfy verself that there were no loose ends? That would still be a lifetime's work. Maybe the race to complete the TOE is only the first step in the race to become the Keystone. How can anything be explained into being, until the Keystone knows that it's been explained?"

Five cut me off impatiently. "A Keystone with a TOE is inexplicable without all of human history, and all prior human knowledge. And just 240.

as every biological ancestor or cousin requires their own quota of s.p.a.ce and time to inhabit and observe-their own body, their own food and air, their own patch of ground to stand on-every intellectual predecessor or contemporary requires their own partial explanation of the universe. It all fits together, in a mosaic reaching back to the Big Bang. If it didn't, we wouldn't be here.

"But the Keystone's burden is to occupy the point where all explanations converge into a kernel concise enough to be apprehended by a single mind. Not to recapitulate all of science and history-merely to encode it."

This was futile. I couldn't beat them at their own game; they'd had years in which to ponder all the obvious objections, and convince themselves that they'd answered them. And if mainstream ACs sharing almost the same mindset hadn't been able to sway them, what hope did I have?

I tried another angle. "And you're happy to believe that you're nothing but a bit player in some jumped-up TOE theorist's dream? Dragged into the plot to save ver from having to invent a way for intelligence to evolve in a species with only one member?"

Five regarded me with pity. "Now you're talking in oxymorons. The universe is not a dream. The Keystone is not. . . the avatar of some slumbering G.o.d-computer in a higher reality, threatening to wake and forget us. The Keystone anchors the universe from within. There's nowhere else to do it.

"A cosmos can have no more solid foundation than a single observer's coherent explanation. What would you consider less ethereal than that? A TOE which is simply true-for no reason? And what would we be, then? A dream of inanimate pre-s.p.a.ce? Figments of the vacuum's imagination? No. Because everything is exactly what it seems to be, whatever underlies it. And whoever the Keystone is, I'm still alive, I'm still conscious"-he kicked the leg of my chair-"the world I inhabit is solid. The only thing that matters to me is keeping it that way."

I turned to the others. Three was gazing at the floor; he seemed embarra.s.sed by the whole unnecessary business of trying to justify anything to an ungrateful world. Nineteen and Twenty regarded me hopefully, as if expecting that the stupidity of my reluctance to embrace their ideas would dawn on me at any moment.

How could I argue with these people7 I no longer knew what was reasonable. It was three in the morning; I was damp, freezing cold, captive, 241.

isolated, and outnumbered. They had all the insider jargon, all the computing power, all the slick graphics, all the condescending rhetoric. Anthrocosmology possessed all the intimidating weapons it could possibly need-according to Culture First-to be a science, as good or bad as any other.

I said, "Name one single experiment you can do, to distinguish all this information cosmology from a TOE which is 'true for no reason.'"

Twenty said quietly, "Here's an experiment for you. Here's an empirical test. We can leave Violet Mosala to finish her work, unmolested. And if you're right, nothing will happen. Ten billion people will live through the eighteenth of April-most of them not even knowing that a Theory of Everything has been completed, and proclaimed to the world."

Five said, "If you're wrong, though . . ." He gestured at the screen, and the animation accelerated. "Logically, the process has to reach right back to the physical Big Bang, to set the ten parameters of the Standard Unified Field Theory, to explain the entire history of the Keystone. That's why it takes so long to compute the simulation. In real-time, though, the observable consequences will begin within seconds of the Aleph moment-and locally at least, they should only last a matter of minutes."

"Locally? You mean, on Stateless-?"

"I mean the Solar System. Which itself should only last a matter of minutes."

As he spoke, a small dark patch on the outermost layer of the information tapestry began to grow. Around it, the thread of explanation was unwinding, knots which weren't really knots were unraveling. I had a sickening, giddy sense of deja vu; my fanciful metaphor for Wu's complaints about Mosala's circular logic was being paraded in front of me as supporting evidence for a death sentence.

Five said, "Conroy and the 'mainstream' take it for granted that every information cosmology must be time-symmetric, with the same physics holding true after the Aleph moment as before. But they're wrong. After Aleph, Mosala's TOE would begin to undermine all of the physics it first implied. It goes through all the labor of creating a past-only to reach the conclusion that it has no future."

The darkness on the screen spread faster, as if on cue. I said, "This isn't proof of anything. Nothing behind this so-called 'simulation' has ever been tested, has it? You're just. . . grinding away at a set of equations from 242.

information theory, with no way of knowing whether or not they describe the truth."

Five agreed. "There is no way of knowing. But suppose it happens, unproven?"