“Whose E-what?”
“PCAM, the Project for a Christian American Millennium. Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 24. ‘As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.’ Operation E 5-24 is working to develop a ‘headship hormone,’ a female submission synthetic.”
“How’s that your concern?” Don asked, curious but still preoccupied with the room’s cutting-edge wonders.
“Neither we in Kitchener nor our acquaintances in Tetragrammaton believe that it’s in the long-term interest of humanity to take consciousness away from half the population, as E 5-24 is intended to do. So you see, we do occasionally find common ground, and together we intervene. Especially when the interests of religious fundamentalism and the BMSS—excuse me, the bio-managed security state—converge in such a particularly bad synergy.”
“Bio-managed?” Don asked, staring at the holographic displays captioned Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Guangzhou.
“Biotechnology used for social control,” Barakian replied.
“You mean like biometrics? Scans? Face and voice recognition software?”
“That’s part of it. But scanning and analyzing people’s fingerprints, the irises of their eyes, their hand geometries, their gaits, even their DNA—that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It’s an old effort, really. In the Victorian era, it was Cesare Lombroso’s measurements of physiognomic and anatomical features, in an attempt to predetermine criminal ‘types.’ Then, later, studies of XYY genetics. The assumptions that led to the Three Strikes and Megan’s Law disclosure statutes, too—that some people are born with criminal tendencies and cannot be rehabilitated.
“The goal has always been the same: The predetection of social deviance by means of biological science.”
“That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, necessarily,” Don said, examining the Memorial Hall schematics and holos more closely, discovering that the display unit was equipped with a very impressive zoom feature. The more he examined the Hall holo, the less it resembled a straightforward octagonal auditorium, and the more it looked like a pagoda that had swallowed a sports stadium.
“No, not necessarily,” Barakian agreed, “but applying the ‘preemptive strike’ to criminal justice does require dissolving the individual into a codable risk factor set. So that the person and his movements can be monitored, via database, within the larger social control system. The BMSS ‘watches your shit,’ so to speak, but it’s less about Big Brother who knows everything about your bowel habits, and more about lots of Little Brothers who, given the opportunity, might go tell everything they can learn about what you’re doing with your dookie.”
Shocked, startled, and appalled, Don burst out laughing. He’d heard oldsters go on before about all the freedoms that had supposedly been lost since ’01, but this was a whole new level of that.
“But isn’t that the whole social deal?” he asked, after his laughter had subsided. “Citizens sacrifice personal freedoms and rights to a government, and in return the government ensures law, order, and security.”
“Yes,” Barakian said. “But events like the World Trade Center and Balinese resort attacks, which ushered in tighter security at this powerhouse starting more than a decade ago, also made clear that it’s impossible to ensure total security. The ‘deal’ itself was always a myth, to some degree. Unfortunately, the response of the state has been to deny all the more forcefully that the deal was a myth—and to demand the sacrifice of ever more rights and personal freedoms in pursuit of ever more illusory security. The more a nation looks like a fortress from the outside, the more it feels like a prison on the inside. That’s how you end up with military takeovers after WMD attacks, and something like the SCANCI—the Selective Criminality, Aberrance, and NonConformity Index.”
Don had heard of the “scan-key,” or “skanky,” as it was more colloquially known. He supposed that his own file in that database had grown considerably over the last few months.
“But what can you do?” Don asked with a shrug of resignation. “There are real threats, real dangers. You can’t just give up on security—”
“Which we obviously haven’t,” Barakian said, “at least judging from the guards we have at the gate to this facility. Or from the remote surveillance tech that usually makes their physical presence unnecessary.”
“Or from the fact that you’ve been doing all you can,” Don said dryly, “to avoid naming our location here.”
Barakian smiled, then continued.
“But giving up on total security isn’t the same thing as completely giving up on security. Here or anywhere else, absolute security is no more attainable nor desirable than is absolute freedom. The point is never to sacrifice the reality of freedom or security for the ideal absolute of either.”
“Your ‘complementarity’ again?” Don asked, still enjoying the holodisplay’s impressive scanning features.
“Indeed. And entanglement, too. Individual rights and social responsibilities are best seen as inherently entangled. But even that only mirrors something much larger. Which is why you’re here.”
“I thought I was here to hide out,” Don said, “and to work on the stuff that was embedded in the Kwok holo-cast.”
“Yes, yes, you are now our specialist on that holo-cast. Complementarity and entanglement are all over that, as in all Kwok’s work. Most immediately, however, your own work will involve investigating the possibility of relationships between the Dossi painting and the memory palace or memory theater it may be part of—presumably one based on the real-world Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.”
“I got that part. I still don’t see why my work has to happen inside a mountain, though.”
Barakian stared hard at him. Don stopped fidgeting with the zoom controls.
“The Kwok holo-cast, along with some of our other sources, suggests that there may be a danger.”
“Danger? You mean like SWAT teams coming after me?”
“There is that,” Barakian said, striding forward and gazing up at the big screens. “The fact, too, that this facility could be converted to a self-sufficient bunker, with just the addition of those long-planned blast doors, was one reason we chose this place—instead of hiding you out in some remote Free Zone like Tri-Border. But there’s another reason too.”
