Грег Иган - Distress

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 that the stupidity of my reluctance to embrace their ideas would dawn on me at any moment.

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 real-time, 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.