On one level, I couldn’t help but be swept along with vis urgent logic – but as the initial shock of recognition faded, I began to wonder again if we weren’t simply reading our own meaning into the four patients’ bizarre soliloquies. Anthrocosmology had never before made a single testable prediction. I didn’t doubt that it could provide an elegant mathematical underpinning to any TOE – but if the first distinct evidence for the theory itself consisted of the rantings of four people suffering from a new and exotic mental disease, that was a slender basis on which to throw out everything I believed about the universe.

And as for the prognosis, if Kuwale was right, of a world completely afflicted by Distress … that was a cataclysm as unthinkable as the moderates’ unraveling .

I kept my doubts to myself, but by the time I left the ward – leaving Kuwale immersed in a conference with the other mainstream ACs – I had my feet back on the ground. All this talk of echoes of the future Aleph moment had to be ranked as less plausible than even the most far-fetched conventional alternatives.

Maybe a neuroactive military pathogen gone wrong, targeting a specific region of the brain, could induce the ordinary symptoms of Distress in most of its victims – plus these outbursts of manic-but-precise observations in four out of three thousand cases. Reasoning was the product of organic events in the brain, like every other mental process – and if a paranoid schizophrenic, injured by crude accidents of genetics and disease, could find personal significance in every advertising sign, every cloud, every tree … maybe the combination of the right scientific background with the highly focused damage wrought by this viral weapon could trigger an equally uncontrollable – but much more rigorous – avalanche of meaning. If the original aim of the weapon had been to impair analytical thought, it wasn’t inconceivable that a wild version might end up overstimulating the very neural pathways it had been designed to destroy.

#

I went back to the electrical shop and bought myself another notepad. I called De Groot from the street; she seemed upset, but she didn’t want to talk on the net.

We met at the hotel, in Mosala’s suite. De Groot ushered me in, in silence. “Is Violet – ?” Dust motes swam beneath the skylight; when I spoke, the room sounded hollow.