De Groot addressed me. “They pulled a childish stunt, when Wendy was in Toronto. They hacked into Kaspar and had it spouting their stupid theories. All for the sake of what? Intimidation? The programmers had to shut it down and go to backups. Wendy didn’t even know what it meant – until I had to tell her who was trying to kill her daughter.”

I heard Akili, still on the floor at my feet, inhale sharply. And then I understood, too.

Free fall.

Sarah frowned, irritated by the distraction. “She’s lying.” She took out her own notepad and checked something, still holding the gun on me. “Break the connection, Andrew.” I did.

Akili said, “Sarah? Have you been following Distress?”

“No. I’ve been busy.” She examined her notepad warily, as if it were a bomb that needed defusing. Mosala’s work was all there in her hands now, and she had to be sure she destroyed it, thoroughly and irrevocably, without letting it taint her.

Akili persisted. “You’ve lost, Sarah. The Aleph moment has passed.”

She glanced up from the screen at me. “Would you shut ver up? I don’t want to hurt ver, but—”

I said, “Distress is a plague of mixing with information. I thought it was an organic virus – but Kaspar proves that it can’t be.”

Sarah scowled. “What are you saying? You think De Groot read the finished TOE paper, and became the Keystone?” She held up her notepad triumphantly, with an audit trail displayed. “Nobody’s read the paper. Nobody’s accessed the final results.”

“Except the author. Wendy sent Violet a Kaspar clonelet. It wrote the paper, it pulled all the calculations together. And it’s become the Keystone.”

Sarah was incredulous. “A piece of software? ”

Akili said, “Scan the nets for lucid Distress victims. Hear what they have to say.”

“If this is some kind of ridiculous bluff, you’re wasting—”

Sisyphus interrupted cheerfully, “This pattern of information requires itself to be encoded in germanium phosphide crystals, in an artifact designed in collaboration with organic—”

Sarah screamed at me wordlessly, waving the gun above her head, casting wild belligerent shadows on the walls of the tent. I hit the MUTE button and killed the audio; the declaration continued silently, in text flowing across the screen. My mind was reeling at the implications – but I’d lost my death wish, and Sarah had my full attention.

Akili spoke calmly but urgently. “Listen to me. Distress numbers must be exploding already. And with a software Keystone – a machine world view – the mixing’s going to keep wrecking people’s minds until someone reads the TOE paper .”