The first section contained no surprises at all. It summarized Mosala’s ten canonical experiments, and the way in which she’d computed their symmetry-breaking properties. It ended with the TOE equation itself, which linked the ten parameters of broken symmetry to a sum over all topologies. The measure Mosala had chosen to give weight to each topology was the simplest, the most elegant, the most obvious of all the possible choices. Her equation couldn’t grant the universe the “inevitability” of freezing out of pre-space which Buzzo and Nishide had sought to contrive, but it showed how the ten experiments – and by extension, everything from mayflies to colliding stars – were bound together, were able to coexist. In an imaginary space of great abstraction, they all occupied exactly the same point.

Past and future were bound together, too. Down to the level of quantum randomness, Mosala’s equation encoded the common order found in every process from the folding of a protein to the spreading of an eagle’s wings. It delineated the fan of probabilities linking any system, at any moment, to anything it might become.

In the second section, Kaspar had trawled the databases for other references to the same mathematics, other resonances to the same abstractions – and in this scrupulously completist search, it had found enough parallels with information theory to push the TOE one step further. Everything Mosala would have spurned – and Helen Wu would have feared to combine – Kaspar had serenely brought together.

There could be no information without physics. Knowledge always had to be encoded as something. Marks on paper, knots on a string, pockets of charge in a semiconductor.

But there could be no physics without information. A universe of purely random events would be no universe at all. Deep patterns, powerful regularities, were the whole basis of existence.

So – having determined which physical systems could share a universe – Kaspar had asked the question: which patterns of information could those systems encode?

A second, analogous equation had emerged from the same mathematics, with almost no effort at all. The informational TOE was the flipside of the physical TOE, an inevitable corollary.

Then Kaspar had unified the two, fitting them together like interlocking mirror images (in spite of everything, I had a feeling that Symmetry’s Champion would have been proud) … and all of the predictions of Anthrocosmology had come tumbling out. The terminology was different – Kaspar had innocently coined new jargon, unaware of the unpublished precedents – but the concepts were unmistakable.

The Aleph moment was as necessary as the Big Bang. The universe could never have existed without it. Kaspar had shied away from claiming the honor of being Keystone – and had even refused to grant the explanatory Big Bang primacy over the physical one – but the paper stated clearly that the TOE had to be known , had to be understood , to have ever had force.