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 me to abandon my stubbornness at any moment and finally embrace their ideas.
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 realtime, 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?”
Chapter 23
When I’d finished my account of the killers’ media presentation, Kuwale said flatly, “Don’t kid yourself that you ever had a chance. No one could have talked them out of it.”
“No?” I didn’t believe ver. They’d talked themselves into it, systematically enough. There had to be a way to unravel their own supposedly watertight logic before their eyes – to force them to confront its absurdity.
I hadn’t been able to find it, though. I hadn’t been able to get inside their heads.
I checked the time with Witness ; it was almost dawn. I couldn’t stop shivering; the slick of algae on the floor felt damper than ever, and the hard polymer beneath had grown cold as steel.
“Mosala will be under close protection.” Kuwale had been despondent when I left ver, but in my absence ve seemed to have recovered a streak of defiant optimism. “I sent a copy of your mutant cholera genome to conference security, so they know the kind of risk she’s facing – even if she won’t acknowledge it herself. And there are plenty of other mainstream AC back on Stateless.”
“No one back on Stateless knows that Wu is involved – do they? And anyway … Wu could have infected Mosala with a bioweapon, days ago. Do you think they would have confessed everything, on camera, if the assassination wasn’t already a fait accompli ? They wanted to ensure that they’d receive due credit, they had to get in early and avoid the rush – before everyone from PACDF to EnGeneUity comes under suspicion. But it would have to be the last thing they’d do, before confirming that’s she dead, and fleeing Stateless.” Meaning that nothing I’d said above deck could have made the slightest difference? Not quite. They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.
Kuwale fell silent. I listened for distant voices or footsteps, but there was nothing: the creaking of the hull, the white noise of a thousand waves.
So much for my grandiose visions of rebirth through adversity as a fearless champion of technolibération . All I’d done was stumble into a vicious game between rival lunatic god-makers – and been cut back down to my proper station in life: conveyor of someone else’s messages.
Kuwale said, “Do you think they’re monitoring us, right now? Up on deck?”
“Who knows?” I looked around the dark hold; I wasn’t even sure if the faint gray light which might have been the far wall was real, or just retinal static and imagination. I laughed. “What do they think we’re going to do? Jump six meters into the air, punch a hole in the hatch, and then swim a hundred kilometers – all dressed as Siamese twins?”
I felt a sudden sharp tug on the rope around my hands. Irritated, I almost protested aloud – but I stopped myself in time. It seemed Kuwale had made good use of an hour without vis wrists jammed between our backs. Working some slack into vis own bonds – and then hiding the loop between vis hands … which in turn might have helped ver keep them slightly apart, when we were tied together again? Whatever houdini ve’d used, after a few more minutes of painstaking manipulation the tension on the rope vanished. Kuwale pulled vis arms free of the space between us, and stretched them wide.
I couldn’t help feeling a rush of pure, dumb elation – but I waited for the inevitable sound of boots on the deck. IR cameras in the hold, monitored non-stop by software, would have registered this transgression easily.
The silence stretched on. Grabbing us must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when they intercepted my call to Kuwale – if they’d planned it in advance, they would have had handcuffs, at the very least. Maybe their surveillance technology, at short notice, was as down-market as their ropes and nets.
Kuwale shuddered with relief – I envied ver; my own shoulders were painfully cramped – then squeezed vis hands back into the gap.
The polymer rope was slippery, and knotted tight – and Kuwale’s fingernails were cut short (they ended up in my flesh several times). When my hands were finally untied, it was an anticlimax; the surge of elation had long faded, I knew we didn’t have the slightest chance of escape. But anything was better than sitting in the dark and waiting for the honor of announcing Mosala’s death to the world.
The net was made from a smart plastic which adhered selectively to its own opposite surface – presumably for ease of repair – and the join was as strong as the stuff itself. We’d been wrapped tight with our arms behind us, though; now that they were free, there was some slack – four or five centimeters. We rose to our feet awkwardly, shoes slipping on the algal slime. I exhaled, and flattened my stomach – glad of my recent fast.
The first dozen attempts failed. In the dark, it took ten or fifteen minutes of tortuous repositioning to find a way of standing which minimized our combined girth all the way down. It seemed like the kind of arduous, inane activity contestants would have to go through on game shows in Hell. By the time the net touched the floor, I’d lost all feeling in my calves; I took a few steps across the hold and almost keeled over. I could hear the faint click of fingernails slipping over plastic; Kuwale was already working on the rope around vis feet. No one had bothered to bind my legs, the second time; I paced a few meters in the darkness, working out the kinks, making the most of the visceral illusion of freedom while it lasted.
I walked back to where Kuwale was sitting, and bent down until I could make out the whites of vis eyes; ve reached up and pressed a vertical finger to my lips. I nodded assent. So far, it seemed we’d been lucky – no IR camera – but there might still be audio surveillance, and there was no way of knowing how smart the listening software might be.
Kuwale stood up, turned and vanished; vis T-shirt had gone dead, deprived of sunlight for so long. I heard occasional squeaks from the wet soles of vis shoes; ve seemed to be slowly circumnavigating the hold. I had no idea what ve was hoping to find – some unlikely breach in the structure itself? I stood and waited. The faint line of light on the floor was visible again, just barely. Dawn was breaking, and daylight could only mean more people awake on deck.
I heard Kuwale approach; ve tapped my arm, then took my elbow. I followed ver to a corner of the hold. Ve pressed my hand to the wall, about a meter up. Ve’d found some kind of utilities panel – guarded by a protective cover, a small spring-loaded door flush with the wall. I hadn’t noticed it when we were being lowered in – bu
t the walls were heavily stained and spattered, an effective camouflage pattern.
I explored the exposed panel with my fingertips. There was a low voltage DC power socket. Two threaded metal fittings, each a couple of centimeters wide, with flow-control levers beneath them. Whatever they supplied – or whatever they were meant to pump out – they didn’t strike me as much of an asset. Unless Kuwale had visions of flooding the hold, so we could float up to the hatch…?
I almost missed it. At the far right of the panel, there was a shallow-rimmed circular aperture, just five or six millimeters wide.
An optical interface port.
Connected to what? The boat’s main computer? If the vessel’s original design had allowed for carrying cargo, maybe a crew member with a portable terminal would have fed in inventory data from here. In a fishing boat leased to Anthrocosmologists, I didn’t have high hopes that it was configured to do anything at all.
I unbuttoned my shirt, while invoking Witness . The software had a crude “virtual terminal” option – which would let me view any incoming data, and mime-type as if on a keyboard. I unsealed the interface port in my navel, and stood pressed against the wall, trying to align the two connectors. It was awkward – but after wriggling out of the fishing net, this seemed like no challenge at all.
The best I could get was a brief surge of random text – and then an error message from the software itself. It was picking up an answering signal – but the data was scrambled beyond recognition. Both ports were sockets, designed to be joined to an umbilical’s connector. Their identical protective rims kept them too far apart – their photodetectors a millimeter beyond the plane of focus of each other’s signal lasers.
I stepped back, trying not to vent my frustration audibly. Kuwale touched my arm, inquiringly. I put vis hand to my face, shook my head, then guided vis finger to my artificial navel. Ve clapped me on the shoulder: I understand. Okay. We tried.