Nothing could have been created without the full knowledge of how it was done: without the unified TOE, physical and informational. No Keystone could have acted in innocence, forging the universe unaware.

But that knowledge was impossible to contain. Kaspar had been right. The moderates had been right. Everything which had breathed fire into the equations would now unravel into empty tautology.

I raised my face to the blank sky, ready to part the veil of the world and find nothing behind it.

Then Akili called my name, and I stopped dead. I looked down at ver – beautiful as ever, unreachable as ever.

Unknowable as ever.

And I saw the way through.

I saw the flaw in Kaspar ’s reasoning which had kept it from becoming the Keystone: an unexamined assumption – an unasked question, not yet true or false.

Could one mind, alone, explain another into being?

The TOE equation said nothing. The canonical experiments said nothing. There was nowhere to look for the answer but my own memories, my own life.

And all I had to do to tear myself out of the center of the universe – all I had to do to prevent the unraveling – was give up one last illusion.

Epilogue

As the plane touches down, I begin recording. Witness confirms: “Cape Town, Wednesday April 15th, 2105. 7:12:10 GMT.”

Karin De Groot has come to the airport to meet me. She looks astonishingly healthy, much more so in the flesh – though, as with all of us ancients, the losses are etched deep. We exchange greetings, then I glance around trying to take in the profusion of styles in anatomy and dress – no more than anywhere else, but every place has a different mix, a different set of fashions. Imposing retractable cowls full of dark violet photosynthetic symbionts seem to be popular throughout Southern Africa. Back home, sleek amphibian adaptions for underwater breathing and feeding are common.

After the Aleph moment, people had feared that the mixing would impose uniformity. It had never happened – any more than, in the Age of Ignorance, the brutal, inescapable truths that water was wet and the sky was blue had forced everyone on the planet to think and act identically. There are infinitely many ways to respond to the single truth of the TOE. What’s become impossible is maintaining the pretense that every culture could ever have created its own separate reality – while we all breathed the same air and walked the same ground.

De Groot checks some schedule in her mind’s eye. “So you didn’t come straight from Stateless?”

“No. Malawi. There was someone I had to see. I wanted to say goodbye.”