The limo pulled away. Malenfant, in his Navy uniform, was tweaking his cuffs. A blank-faced young soldier waited at his arm, ready to escort them into the building.
The Vice President’s official residence was a rambling brick mansion on a broad green lawn, set at the corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Kate, who wasn’t as accustomed to Washington as she liked to pretend, thought it looked oddly friendly, like a small-town museum, rather than a major centre of federal power.
Beyond the security fence city life went on as usual, a stream of Smart-driven traffic washing with oily precision along the street, tourists and office workers drifting along the sidewalk, speaking into the air to remote contacts.
Malenfant said, ‘You wouldn’t think the damn sky was about to fall, would you?’
‘Everybody knows as much as we do,’ she said. ‘Nothing stays secret. So how come there isn’t –’
‘Panic buying?’ he grinned. ‘Rutting in the streets? Running for the hills? Because we don’t get it, Manzoni. Look in your heart. You don’t believe it, do you? Not deep down. We’re not programmed to look further than the other guy’s nose.’
Unexpectedly the young soldier spoke up. ‘“This is the way I think the world will end – with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.”’ They looked at him, surprised. ‘Kierkegaard. Sorry, sir. If you’re ready, will you follow me?’
When they reached Maura Della’s office, Cornelius Taine was already there, sitting bolt uptight on one of the overstuffed armchairs, already talking.
‘Past speculation on artificial realities provides us with clues as to our likely response to finding ourselves in a “planetarium”. You may remember movies in which the protagonist is the unwitting star of a TV show or movie, who invariably tries to escape. But the idea that the world around us may not be real reaches back to Plato, who wondered if what we see resembles the flickering shadows on a cave wall. And the notion of creating deceptive artificial environments dates back at least as far as Descartes, who in the seventeenth century speculated on the philosophical implications of a sense-manipulating “demon” – effectively a pre-technological virtual-reality generator …’
Della, listening, waved Malenfant and Kate to seats. Kate selected an expensive-looking upright that creaked under her weight.
The office was large and spacious. The furniture was stuffed leather, the big desk polished mahogany, the wallpaper and carpets lush. But Maura Della had stamped her personality on the room; on every wall were cycling softscreen images of the surfaces of Mars and Io, the gloomy oceans of Europa, a deep-space image of a galaxy field.
Malenfant leaned forward. ‘Planetarium? What the hell are you talking about, Cornelius?’
Cornelius regarded him coolly. ‘The logic is compelling, Malenfant. Your own logic: the Fermi Paradox, which you claim has driven your life. The Paradox defies our intuition, as well as philosophical principles such as the assumption of mediocrity, that it is only on our own apparently commonplace world that mind has evolved. The Paradox is surely telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with our view of the universe, and our place in it.’
Malenfant prompted, ‘And so …’
‘And so, perhaps the reason that the universe does not appear to make sense is that what we see around us is artificial.’
Malenfant let his mouth drop open.
Kate sat as still as she could, unsure how to react.
They were both looking at the Vice President, waiting for her lead.
Della sighed. ‘I know how this sounds. But Cornelius is here at my invitation, Malenfant. Look, I have plenty of people explaining the rational possibilities to me. Perhaps we’re in the middle of some huge solar storm, for instance, which is disrupting communications. Perhaps the solar system has wandered into a knot of interstellar gas, or even dark matter, which is refracting or diffusing electromagnetic radiation, including your laser beam –’
‘None of which hangs together,’ Kate guessed.
Della frowned at her. Malenfant quickly introduced Kate as a personal aide.
Della said, ‘Okay. You’re right. Nobody has come up with anything that works. It isn’t just a question of some new anomaly; we have a situation for which, as far as I understand it, no explanation within our physical law is even possible … But here is Cornelius, with a proposal that is frankly outrageous –’
‘But an outrageous problem requires outrageous proposals,’ Cornelius said, his smile cold.
Malenfant said, ‘Just tell me what you’re talking about, Cornelius.’
Cornelius went on, ‘Think about it. What if we have been placed in some form of “planetarium”, perhaps generated using an advanced virtual reality technology, designed to give us the illusion of an empty universe – while beyond the walls with their painted stars, the shining lights of extraterrestrial civilizations glow unseen?’
‘Which would resolve Fermi,’ Malenfant said. ‘They’re there, but they are hiding.’
‘Which would resolve Fermi, yes.’
‘And now the planetarium’s, uh, projector is breaking down. Hence A-4, Neptune and the rest. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Exactly.’
Kate thought it over. ‘That’s what the Fermi experts call a zoo hypothesis.’
Cornelius looked impressed. ‘So it is.’
‘It belongs in a zoo,’ Malenfant said. ‘For one thing it’s paranoid. It’s classic circular logic: you could never disprove it. We could never detect we were in a planetarium because it’s designed not to be detected. Right?’
