“ Everything could unravel tonight – and most TOEs would have nothing to say about it, one way or another. The rules of chess can’t tell you whether or not the board is strong enough to hold up every legal configuration of the pieces.”

“But every TOE has plenty to say about the human brain – doesn’t it? It’s a lump of ordinary matter, subject to all the ordinary laws of physics. It doesn’t start ‘mixing with information’ just because someone completes a Theory of Everything on the other side of the planet.”

Akili said, “Two days ago, I would have agreed with you. But TOEs which fail to deal with their own basis in information are as incomplete as … General Relativity – which required the Big Bang to take place, but then broke down completely at that point. It took the unification of all four forces to smooth away the singularity. And it looks like it’s going to take one more unification to understand the explanatory Big Bang.”

“But two days ago—?”

“I was wrong. The mainstream always assumed that an incomplete TOE was just the way things had to be. The Keystone would explain everything – except how a TOE could actually come into force. Anthrocosmology would answer that question – but that side of the equation would never be visible .” Akili held out both hands, palms pressed together horizontally. “Physics and metaphysics: we believed they’d remain separate forever. They always had, in the past – so it seemed like a reasonable premise. Like the single Keystone.” Ve interlocked vis fingers – and tipped vis hands to a forty-five-degree angle. “It just happens to be wrong. Maybe because a TOE which unifies physics and information – which mixes the levels, and describes its own authority – is the very opposite of unraveling . It’s more stable than any other possibility; it affirms itself, it tightens the knot.”

I suddenly recalled the night I’d visited Amanda Conroy – when I’d concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that the separation of powers between Mosala and the Anthrocosmologists was a good thing. And later, Henry Buzzo had jokingly postulated a theory which supported itself, defended itself, ruled out all competitors, refused to be swallowed.

I said, “But whose theory is going to unify physics and information? Mosala’s TOE makes no attempt to ‘describe its own authority.’”

Akili saw no obstacle. “She never intended it to. But either she failed to understand all the implications of her own work – or someone out on the net is going to get hold of her purely physical TOE, and extend it to embrace information theory. In a matter of days. Or hours.”