Distress

The reality could not have been more different. Like the coded markings of the reef-rock, the surface of the world began to speak of its depths, and its hidden connections. It was like learning to read a new language, in seconds, and seeing the beautiful but hitherto merely decorative calligraphy of a foreign alphabet transformed before my eyes—acquiring meaning, without changing its appearance in any way. The fading stars described their fusion fires, the crush of gravity held in check by the liberation of binding energy. The pale air, reddened in the east, deftly portrayed its own biased scatter of photons. The lightly rippled water hinted at the play of intermolecular forces, the strength of the hydrogen bond, the gentle elasticity of a surface trying to minimize its contact with air.

And all of these messages were written in a common language. It was clear at a glance that they belonged together.

No wheels within wheels, no dazzling cosmic technoporn, no infernal diagrams.

No visions. Just understanding.

I pocketed the notepad and spun around, laughing. There was no overload, no crippling flood of information. The messages were always there—but I could take them or leave them. At first, it was like skipping over text with glazed eyes, requiring a conscious shift of focus—but with a few moments' practice, it became second nature.

This was the world as I'd always strived to see it: majestically beautiful, intricate and strange—but at its core harmonious, and hence ultimately comprehensible.

It was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe.

The mixing began to cut deeper.

I grew aware of my own physicality, my own nature written in the TOE. The connections I'd seen in the world reached into me, and bound me to everything in sight. There was, still, no X-ray vision, no double-helix dream—but I felt the immutable grammar of the TOE in my limbs, in my blood, in the dark glide of consciousness.

It was the lesson of the cholera—only starker and clearer. I was matter, like everything else.

I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelled out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.

I inhaled deeply, studying the events which followed the inrush of air. And I could trace the sweetness of the odor and the cooling of the nasal membranes, the satisfying fullness of the lungs, the surge of blood, the clarity delivered to the brain… all back to the TOE.

My claustrophobia evaporated. To inhabit this universe—to coexist with anything—I had to be matter. Physics was not a cage; its delineation between the possible and the impossible was the bare minimum that existence required. And the broken symmetry of the TOE—hacked out of the infinite paralyzing choices of pre-space—was the bedrock on which I stood.

I was a dying machine of cells and molecules; I would never be able to doubt that again.

But it was not a path into madness.

The mixing had still more to show me; the messages of introspection grew richer. I'd read the explanatory threads fanning out from the TOE, binding me to the world—but now the threads which explained my thoughts began to turn back toward their source. So I followed them down, and I understood what my own mind was creating through understanding:

Interacting symbols coded as firing patterns in neural pathways. Rules of dendritic growth and connection, synoptic weight adjustment, neurotransmitter diffusion. A chemistry of membranes, ion pumps, proteins, amines. All the detailed behavior of molecules and atoms, all the laws governing their necessary constituents. Layer after layer of converging regularity—

—right down to the TOE.

There was no arena of disinterested physics. There was no solid layer of objective laws. Just a deep circulating convection current of explanation, a causal magma upwelling from the underworld and then plunging down again into darkness, churning from TOE to body to mind to TOE—held up by nothing but the engine of understanding.

There was no bedrock, no fixed point, no place to rest.

I was endlessly treading water.

I sank to my knees, fighting away vertigo. I lay face down, clinging to the reef-rock. The cool solidity of the ground refuted nothing.

But did it need to? Held up by aloof, timeless laws, or held up by the bootstrap of explanation… it endured, regardless.