There was no arena of disinterested physics. There was no solid layer of objective laws. Just a deep circulating convection current of explanation, a causal magma upwelling from the underworld and then plunging down again into darkness, churning from TOE to body to mind to TOE – held up by nothing but the engine of understanding.

There was no bedrock, no fixed point, no place to rest.

I was endlessly treading water.

I sank to my knees, fighting away vertigo. I lay face down, clinging to the reef-rock. The cool solidity of the ground refuted nothing.

But did it need to? Held up by aloof, timeless laws, or held up by the bootstrap of explanation … it endured, regardless.

I thought of the inland divers who’d descended through every layer of the unnatural ecology which kept this island afloat, who’d witnessed the subterranean ocean ceaselessly corroding the rock from below.

They’d walked away – dazed, but exalted.

I could do the same.

#

I rose to my feet unsteadily. I thought it was over: I thought I’d come through the mixing, unscathed. Kaspar could not have become the Keystone – and yet somehow the Aleph moment must have passed safely, removing the distortion, banishing Distress. Maybe some mainstream AC had hacked into Mosala’s account upon learning of her death – and had grasped some crucial error in Kaspar ’s analysis before I’d read a word of it.

Akili was approaching – an indistinct figure in the distance, but I knew it could be no one else. I raised a hand tentatively, then waved in triumph. The figure waved back, stretching vis giant shadow west across the desert.

And everything I’d learned came together, like a thunderclap, like an ambush.

I was the Keystone. I’d explained the universe into being, wrapped it around the seed of this moment, layer after layer of beautiful convoluted necessity. The blazing wasteland of galaxies, twenty billion years of cosmic evolution, ten billion human cousins, forty billion species of life – the whole elaborate ancestry of consciousness flowed out of this singularity. I had no need to reach out and imagine every molecule, every planet, every face. This moment encoded them all.

My parents, friends, lovers … Gina, Angelo, Lydia, Sarah, Violet Mosala, Bill Munroe, Adelle Vunibobo, Karin De Groot. Akili. Even the helpless bellowing strangers, victims of the same revelation, had only been mouthing distorted echoes of my own horror at the understanding that I’d created them all.

This was the solipsistic madness I’d seen reflected in that first poor woman’s face. This was Distress: not fear of the glorious machinery of the TOE, but the realization that I was alone in the darkness with a hundred billion dazzling cobwebs wrapped around my non-existent eyes—

— and now that I knew it, the breath of my own understanding would sweep them all away.