Грег Иган - Distress

—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. Kasparcould 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’sanalysis 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. Kasparhad 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’sreasoning 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.

As the plane touches down, I begin recording. Witnessconfirms:

"Cape Town, Wednesday April 15, 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."