Стивен Бакстер - Phase space

the rational possibilities to me. Perhaps we're in the middle of some huge solar storm, for instance, which is disrupting communications. Perhaps the solar system has wandered into a knot of interstellar gas, or even dark matter, which is refracting or diffusing electromagnetic radiation, including your laser beam -'

'None of which hangs together,' Kate guessed.

Delia frowned at her. Malenfant quickly introduced Kate as a personal aide.

Delia said, 'Okay. You're right. Nobody has come up with anything that works. It isn't just a question of some new anomaly; we have a situation for which, as far as I understand it, no explanation within our physical law is even possible… But here is Cornelius, with a proposal that is frankly outrageous -'

'But an outrageous problem requires outrageous proposals,' Cornelius said, his smile cold.

Malenfant said, 'Just tell me what you're talking about, Cornelius.'

Cornelius went on, 'Think about it. What if we have been placed in some form of "planetarium", perhaps generated using an advanced virtual reality technology, designed to give us the illusion of an empty universe - while beyond the walls with their painted stars, the shining lights of extraterrestrial civilizations glow unseen?'

'Which would resolve Fermi,' Malenfant said. 'They're there, but they are hiding.'

'Which would resolve Fermi, yes.'

'And now the planetarium's, uh, projector is breaking down. Hence A-4, Neptune and the rest. Is that what you're saying?' 'Exactly.'

Kate thought it over. 'That's what the Fermi experts call a zoo hypothesis.'

Cornelius looked impressed. 'So it is.'

'It belongs in a zoo,' Malenfant said. 'For one thing it's paranoid. It's classic circular logic: you could never disprove it. We could never detect we were in a planetarium because it's designed not to be detected. Right?'

'Malenfant, the fact that a hypothesis is paranoid doesn't make it wrong.'

Delia said, 'Let me see if I understand you, Cornelius. You're suggesting that not everything we see is real. How much of everything?'

Cornelius shrugged. 'There are several possible answers. It depends on how far the boundary of the artificial "reality" is set from the human consciousness. The crudest design would be like a traditional planetarium, in which we - our bodies - and the objects we touch are real, while the sky is a fake dome.'

Malenfant nodded. 'So the stars and galaxies are simulated by a great shell surrounding the solar system.'

'But,' said Kate, 'it would surely take a lot to convince us. Photons of starlight are real entities that interact with our instruments and eyes.'

Malenfant said, thinking, 'And you'd have to simulate not just photons but such exotica as cosmic rays and neutrinos. You're talking about some impressive engineering.'

Cornelius waved a hand, as if impatient with their ill-informed speculation. 'These are details. If the controllers anticipate our technological progress, perhaps even now they are readying the gravity-wave generators…'

'And what,' asked Delia, 'if the boundary is closer in than that?'

Cornelius said, 'There are various possibilities. Perhaps we humans are real, but some - or all - of the objects we see around us are generated as simulations, tangible enough to interact with our senses.'

'Holograms,' Kate said. 'We are surrounded by holograms.' 'Yes. But with solidity. Taste, smell…'

Malenfant frowned. 'That's kind of a brute-force way of doing it. You'd have to form actual material objects, all out of some kind of controlling rays. How? Think of the energy required, the control, the heat… And you'd have to load them with a large amount of information, of which only a fraction would actually interact with us to do the fooling.'

Delia said, 'And would these hologram objects be evanescent -like the images on a TV screen? In that case they would need continual refreshing - yes?'

Again Cornelius seemed impatient; this is a man not used to being questioned, Kate saw. 'It is straightforward to think of more efficient design strategies. For example, allowing objects once created to exist as quasi-autonomous entities within the environment, only loosely coupled to the controlling mechanism. This would obviate the need, for example, to reproduce continually the substance at the centre of the Earth, with which we never interact directly. But any such compromise is a step back from perfection.

With sufficient investment, you see, the controllers would have full control of the maintained environment.' Delia said, 'What would that mean?'

Cornelius shrugged. 'The controllers could make objects appear or disappear at will. The whole Earth, if necessary. For example.' There was a brief silence.

Delia got out of her chair and faced the window. She flexed her hands, and pressed her fingertips against the sunlit desk top, as if testing its reality. 'You know, I find it hard to believe we're having this conversation. Anything else?'

Cornelius said, 'A final possibility is that even our bodies are simulated, so that the boundary of reality is drawn around our very consciousness. We can already think of crude ways of doing this.' He nodded at Kate. 'For example, the fashionable implants in the corpus callosum that allow the direct downloading of virtual-reality sensations into the consciousness.'

'If that was so,' said Delia, 'how could we ever tell?'

Cornelius shook his head. 'If the simulation was good enough, we could not. And there would be nothing we could do about it. But I don't think we are in that situation.'

'How do you know?'

'Because the simulation is going wrong. Alpha A-4, the evaporation of the Oort Cloud, Neptune, the vanishing of Saturn's rings…'

Kate hadn't heard about Saturn; she found room for a brief, and surprising, stab of regret.

T think,' said Cornelius, 'that we should assume we are in a planetarium of the second type I listed. We are "real". But not everything around us is genuine.'

Delia turned and leaned on her desk, her knuckles white. 'Cornelius, whatever the cause, this wave of anomalies is working its way towards us. There is going to be panic; you can bet on that.'

Cornelius frowned. 'Not until the anomalies are visible in our own sky. Most of us have remarkably limited imaginations. The advance of the anomaly wave is actually quite well understood. Its progression is logarithmic; it is slowing as it approaches the sun. We can predict to the hour when effects will become visible to Earth's population.' His cool gaze met the Vice President's. 'That is, we can predict when the panicking will begin.'

Kate asked, 'How long?'

'Five more days. The precise numbers have been posted.' He

smiled, cold, analytical. 'You have time to prepare, madam Vice President. And if it is cloudy, Armageddon will no doubt be postponed by a few hours.'

Delia glowered at him. 'You're a damn cold fish, Cornelius. If you're right - what do you suggest we do?'

'Do?' The question seemed to puzzle him. 'Why - rejoice. Rejoice that the facade is cracking, that the truth will soon be revealed.'

A phone chimed, startling them all. Malenfant looked abstractedly into the air while an insect voice buzzed in his ear.

He turned to Kate. 'It's Saranne. She's gone into labour.'

The meeting broke up. Kate followed Malenfant out of the room, frustrated she hadn't gotten to ask the most important questions of all:

What controllers?

And, what do they want?

Her own voice wafted out of the dark.

You know who's really taking a bath over this? The astrologers. Those planets swimming around the sky are turning their fancy predictions into mush. And if this is the end of the world, how come none of them saw it coming?…

It was the fourth day after the Alpha echo had failed to return. Three days left, if Cornelius was right, until…