Distress

29

The camp was in jubilant disarray. There were thousands of people out in the moonlight, checking each other for injuries, raising collapsed tents, celebrating victory, mourning the city—or soberly reminding anyone who’d listen that the war might not be over. No one knew for certain what forces, what weapons, might have been concealed far from the city, safe from the devastation of the center’s collapse—or what might yet crawl out of the lagoon.

I found Akili, unharmed, helping with the marquee which had fallen onto the water pumps. We embraced. I was bruised all over, my face was caked with blood, and my thrice re-opened wound was sending out flashes of pain like electric arcs—but I’d never felt more intensely alive.

Akili pulled free of me gently. “At six a.m., Mosala’s TOE will be posted on the nets. Will you sit up with me and wait?” Ve looked me in the eye, hiding nothing—afraid of the plague, afraid effacing it alone.

I squeezed vis arm. “Of course.”

I went to the latrines to clean up. Mercifully, the sewage conduits remained open and the raw waste previously discharged hadn’t been forced back up to the surface by the compression waves of the quake. I washed the blood off my face, and then cautiously unbandaged my stomach.

The wound was still bleeding thinly. The cut from the insect’s laser ran deeper than I’d realized; when I bent over the washbasin, I could feel the two walls of flesh on either side of the gash—some seven or eight centimeters long—slide against each other, disconnected except at the ends. The burn had cauterized tissue all the way through the abdominal wall—and now the dead seam had split open.

I looked around; there was no one else in sight. I thought: This is not a good idea. But I’d already been pumped full of antibiotics against the risk of internal infection…

I closed my eyes and forced three fingers deep into the wound. I touched the small intestine, blood-warm not snake-cold, resilient, muscular and unslick beneath my fingertips. This was the part of me which had almost killed me—subverted by foreign enzymes, mercilessly wringing me dry. But the body is not a traitor: it only obeys the laws it must obey in order to exist at all.

Pain caught up with me, and I almost froze—I imagined spending my life as a Bonaparte, or a self-doubting Thomas—but I jerked my hand free and then leaned against the plastic barrel of the washbasin, punching the side.

I wanted to stare into a mirror and proclaim: This is it. I know who I am, now. And I accept, absolutely, my life as a machine driven by blood, as a creature of cells and molecules, as a prisoner of the TOE.

There were no mirrors, though. Not in the latrines of a refugee camp, not even on Stateless.

And if I waited a few more hours, the words would carry more weight—because by dawn, I’d finally know the whole truth about the TOE which enabled me to speak them.

On my way back to meet Akili, I took out my notepad and scanned the international nets. The anarchists’ strike against the mercenaries was being talked about, breathlessly, everywhere.

SeeNet’s coverage was the best, though.

It started with a view of the lagoon itself, huge and eerily calm in the moonlight, almost a perfect circle—like some ancient flooded volcanic crater, an echo of the hidden guyot below. I felt, in spite of everything, a pang of sorrow at the death of the mercenaries whose faces I’d never seen, who’d been betrayed by solid rock, and had drowned in terror for nothing but money and the rights of EnGeneUity’s shareholders.

The journalist spoke—a woman, out-of-shot, a professional with optic nerve taps. “It may take decades to reveal exactly who funded the invasion of Stateless, and why. It’s not even clear, as I speak, whether or not the desperate sacrifice the residents of this island have made will save them from the aggressors.

“But I do know this. Violet Mosala—the Nobel laureate who was evacuated from Stateless in a critical condition, less than twenty-four hours ago—had intended to make this island her new home. She had hoped to lend the renegades enough respectability to enable a group of nations opposed to the UN boycott to speak their minds, at last. And if the invasion was an effort to silence those dissenting voices, it now seems doomed to failure. Violet Mosala is in a coma, fighting for her life after an attack by a violent cult—and the people of Stateless will be struggling harder than ever to survive the next few years, even if peace has come to them tonight—but the astonishing courage of both will not be easily forgotten.”

