by Greg Egan
My notepad emitted a brief, soft squeal, like a children’s toy impaled on a knife. I took it from my pocket; the screen was blank – the first time ever I’d seen it that way. The door opened, and an elegantly dressed woman smiled at me and extended a hand, saying, “You must be Andrew Worth. I’m Amanda Conroy.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
Still clutching my notepad, I shook her hand. She glanced at the dead machine. “It won’t be damaged – but you understand, this is off the record.” She had a west coast US accent, and unashamedly unnatural milk-white skin, smooth as polished marble. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty.
I followed her into the house, down a plushly carpeted hallway, and into the living room. There were half a dozen wall-hangings: large, abstract and colorful. They looked to me like Brazilian Mock Primitive – the work of a school of fashionable Irish artists – but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were the “genuine” article: self-consciously exploitative “remixes” of twenties São Paulo ghetto art, currently valued at a hundred thousand times the price of the real thing from Brazil. The four-meter wall-screen certainly wasn’t cheap, though, and nor was the hidden device which had turned my notepad into a brick. I didn’t even contemplate trying to invoke Witness ; I was just glad I’d transmitted the morning’s footage to my editing console at home, before leaving the hotel.
We seemed to be alone in the house. Conroy said, “Take a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?” She moved toward a small beverage dispenser in a corner of the room. I glanced at the machine, and declined. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar synthesizer model – essentially a scaled-up pharm; it could have served anything from orange juice to a cocktail of neuroactive amines. Its presence on Stateless surprised me – I hadn’t been allowed to bring my own out-of-date pharm here – but not having memorized the schedules to the UN resolution, I wasn’t sure what technology was prohibited universally, and what was banned only from Australian exports.
Conroy sat opposite me, composed, but thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, “Akili Kuwale is a very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful person, but ve’s something of a loose canon.” She smiled disarmingly. “I can’t imagine what impression you have of us, after ve led you on with all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense.” She glanced at my notepad again, meaningfully. “I suppose our insistence on strict privacy doesn’t help matters, either – but there’s nothing sinister about that, I assure you. You must appreciate the power of the media to take a group of people, and their ideas, and distort the representation of both to suit … any number of agendas.” I started to reply – to concede the point, actually – but she cut me off. “I’m not trying to libel your profession, but we’ve seen it happen so many times, to other groups, that you shouldn’t be surprised if we treat it as an inevitable consequence of going public.
“So we’ve made the difficult choice, for the sake of autonomy, to refuse to be represented by outsiders at all. We don’t wish to be portrayed to the world at large: fairly or unfairly, sympathetically or otherwise. And if we have no public image whatsoever, the problem of distortion vanishes. We are who we are.”
I said, “And yet, you’ve asked me here.”
Conroy nodded, regretfully. “Wasting your time, and risking making things even worse. But what choice did we have? Akili stirred your curiosity, and we could hardly expect you to let the matter drop. So … I’m willing to discuss our ideas with you directly – rather than leaving you to track down and piece together a lot of unreliable hearsay from third parties. But it must, all, be off the record.”
I shifted in my seat. “You don’t want me drawing any more attention to you by asking questions of the wrong people – so you’ll answer them yourself, just to shut me up?”
I’d expected this blunt appraisal to be met with wounded denials and a barrage of euphemisms – but Conroy replied calmly, “That’s right.”
Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value: Just say I asked you more or less at random – that I’ve been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you. If the ACs thought my hastily improvised story for Lee about the “vanishing informant” Kuwale was in the process of being repeated to every last journalist and physicist on Stateless, no wonder they’d wasted no time in calling me in.
I said, “Why are you willing to trust me? What’s to stop me from using everything you say?”
Conroy spread her hands. “Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I’ve viewed your previous work; it’s clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don’t interest you. You’re here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference – which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture – they’re forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we’re not. And with no images of us – unless you care to fake them – what would you put in your documentary? A five minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?”
I didn’t know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosala’s antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.
What’s more, I couldn’t help but sympathize a little with the ACs’ stand. It seemed that almost everyone I’d encountered in the last few years – from gender migrants fleeing other people’s definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe – was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons – although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.
I said cautiously, “I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I’ll try to respect your wishes.”
This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she’d weighed up everything before we’d even met – and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.
She said, “ Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won’t waste your time, though, listing what we do and don’t have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth century France, or eighteenth century Germany … you can mine all the distant history yourself, if you really care. I’ll start with a man I’m sure you’ve heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler.” I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he’d played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.