‘Malenfant, the fact that a hypothesis is paranoid doesn’t make it wrong.’
Della said, ‘Let me see if I understand you, Cornelius. You’re suggesting that not everything we see is real. How much of everything?’
Cornelius shrugged. ‘There are several possible answers. It depends on how far the boundary of the artificial “reality” is set from the human consciousness. The crudest design would be like a traditional planetarium, in which we – our bodies – and the objects we touch are real, while the sky is a fake dome.’
Malenfant nodded. ‘So the stars and galaxies are simulated by a great shell surrounding the solar system.’
‘But,’ said Kate, ‘it would surely take a lot to convince us. Photons of starlight are real entities that interact with our instruments and eyes.’
Malenfant said, thinking, ‘And you’d have to simulate not just photons but such exotica as cosmic rays and neutrinos. You’re talking about some impressive engineering.’
Cornelius waved a hand, as if impatient with their ill-informed speculation. ‘These are details. If the controllers anticipate our technological progress, perhaps even now they are readying the gravity-wave generators …’
‘And what,’ asked Della, ‘if the boundary is closer in than that?’
Cornelius said, ‘There are various possibilities. Perhaps we humans are real, but some – or all – of the objects we see around us are generated as simulations, tangible enough to interact with our senses.’
‘Holograms,’ Kate said. ‘We are surrounded by holograms.’
‘Yes. But with solidity. Taste, smell …’
Malenfant frowned. ‘That’s kind of a brute-force way of doing it. You’d have to form actual material objects, all out of some kind of controlling rays. How? Think of the energy required, the control, the heat … And you’d have to load them with a large amount of information, of which only a fraction would actually interact with us to do the fooling.’
Della said, ‘And would these hologram objects be evanescent – like the images on a TV screen? In that case they would need continual refreshing – yes?’
Again Cornelius seemed impatient; this is a man not used to being questioned, Kate saw. ‘It is straightforward to think of more efficient design strategies. For example, allowing objects once created to exist as quasi-autonomous entities within the environment, only loosely coupled to the contr
olling mechanism. This would obviate the need, for example, to reproduce continually the substance at the centre of the Earth, with which we never interact directly. But any such compromise is a step back from perfection. With sufficient investment, you see, the controllers would have full control of the maintained environment.’
Della said, ‘What would that mean?’
Cornelius shrugged. ‘The controllers could make objects appear or disappear at will. The whole Earth, if necessary. For example.’
There was a brief silence.
Della got out of her chair and faced the window. She flexed her hands, and pressed her fingertips against the sunlit desk top, as if testing its reality. ‘You know, I find it hard to believe we’re having this conversation. Anything else?’
Cornelius said, ‘A final possibility is that even our bodies are simulated, so that the boundary of reality is drawn around our very consciousness. We can already think of crude ways of doing this.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘For example, the fashionable implants in the corpus callosum that allow the direct downloading of virtual-reality sensations into the consciousness.’
‘If that was so,’ said Della, ‘how could we ever tell?’
Cornelius shook his head. ‘If the simulation was good enough, we could not. And there would be nothing we could do about it. But I don’t think we are in that situation.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because the simulation is going wrong. Alpha A-4, the evaporation of the Oort Cloud, Neptune, the vanishing of Saturn’s rings …’
Kate hadn’t heard about Saturn; she found room for a brief, and surprising, stab of regret.
‘I think,’ said Cornelius, ‘that we should assume we are in a planetarium of the second type I listed. We are “real”. But not everything around us is genuine.’
Della turned and leaned on her desk, her knuckles white. ‘Cornelius, whatever the cause, this wave of anomalies is working its way towards us. There is going to be panic; you can bet on that.’
Cornelius frowned. ‘Not until the anomalies are visible in our own sky. Most of us have remarkably limited imaginations. The advance of the anomaly wave is actually quite well understood. Its progression is logarithmic; it is slowing as it approaches the sun. We can predict to the hour when effects will become visible to Earth’s population.’ His cool gaze met the Vice President’s. ‘That is, we can predict when the panicking will begin.’
Kate asked, ‘How long?’
‘Five more days. The precise numbers have been posted.’ He smiled, cold, analytical. ‘You have time to prepare, madam Vice President. And if it is cloudy, Armageddon will no doubt be postponed by a few hours.’
Della glowered at him. ‘You’re a damn cold fish, Cornelius. If you’re right – what do you suggest we do?’
‘Do?’ The question seemed to puzzle him. ‘Why – rejoice. Rejoice that the façade is cracking, that the truth will soon be revealed.’
A phone chimed, startling them all. Malenfant looked abstractedly into the air while an insect voice buzzed in his ear.
He turned to Kate. ‘It’s Saranne. She’s gone into labour.’
The meeting broke up. Kate followed Malenfant out of the room, frustrated she hadn’t gotten to ask the most important questions of all:
What controllers?