There was more, with some of my footage of Mosala at the conference, and this journalist’s own coverage of the shelling, the dignified exodus from the city, the establishment of the camps, and an attack by one of the mercenaries’ robots.

It was all immaculately shot and edited. It was powerful, but never exploitative. And from start to finish, it was unashamed—but absolutely honest—propaganda for the renegades.

I could not have done it half as well.

The best was yet to come, though.

As the view returned to the dark waters of the lagoon, the journalist signed off.

“This is Sarah Knight, for SeeNet News, on Stateless.”

As far as the personal com nets were concerned, Sarah Knight was still incommunicado in Kyoto. Lydia wouldn’t take my call—but I found a SeeNet production assistant willing to pass on a message to Sarah. She called me half an hour later, and Akili and I dragged the story out of her.

“When Nishide became ill in Kyoto, I told the Japanese authorities exactly what I thought was happening—but his pneumococcus sequenced as an unengineered strain, and they refused to believe that it had been introduced by a trojan.” Trojans were bacteria which could reproduce themselves and their hidden pathogenic cargo—without symptoms or an immune response—for dozens of generations… and then self-destruct without a trace, leaving behind a massive but apparently natural infection to swamp the body’s defenses. “After making so much of a stink—and no one believing me, not even Nishide’s family—I thought it would be wise to keep a low profile.”

We weren’t able to talk for long, Sarah had to get to an interview with one of the militia’s divers, but just as she was about to break the connection, I said haltingly, “The Mosala documentary. You deserved the commission. You should have got it.”

She made as if to laughingly dismiss the whole question as ancient history—but then she stopped herself, and said calmly: “That’s true. I spent six months making sure I was better prepared than anyone else— and you still came along and stole it in a day. Because you were Lydia’s blue-eyed boy, and she wanted to keep you happy.”

I couldn’t believe how hard it was to get the words out. The injustice was blindingly obvious—and I’d admitted it to myself a thousand times—but some splinter of pride and self-righteousness resisted every step of the way.

I said, “I abused my power. I'm sorry.”

Sarah nodded slowly, lips pursed. “Okay. Apology accepted, Andrew. On one condition: you and Akili agree to be interviewed. The invasion is only half the story here—and I don’t want the fuckers who put Violet in a coma to get away with anything. I want to hear exactly what happened on that boat.”

I turned to Akili. Ve said, “Sure.”

We exchanged coordinates. Sarah was on the other side of the island, but she was working her way around to all of the camps, hitching rides with the militia.

“At five a.m.?” she suggested.

Akili laughed, flashing a conspiratorial glance at me. “Why not? No one’s sleeping tonight, on Stateless.”

The camp was full of the sounds of celebration. People streamed past the tent, laughing and shouting, shrunken silhouettes against the moonlight. Music from the satellites—from Tonga, from Berlin, from Kinshasa—blasted out of the main square—and someone, somehow, had found or made firecrackers. I was still intoxicated with adrenaline, but ragged with fatigue—I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join the party, or curl up and hibernate for a fortnight. I’d promised to do neither.

Akili and I sat on the sleeping bag—warmly dressed, with the tent flap closed; the electricity was fading. We passed the hours talking, scanning the nets, lapsing into awkward silences. I longed to bring ver, somehow, inside the aura of invulnerability I felt, having survived my own imagined apocalypse. I wanted to comfort ver in any way I could. My judgment was paralyzed, though; vis body language had become opaque to me, and I had no sense of how or when to touch ver. We’d lain together naked, but I couldn’t keep that memory, that image, from signifying more to me than it could ever mean to ver. So we sat apart.

I asked why ve hadn’t mentioned the mixing plague to Sarah.

“Because she might have taken it seriously enough to spread word, start a panic.”

“Don’t you think people might panic less if they knew the cause?”

Akili snorted. “You don’t believe what I’ve told you about the cause. Do you think people would react to the news with anything but incomprehension or hysteria? Anyway, after the Aleph moment, the ‘victims’ will know far more than anyone who hasn’t mixed could ever tell them. And there’ll be no question of panic, then: Distress itself will have vanished.” Most of this was said with absolute conviction; it was only with the last pronouncement that ve seemed to waver.

