Phase Space (68 page)

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 distribution 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.

But this office, here in the heart of Manhattan, was none of that.

Malenfant was glaring at Cornelius. ‘You know, I have the feeling you’ve played me for a patsy through this whole damn thing. You’ve always known more than me, been one step ahead, used me to front your projects without telling me the full logic –’

Cornelius laughed at him, with a chilling arrogance. He barely sees us as human beings at all, Kate realized. He said, ‘Sore pride, Malenfant? Is that really what’s most important to you? We really are just frightened chimpanzees, bewildered by the lights in the sky –’

‘You arrogant asshole.’

Kate looked around the small, oak-panelled conference room. The three of them sat at a polished table big enough for twelve, with small inlaid softscreens. There was a smell of polished leather and clean carpets: impeccable taste, corporate lushness, anonymity. The only real sign of unusual wealth and power, in fact, was the enviable view – from a sealed, tinted window – of Central Park. She saw people strolling, children playing on the glowing green grass, the floating sparks of police drones everywhere.

The essentially ordinariness made it all the more scary, of course – today being a day when, she had learned, Mars had gone, vanishing into a blurring wave of alternate possibilities, volcanoes and water-carved canyons and life traces and all.

Kate said, ‘Malenfant’s essentially right, isn’t he? On some level you anticipated all this.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘I saw you smile. At JPL.’

Cornelius nodded. ‘You see? Simple observation, Malenfant. This girl really is brighter than you are.’

‘Get to the point, Cornelius.’

Cornelius sighed, a touch theatrically. ‘You know, the facts are there, staring everybody in the face. The
logic
is there. It’s just that most people are unwilling to think it through.

‘Take seriously for one minute the possibility that we are living in a planetarium, some kind of virtual-reality projection. What must it cost our invisible controllers to run? We are an inquisitive species, Malenfant. At any moment we are liable to test anything and everything to destruction. To maintain their illusion, the controllers would surely require that their simulation of every object should be
perfect
– that is, undistinguishable from the real thing by any conceivable physical test.’

‘No copy is perfect,’ Malenfant said briskly. ‘Quantum physics. Uncertainty. All that stuff.’

‘In fact your intuition is wrong,’ Cornelius said. ‘Quantum considerations actually show that a perfect simulation
is
possible – but it is energy-hungry.

‘You see, there is a limit to the amount of information which may be contained within a given volume. This limit is called the Bekenstein Bound.’ Equations scrolled across the table surface before Kate; she let them glide past her eyes. ‘The Bound is essentially a manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a reflection of the fundamental “graininess” of our reality. Because of the existence of the Bound, every physical object is a finite state machine – that is, it only requires a finite number of bits to replicate its every possible condition. Therefore a
perfect
simulation of any physical object can be made – perfect, meaning undistinguishable from the real thing by any conceivable physical test.’

Kate said uneasily, ‘Anything can be replicated?’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Including you, Kate. But perfect simulations are expensive. The bigger they are, the more energy they burn. And
that
is the chink in the controllers’ armour.’

‘It is?’

‘As human civilization has progressed, successively larger portions of reality have come within our reach. And the extent of the universe which must be simulated to high quality likewise increases: the walls around reality must be drawn successively back. Before 1969, for example, a crude mock-up of the Moon satisfying only a remote visual inspection might have sufficed; but since 1969, we can be sure that the painted Moon had to be replaced with a rocky equivalent. You see?’ He winked at Kate. ‘A conspiracy theorist might point to the very different quality of the Moon’s far side to its Earth-visible near side – mocked up in a hurry, perhaps?’

‘Oh, bullshit, Cornelius,’ Malenfant said tiredly.

Kate said, ‘You actually have numbers for all this?’

Malenfant grunted. ‘Numbers, yeah. The mathematics of paranoia.’

Cornelius, unperturbed, tapped at his desktop surface, and a succession of images, maps with overlays and graphs, flickered over its surface. ‘We can estimate the resources required to run a perfect planetarium of any given size. It’s just a question of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.’ He flicked a smile. ‘Graduate physics. Two equations.