Conroy continued, “Wheeler was a great advocate of the idea of a participatory universe: a universe shaped by the inhabitants who observe and explain it. He had a favorite metaphor for this concept … do you know the old game of twenty questions? One person thinks of an object, and the other keeps asking yes-or-no questions, to try to find out what it is.
“There’s another way to play the game, though. You don’t choose any object at all, to start with. You just answer the questions ‘yes’ or ‘no’, more or less at random – but constrained by the need to be consistent with what you’ve already said. If you’ve said that ‘it’ is blue all over, you can’t change your mind later and say that it’s red … even though you still have no precise idea what ‘it’ really is. But as more and more questions are asked, what ‘it’ might be becomes narrower and narrower.
“Wheeler suggested that the universe itself behaved like that undefined object – only coming into being as something specific through a similar process of interrogation. We make observations, we carry out experiments – we ask questions about ‘it.’ We get back answers – some of them more or less random – but they’re never absolute contradictions. And the more questions we ask … the more precisely the universe takes shape.”
I said, “You mean like … making measurements on microscopic objects? Some properties of subatomic particles don
’t exist until they’re measured – and the measurement you get has a random component – but if you measure the same thing a second time, you get the same result.” This was old, old ground, well-established and uncontroversial. “Surely that’s the kind of thing Wheeler would have meant?”
Conroy agreed. “That’s the definitive example. Which dates back to Niels Bohr, of course – and Wheeler was one of his students, in Copenhagen in the nineteen-thirties. Quantum measurement was certainly the inspiration for the whole model. Wheeler and his successors took it further, though.
“Quantum measurement is about individual, microscopic events which do or don’t happen – at random, but according to probabilities determined by a set of pre-existing laws. About … individual heads and tails, not the shape of the coin, or the overall odds when it’s thrown repeatedly. It’s easy enough to see that a coin is neither ‘heads’ nor ‘tails’ while it’s still up in the air, spinning – but what if it’s not even any particular coin? What if there really are no pre-existing laws governing the system you’re about to measure … any more than there are pre-existing answers to any of those measurements?”
I said warily, “You tell me.” I’d come here expecting a serve of the usual florid cult-speak from the very start: gibberish about archetypal warlocks and witches, or the urgent need to rediscover the lost wisdom of the alchemists. The strategy of taking quantum mechanics and distorting the boundaries of its counter-intuitive weirdness in whatever direction suited the cult philosophy was far harder to track. In the hands of a smooth-talking charlatan, QM could be blurred into just about anything – from a “scientific” basis for telepathy, to a “proof” of Zen Buddhism. Still, if I couldn’t gauge the precise moment when Conroy moved from established science to Anthrocosmological fantasy, that hardly mattered; I could map it all out later, when I had my electronic teat back, giving me access to some expert guidance.
Conroy smiled at my edginess – and continued in the language of science. “What happened, historically, was that physics merged with information theory . Or at least, a lot of people explored the union, for a while. They tried to discover whether it made sense to talk about building, not just a space-time of individual microscopic events, but all of the underlying quantum mechanics, and all of the various – then, non-unified – field equations … out of nothing but a stream of yes-and-no answers. Reality from information, from an accumulation of knowledge. As Wheeler put it, ‘an it from a bit.’”
I said, “Sounds like one of those nice ideas that just didn’t pan out. No one at the conference is talking about anything of the kind.”
Conroy conceded, “ Information physics pretty much vanished from serious contention when the Standard Unified Field Theory rose from the ashes of superstrings. What did the geometry of ten-dimensional total space have to do with sequences of bits? Very little. Geometry took over. And it’s been the most productive approach ever since.”
“So where do the Anthrocosmologists fit in? Do you have your own – ‘information physics’ – rival TOEs … which the establishment won’t take seriously?”
Conroy laughed. “Hardly! We couldn’t begin to compete in that arena, and we have no wish to do so. Buzzo, Mosala and Nishide can fight it out between themselves. One of them will come up with a flawless TOE in the end – I’m certain of that.”
“Then—?”
“Go back to the old Wheeler model of the universe. Laws of physics emerge from patterns – consistencies – in random data. But just as an event doesn’t take place unless it’s observed, a law doesn’t exist unless it’s understood. The question then is: understood by whom? Who decides what ‘consistent’ means? Who decides what form a ‘law’ can take – or what constitutes an ‘explanation’?
“If the universe instantly succumbed to any human explanation whatsoever … we’d be living in a world where stone age cosmology was literally true. Or … it would be like the old satires of the afterlife – a separate heaven for every conflicting faith – even before we died. But the world just isn’t like that. However much people disagree, we still find ourselves together, arguing about the nature of reality. We don’t float off into individual universes where our own private explanations are the ultimate truth.”
