The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  "OK," I say.

  Now, on my little image of my laptop I can imagine two layers of code: the stuff that makes the program and the stuff that makes the machine work. I can see that the two would be closely related, but that one—the machine code—is operating on a deeper level than the other.

  "So in our world, what is written in machine code?" Lura asks me.

  "Um," I think quickly. What tells our world how to work? Do we even know? "The laws of physics?"

  "Yes. Excellent. And?"

  "And...?"

  "This is impressive," says Burlem. "It took me longer than this."

  I think for a few minutes. While I'm thinking, Burlem finishes eating and tops up everyone's wine; then he clears the plates away and stacks them in the dishwasher.

  "What about philosophy?" Lura prompts me. "Metaphysics?"

  I nod slowly. "OK. So ... What are you saying? That some people think in this machine code?"

  "Possibly," she says. "Who do you imagine would think in machine code?"

  "You mean as opposed to the more 'ordinary world' kind of code?"

  "Yes."

  "So the code of the ordinary world is basically language, and machine code is the thoughts of ... um ... scientists? Philosophers?"

  "Yes. Now think of a historical figure. Someone who would be capable of this."

  I sip my wine. "Einstein?"

  "Good answer. But now I've got the hardest question of all. When Einstein came up with his relativity theories, was he just describing the world as it was already or..." She raises her eyebrows and leaves a space for me to finish her sentence.

  "Making it work like that," I say. "God."

  "Do you see it?" Lura asks.

  "I think so. You're saying that Einstein came up with relativity theory as an explanation for the world, but what he was actually doing was constructing it? So when he said that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, he wasn't observing nature's speed limit but actually setting it."

  "Yes."

  I roll up a cigarette for Burlem and then one for myself. I do it almost in slow motion, my brain using 99 percent of its processing power to think over what Lura is saying, and most of the remaining 1 percent just keeping me alive while I do that. There's very little left for self-destruction. But still, I manage to light my cigarette, and Burlem lights his.

  "Have you ever thought just how fucked-up twentieth-century physics is?" he asks me.

  "Yeah. Obviously. You know that's one of my interests."

  "It's odd, don't you think," Lura says, "that Einstein found exactly what he was looking for, even though it shouldn't have made sense. It was a brilliant theory, of course, but so outlandish compared with Newtonian physics. Then Eddington went off to look at the eclipse and Einstein's predictions were proven. They keep being proven. You can't build a GPS system now without taking relativity theory into account. And even the cosmological constant, which Einstein rejected and said was his biggest mistake—even that refuses to go away completely. And then there's quantum physics..."

  "Which Einstein didn't like," I say.

  "Hmm. Yes. Well, what's the one main thing we know about quantum physics?"

  "It's absolutely crazy?"

  "Yes." She laughs. "And?"

  "Um..."

  "It's the study of things you shouldn't be able to see," she says. "It's the study of things no one has ever looked at, or thought about very much. And what happened?"

  "They found that everything's messed up and uncertain," I say.

  "Uncertain. That's the key word," she says.

  I frown. "How do you mean?"

  "No one had ever said what this tiny stuff should be doing," Burlem says. "So when they looked at it, they found it was doing whatever the fuck it liked."

  "Oh you do paraphrase in an awkward way," Lura says. "Matter doesn't 'do what it likes.' Quantum matter just had no laws. No one had decided whether or not light was waves or particles. And then people were surprised when they found that it was both at once."

  "But didn't Newton's laws apply to everything?" I say. "I mean, once they were invented."

  "Ah," says Lura. Then she doesn't say anything else.

  "Sorry?" I say.

  "This is where it gets complicated."

  "In what way?"

  "Well, I'll tell you in a minute over coffee. But for a moment, think about this. There is a possibility that the quantum level is fundamental: that when you look at subatomic particles you are actually looking at the most basic parts of the physical—and mental—world. I suppose you might call them the basic building blocks. And in terms of my theory, perhaps it's not a surprise to find that on that level the electron is everywhere at once until you decide where it is—and therefore what it is. It fits the theory. Matter has to be coded before it can mean anything. And thought is what encodes matter. Thought decides where the electron is."

  We move onto the sofas with a cafetière full of coffee. Lura knits as she speaks: pale green cashmere turning from something that looks like string into something that looks like the sleeve of a cardigan as the gray needles click-click-click in her lap. She explains to me the way in which she believes the laws of the physical world are constructed. She says that there was never any a priori existence: no sense that matter was anything or obeyed any laws until there was consciousness to perceive it. But, because consciousness is also made from the same matter, the two areas that we always think are distinct—the human mind, and the world of things—started working together to create, refine, and mold each other. Conscious beings started looking at things and deciding what things were and how they worked. Thus, the first fish didn't just chance upon the weed it needed to survive: It created it. And no one "found" fire by a lucky accident. Someone just had to think fire and, as long as the thought was in this "machine" code, there it was. And, for a while, things worked exactly the way everyone assumed they did. And there were no competing laws, so everything was simple. Earth did revolve around the sun, and magic did exist. But then other people came along—also people able to think in this machine code—and decided that the world worked differently. The sun became the center of something called a "solar system" and the stars stopped being the burn holes of the saints. Magic gradually faded.