I asked tentatively, “So why did the moderates get it so wrong? They had their own supercomputers. They seemed to know as much about Anthrocosmology as anyone. If they could be mistaken about the unraveling…”

Akili gave me a long, hard look—still trying to judge how far ve could trust me. “I don’t know that they’re mistaken about the unraveling. I hope they are but I don’t know it for sure.”

I thought that over. “You mean the distortion in the mixing before the Aleph moment could be enough to have prevented the unraveling, so far—but once the TOE is completed…?”

“That’s right.”

I felt a chill, more of incomprehension than fear. “And you still tried to protect Mosala? Believing there was a chance that she could end everything?”

Akili stared at the floor, trying to find the right words. “If it does happen, we won’t even have time to know it—but I still think it would have been wrong to kill her. Unless the unraveling was absolutely certain, and there was no other way to stop it. No one can deal with an unknown chance of the end of the universe. How many people can you kill, for a cause like that? One? A hundred? A million? It’s like… trying to manipulate an infinitely heavy weight, on the end of an infinitely long lever. However fine your judgment is, you know it can’t be good enough. All you can do is admit that, and walk away.”

Before I could reply, Sisyphus said, “I think you’ll want to see this.”

The fishing boat with the moderates had been intercepted off the coast of New Zealand. The news footage showed people in handcuffs being herded ashore from a patrol boat onto floodlit docks, eyes downcast. “Five,” Giorgio, who’d lectured me on the unraveling. “Twenty,” who’d refused to let me leave the boat with their confession in my gut. Others were missing, though.

Then sailors followed, carrying the bodies on stretchers. They were covered in sheets—but the umale, Three, was unmistakable. The journalist spoke of suicide pacts. Helen Wu was mentioned by name, dead from poison.

The first scenes of the arrest had filled me with a buzz of righteous euphoria at the prospect of these fanatics facing justice—but I felt nothing but enervating horror as I tried to understand what had gone on in their minds, in the last moments. Maybe they’d seen the reports of ranting Distress victims—and some had concluded that the unraveling was inevitable, others that it was now impossible. Or maybe the whole convoluted logic of their actions had simply unwound, leaving them staring at the unadorned truth of what they’d done.

I couldn’t judge them. I didn’t know how I could have clawed my way up, if I’d spiraled down into the nightmare of believing what they’d believed. I might have struggled hard to reason all of Anthrocosmology out of existence—but if I’d failed, would I have had the humility (or the genocidal irresponsibility) to walk away from the implications, to refuse to intervene?

Outside, people were roaring with laughter. In the square, someone turned the music up insanely loud for a second, distorting it into booming bass static, shaking the ground.

Akili held conference with the other mainstream ACs. Someone was hacking into a WHO computer, to get the unofficial latest figures for reported cases of Distress.

“Nine thousand and twenty.” Ve turned to me with a sharp intake of breath; I didn’t know if it was panic, or the exhilaration of free fall. “Tripled in two days. And you still think it’s a virus?”

“No.” Even without this inexplicable burst of contagion, I knew my targeted neuroactive mutant bioweapon theory wouldn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. “But we can still both be wrong, can’t we?”

“Maybe.”

I hesitated. “If it’s this fast now, then after the Aleph moment…?”

“I don’t know. It could sweep the planet in a week. Or an hour. The faster the better—less suffering for the people who see it coming, but don’t yet understand.” Akili closed vis eyes, began to put vis face in vis hands, stopped, clenched vis fists. “When it comes, it better be good. The truth you can’t escape had better be sweet.”

I moved closer and put my arm around ver, and swayed our bodies gently together from side to side.

Sarah arrived, barely a minute later than promised. She sat on my suitcase, and we talked for her camera eyes. Sometimes we had to shout to make ourselves heard—but software would bring the noise of the celebrations down to an atmospheric murmur.

