I pleaded, “ Why should it? If Mosala is the Keystone, she doesn’t need this ” – I tugged at my hands, wishing I could point at the travesty – “to explain her own existence! Her TOE doesn’t predict it, doesn’t allow it! ”

“No, it doesn’t. But her TOE can’t survive its own expression. It can make her the Keystone. It can grant her a seamless past. It can manufacture twenty billion years of cosmology. But once it’s been stated explicitly, it will resolve itself into pure mathematics, pure logic.” He joined his hands together, fingers interlocked – and then dragged them slowly apart. “You can’t hold a universe together with a system which spells out its own lack of physical content. There’s no … friction anymore. No fire in the equations.”

Behind him, the tapestry was coming apart; all the ornate dazzling patterns of knowledge were disintegrating. Not devoured by entropy, or halted and reversed like the galaxies’ flight; the process was simply pushing on, relentlessly, toward a conclusion which had been implicit from the start. Every possible rearrangement of meaning had been extracted from the Aleph “knot” – except the very last. It wasn’t a knot at all: it was a simple loop, leading nowhere. The colors of a thousand different explanatory threads had encoded only the lack of awareness of their hidden connections. And the universe which had bootstrapped itself into existence by spinning those explanations into a billion tangled hierarchies of ever-increasing complexity … was finally unwinding into a naked statement of its own tautology.

A plain white circle spun in the darkness for a second, and then the screen switched off.

The demonstration was over. Three began to untie me from the chair.

I said, “There’s something I have to tell you. I’ve kept it from everyone – SeeNet, Conroy, Kuwale. Sarah Knight never found out. No one else knows, except me and Mosala. But you really need to hear it.”

Twenty said, “We’re listening.” She stood by the blank display screen, watching me patiently, the model of polite interest.

This was the last chance I had to change their minds. I struggled to concentrate, to put myself in their place. Would it make any difference to their plans, if they knew that Buzzo was wrong? Probably not. With or without other candidates to take her place, Mosala would be equally dangerous. If Nishide died, his intellectual legacy could still be pursued – and they’d simply race to protect his successors, and to slaughter Mosala’s.

I said, “Violet Mosala completed her TOE back in Cape Town. The computing she’s doing now is all just cross-checking; the real work was finished months ago. So … she’s already become the Keystone. And nothing’s happened, the sky isn’t falling, we’re all still here.” I tried to laugh. “The experiment you think is too dangerous to risk is already over. And we’ve survived.”