Distress

The tent contained nothing but a backpack and an unrolled sleeping bag; the transparent floor looked dry, despite the hint of dew outside, but almost thin enough for the grit beneath it to be felt through the plastic. A black patch on the wall radiated gentle heat, powered by the solar energy stored in the charge-displacement polymers which were woven into every strand of the tent's fabric.

I sat on one end of the sleeping bag. Akili sat cross-legged beside me. I looked around appreciatively; however humble, it was a vast improvement on bare rock. "Where did you find this? I don't know if they shoot looters on Stateless… but I'd say it was worth the risk."

Akili snorted. "I didn't have to steal it. Where do you think I've been living for the past two weeks? We can't all afford the Ritz."

We exchanged updates. Akili had heard most of my news already, from other sources: Buzzo's death; Mosala's evacuation, and uncertain condition. But not her joke on the ACs: the automatic dissemination of her TOE around the world.

Akili frowned intensely, silent for a long time. Something had changed in vis face since I'd seen ver in the hospital; the deep shock of recognition at the news of the supposed mixing plague had given way to a kind of expectant gaze—as if ve was prepared, now, to be taken by Distress at any moment and was almost eager to embrace the experience, despite the anguish and horror all its victims had displayed. Even the few who'd been briefly calm and lucid in their own strange way had swiftly relapsed; if I'd believed that the syndrome was everyone's fate, I would not have wished to go on living.

Akili confessed, "We still can't fit our models to the data. No one I've been in contact with can work out what's going on." Ve seemed resigned to the fact that the plague would elude precise analysis, in the short term—but still confident that vis basic explanation was correct. "The new cases are appearing too rapidly, much faster than exponential growth."

"Then maybe you're wrong about the mixing. You made a prediction of exponential growth and now it's failed. So maybe you've been reading too much Anthrocosmology into four sick people's ranting."

Ve shook vis head, calmly dismissing the possibility. "Seventeen people, now. Your SeeNet colleague isn't the only one who's seen it; other journalists have begun to report the same phenomenon. And there's a way to explain the discrepancy in the case numbers."

"How?"

"Multiple Keystones."

I laughed wearily. "What's the collective noun for that? Not an arch of Keystones, surely. A pantheon? One person, with one theory, explaining the universe into existence—isn't that the whole premise of Anthrocosmology?"

"One theory, yes. And one person always seemed the most likely scenario. We always knew that the TOE would be broadcast to the world— but we always assumed that every last detail would be worked out in full by its discoverer, first. But if the discoverer is lying in a coma when the complete TOE is dispatched to tens of thousands of people, simultaneously… that's like nothing we ever contemplated. And nothing we can hope to model: the mathematics becomes intractable." Ve spread vis hands in a gesture of acceptance. "No matter. We'll all learn the truth, soon enough."

My skin crawled. In Akili's presence, I didn't know what I believed. I said, "Learn it how? Mosala's TOE doesn't predict telepathy with the Keystone—or Keystones—any more than it predicts the universe unraveling. If she's right, you must be wrong."

"It depends what she's right about."

"Everything? As in Theory of?"

"Everything could unravel tonight—and most TOEs would have nothing to say about it, one way or another. The rules of chess can't tell you whether or not the board is strong enough to hold up every legal configuration of the pieces."

"But every TOE has plenty to say about the human brain, doesn't it? It's a lump of ordinary matter, subject to all the ordinary laws of physics. It doesn't start 'mixing with information' just because someone completes a Theory of Everything on the other side of the planet."

Akili said, "Two days ago, I would have agreed with you. But TOEs which fail to deal with their own basis in information are as incomplete General Relativity—which required the Big Bang to take place, but then broke down completely at that point. It took the unification of all four forces to smooth away the singularity. And it looks like it's going to take one more unification to understand the explanatory Big Bang."

"But two days ago—?"