Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then … amusement? I couldn’t tell – and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.

I said, “Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet … ” I was grasping at straws, but I couldn’t make sense of this any other way.

Kuwale said flatly, “No. I would have heard.”

“Then—?”

“It’s genuine.”

“How can it be?”

Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. “Because everything we thought was true, is true – but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different assumptions – and we were all wrong.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. We all will.”

I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi’s death. “You think Distress comes from … mixing with information?”

“Yes.”

“If the Keystone does it, everyone else gets dragged along? Exponential growth? Just like a plague?”

“Yes.”

“But – how? Who was the Keystone? Who started it? Muteba Kazadi, all those years ago?”

Kuwale laughed crazily. “No!” The man in the opposite bed was awake now, and listening to every word, but I was past caring. “Miller didn’t get around to telling you the strangest thing about that cosmological model.”

Miller was the umale, the one I’d thought of as “Three.”

“Which is—?”

“If you follow through with the calculations … the effect reaches back in time. Not far: exponential growth forward means exponential decay backward. But the absolute certainty of the Keystone mixing at the Aleph moment implies a small probability of other people being ‘dragged along’ at random – even before the event. It’s a continuity condition; there’s no such thing in any system as an instantaneous jump from zero to one.”

I shook my head, uncomprehending. I couldn’t take this in.

Akili took my hand and squeezed it hard, unthinking, transmitting vis fear – and a vertiginous thrill of anticipation – straight into my body, from skin to skin.

“The Keystone isn’t the Keystone yet. The Aleph moment hasn’t even happened – but we’re already feeling the shock.”

Chapter 25

Kuwale borrowed my notepad and rapidly sketched out the details of the information flows which ve believed lay behind Distress. Ve even attempted to fit a crude computer model of the process to the epidemiological data – although ve ended up with a curve far less steep than the actual case figures (which had risen faster than exponential growth – “probably distorted by early under-reporting”), and a predicted date for the Aleph moment somewhere between February 7th, 2055 … and June 12th, 3070. Undeterred, ve struggled to refine the model. Graphs, network diagrams, and equations flickered across the screen beneath vis fingertips; it looked as impressive as anything I’d seen Violet Mosala do – and I understood it about as well.