That remained a matter of opinion. “If this is meant to be the contents of Violet Mosala’s skull, it doesn’t look like any kind of brain map I’ve ever seen.”

Five said dryly, “I should hope not. It’s not an anatomical scan – or a functional neural map, or even a cognitive symbolic network. The Keystone’s neurons – let alone vis skull – don’t even exist, ‘yet.’ This is the pure information which logically precedes the existence of all physical objects. The Keystone’s ‘knowledge’ and ‘memory’ come first. The brain which encodes them follows.”

He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. “The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE, and aware of both vis own existence, and a canonical body of observations of experimental results – whether vis own, or ‘second hand’ – which need to be accounted for. If ve lacked either the information density or the organizational schema to explain vis own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-critical: there’d be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won’t stop until an entire physical cosmos is created.

“Of course, the process never ‘starts’ or ‘stops’ in the conventional sense – it doesn’t take place in time at all. Successive frames in this simulation simply correspond to increments in logical extension – like steps in a mathematical proof, adding successive layers of consequences to an initial set of premises. The history of the universe is embedded in those consequences like … the sequence of a murder, pieced together by pure deduction from evidence at the scene of the crime.”

As he spoke, the patterns I’d glimpsed on the surface of “Aleph” were woven and rewoven in the surrounding “information vacuum.” It was like watching a dazzling new tapestry being created every second from the one beneath – threads picked loose enough to drag a little further, and then recombined by a million invisible hands. A thousand subtle variations echoed the original canon – but there were also startling new themes emerging, apparently from nowhere. Intermeshing fractal islands, red and white, drifted apart and recombined, struggled to engulf each other – then melted into an archipelago of hybrids. Hurricanes within hurricanes, violet and gold, spun the thread ever tighter – and then the tiniest vortices counter-rotated, and the whole hierarchy dissolved. Tiny jagged shards of crystalline silver slowly diffused through all the chaos and regularity, infiltrating and interacting with everything.

I said, “This is beautiful technoporn – but what exactly is it meant to be showing?”