  We talk about chaos theory, and how butterflies suddenly acquired the power to cause hurricanes; and we talk about evolution. Lura explains her theory—part of her whole project—that once someone has thought something into being via this machine code, that theory has to survive. Some do and some don't. Newton's theory had some small glitches that were worked out in Einstein's theory. Einstein's theory was a mutation, but it was stronger. It survived.

  "So knowledge or, at least, its effects are democratic?" I ask.

  "Yes, but not in the way you might think from what I've just said."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, it's not belief that keeps things in the physical world—the Enlightenment took care of that. You can see only what can be proved. Everything else just haunts the Troposphere. This mouse god of yours must be one of many. I've been thinking about this since you got here and told us about what you'd seen. Everything's recorded in the Troposphere, of course, and if enough people believe in one thing, then the energy seems to come alive. I think that there are conscious beings in the Troposphere made out of this energy. Ghosts, gods ... And they have omniscience because we've given them that power. But they can't act in the way we can. They are not agents. Omniscience implies infinite knowledge—but not necessarily the possibility for any action. That's why, when Apollo Smintheus's cult prays to him, he has to get you to do his task for him. You see, you just can't have gods in the physical world. In the physical world you have to be able to prove things exist."

  "But if Apollo Smintheus was standing right here, we'd have proved that he existed," I say.

  "No. Think about it," Burlem says. "All you could prove is that you could see him. Even if you took a photograph, people would say it was
a forgery."

  "Whoops," I say, smiling. "I forgot all about phenomenology there and almost became an empiricist."

  Burlem smiles back. "Indeed."

  "And the question isn't whether or not Apollo Smintheus exists, but what existence is."

  "Exactly, and, for now, Apollo Smintheus isn't consistent with the laws of physics, so he's consigned to the Troposphere. He can't exist in the physical world because he wouldn't make sense here."

  "Which probably isn't a bad thing," Lura says.

  "But didn't Einstein's theories go against Newtonian physics?" I say. "I mean, they were probably more against the laws of physics than Apollo Smintheus."

  "Yes, but he thought them in machine code," she says. "Or, to put it another way, in mathematics. Einstein was able to think relativity into existence because he could think it into the very fabric of the universe. And of course his theories were plausible. They went with what had come before, even if they seemed counterintuitive."

  I make a little gasping noise. "Mathematics. Of course." That's what machine code is made from. That's what makes the laws of physics.

  "Yes."

  "And that's what you see when you go into the Troposphere, isn't it?" I say.

  Lura doesn't catch my eye. "Yes," she says.

  But my mind is racing on.

  "So what if someone who could think in this code thought about God?" I say. "I mean, didn't Einstein even say that he was trying to read the mind of God? He believed in God—so how come that didn't make God a physical being?"

  "Because you can't create your own creator," Lura says simply.

  "You can't create anything outside the system," Burlem says.

  "But ... So how come God exists in the Troposphere? I'm still not sure I get that. I can see how an entity like Apollo Smintheus would end up there. But God with a capital 'G': He's supposed to be the creator—just like you said."

  "God has other functions," Lura says. "As you pointed out the other day, God is simply a collection of people's thoughts about how we should live and what the world means. I expect that if you met God in the Troposphere he wouldn't claim to have created the whole thing. You have to sit outside something to create it. And we just don't know what's outside."

  I think about Jim Lahiri's book again, and the argument I got so excited about when I was talking to Adam and Heather. I can't help thinking about those questions about the beginnings of everything. Is there a multiverse? Or is God sitting beyond the laptop; the entity that switched the whole thing on?

  "What about time?" I say.

  "What about it?" says Lura.

  "Well, no one thinks that relativity only existed from 1905, or whenever it was. People think that there was always relativity, but no one noticed it before."

  "What do you think?" says Lura.

  "I'm not sure," I say. "But there does seem to be the possibility that these theories have backwards effects ... Or am I going nuts?"

  "No. That's very sophisticated," says Lura. "You could give that some more thought. Of course, the other possibility is that the way the world works is always changing." She doesn't say anything else for a minute or so, and when I look at her lined face, it seems tired.

  "Who's the writer you were talking about before?" I ask. "The one who keeps leaving all the messages."

  "Ah," says Burlem.

  "Oh," says Lura. "She's interested in my theories and she's condensed some of them into a short story. She's having it published in Nature magazine, but I wasn't sure I wanted her to. She offered to put my name on the piece, but I'm not sure I want to put my name to all of this just yet. And as for my book..."

  Lura's eyes drift away from mine and settle somewhere on the table.

  "What's your book called?" I ask her.

