The largest display screen in the cabin, some five meters wide and three high, suddenly lit up. The image it showed resembled an elaborately interwoven mass of fine, multicolored thread. I'd seen nothing like it at the conference; this wasn't the writhing, anarchic foam of the quantum vacuum. It looked more like a compact ball of neon-luminous twine, which had been wound by Escher and Mandelbrot in turn, with exquisite care, over several centuries. There were symmetries within symmetries, knots within knots, details and patterns which seized the eye, but were too intricate and convoluted to follow to any kind of closure.
I said, "That's not pre-space, is it?"
"Hardly." Five regarded me dubiously, as if he suspected that my ignorance would prove insurmountable. "It's a very crude map of information space, at the instant the Keystone 'becomes' the Keystone. We call this initial configuration 'Aleph,' for short." I didn't respond, so he added with distaste, as if forced to resort to baby-talk, "Think of it as a snapshot of
"This is the starting point of… everything? The premise for an entire universe?"
"Yes. Why are you surprised? The physical, primordial Big Bang is orders of magnitude simpler; it can be characterized by just ten numbers. Aleph contains a hundred million times more information; the idea of creating galaxies and DNA out of this is far less outlandish."
That remained a matter of opinion. "If this is meant to be the contents of Violet Mosala's skull, it doesn't look like any kind of brain map I've ever seen."
Five said drily, "I should hope not. It's not an
He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. "The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE, and aware of both vis own existence, and a canonical body of observations of experimental results—whether vis own, or 'second hand'—which need to be accounted for. If ve lacked either the information density or the organizational schema to explain vis own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-critical: there'd be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won't stop until an entire physical cosmos is created.
"Of course, the process never 'starts' or 'stops' in the conventional sense—it doesn't take place in time at all. Successive frames in this simulation simply correspond to increments in logical extension—like steps in a mathematical proof, adding successive layers of consequences to an initial set of premises. The history of the universe is embedded in those consequences like… the sequence of a murder, pieced together by pure deduction from evidence at the scene of the crime."
As he spoke, the patterns I'd glimpsed on the surface of "Aleph" were woven and re-woven in the surrounding "information vacuum." It was like watching a dazzling new tapestry being created every second from the one beneath—threads picked loose enough to drag a little further, and then re-combined by a million invisible hands. A thousand subtle variations echoed the original canon, but there were also startling new themes emerging, apparently from nowhere. Intermeshing fractal islands, red and white, drifted apart and recombined, struggled to engulf each other, then melted into an archipelago of hybrids. Hurricanes within hurricanes, violet and gold, spun the thread ever tighter—and then the tiniest vortices counter-rotated, and the whole hierarchy dissolved. Tiny jagged shards of crystalline silver slowly diffused through all the chaos and regularity, infiltrating and interacting with everything.
I said, "This is beautiful technoporn—but what exactly is it meant to be showing?"
Five hesitated, but then condescended to point out a few features. "This is the age of the Earth, being refined toward a definite value, as various geophysical and biological conclusions feed into it. This is the
"And you expect Violet Mosala to fall into some kind of trance, and think all these things through, right after her moment of apotheosis?"
