Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Lisa Durnau can still recall the surge of anger. She pressed her hands palm-down on to the thighs of her good pant suit to push the rage down. When she lifted them she had left two palm-shaped sweat marks like warnings against the evil eye.

“Professor Lull, I’m trying to be professional here and I think you owe me the professional courtesy of your attention.”

She could have stayed in Oxford. She had been happy in Oxford. Carl Walker would have sold body parts to keep her at Keble. Better doctorates than hers had returned shattered from this cow town where the schools by law still taught Intelligent Design. If the world’s preeminent centre for cyberlife research sar on a hill in the Bible Belt, Lisa Durnau would come to that hill. She had rejected her father’s Christian universe before he and her mother separated, but Presbyterian stubbornness and self-reliance were twined around her DNA. She would not let this man shake her. He said, “You can earn my attention by answering my question. I want to know about your inspiration. Those moments when it hit you like lightning. Those moments when you ran for seventy hours on coffee and Dexedrine because if you ler go of it, even for an instant, you’d lose it. The moments when it came out of the void and was all there, perfect and entire. I want to know how and when and where it hit you. Science is creation. Nothing else interests me.”

“Okay,” Lisa Durnau said. “It was the women’s toilet in Paddington Station in London, England.”

Professor Thomas Lull beamed and settled back in his chair.

The Cognitive Cosmology group met twice monthly in Stephen Sanger’s office at Imperial College London. It was one of those things that Lisa Durnau knew she should get round to some time but probably never would, like balancing her cheque book or having children. Carl Walker would cc. her its notes and abstracts. It was intellectually thrilling and she had no doubt that membership of the group would advance her name and career, but theirs was a quantum informational approach and Lisa’s thoughts moved in topological curves. Then the bimonthly reports began to stray from quantum informational judder into speculation that Artificial Intelligence could indeed be a parallel universe mapped out in computing code as Oxford’s cloisters and choristers were in elementary particles and DNA. This was her bailiwick. She resisted for a month, then Carl Walker took her our for a Friday lunch that ended up in a Jamaican restaurant at midnight drinking Triple-X Guinness and swaying to the towers of dub. Two days later she was in a fifth-floor conference room breakfasting on chocolate croissants and smiling too much at the country’s leading thinkers on the place of mind in the structure of the universe.

Everyone recharged coffee cups and the discourse began. The speed of debate left Lisa slipstreamed and breathless. The transcripts gave no indication of the breadth and diversity of discussion. She felt like a fat kid at a basketball match, clutching and darting too late, too slow. By the time Lisa got to speak she was responding to things said three ideas ago and the climate of the conversation had raced on. The sun moved across Hyde Park and Lisa Durnau felt herself settling into despair. They were fast and quick and dazzling and they were wrong wrong wrong but she couldn’t get a word in to tell them. They were already becoming bored with the subject. They had milked it for what they thought it could yield and were moving on. She was going to lose it. Unless she told them. Unless she spoke now. Her right forearm lay flat on the oak table. She slowly raised her hand to the vertical. Every eye followed it. There was a sudden, terrible hush.

“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them, too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She railed off into an apologetic mumble.

“Thank you for that,” Stephen Sanger said. “There are a lot of interesting ideas in there.”

They did not even let him finish his sentence. Chris Drapier from the Level Three Artificial Intelligence Unit at Cambridge sprang first. He had been the rudest and loudest and most pedantic and Lisa had caught him trying to size up her ass in the queue for the coffee flask. There was no reason to invoke some deus ex machina argument when quantum computation had the whole thing sewn up pretty nicely. This was vitalism—no, this was mysticism . Next up was Vicki McAndrews from Imperial. She picked a loose theoretical thread in her modelling, tugged it, and the whole edifice unravelled. Lisa didn’t have a topological model of the space or even a mechanism for describing this universe that thought. All Lisa could hear was that high-pitched whine behind her eyes that is the sound when you want to cry but must not. She sat, annihilated among the coffee cups and chocolate croissant smears. She knew nothing. She had no talent. She was arrogant and stupid and shot her mouth off when any sensible postgrad would have sat and nodded and kept everyone’s coffee cups filled and the cookies coming round. Her star was at its absolute nadir. Stephen Sanger passed some encouragement as Lisa crept out, but she was destroyed. She cried her way back across Hyde Park, up through Bayswater to Paddington Station. She downed a half bottle of dessert wine in the station restaurant as that seemed the menu item that would get her whacked really quickly. She sat at her table shuddering with shame and tears and the certainty that her career was over, she could not do this thing, she didn’t know what they meant. Her bladder called ten minutes before her train. She sat in the cubicle, jeans around her knees, trying not to sob out loud because the acoustics of London station toilets would take it and amplify it so everyone could hear.

And then she saw it. She could not say what it was she saw, staring at the cubicle door, there was no shape, no form, no words or theorems. But it was there, whole and unimaginably beautiful. It was simple. It was so simple. Lisa Durnau burst from the cubicle, rushed to the Paperchase store, bought a pad and a big marker. Then she ran for her train. She never made it. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth carriages, it hit her like lightning. She knew exactly what she had to do. She knelt sobbing on the platform while her shaking hands tried to jam down equations. Ideas poured through her. She was hardwired to the cosmos. The evening shift detoured around her, not staring. It’s all right, she wanted to say. It’s so all right.

M-Star Theory. It was there all along, right in front of her. How had she not seen it? Eleven dimensions folded into a set of Calabi-Yau shapes, three extended, one time-like, seven curled up at Planck length. But the handles, the holes in the shapes, dictated the winding energies of the superstrings, and thus the harmonics that were the fundamental physical properties. All she had to do was model CyberEarth as a Calabai-Yau space and show its equivalence to a physical possibility in M-Star theory. It was all in the strucrure. Out there was a universe with its onboard computer built in. Minds were part of the fabric of reality there, not shelled in evolved carbon as they were in this bubble of the polyverse. Simple. So simple.