Sarah and I had never been more than casual acquaintances—I’d only spoken to her in person a dozen times before—but for me, she came from the world beyond Stateless, the time before the conference; she was living proof of that era of sanity. And it only took one third party, there in the flesh, to anchor me to normality—to render me certain, again, that Akili was wrong. Distress was a mundane horror, no different from cholera. The universe was oblivious to human explanation. The laws of physics always had been and always would be solid—all the way down to the bedrock of the TOE—whether or not they were understood.

And—though we weren’t going out in real-time—she’d brought her audience with her. Under the potential scrutiny of ten million people, what else could I do but think what they expected me to think, give in to their consensus, conform?

Akili, too, seemed to relax—but whether Sarah’s presence anchored ver in the same way, or merely served as a welcome distraction, I couldn’t tell.

Sarah guided us deftly through our roles in Violet Mosala: Victim of Anthrocosmology. The deposition I’d made for Joe Kepa had stuck to the legally pertinent facts; this interview pretended to probe the moral and philosophical depths of the ACs’ conspiracy. But Akili and I both talked of the fishing boat, and the moderates’ insane beliefs, as if we had no doubt that their whole world view—as much as their violent methods—deserved only contempt; as if nothing remotely similar could have crossed our own minds in a thousand years.

And it all became news. It all became history. Sarah was doing her job flawlessly—but for the record, the three of us willingly steam-rollered flat every unspoken fear, every qualm, every trace of doubt that the world could ever be different from the nets’ pale imitation of it.

We were almost finished—I was on the verge of recounting the events in the ambulance—when my notepad chimed. It was a coded trill for a call to be taken only in private. If I answered, the communications software would shift to deepest encryption, automatically—but if the notepad sensed other people within earshot, it would refuse to maintain the connection.

I excused myself, and left the tent. The sky showed a faint wash of gray over the stars. Music and laughter still flooded out of the square behind the markets, and people were still roaming the camp, but I found a secluded spot nearby.

De Groot said, “Andrew? Are you all right? Can you talk?” She looked haggard and tense.

“I'm fine. A little bruised by the quake, that’s all.” I hesitated; I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question.

“Violet died. About twenty minutes ago.” De Groot’s voice faltered, but she steeled herself and pushed on wearily. “No one knows exactly why, yet. Some kind of trap sprung by one of the anti-viral magic bullets—maybe an enzyme in concentrations too weak to detect, which converted it into a toxin.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “They turned her body into a minefield. What did she ever do to deserve that? She tried to find a few simple truths, a few simple patterns to the world.”

I said, “They’ve been caught. They’ll stand trial. And Violet will be remembered… for centuries.” It was all hollow comfort, but I didn’t know what else to say.

And I’d thought I’d been prepared for this news, ever since I’d heard she was in coma—but it still came like a sudden blow to the head… as if the anarchists’ astonishing reversal of fortune, and Sarah’s miraculous reappearance, had somehow rewritten the odds. I covered my eyes with my forearm for a moment, and saw her sitting in her hotel room beneath the skylight, raked by the sun, reaching out and taking my hand. Even if I'm wrong… there has to be something down there. Or nobody could even touch.

De Groot said, “How soon can you get off the island?” She sounded more than a little concerned—which was touching, but strange. We’d hardly been that close.

I laughed dismissively. “Why? The anarchists have won, the worst is over. I'm sure of that.” De Groot did not look sure at all. “Have you heard something? From… your political contacts?” There was a sudden chill in my bowels, like the disbelief I’d felt before each new spasm from the cholera: It can’t be happening again.

“This isn’t about the war. But—you’re stuck, aren’t you?”

“For now. Are you going to tell me what this—?”

“We had a message. Just after Violet died. A threat from the Anthrocosmologists.” Her face contorted with anger. “Not the ones on the boat, obviously. So it must have come from the ones who killed Buzzo.”

“Saying what?”