‘Look here. For much of its pre-agricultural history humanity consisted of small roaming bands with little knowledge, save for tentative trading links, beyond a disc on the Earth’s surface with radius of a few kilometres. To generate planetariums on such a scale would require no more than a few per cent of the energy available to a planetary-scale civilization:
we
could probably do it.

‘But by the time you have to fool a cohesive culture covering a hundred kilometres – that’s a lot smaller than the Roman Empire, say – the capabilities of that planetary-level civilization would be exceeded.

‘The bigger the planetarium, the harder it gets. We can characterize our modern globe-spanning civilization by the radius of Earth and a depth corresponding to our deepest mines. To generate a planetarium on such a scale would exceed even the capability of a civilization able to master the energy output of a single star.

‘A future human culture capable of direct exploration of the centre of the Earth, and able to reach comets twice as far away as Pluto, would exhaust the resources of a galaxy.

‘And if we reach the stars, we would test the resources of any conceivable planetarium …’

Kate was bewildered by the escalation of number and concept. ‘We would?’

‘Imagine a human colonization disc of radius a hundred light years, embedded in the greater disc of the Galaxy. To simulate every scrap of mass in there would exceed in energy requirements the resources of the entire visible universe. So after that point, any simulation
must
be less than perfect – and its existence prone to our detection. The lies must end, sooner or later. But, of course, we might not have to wait that long.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘To crash the computer.’ He grinned, cold; on some level, she saw, this was all a game to him, the whole universe as an intellectual puzzle. ‘Perhaps we can overstretch their capacity to assemble increasing resources. Rushing the fence might be the way: we could send human explorers out to far distances in all directions as rapidly as possible, pushing back the walls around an expanding shell of space. But advanced robot spacecraft, equipped with powerful sensors, might achieve the same result …’

‘Ah,’ said Kate. ‘Or maybe even active but ground-based measures. Like laser echoing. And
that’s
why you pushed Project Michelangelo.’

Malenfant leaned forward. ‘Cornelius –
what have you done
?’

Cornelius bowed his head. ‘By the logic of Fermi, I was led to the conclusion that our universe is, in whole or in part, a thing of painted walls and duck blinds. I wanted to challenge those who hide from us. The laser pulse to Centauri – a sudden scale expansion of direct contact by a factor of thousands – was the most dramatic way I could think of to drive the controllers’ processing costs through the roof. And it must have caught them by surprise – our technology is barely able enough to handle such a feat – those critics were right, Malenfant, when they criticized the project for being premature. But they did not see my true purpose.’

Kate said slowly, ‘I can’t believe your arrogance. What gave you the
right –
’

‘To bring the sky crashing down?’ His nostrils flared. ‘What gave
them
the right to put us in a playpen in the first place? If we are being contained and deceived, we are in a relationship of unequals. If our controllers exist, let them show themselves and justify their actions.
That
was my purpose – to force them out into the open. And imagine what we might see!
The fire-folk sitting in the air! / The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! …
Do you know Gerard Manley Hopkins?’

Malenfant shook his head. ‘You were right, Kate. The guy is crazy.’

Cornelius studied them both. ‘To practical matters. When the anomalies are visible to all, disorder among the foolish herds will follow. Soon flights will be grounded, the freeways jammed. If you wish to leave –’

Malenfant touched Kate’s hand. ‘Where is home for you?’

She shrugged. ‘I have an apartment in LA. I don’t even know where my parents are. Either of them.’

‘It’s not a time to be alone. Go be with your mom.’

‘No.’ She was shuddering. Her involvement in all this had long passed that of a journalist attached to a story; now she was just another human being, staring bewildered at the approaching hurricane – but here she was at the eye of the storm, and something about Malenfant’s strength reassured her. ‘Let me stay. Please.’

He nodded brusquely, avoiding her eyes. ‘Cornelius, if you have nowhere else to go –’

Kate said, ‘How long?’

Cornelius shrugged. ‘The math is chancy. Twenty-four hours at best.’

It feels like half the population of the human race has downloaded.