Distress полностью

Past and future were bound together, too. Down to the level of quantum randomness, Mosala's equation encoded the common order found in every process from the folding of a protein to the spreading of an eagle's wings. It delineated the fan of probabilities linking any system, at any moment, to anything it might become.

In the second section, Kaspar had trawled the databases for other references to the same mathematics, other resonances to the same abstractions—and in this scrupulously completist search, it had found enough parallels with information theory to push the TOE one step further. Everything Mosala would have spurned—and Helen Wu would have feared to combine—Kaspar had serenely brought together.

There could be no information without physics. Knowledge always had to be encoded as something. Marks on paper, knots on a string, pockets of charge in a semiconductor.

But there could be no physics without information. A universe of purely random events would be no universe at all. Deep patterns, powerful regularities, were the whole basis of existence.

So—having determined which physical systems could share a universe—Kaspar had asked the question: which patterns of information could those systems encode?

A second, analogous equation had emerged from the same mathematics, with almost no effort at all. The informational TOE was the flipside of the physical TOE, an inevitable corollary.

Then Kaspar had unified the two, fitting them together like interlocking mirror images (in spite of everything, I had a feeling that Symmetry's Champion would have been proud)… and all of the predictions of Anthrocosmology had come tumbling out. The terminology was different—Kaspar had innocently coined new jargon, unaware of the unpublished precedents—but the concepts were unmistakable.

The Aleph moment was as necessary as the Big Bang. The universe could never have existed without it. Kaspar had shied away from claiming the honor of being Keystone—and had even refused to grant the explanatory Big Bang primacy over the physical one—but the paper stated clearly that the TOE had to be known, had to be understood, to have ever had force.

Mixing, too, was inevitable. Latent knowledge of the TOE infected all of time and space—every system in this universe encoded it—but once it was understood explicitly, that hidden information would crystallize out wherever the possibility arose, percolating up through the foam of quantum randomness. It was more like cloud-seeding than telepathy; nobody would read the mind of the Keystone—but they'd follow the Keystone in reading the TOE which their own minds, their own flesh, already encoded.

And even before the Aleph moment, the mixing would happen, albeit imperfectly.

But not for long.

In the last section, Kaspar predicted the unraveling. The Aleph moment would be followed, on a timescale of seconds, by the degeneration of physics into pure mathematics. Just as the Big Bang implied pre-space before it—an infinitely symmetric roiling abstraction where nothing really existed or happened—the Aleph moment would bring on the informational mirror image, another infinite wasteland without time or space.

These words prophesying the end of the universe had been written half an hour before I was reading them.

Kaspar had not become the Keystone.

I lowered the notepad and looked around. The lagoon had come into view in the distance, silver gray with the hint of dawn. A few bright stars remained in the west. I could still hear the music from the celebrations, faintly: a distant tuneless hum.

The mixing took place so smoothly that I barely knew when it began. Listening to Reynolds' Distress victims, I'd imagined them granted X-ray vision and more, assailed by images of molecules and galaxies, reeling at the universe in every grain of sand—and they were the lucky few. I'd steeled myself for the worst: the sky peeling open to reveal some Mystical Renaissance wet dream of stargate acid-trip stupefaction, the end of thought, the candied incineration of reason.