“Shut down all of Violet’s calculations. Present them with a verified audit trail for her supercomputer account, proving that all the records of her TOE work have been erased without being copied or read.”

I made a sound of derision. “Yeah? Where do they think that will get them? All her methods and ideas have been published already. Someone else will duplicate everything… in a year at the most.”

De Groot seemed indifferent to the ACs’ motives; she just wanted an end to the violence. “I’ve shown the message to the police, here—but they say there’s nothing anyone can do, with Stateless the way it is.” She caught herself; she still hadn’t spelled it out. “The threat is, we post the audit trail within an hour—or they kill you.”

“Right.” I could see the logic of it: De Groot, and Mosala’s family, would all be too well guarded to threaten directly—but they’d hardly sit back and let the extremists kill me, after I’d helped get Violet off Stateless.

“The calculations were already completed when I logged on—lucky Violet programmed her net broadcast to wait until the hour.” De Groot laughed softly. “Her idea of making it a formal occasion. We’ll do what they’ve asked, of course. The police advised me not to call you—and I know the news does you no good—but I still thought you had a right to be told.”

I said, “Don’t do anything, don’t erase a single file. I’ll call you back, very soon.” I broke the connection.

I stood there in the alley for several seconds, listening to the wild music, chilled by the wind, thinking it through.

When I walked into the tent, Sarah and Akili were laughing. I’d meant to invent an excuse to get Sarah out quietly, so we could both just walk away—but it struck me at that moment that it would do me no good. Buzzo had been killed with a gunshot, but their favored methods were biological. If I fled, the chances were that I’d be carrying the weapon inside me.

I reached down and grabbed Akili by the front of vis jacket and sent ver sprawling backward onto the floor. Ve stared up at me, faking shock, anguish, bewilderment. I knelt down over ver and punched ver in the face, clumsily—surprised that I’d even got this far; I was no good at violence, and I’d expected ver to defend verself with all the agility ve’d demonstrated on the boat, long before I’d lain a finger on ver.

Sarah was outraged. “What are you doing? Andrew!” Akili just stared at me speechless, hurt, still playing dumb. I lifted ver half off the ground with one hand—ve barely resisted—then punched ver again.

I said evenly, “I want the antidote. Now. Do you understand? No more threats to De Groot, no files destroyed, no negotiations—you’re just going to hand it over.”

Akili searched my face, clinging to the charade, protesting innocence with vis eyes like some wrongfully accused lover. For a moment, I wanted to hurt ver badly; I had idiot visions of some bloody catharsis, washing the pain of betrayal away. But the thought of Sarah recording it all kept me in check; I never found out what I would have done, if we’d been alone.

And my rage slowly ebbed. Ve’d infected me with cholera, slaughtered three people, manipulated my pathetic emotional needs, used me as a hostage… but ve hadn’t, remotely, betrayed me. It had all been an act from the start; there’d never been anything between us to be sacrificed to the cause. And if the solace I thought we’d given each other had only been in my head, then so was the humiliation.

I’d live.

Sarah said sharply, “Andrew!” I glanced at her over my shoulder; she was livid, she must have thought I’d gone insane. I explained impatiently, “That call was from Karin De Groot. Violet’s dead. And now the extremists have threatened to kill me if De Groot doesn’t trash the TOE calculations.” Akili mimed grave consternation; I laughed in vis face.

“Okay. But what makes you think Akili’s working for the extremists? It could be anyone in the camp—”

“Akili is the only person besides me and De Groot who knew about Mosala’s joke on the ACs.”

“What joke?”

“In the ambulance.” I’d almost forgotten; I hadn’t reached the end of the story for Sarah. “Violet programmed software to write up the calculations, polish the TOE, and dispatch it over the net. And the work’s all completed; De Groot only caught it before it was sent.”

Sarah fell silent. I turned to her warily, still expecting Akili to make a move once my guard was down.

She had a gun in her hand. “Stand up please, Andrew.”

I laughed wearily. “You still don’t believe me? You’d rather trust this piece of shit—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 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 illustrate 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 open?”