  "Poststructuralist Physics," she says. Now the click-click-click noise stops. She sighs and puts her knitting in her lap. "It will never be published, of course," she says.

  "Why not?" I say.

  "Because there's no evidence for anything I've said tonight. There is no such thing as poststructuralist physics."

  She shrugs: a small, almost imperceptible movement.

  "What about the Troposphere?" I say.

  "The Troposphere is going to be gone," Burlem says.

  "Gone? But ... How?"

  "You're going to destroy it," he says.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I'm sitting on my bed with my thoughts flapping in my mind like chaotic butterflies.

  Oh fuck.

  Now I understand why Apollo Smintheus took a special interest in me.

  So I can change things in people's minds—just like the KIDS can. I can make people like Martin Rose want to go to the toilet so badly that he leaves his stakeout. And I made Wolf refuse to tell Adam where the book was when the Project Starlight men were surely in Adam's mind, listening in. But I thought everyone could do that. I didn't think there was anything special about me. Now it turns out that there is. Lura also thinks I could probably think in machine code; that I have that potential. And that's why Apollo Smintheus wants me to seek out Abbie Lathrop and, through her, to change history. So now Burlem and Lura want me to go even farther back and convince Lumas not to write the book at all. They say I can have as long as I want to plan my journey—after all, once the book is gone then the knowledge is gone. The Project Starlight men will never find the book in the priory because the book will not be there anymore. There won't be any Project Starlight. But I am bothered by paradoxes again: They are pinning me down by my wings. If I had already done this and been successful, then I wouldn't need to go. And I don't have all the time in the world, really. Martin and Ed could come here tomorrow and blow my brains out. The fact that they're here, in this world, and they want to do this—surely that implies that I have already been unsuccessful.

  Except ... I'm not sure that time works in exactly the way we all think.

  But maybe I'd better not think about that too much ... I'm actually a bit scared of thinking anything, now I know what my thoughts potentially are.

  So I wanted knowledge, and I got it. But did I ever want this kind of knowledge? Did I ever want to know that there is no God: that we are God? That there's not necessarily a creator or a reason? We make reason and only dream of creators: That's all we can do. But I knew this all along, right? Maybe. But how awful this is: How awful to be proved right; for someone to demonstrate to you that yes, there's no Daddy up there who's going to approve of you because you got the puzzle right. No supreme being is going to clap and give you a special place in heaven because you understood some of Heidegger. God might be up there in the Troposphere, but the Troposphere is simply our thought. And there really is nothing outside of that. Our thoughts spin quarks up and down and smear electrons into whatever we want them to be.

  Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking and that every single action in the universe could be predicted—if you had something powerful enough on which to do the prediction. There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known. In that world I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes. It's what happens when you try to combine God with science. It's narrative, pure and simple. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is. And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

  Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability. But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will. You can decide to become rich. You can grow up to be president. Improbable, but possible.

  But in
this new world of poststructuralist physics I have so much free will that nothing means anything anymore.

  But you believed that before, Ariel. You've read Heidegger, Derrida. You got a thrill out of it all: no absolutes. It's what you believed. Everything depends on everything else.

  But I didn't want it to be true. Or, I wanted it to be true for the closed system of language in which nothing is ever absolutely true, anyway. I wanted uncertainty. But I didn't want the world to be made only of language and nothing else.

  Maybe that's why Burlem's heading for the void.

  And that's where I'd be going, too, if I didn't have to go into the Troposphere again, with a real possibility that I'll never come back. But I suppose that Burlem and Lura's reasoning is clear enough. If I'm going back to change Abbie Lathrop's mind for Apollo Smintheus, why not just keep going and change Lumas's mind for the human race? And of course what they said made sense. The Troposphere shouldn't be there. If enough people knew about the Troposphere, we'd have the worst possible scenario: no God—and no free will, either. People would simply be able to control other people's minds. Those with power could simply manipulate the rest of us to think what they want us to think. Any "bad" or "revolutionary" thoughts could be erased.

  Yeah: like I'm going to erase the thoughts of Abbie Lathrop and Thomas E. Lumas.

  Later that night, I can hardly sleep. And when I do drop off I just find I'm dreaming of Apollo Smintheus again. Most of the dream is the same as the one from the other night, with him saying, "You owe me," over and over again. But the other half of the dream is about everything he said about time travel and paradoxes. I'm asking him, "But how can I go back in time and change a world that is not already now changed by what I did?"

  And he's saying, "You already have."

  I get about an hour's sleep in the end.

  When I get up in the morning the rain has stopped and Burlem's cooked me porridge. I'm not sure I want porridge: I think I want to smoke a lot and then go through the kitchen drawers until I find the sharpest knife, and then I want to spend a few hours alone convincing myself that I'm real and I'm human and I mean something. But in the end I just eat the porridge and then smoke one cigarette with a glass of water. Lura comes down from her study at about ten o'clock.