“Which is?”
By way of answer, Barakian played a feed featuring a recording Don recognized from Kwok’s holo-cast.
“If you build a computer of 400 ordinary quantum bits, or approximately 10120 classical bits,” said the Newcomer, “that easily matches the sum total of all information all humans have ever accumulated about the universe. Even for the most godlike computer, though, there’s a bandwidth limitation. Building a quantum DNA computer of, say, 400 4-bits inside the simulation would require at least doubling the usable bandwidth of the sim.”
Barakian cut off the feed.
“Recognize that?”
“From the Kwok broadcast,” Don said. “It’s in one of the sections where noise initially obscures the audio content. So?”
“It’s possible that a fully operational, universal quantum computer, capable of manipulating information densities comparable to our universe’s bandwidth, might be used as far more than an ‘information weapon.’ We theorize that it could be used to distort or destroy physical reality.”
“Some sort of e-bomb, then?”
“No. Not an electromagnetic pulse that would put out the lights. More like a device to put out the stars.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Barakian shook his head. His gaze seemed to become lost in one of the screens, a screen that was displaying still more imagery from the Kwok holo-cast. Don wondered if the old guy was putting him on, or just wacko. He didn’t particularly like either possibility.
“We’ve obtained reports indicating that, when they’ve been activated, the prototype universe-bandwidth devices currently under development—primitive as they are—yield dramatic physical
effects. Several of the devices have reportedly flashed out of existence.”
“They—exploded?”
“More like they imploded—right out of our universe. Nothing remained.”
…BREAKING
LAKE NOT-TO-BE-NAMED
Don tried to take that in, but even knowing what he already knew of Jaron Kwok’s disappearance, it wasn’t easy.
“And that’s why we’re inside a mountain?”
“Yes,” Barakian said, his gaze roving over the screens. “Strange, really. A number of the movies shot here were low-budget apocalypse flicks. The underground tunnels were supposed to be where humanity survives being sky-rocketed by a comet or an asteroid, buried by nuclear winter, whatever. Protection against the outside world. But now we’re trying to protect the world from what just might happen inside here, a mile into a mountain and a thousand feet underground.”
Barakian looked around and shrugged.
“For whatever good it might do. It might be a protection, or it might not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the comments in the Kwok holo-cast seem to indicate that the physical effects, though initially unexpected, have now become an important goal of ongoing covert research.”
“Into what?”
“A cryptologic catastrophe. A ‘cryptastrophe,’ if you will—or rather a controlled cryptastrophe. Some investigators seem to think they can produce an event in which only the device and a specified area around it would be annihilated. Neatly snipped out of existence. No fallout, no fire, no shrapnel. The ultimate precision munition, scalable to any required size. The Kwok holo-cast, however, indicated the possibility that something much more devastating might occur.”
“You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?” Don said, shaking his head. He thought of that ‘put out the stars’ comment and smiled crookedly at the image of the Memorial Hall. “Okay. I’ll bite. What kind of ‘devastating’?”
“If we believe the theorists, a cryptastrophe in which perhaps our entire universe winks out of existence. Kwok’s holo-cast suggests that, if we conclude and achieve closure within the memory palace ‘room’ that is our home universe—that alone will destroy those who are working with the device, and may bring down the cryptastrophe on our universe as a whole.”
“Is that possible?” Don asked.
“Who knows? We’re not at all sure that it is,” Barakian said, shrugging awkwardly again. “If so, it has something to do with the concept that our universe, or at least a part of it, would be ‘displaced.’ Transformed from ‘real’ into ‘virtual.’ Depends how correct the plenum theorists are about a particular sort of complementarity among parallel universes.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Don asked, more than a little annoyed that Barakian should be taking the idea of parallel universes quite so seriously. Despite his familiarity with virtual realities—or maybe because of it—Don had long resisted the idea of multiple and parallel universes. It always struck him as rather like being told that God had been traumatized as a child and suffered from a multiple personality disorder.
Barakian, however, remained unfazed. He simply nodded and continued.
“According to the plenum physicists, the total number of universes is essentially infinite. But with this peculiarity: from within any given universe, only that particular universe may be considered ‘real’—all of the others are at best only ‘virtual.’”
“And that fits ‘devastation’…how?”
“What the cryptastrophists are most likely after is a virtualization bomb,” Barakian said. “A map that destroys the country it describes, shoving it out of our universe through a wave of translation. But if such a device goes out of control, it has the potential to turn our universe, our branch of the plenum tree, into a phantom limb.”
Don stared at the older man.
“So you’re saying that even what I’ll be working on has the potential to kill me? Or destroy this mountain? Or maybe even destroy the universe? Well, that really makes me eager to get started.”
“It’s also possible that none of those things will happen. We have only one real precedent here, Don. There’s one comparable ‘doomsday’ device.”
“You mean nuclear weapons?”
Barakian nodded. Don was reminded uncomfortably of the not so old adage, “Politics is for the moment, but extinction is for eternity.” But that just twisted something Einstein had once said: Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity.
