How could I argue with these people? I no longer knew what was reasonable. It was three in the morning; I was damp, freezing cold, captive, isolated, and outnumbered. They had all the insider jargon, all the computing power, all the slick graphics, all the condescending rhetoric. Anthrocosmology possessed all the intimidating weapons it could possibly need – according to Culture First – to be a science, as good or bad as any other.

I said, “Name one single experiment you can do, to distinguish all this information cosmology from a TOE which is ‘true for no reason.’”

Twenty said quietly, “Here’s an experiment for you. Here’s an empirical test. We can leave Violet Mosala to finish her work, unmolested. And if you’re right, nothing will happen. Ten billion people will live through the eighteenth of April – most of them not even knowing that a Theory of Everything has been completed, and proclaimed to the world.”

Five said, “If you’re wrong, though … ” He gestured at the screen, and the animation accelerated. “Logically, the process has to reach right back to the physical Big Bang, to set the ten parameters of the Standard Unified Field Theory, to explain the entire history of the Keystone. That’s why it takes so long to compute the simulation. In realtime, though, the observable consequences will begin within seconds of the Aleph moment – and locally at least, they should only last a matter of minutes.”

“Locally? You mean, on Stateless—?”

“I mean the Solar System. Which itself should only last a matter of minutes.”

As he spoke, a small dark patch on the outermost layer of the information tapestry began to grow. Around it, the thread of explanation was unwinding, knots which weren’t really knots were unraveling. I had a sickening, giddy sense of déjà vu ; my fanciful metaphor for Wu’s complaints about Mosala’s circular logic was being paraded in front of me as supporting evidence for a death sentence.

Five said, “Conroy and the ‘mainstream’ take it for granted that every information cosmology must be time-symmetric, with the same physics holding true after the Aleph moment as before. But they’re wrong. After Aleph, Mosala’s TOE would begin to undermine all of the physics it first implied. It goes through all the labor of creating a past – only to reach the conclusion that it has no future.”

The darkness on the screen spread faster, as if on cue. I said, “This isn’t proof of anything. Nothing behind this so-called ‘simulation’ has ever been tested – has it? You’re just … grinding away at a set of equations from information theory, with no way of knowing whether or not they describe the truth.”

Five agreed. “There is no way of knowing. But suppose it happens, unproven?”