Distress

by Greg Egan

  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 OK.”

  I looked at Sarah. She had the gun raised, and she was repeating angrily, “Call De Groot!”

  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 m
e. “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.

  Chapter 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 clonelet 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.r />
  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.