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 passed.”

She glanced up from the screen at me. “Would you shut ver up? I don’t want to hurt ver, but—”

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. “Nobody’s read the paper. Nobody’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 software?”

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 button 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 transcendence."

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.

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.”

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.

30

I kept walking as I read, half-consciously retracing the steps I’d taken some eight hours before. The reef-rock hadn’t fissured 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-space 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 together, were able to coexist. In an imaginary space 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 encode?

A second, analogous 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 of time and space—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; nobody 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-space 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 space.

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, assailed 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—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 technoporn, 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 matter, 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.

My claustrophobia evaporated. To inhabit this universe—to coexist with anything—I 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-space—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, neurotransmitter diffusion. A chemistry of membranes, ion pumps, proteins, amines. All the detailed behavior of molecules and atoms, all the laws governing their necessary constituents. 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.

I was endlessly treading water.

I sank to my knees, fighting away vertigo. I lay face down, clinging to the reef-rock. The cool solidity of the ground refuted nothing.

But did it need to? Held up by aloof, timeless laws, or held up by the bootstrap of explanation… it endured, regardless.

I thought of the inland divers who’d descended through every layer of the unnatural ecology which kept this island afloat, who’d witnessed the subterranean ocean ceaselessly corroding the rock from below.

They’d walked away—dazed, but exalted.

I could do the same.

I rose to my feet unsteadily. I thought it was over: I thought I’d come through the mixing, unscathed. Kaspar could not have become the Keystone—and yet somehow the Aleph moment must have passed safely, removing the distortion, banishing Distress. Maybe some mainstream AC had hacked into Mosala’s account upon learning of her death and had grasped some crucial error in Kaspar’s analysis before I’d read a word of it.

Akili was approaching—an indistinct figure in the distance, but I knew it could be no one else. I raised a hand tentatively, then waved in triumph. The figure waved back, stretching vis giant shadow west across the desert.

And everything I’d learned came together, like a thunderclap, like an ambush.

I was the Keystone. I’d explained the universe into being, wrapped it around the seed of this moment, layer after layer of beautiful convoluted necessity. The blazing wasteland of galaxies, twenty billion years of cosmic evolution, ten billion human cousins, forty billion species of life— the whole elaborate ancestry of consciousness flowed out of this singularity. I had no need to reach out and imagine every molecule, every planet, every face. This moment encoded them all.

My parents, friends, lovers… Gina, Angelo, Lydia, Sarah, Violet Mosala, Bill Munroe, Adelle Vunibobo, Karin De Groot. Akili. Even the helpless bellowing strangers, victims of the same revelation, had only been mouthing distorted echoes of my own horror at the understanding that I’d created them all.

This was the solipsistic madness I’d seen reflected in that first poor woman’s face. This was Distress: not fear of the glorious machinery of the TOE, but the realization that I was alone in the darkness with a hundred billion dazzling cobwebs wrapped around my non-existent eyes—

—and now that I knew it, the breath of my own understanding would sweep them all away.

Nothing could have been created without the full knowledge of how it was done: without the unified TOE, physical and informational. No Keystone could have acted in innocence, forging the universe unaware.

But that knowledge was impossible to contain. Kaspar had been right. The moderates had been right. Everything which had breathed fire into the equations would now unravel into empty tautology.

I raised my face to the blank sky, ready to part the veil of the world and find nothing behind it.

Then Akili called my name, and I stopped dead. I looked down at ver—beautiful as ever, unreachable as ever.

Unknowable as ever.

And I saw the way through.

I saw the flaw in Kaspar’s reasoning which had kept it from becoming the Keystone: an unexamined assumption—an unasked question, not yet true or false.

Could one mind, alone, explain another into being?

The TOE equation said nothing. The canonical experiments said nothing. There was nowhere to look for the answer but my own memories, my own life.

And all I had to do to tear myself out of the center of the universe—all I had to do to prevent the unraveling—was give up one last illusion.