Distress - A Novel Part 30

I laughed wearily. "You still don't believe me? You'd rather trust this piece of s.h.i.t-just because ve was your source?"

"I know ve didn't send that message to De Groot."

"Yeah? How?"

"Because I did. I sent it." I stood up slowly, turning to face her, refusing to accept this ridiculous claim. The music from the square surged madly again, making the whole tent hum. She said, "I knew there were calculations in progress, but I thought they still had days to run. I had no idea we'd cut it so fine."

My ears were ringing. Sarah watched me calmly, aiming the gun with unwavering conviction. She must have made contact with the extremists when she'd been researching Holding Up the Sky-and no doubt she'd intended to expose them, once she had the whole story. But they would have realized how valuable she could be to them-and before resorting to killing her, they would have tried everything possible to bring her round to their point of view.

And they'd succeeded. In the end, they'd convinced her to swallow it all: Any TOE would be an atrocity, a crime against the human spirit, an unendurable cage for the soul.

That was why she'd worked so hard to get Violet Mosala-and when she'd lost it, she'd had someone infect me with the cholera, modified to do the job indirectly. But they'd been sloppy with the timing provisions needed to accommodate the last-minute change of plan.

Nishide and Buzzo she'd dealt with in person.

And I'd just destroyed every chance of trust, every chance of friendship, every chance of love I might have found with Akili. I'd beaten it all 327.

into the ground. I covered my face with my hands, and stood there wrapped in the darkness of solitude, ignoring her commands. I didn't care what she did; I had no reason to go on.

Akili said, "Andrew. Do as she says. It'll be okay."

I looked at Sarah. She had the gun raised, and she was repeating angrily, "Call DeGroot!"

I took out my notepad and made the call. I swept the camera around, to ill.u.s.trate the situation. Sarah gave detailed instructions to De Groot, a procedure for transferring authority over Mosala's supercomputer account.

De Groot seemed to be in shock at first, stunned to learn of Sarah's allegiance; she complied with barely a word. Then her anger boiled to the surface, and she interjected sardonically, "All your resources and expertise, and you couldn't even have an academic account hacked open7"

Sarah was almost apologetic. "Not for lack of trying. But Violet was paranoid, she had good protection."

De Groot was incredulous. "Better than Thought Craft's?"

"What?"

De Groot addressed me. "They pulled a childish stunt, when Wendy was in Toronto. They hacked into Kaspar and had it spouting their stupid theories. All for the sake of what? Intimidation? The programmers had to shut it down and go to backups. Wendy didn't even know what it meant-until I had to tell her who was trying to kill her daughter."

I heard Akili, still on the floor at my feet, inhale sharply. And then I understood, too.

Free fall.

Sarah frowned, irritated by the distraction. "She's lying." She took out her own notepad and checked something, still holding the gun on me. "Break the connection, Andrew." I did.

Akili said, "Sarah? Have you been following Distress?" "No. I've been busy." She examined her notepad warily, as if it were a bomb that needed defusing. Mosala's work was all there in her hands now, and she had to be sure she destroyed it, thoroughly and irrevocably, without letting it taint her.

Akili persisted. "You've lost, Sarah. The Aleph moment has pa.s.sed." She glanced up from the screen at me. "Would you shut ver up? I don't want to hurt ver, but-"

328.

I said, "Distress is a plague of mixing with information. I thought it was an organic virus, but Kaspar proves that it can't be."

Sarah scowled. "What are you saying? You think De Groot read the finished TOE paper, and became the Keystone?" She held up her notepad triumphantly, with an audit trail displayed. "n.o.body's read the paper. n.o.body's accessed the final results."

"Except the author. Wendy sent Violet a Kaspar clonelet. It wrote the paper, it pulled all the calculations together. And it's become the Keystone."

Sarah was incredulous. "A piece of software7."

Akili said, "Scan the nets for lucid Distress victims. Hear what they have to say."

"If this is some kind of ridiculous bluff, you're wasting-"

Sisyphus interrupted cheerfully, "This pattern of information requires itself to be encoded in germanium phosphide crystals, in an artifact designed in collaboration with organic-"

Sarah screamed at me wordlessly, waving the gun above her head, casting wild belligerent shadows on the walls of the tent. I hit the MUTE b.u.t.ton and killed the audio; the declaration continued silently, in text flowing across the screen. My mind was reeling at the implications-but I'd lost my death wish, and Sarah had my full attention.

Akili spoke calmly but urgently. "Listen to me. Distress numbers must be exploding already. And with a software Keystone-a machine world view-the mixing's going to keep wrecking people's minds until someone reads the TOE paper."

Sarah was unmoved. "You're wrong. There is no Keystone. We've won: we've left the last question unanswered." She smiled at me suddenly, radiantly, lost in some private apotheosis. "It doesn't matter how small the loophole is, the residue of uncertainty; in the future, we'll know how to enlarge it. And we'll never be brute machines, we'll never be mere physical beings ... so long as there's still that hope of transcen-dence."

