I absorbed that in silence. The ACs’ obsessive secrecy went far beyond Conroy’s fear of media ridicule, or the need to plot assassinations unobserved. They really did believe that their ideas alone were as perilous as any physical weapon.

I could hear the ocean moving gently around us, but the windows only mirrored the scene within. My reflection looked like someone else: hair sticking out oddly, eyes sunken, context all wrong. I pictured the boat perfectly becalmed, the cabin a tiny island of light fixed in the darkness. I forced my wrists apart experimentally, gauging the strength of the polymer, the topology of the knot. There was no give, no slippage. Since I’d been woken and hauled above the deck, I’d been sick with dread, wired and ragged – but for a moment I felt something like the clarity of the hospital ward returning. The world lost all pretense of meaning: no comfort, no mystery, no threat.

Five – a middle-aged Italian man – finished tinkering with the electronics. He addressed me as self-consciously as if I was pointing a thousand-watt floodlight and a nineteen-fifties movie camera in his face.

“This is our latest supercomputer run, based on everything Mosala has published so far. We’ve deliberately avoided trying to extrapolate to a TOE, for obvious reasons – but it’s still possible to approximate the effects which might result if the work was ever completed.”

The largest display screen in the cabin, some five meters wide and three high, suddenly lit up. The image it showed resembled an elaborately interwoven mass of fine, multicolored thread. I’d seen nothing like it at the conference; this wasn’t the writhing, anarchic foam of the quantum vacuum. It looked more like a compact ball of – neon-luminous – twine, which had been wound by Escher and Mandelbrot in turn, with exquisite care, over several centuries. There were symmetries within symmetries, knots within knots, details and patterns which seized the eye, but were too intricate and convoluted to follow to any kind of closure.

I said, “That’s not pre-space, is it?”

“Hardly.” Five regarded me dubiously, as if he suspected that my ignorance would prove insurmountable. “It’s a very crude map of information space, at the instant the Keystone ‘becomes’ the Keystone. We call this initial configuration ‘Aleph’, for short.” I didn’t respond, so he added with distaste, as if forced to resort to baby-talk, “Think of it as a snapshot of the Explanatory Big Bang .”

“This is the starting point of … everything? The premise for an entire universe?”

“Yes. Why are you surprised? The physical, primordial Big Bang is orders of magnitude simpler; it can be characterized by just ten numbers. Aleph contains a hundred million times more information; the idea of creating galaxies and DNA out of this is far less outlandish.”