And, what do they want?
Her own voice wafted out of the dark.
You know who’s really taking a bath over this? The astrologers. Those planets swimming around the sky are turning their fancy predictions into mush. And if this is the end of the world, how come none of them saw it coming? …
It was the fourth day after the Alpha echo had failed to return. Three days left, if Cornelius was right, until …
Until what?
‘Don’t talk about astrology,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me about reality.’
… Okay. Why do we believe that the universe is real? Starting with Bishop Berkeley, the solipsists have wondered if the apparently external world is contained within the observer’s imagination – just as this virtual abyss we share is contained within the more limited imagination of a bank of computers.
‘I don’t see how you could disprove that.’
Right. But when Boswell asked Dr Johnson about the impossibility of refuting Berkeley’s theory, Johnson kicked a large rock and said, ‘I refute it thus.’ What Johnson meant was that when the rock ‘kicked back’ at his foot, he either had to formulate a theory of physical law which explained the existence and behaviour of the rock – or else assume that his imagination was itself a complex, autonomous universe containing laws which precisely simulated the existence of the rock – which would therefore, imagination plus rock, be a more complex system. You see? If we’re in a planetarium there must be some vast hidden mechanism that controls everything we see. It’s simpler to assume that what looks real is real.
‘Occam’s razor.’
Sure. But Occam’s razor is a guide, not a law of physics … And turn it around. What if the universe is a simulation? Then we can use Dr Johnson’s criterion to figure out what is required of the controllers.
‘I don’t understand.’
The model universe must have a lot of industrial-strength properties. For instance it must be consistent. Right? In principle, anybody anywhere could perform a scientific experiment of the finest detail on any sample of the universe and its contents, and find the fabric of reality yielding consistent results. The rocks have always got to ‘kick back’ in the same way, no matter where and how we kick them. So you have to build your cage that way. Expensive, right?
And the environment has to be self-contained: no explanations of anything inside should ever require the captives to postulate an outside. Kate, I bet if you had been born in this darkness you could figure out there has to be something beyond. How could your consciousness have emerged from this formless mush?
And so on. The technical challenge of achieving such a deep and consistent simulation should not be underestimated – and nor should the cost … Oh. It just reached Jupiter. Wow, what a spectacle. You want to see?
Her field of view filled up abruptly with fragmentary images, bits of cloud fractally laced, stained salmon pink.
She turned away, and the images disappeared.
Strange thought, isn’t it? What if Cornelius is right? Here you are in one virtual reality, which is in turn contained within another. Layers of nested unreality, Kate …
Kate felt a sudden revulsion. ‘Wake up, wake up.’
For long minutes she immersed herself in gritty reality: the pine scent that came from the open window of her bedroom, the song of the birds, the slow tick of the old-fashioned clock in the wall.
Reality?
On impulse, she closed her eyes. ‘Wake up. Wake up.’
The clock continued to tick, the birds to sing.
Civil defence programmes were activated, Cold War bunkers reopened, food stocks laid down. Various space probes were hastily launched to meet the advancing anomaly. There was even an extraordinary crash programme to send an astronaut team to orbit the Moon, now seen as the last line of defence between Earth and sky.
Kate knew the government had to be seen doing something; that was what governments were there for.
But she knew it was all futile, and in its own way damaging. Though reassuring talking heads from the President on down tried to tell people to keep calm – and, more importantly, to keep showing up at work – there was growing disruption from the preparations themselves, if not from the strange lights in the sky, still invisible to the naked eye.
Of course it all got worse when Cornelius’s countdown timetable became widely known.
She did a little digging into the history of Cornelius Taine.
He had been an academic mathematician. She hadn’t even recognized the terms his peers used to describe Cornelius’s achievements – evidently they covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distributi
on of prime numbers – anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.
But his gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its rightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.
As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance. Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age. Or maybe there was a darker explanation. It wasn’t unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.
Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn’t seem to have worked.
The anecdotes of Cornelius’s breakdown were fragmentary. On his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.
After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma’s data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time. When he re-emerged, it was to become a founding board member of a consultancy called Eschatology, Inc.
She took this to Malenfant. ‘Don’t you get it? Here’s a guy who sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out – a guy who went through a breakdown, driven crazy by the numbers in his head – a guy who now believes he can predict the end of humanity. If he came up to you in the street, what would you think of what he was muttering?’
‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But –’
‘But what?’
‘What if it’s true? Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he’s right? What then?’ His eyes were alive, excited.
‘He’s gone to ground, you know,’ she said.
‘We have to find him.’
It took two more precious days.
They tracked Cornelius to New York. He agreed to meet them at the head offices of Eschatology, Inc.
Kate wasn’t sure what she had expected. Maybe a trailer home in Nevada, the walls coated with tabloid newspaper cuttings, the interior crammed with cameras and listening gear.
Phase Space Page 45
