Distress полностью

"I've done all I can to try to steer her onto safer ground," Wu insisted solemnly. "I thought, if she understood where she was heading, she'd change her methods—for conventional scientific reasons. For the sake of a theory with physical content—which is what most of her peers expect of a TOE." She raised her hands in a gesture of despair. "Nothing stops Violet! You know that. She absorbed every criticism I offered—and turned it into a virtue. I've only made things worse."

Twenty said, "I don't expect Amanda Conroy even began to convey a true picture of the richness of information cosmology. What did she describe to you? One model only: a Keystone creating a perfect, seamless universe—with no observable effects, ever, violating the TOE? No prospect of seeing through to the metaphysics beneath?"

"That's right." I'd given up expressing outrage; the best strategy I could think of was to play along, let them incriminate themselves as much as they wanted, and cling to the hope that I might still have a chance to warn Mosala.

"That's only one possibility, among millions. And it's about as simplistic as the earliest cosmological models of General Relativity from the nineteen twenties: perfectly homogeneous universes, bland and empty as giant toy balloons. They were only studied because anything more plausible was too difficult to analyze, mathematically. Nobody ever believed that they described reality."

Wu took up the thread. "Conroy and her friends are not scientists; they're enthusiastic dilettantes. They seized hold of the very first solution that came along, and decided it was everything they wanted." I didn't know about the others, but Wu had a career, a comfortable life, which she was tearing to shreds before my eyes. Maybe the intellectual energy she'd devoted to Anthrocosmology had already cost her any success she might have had with ATMs—but now she was sacrificing everything.

"That kind of perfect, stable cosmos isn't impossible—but it depends entirely on the structure of the theory. The observable physics, and the information metaphysics underlying it, can only be guaranteed independent and separable under certain rigorous constraints. Mosala's work shows every sign of violating those constraints in the most dangerous manner possible."

Wu stared at me for a moment longer, as if trying to judge whether or not she'd hammered home the gravity of the situation. Nothing in her manner betrayed any hint of paranoia or fanaticism; however mistaken she was, she seemed as sober to me as a Manhattan Project scientist, terrified that the first A-bomb test might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would engulf the world.

I must have looked suitably dismayed; she turned to Five, and said, "Show him." Then she left the room.

My heart sank. I said, "Where's she going?" Back to Stateless, in another boat! No one here had a better chance of getting close to Mosala than Wu. I remembered the two of them walking through the hotel lobby, laughing, almost arm in arm.

"Helen already knows too much about Mosala's TOE—and too much information cosmology," Nineteen explained. "Pushing that any further could make a dangerous combination, so she no longer attends sessions where we discuss new results. There's no point taking risks."

I absorbed that in silence. The ACs' obsessive secrecy went far beyond Conroy's fear of media ridicule, or the need to plot assassinations unobserved. They really did believe that their ideas alone were as perilous as any physical weapon.

I could hear the ocean moving gently around us, but the windows only mirrored the scene within. My reflection looked like someone else: hair sticking out oddly, eyes sunken, context all wrong. I pictured the boat perfectly becalmed, the cabin a tiny island of light fixed in the darkness. I forced my wrists apart experimentally, gauging the strength of the polymer, the topology of the knot. There was no give, no slippage. Since I'd been woken and hauled above the deck, I'd been sick with dread, wired and ragged—but for a moment I felt something like the clarity of the hospital ward returning. The world lost all pretense of meaning: no comfort, no mystery, no threat.

Five—a middle-aged Italian man—finished tinkering with the electronics. He addressed me as self-consciously as if I was pointing a thousand-watt floodlight and a nineteen-fifties movie camera in his face.

"This is our latest supercomputer run, based on everything Mosala has published so far. We've deliberately avoided trying to extrapolate to a TOE, for obvious reasons—but it's still possible to approximate the effects which might result if the work was ever completed."