Distress

She said, "This pattern of information, this state of being conscious and possessing these perceptions, wraps itself in ever-growing layers of corollaries: neurons to encode the information, blood to nourish the neurons, a heart to pump the blood, intestines to enrich it, a mouth to supply the intestines, food to pass through it, fields of crops, earth, sunlight, a trillion stars." Her gaze shifted slightly as she spoke, scanning back and forth across Reynolds' face. "Neurons, heart, intestines, cells of proteins and ions and water wrapped in lipid membranes, tissues differentiated in development, genes switched on by intersecting marker hormone gradients, a million interlocking molecular shapes, tetravalent carbon, monovalent hydrogen, electrons shared in bonds between nuclei of protons, neutrons to balance electrostatic repulsion, quarks spinning in both to partner the leptons in a hierarchy of field excitations, a ten-dimensional manifold to support them… defining a broken symmetry on the space of all topologies." Her voice quickened. "Neurons, heart, intestines, morphogenesis converging back to a single cell, a fertilized egg in another body. Diploid chromosomes requiring a separate donor. Ancestry iterates. Mutations split species from earlier lineages, unicellular life, self-replicating fragments, nucleotides, sugars, amino acids, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen. A condensing protostellar cloud—rich in heavy elements synthesized in other stars, flung throughout a gravitationally unstable cosmos which starts and ends in singularities."

She fell silent, but her eyes kept moving; I could almost see the outline of Reynolds' face in the sweep of her gaze. And if he'd appeared to her, at first, as a bizarre apparition, flashes of intense comprehension now seemed to break through her astonishment—as if she was pushing her cosmological reasoning to its limits, and weaving this stranger, this logically necessary distant cousin, into the same unified scheme.

But then something happened to put an end to her brief remission: an upwelling of horror and panic distorted her features. Distress had reclaimed her. I halted the replay before she could begin to thrash and scream.

I said, "There are three other cases, more or less the same. So am I putting my own spin on this raving—or does it sound the same to you? Because… what kind of plague could make people believe that they're the Keystone?"

Kuwale put the notepad down on the bed and turned to face me. "Andrew, if this is a hoax—"

"No! Why would I—?"

"To save Mosala. Because if it's a hoax, you'll never pull it off."

I groaned. "If I was going to invent a Keystone to get her off the hook, I would have simulated Yasuko Nishide on his deathbed having all the cosmic revelations—not some random psychiatric case." I explained about Reynolds and the SeeNet documentary.

Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then… amusement? I couldn't tell—and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.

I said, "Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet…" I was grasping at straws, but I couldn't make sense of this any other way.

Kuwale said flatly, "No. I would have heard."

"Then—?"

"It's genuine."

"How can it be?"

Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. "Because everything we thought was true, is true—but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different assumptions—and we were all wrong."

"I don't understand."

"You will. We all will."

I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi's death. "You think Distress comes from… mixing with information?"

"Yes."

"If the Keystone does it, everyone else gets dragged along? Exponential growth? Just like a plague?"

"Yes."

"But—how? Who was the Keystone? Who started it? Muteba Kazadi, all those years ago?"

Kuwale laughed crazily. "No!" The man in the opposite bed was awake now, and listening to every word, but I was past caring. "Miller didn't get around to telling you the strangest thing about that cosmological model."

Miller was the umale, the one I'd thought of as "Three."

"Which is—?"

"If you follow through with the calculations… the effect reaches back in time. Not far: exponential growth forward means exponential decay backward. But the absolute certainty of the Keystone mixing at the Aleph moment implies a small probability of other people being 'dragged along' at random even before the event. It's a continuity condition; there's no such thing in any system as an instantaneous jump from zero to one."

I shook my head, uncomprehending. I couldn't take this in.

Akili took my hand and squeezed it hard, unthinking, transmitting vis fear—and a vertiginous thrill of anticipation—straight into my body, from skin to skin.