"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—"
"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 as every biological ancestor or cousin requires their own quota of space 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 god-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-space? 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 embarrassed 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 people? I no longer knew what was reasonable. It was three in the morning; I was damp, freezing cold, captive, 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 déjà 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 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?"
I pleaded, "Why should it? If Mosala is the Keystone, she doesn't need this"—I tugged at my hands, wishing I could point at the travesty—"to explain her own existence! Her TOE doesn't predict it, doesn't allow it!"
"No, it doesn't. But her TOE can't survive its own expression. It can make her the Keystone. It can grant her a seamless past. It can manufacture twenty billion years of cosmology. But once it's been stated explicitly, it will resolve itself into pure mathematics, pure logic." He joined his hands together, fingers interlocked—and then dragged them slowly apart. "You can't hold a universe together with a system which spells out its own lack of physical content. There's no… friction anymore. No fire in the equations."
Behind him, the tapestry was coming apart; all the ornate dazzling patterns of knowledge were disintegrating. Not devoured by entropy, or halted and reversed like the galaxies' flight; the process was simply pushing on, relentlessly, toward a conclusion which had been implicit from the start. Every possible rearrangement of meaning had been extracted from the Aleph 'knot'—except the very last. It wasn't a knot at all: it was a simple loop, leading nowhere. The colors of a thousand different explanatory threads had encoded only the lack of awareness of their hidden connections. And the universe which had bootstrapped itself into existence by spinning those explanations into a billion tangled hierarchies of ever-increasing complexity… was finally unwinding into a naked statement of its own tautology.
A plain white circle spun in the darkness for a second, and then the screen switched off.
The demonstration was over. Three began to untie me from the chair.
I said, "There's something I have to tell you. I've kept it from everyone—SeeNet, Conroy, Kuwale. Sarah Knight never found out. No one else knows, except me and Mosala. But you really need to hear it."
Twenty said, "We're listening." She stood by the blank display screen, watching me patiently, the model of polite interest.
This was the last chance I had to change their minds. I struggled to concentrate, to put myself in their place. Would it make any difference to their plans, if they knew that Buzzo was wrong? Probably not. With or without other candidates to take her place, Mosala would be equally dangerous. If Nishide died, his intellectual legacy could still be pursued—and they'd simply race to protect his successors, and to slaughter Mosala's.
I said, "Violet Mosala completed her TOE back in Cape Town. The computing she's doing now is all just cross-checking; the real work was finished months ago. So… she's already become the Keystone. And nothing's happened, the sky isn't falling, we're all still here." I tried to laugh. "The experiment you think is too dangerous to risk is already over. And we've survived."
Twenty continued to watch me, with no change of expression. A wave of intense self-consciousness swept over me. I was suddenly aware of every muscle in my face, the angle of my head, the stoop of my shoulders, the direction of my gaze. I felt like a barely man-shaped lump of clay, which would need to be molded, painstakingly, into a convincing likeness of a human being speaking the truth.
And I knew that every bone, every pore, every cell in my body was betraying the effort I was making to fake it.
Rule number one: never let on that there are any rules at all.
Twenty nodded at Three, and he untied me from the chair. I was taken back to the hold, lowered in with the winch, and bound to Kuwale again.
As the others began to climb out on the rope ladder, Three hesitated. He crouched down beside me and whispered, like a good friend offering painful but essential advice: "I don't blame you for trying, man. But hasn't anyone ever told you that you're the worst liar in the world?"