“Well, no.” I had a vivid image of the Mystical Renaissance theater troupe following Carl Jung – dressed in a Pied Piper costume – down a psychedelic wormhole into another cosmos entirely, where no rationalists could follow.
I said, “Doesn’t that suggest to you that the universe might not be participatory, after all? That the laws just might be fixed principles, independent of the people who understand them?”
“No.” Conroy smiled gently, as if this suggestion struck her as quaintly naïve. “Everything in relativity and quantum mechanics cries out against any absolute backdrop: absolute time, absolute history … absolute laws. But I think it does suggest that the whole idea of participation needs to be formulated rigorously in the mathematics of information theory, and different possibilities analyzed with great care.”
It was hard to argue with that. “To what end, though? If you’re not competing for the discovery of a successful TOE…?”
“The point is to understand the means by which TOE science can give rise to an active TOE. How knowledge of the equations can fix the reality they describe firmly in place – so firmly that we can’t even hope to see behind them, to glimpse the process which holds them there.”
I laughed. “If you admit we can’t hope to do that, you’ve just crossed right over into metaphysics.”
Conroy was unfazed. “Certainly. But we believe it can still be done in the spirit of science: applying logic, using appropriate mathematical tools. That’s what Anthrocosmology is: the old information-theoretic approach, revived as something external to physics. It may not be needed to discover the TOE itself – but I believe it can make sense of the fact that there is a TOE at all.”
I leaned forward – I think I was smiling, almost unwillingly – fascinated in spite of my skepticism. As cult pseudoscience went, at least this was high class bullshit.
“ How, exactly? Which of these possibilities you’ve ‘analyzed with great care’ can give a theory any kind of power which wasn’t already there in nature?”
Conroy said, “Imagine this cosmology: Forget about starting the universe with just the right finely-tuned Big Bang needed to create stars, planets, intelligent life … and a culture capable of making sense of it all. Instead, take as your ‘starting point’ the fact that there’s a living human being who can explain an entire universe, in terms of a single theory. Turn everything around, and take it as the only thing given that this one person exists.”
I said irritably, “How can it be the only thing? You can’t have a living human being … and nothing else. And if it’s given that this person can explain the universe, then there has to be a universe to explain .”
“Exactly.”
Conroy smiled, calmly and sanely, but the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I suddenly knew what she was going to say next.
“From this person, the universe ‘grows out’ of the power to explain it: out in all directions, and forward and backward in time. Instead of being blasted out of pre-space – instead of being ‘caused’ inexplicably at the beginning of time – it crystallizes quietly around a single human being.
“That’s why the universe obeys a single law – a Theory of Everything. It’s all explained by a single person. We call this one person the Keystone. Everyone, and everything, exists because the Keystone exists. The Big Bang model of cosmology can lead to anything at all: a universe of cold dust, a universe of black holes, a universe of dead planets. But the Keystone needs everything which the universe actually contains – stars, planets, life – in order to explain vis own existence. And not only needs them: the Keystone can account for all of them, make sense of all of them, without gaps, without flaws, without contradictions.
“That’s why it’s possible for
billions of people to be wrong . That’s why we’re not living with stone age cosmology – or even Newtonian physics. Most explanations just aren’t powerful, rich or coherent enough to bring a whole universe into being – and to explain a mind capable of holding such an explanation.”
I sat and stared at Conroy, not wishing to insult her, but at a loss for anything polite to say. This was pure cult-speak at last: she might as well have been telling me that Violet Mosala and Henry Buzzo were the incarnations of a pair of warring Hindu deities, or that Atlantis would rise from the ocean and the stars would fall from the sky when the Final Equation was written.
Except that, if she had, I doubt I would have felt the same uneasy tingling down my back and across my forearms. She’d steered close enough to the shores of science, for enough of the way, to disarm me a little.
She continued. “We can’t watch the universe emerge; we’re part of it, we’re trapped inside the space-time created by the act of explanation. All we can hope to witness, in the progression of time, is one person become the first to hold the TOE in vis mind, and grasp its consequences, and – invisibly, imperceptibly – understand us all into being .”
She laughed suddenly, breaking the spell. “It’s only a theory. The mathematics behind it makes perfect sense – but the reality is untestable, by its very nature. So of course, we could be wrong.
“But now, can you understand why someone like Akili – who believes, perhaps too passionately, that we could be right – wishes to be certain that Violet Mosala will come to no harm?”
#
I walked further south than I needed to, heading for a tram stop some way down the line from the point where I’d disembarked. I needed to be out under the stars for a while, to come back down to Earth. Even if Stateless didn’t exactly qualify as solid ground.