I kept my expression deadpan. The music swelled. The two tall Polynesian women-militia members?-creeping in behind her raised their truncheons and struck together; she went down cold.

One of them dropped to her knees to inspect Sarah; the other eyed me curiously. "So what was her problem?"

"She was high on something." Akili climbed to vis feet beside me.

329.

I said, "She came in here ranting, stole vis notepad. We couldn't get any sense out of her."

"Is that true?"

Akili nodded meekly. The militia members looked suspicious. They took possession of the gun, with obvious distaste-but handed Akili the notepad. "Okay. We'll take her to the first aid tent. Some people just don't know how to enjoy themselves."

"We should restart Mosala's dispatch procedure. Scatter the TOE over the net." Akili sat beside me, tense with urgency, the notepad in one hand.

I struggled to focus my thoughts. The situation eclipsed everything which had happened between us-but I still couldn't look ver in the eye. Akili's knowledge miner had already counted more than a hundred new cases of Distress in five minutes-via media reports of people dropping in the streets.

I said, "We can't scatter it. Not until we know if that would make things better, or worse. All your models, all your predictions, have failed. Maybe Kaspar proves that the mixing is real-but everything else is still guesswork. Do you want to send every TOE theorist on the planet insane?"

Akili turned on me angrily. "It won't do that! This is the cure as well as the cause. It just needs one last step. It just needs a human interpretation." But ve did not sound convinced. Maybe the whole truth was even worse than the distorted glimpse which led to Distress. Maybe there was nothing ahead but madness. "Do you want me to prove that? Do you want me to read it first?"

Ve raised the notepad; I grabbed vis arm. "Don't be stupid! There are too few people who even half understand what's going on, to risk losing one of you."

We sat there, frozen. I stared at my hand where it held ver; I could see where I'd broken the skin, striking vis face.

I said, "You think Kaspar's view is too much for most people to swallow? You think someone has to step in and interpret it? To bridge the difference in perspectives?

"Then you don't want an expert-in TOEs, or in Anthrocosmology. You want a science journalist."

330.

Akili let me drag the notepad from vis hand.

I thought of the hopeless screaming woman thrashing on the floor in Miami, and the briefly lucid victims who'd clung to their sanity only minutes longer. I had no wish to follow them.

If there was one remaining purpose to my life, though, this was it: to prove that the truth could always be faced-explained, demystified, accepted. This was my job, this was my vocation. I had one last chance to try to live up to it.

I stood. "I'll have to leave the camp. I can't concentrate with all this noise. But I'll do it."

Akili was huddled on the ground with vis head bowed. Ve said quietly, without looking up, "I know you will. I trust you."

I left the tent quickly, and headed south. Stars still showed dimly in half the pale sky; the wind from the reefs was colder than ever.

A hundred meters into the desert, I stopped and raised the notepad. I said, "Show me A Tentative Theory of Everything, by Violet Mosala."

I took off the blindfold.

331.

30.I kept walking as I read, half-consciously retracing the steps I'd taken some eight hours before. The reef-rock hadn't a.s.sured in the quake, but the ground's texture seemed to have been transformed in some subtle way. Maybe the pressure waves had realigned the polymer chains, forging a new kind of mineral; the island's first ever geological metamorphosis.

Out in the desert, away from all the factions of Anthrocosmology, the anarchists' heedless rejoicing, the mounting reports of Distress, I did not know what I believed. If I'd felt the weight of ten billion people slipping into madness around me, I know I would have been paralyzed. I must have been saved in part by lingering skepticism-and in part by sheer curiosity. If I'd surrendered to the appropriate human responses-blind panic and awe-struck humility-in the face of the magnitude of everything which supposedly lay in the balance, I would have thrown the poisoned chalice of the notepad away.

So I emptied my mind of everything else, and let the words and equations take over. The Kaspar clone let had done a good job; I had no trouble understanding the paper.

The first section contained no surprises at all. It summarized Mosala's ten canonical experiments, and the way in which she'd computed their symmetry-breaking properties. It ended with the TOE equation itself, which linked the ten parameters of broken symmetry to a sum over all topologies. The measure Mosala had chosen to give weight to each topology was the simplest, the most elegant, the most obvious of all the possible choices. Her equation couldn't grant the universe the "inevitability" of freezing out of pre-s.p.a.ce 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 332.

together, were able to coexist. In an imaginary s.p.a.ce 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 encode7 A second, a.n.a.logous 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 333.

of time and s.p.a.ce-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; n.o.body 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-s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce.

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, a.s.sailed 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- 334.

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 technop.o.r.n, 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 mat' ter, 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.

335.

My claustrophobia evaporated. To inhabit this universe-to coexist with anything-1 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-s.p.a.ce-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, neurotransmit' ter diffusion. A chemistry of membranes, ion pumps, proteins, amines. All the detailed behavior of molecules and atoms, all the laws governing their necessary const.i.tuents. 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 understanding.

There was no bedrock, no fixed point, no place to rest.