by Greg Egan
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, synaptic 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.
Epilogue
As the plane touches down, I begin recording. Witness confirms: “Cape Town, Wednesday April 15th, 2105. 7:12:10 GMT.”
Karin De Groot has come to the airport to meet me. She looks astonishingly healthy, much more so in the flesh – though, as with all of us ancients, the losses are etched deep. We exchange greetings, then I glance around trying to take in the profusion of styles in anatomy and dress – no more than anywhere else, but every place has a different mix, a different set of fashions. Imposing retractable cowls full of dark violet photosynthetic symbionts seem to be popular throughout Southern Africa. Back home, sleek amphibian adaptions for underwater breathing and feeding are common.
After the Aleph moment, people had feared that the mixing would impose uniformity. It had never happened – any more than, in the Age of Ignorance, the brutal, inescapable truths that water was wet and the sky was blue had forced everyone on the planet to think and act identically. There are infinitely many ways to respond to the single truth of the TOE. What’s become impossible is maintaining the pretense that every culture could ever have created its own separate reality – while we all breathed the same air and walked the same ground.
De Groot checks some schedule in her mind’s eye. “So you didn’t come straight from Stateless?”
“No. Malawi. There was someone I had to see. I wanted to say goodbye.”
We descend to the subway, where the train is expecting us and lights a path for our eyes to the carriage door. It’s almost fifty years since I’ve been in this city, and most of the infrastructure has changed; in unfamiliar surroundings, the TOE blazes out of every surface, unbidden, like an exuberant child boasting of the bright new things ve’s made. Even the simplest novelties – the non-slip dirt-eating coating on the floor tiles, the luminous pigments of the living sculptures – catch my attention as they spell out their unique ways of coexisting.
Nothing is incomprehensible. Nothing can be mistaken for magic.
I say, “When I first heard that they were building the Violet Mosala Memorial Kindergarten , I imagined she would have been insulted. Which only goes to show how little I knew her. I don’t know why I was invited.”
De Groot laughs. “I’m just glad you didn’t come all this way for the ceremony and nothing else. You could have done it on the net; no one would have minded.”
“There’s nothing like being there.”
The train reminds us of our stop, holds the doors for us. We walk through the neat suburbs not far from the house where Mosala spent her childhood, though the streets now are lined with species of plants she would never have recognized. She never saw trees growing on Stateless, either. People stride past us, glancing up at the elegant logic of the cloudless blue sky.
The kindergarten is a small building, reconfigured into an auditorium for the occasion. Half a dozen speakers are here to address the fifty children. I lapse into reverie until one of Violet’s grand-daughters, working on the Halcyon , explains the starship’s drive; the core principle, close to the TOE, is easy to grasp. Karin De Groot speaks about Violet, anecdotes of generosity and intransigence. And one of the children sets the stage for me, telling the others about the Age of Ignorance.
“It hangs like a stalactite from the Information Cosmos.” The present tense is sophistication, not solecism; relativity demands it. “It’s not autonomous, it doesn’t explain itself – it needs to be joined to the Information Cosmos, in order to exist. We need it, too, though. It’s a necessary history, a logical outgrowth if you try to extend time before the Aleph moment.”
Ve summons vivid diagrams and equations into the air. The brilliant stellar cluster of the Information Cosmos, wrapped densely in explanatory threads, holds up the simple drab cone of the Age of Ignorance, which points back to the physical Big Bang. Vis audience of less precocious four-year-olds struggle with the concepts. Time before the Aleph moment? Grandparents notwithstanding, it almost defies belief.
I rise to my feet and recite my prepared version of the events of fifty years ago – getting laughs of incredulity in all the right places. Ownership of genes? Centralized authorities? Ignorance Cults?
Ancient history always sounds quaint, old victories preordained, but I try to convey some sense of how long and hard their ancestors struggled to learn everything they now take for granted: that law and morality, physics and metaphysics, space and time, pleasure, love, meaning … are all the burden of the participants. There are no immovable centers, dispensing absolutes like manna: no God, no Gaia, no beneficent rulers. No reality but the universe explained into being. No purpose to life unless we create it, together or alone.
Someone asks about the turmoil in the days after Aleph.
I say, “Everyone found the truth hard to swallow. Orthodox scientists – because the TOE had turned out to be grounded in nothing but its own explanatory powers. The Ignorance Cults – because even the participatory universe, the most subjective reality possible, was no synthesis of their favorite myths – which could never have created anything – but the product of universal scientific understanding of what coexistence really meant. Even the Anthrocosmologists turned out to have been wrong; they’d been so obsessed with the idea of a single Keystone that they’d barely considered the possibility that everyone, equally, could play that role. They’d missed the most stable, and symmetrical, solution: where every mind obeys the TOE – but it takes all of them, together, to create it.”
One astute listener sees that I’m dodging the issue – a child I would have called “human”, in the days before the H-word exploded and it was finally understood: the TOE is all we have in common .
“Most people weren’t scientists, cultists, or Anthrocosmologists – were they? They had no stake in these ideas. So why were they so sad?”
Sad. There were nine million suicides. Nine million people we could not hold up, when all illusions of solidity vanished. And I’m still not certain that there was no other way – that I found the only possible bridge into the Information Cosmos. If I’d let myself descend into the madness of Distress, would someone else have asked a different last question, and found another way through?
No one has accused me, no one has judged me. I’ve never been damned as a criminal, or hailed as a savior. The idea that a single Keystone could ever have explained ten billion people into existence is absurd, now. In retrospect, Distress is seen as no different from the naïve illusion that every galaxy is rushing away from us – when in truth, there is not, and cannot be, any center at all.
I talk haltingly about Lamont’s Area. “It made people think that they knew each other, and could speak for each other, understand each other – much more than they really could. Some of you might still have it in your brain – but in the face of the evidence, now, it’s easy to ignore.”
I try to explain about the delusion of intimacy, and how much was invested in it once. They listen politely, but I can see that it makes no sense to them, because they know full well that they’ve lost nothing. Love in the face
of the truth has turned out to be stronger than ever. Happiness never really depended on the old lies.
Not for these children, born without crutches.
In vis home in the dazzling bounteous engineered jungle of Malawi, I’d told Akili I was dying. After you, there was no one. And we’d touched for the last time.
I move on quickly.
“Other people,” I add, “lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it’s true that there are no more ‘deep’ surprises – there’s nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there’ll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there’ll always be new stories written in the TOE – new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be other minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can’t even imagine yet.
“Violet Mosala once said: ‘Reaching the foundations doesn’t mean hitting the ceiling.’ She helped us all touch the foundations; I only wish she could have lived to see you building on them, higher than anyone has built before.”
I take my seat. The children applaud politely – but I feel like a senile fool for telling them that their future is unbounded .
They already knew that, of course.
Author’s Note
Among many works which inspired me in the writing of this novel, I must single out Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said, and “Out of the Light, Back Into the Cave” by Andy Robertson ( Interzone 65 , November 1992). The excerpt from the poem Technolibération is modeled on a passage from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land .