“Before the first nuclear device was detonated at Alamogordo,” Barakian said, “some scientists of the Manhattan Project believed the detonation of the device would cause all the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere to chain-react and catch fire. It didn’t happen.”
“Maybe,” Don said, “but destroy the universe? What could possibly be worth such a risk?”
Barakian’s gaze drifted toward the floor and hung there. He rocked back on his heels, like someone deciding which path he should follow.
“People are already dying for it. For conscience, and consciousness. For the chance to find a hole through the wall, a doorway out of no way—because we’ve already painted ourselves into a deadly corner. Tell me, Don—have you ever read Sartre?”
“Tell me, Nils—are you avoiding my question?”
“Not at all. Bear with me a bit. Sartre said the individual human consciousness is a kind of hole in the fabric of the physical world. A special kind of nothingness.”
“Sounds like what Tetragrammaton is supposed to be working on.”
“Indeed. One thing Tetragrammaton is really about, I’d say, is an attempt to externalize consciousness in such a way that the ‘consciousness hole’ coincides with what physicists call a singularity—only a singularity much more easily generated, much more controllable and manipulable than the physicists.’”
Don nodded. He’d come to a similar conclusion already.
“But Sartre also said that human beings try to transcend that nothingness by becoming God….” Barakian continued.
“So the whimsical code name of ‘Tetragrammaton,’” Don said, “isn’t such a laughing matter after all.”
Barakian shook his head absently.
“As the name of God? Not even Tetragrammaton’s proponents claim to be working on the transformation of human beings into God. They would agree with Sartre that our human passion for divine transcendence is useless, because it is a passion to become what we cannot be. Since we didn’t create ourselves, we can’t be responsible for our own responsibility. Only God, according to Sartre, could be that.
“So there’s always a gap, missing information, between what is ‘our responsibility’—and what isn’t. In that gap, however, they hope to find space for creating at least better angels, through a technologically mediated sort of ‘transhuman’ transcendence.”
“Hmm,” Don said, nodding slowly as he considered it. “In complex systems, there’s always missing information. Analyzing any system, you usually go out only so far before rounding off your figures and declaring that the rest is insignificant.”
“Yes,” Barakian agreed, “but it’s from the missing information, the ‘trivial,’ that the surprises come. Surprises, epiphanies, irruptions of the unexpected into the expected—they generally come as a result of multiplier effects. So, where Sartre calls human consciousness a nothingness, I would rather think that it’s our ‘insignificant’ incompleteness that makes consciousness possible.”
Don noticed that the techs had ceased their work with the virtuality unit and were standing by, as if waiting. It made him feel impatient.
“But what does that have to do with Kwok’s work—and what I’m supposed to find out about what he left behind?”
“If we knew all that,” Barakian said, smiling, “we wouldn’t have had to hire you, now would we? Kwok’s fascination with sixteenth-century memory metaphysicians and contemporary quantum theory suggest an overlap we wouldn’t otherwise have expected.”
“Overlap?”
“I’ll show you,” Barakian said, stepping up into the virtuality unit and switching on the pickup microphones and cameras. He nodded to the distant techs, who strode swiftly to their stations.
Somewhere, the technicians’ hands flew over keyboards. In response to Barakian’s words—and to his hands hovering and moving through the space before him, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra—the imagery on the screens shifted and changed. Transcripts from dead languages and complex ancient diagrams appeared, then shifted to become cloud chamber tracings of particles, then again to become patterns of light and shadow. Constellations, highlighted among the apparent randomness of the stars, shifted to become space-time snapshots and supersnapshots of universes and multiverses.
“From our research,” Barakian said, “we know that Giordano Bruno was the first person to put forward the idea of infinite worlds in infinite space. He saw the constellations of the night sky as the bright shadows of Ideas. Multiverse physicists, who also believe in infinite worlds, claim that all a ‘parallel universe’ actually boils down to is a ‘constellation of particles’ that barely interacts—like parallel lines that don’t cross—with our own particular ‘constellation of particles,’ or universe.”
“So they both use the word ‘constellation’?” Don asked. “That’s a pretty weak peg to hang your hat on.”
“That’s not the whole of it,” Barakian said, moving his hands so that his words were real-time translated to captions onscreen. “Think of that word ‘constellation,’ then. What is a language but a ‘constellation of particles’—letters, words, phrases? Just as every word in every language is made out of all the traces of all the words it is not, every universe is made out of all the traces of all the universes it is not, at least according to the theorists.”
“Wait a minute,” Don asked. “Which theorists? The multiverse people or the plenum people? And what’s the difference?”
“The multiversalists believe the cosmic computer’s virtual reality capability covers every physically possible universe,” Barakian explained, “but only the physically possible ones. The plenum theorists believe in a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes all possible universes, logical and physical. In the plenum, everything is possible and everything possible is real. The multiverse is an incredibly vast, yet still smaller, subset—the system of all possible constellations of particles, where every constellation of particles is made out of all the constellations of particles it is not.”
The Labyrinth Key Page 24