Phase Space (67 page)

Malenfant prompted, ‘And so …’

‘And so, perhaps the reason that the universe does not appear to make sense is that
what we see around us is artificial.
’

Malenfant let his mouth drop open.

Kate sat as still as she could, unsure how to react.

They were both looking at the Vice President, waiting for her lead.

Della sighed. ‘I know how this sounds. But Cornelius is here at my invitation, Malenfant. Look, I have plenty of people explaining the
rational
possibilities to me. Perhaps we’re in the middle of some huge solar storm, for instance, which is disrupting communications. Perhaps the solar system has wandered into a knot of interstellar gas, or even dark matter, which is refracting or diffusing electromagnetic radiation, including your laser beam –’

‘None of which hangs together,’ Kate guessed.

Della frowned at her. Malenfant quickly introduced Kate as a personal aide.

Della said, ‘Okay. You’re right. Nobody has come up with anything that works. It isn’t just a question of some new anomaly; we have a situation for which, as far as I understand it, no explanation within our physical law is
even possible …
But here is Cornelius, with a proposal that is frankly outrageous –’

‘But an outrageous problem requires outrageous proposals,’ Cornelius said, his smile cold.

Malenfant said, ‘Just tell me what you’re talking about, Cornelius.’

Cornelius went on, ‘Think about it. What if we have been placed in some form of “planetarium”, perhaps generated using an advanced virtual reality technology, designed to give us the illusion of an empty universe – while beyond the walls with their painted stars, the shining lights of extraterrestrial civilizations glow unseen?’

‘Which would resolve Fermi,’ Malenfant said. ‘They’re there, but they are hiding.’

‘Which would resolve Fermi, yes.’

‘And now the planetarium’s, uh, projector is breaking down. Hence A-4, Neptune and the rest. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Exactly.’

Kate thought it over. ‘That’s what the Fermi experts call a zoo hypothesis.’

Cornelius looked impressed. ‘So it is.’

‘It belongs in a zoo,’ Malenfant said. ‘For one thing it’s paranoid. It’s classic circular logic: you could never disprove it. We could never detect we were in a planetarium because it’s
designed
not to be detected. Right?’

‘Malenfant, the fact that a hypothesis is paranoid doesn’t make it wrong.’

Della said, ‘Let me see if I understand you, Cornelius. You’re suggesting that not everything we see is real.
How
much of everything?’

Cornelius shrugged. ‘There are several possible answers. It depends on how far the boundary of the artificial “reality” is set from the human consciousness. The crudest design would be like a traditional planetarium, in which we – our bodies – and the objects we touch are real, while the sky is a fake dome.’

Malenfant nodded. ‘So the stars and galaxies are simulated by a great shell surrounding the solar system.’

‘But,’ said Kate, ‘it would surely take a lot to convince us. Photons of starlight are real entities that interact with our instruments and eyes.’

Malenfant said, thinking, ‘And you’d have to simulate not just photons but such exotica as cosmic rays and neutrinos. You’re talking about some impressive engineering.’

Cornelius waved a hand, as if impatient with their ill-informed speculation. ‘These are details. If the controllers anticipate our technological progress, perhaps even now they are readying the gravity-wave generators …’

‘And what,’ asked Della, ‘if the boundary is closer in than that?’

Cornelius said, ‘There are various possibilities. Perhaps we humans are real, but some – or all – of the objects we see around us are generated as simulations, tangible enough to interact with our senses.’

‘Holograms,’ Kate said. ‘We are surrounded by holograms.’

‘Yes. But with solidity. Taste, smell …’

Malenfant frowned. ‘That’s kind of a brute-force way of doing it. You’d have to form actual material objects, all out of some kind of controlling rays. How? Think of the energy required, the control, the heat … And you’d have to load them with a large amount of information, of which only a fraction would actually interact with
us
to do the fooling.’

Della said, ‘And would these hologram objects be evanescent – like the images on a TV screen? In that case they would need continual refreshing – yes?’

Again Cornelius seemed impatient; this is a man not used to being questioned, Kate saw. ‘It is straightforward to think of more
efficient
design strategies. For example, allowing objects once created to exist as quasi-autonomous entities within the environment, only loosely coupled to the controlling mechanism. This would obviate the need, for example, to reproduce continually the substance at the centre of the Earth, with which we never interact directly. But any such compromise is a step back from perfection. With sufficient investment, you see, the controllers would have
full control
of the maintained environment.’

Della said, ‘What would that mean?’

Cornelius shrugged. ‘The controllers could make objects appear or disappear at will. The whole Earth, if necessary. For example.’

There was a brief silence.

Della got out of her chair and faced the window. She flexed her hands, and pressed her fingertips against the sunlit desk top, as if testing its reality. ‘You know, I find it hard to believe we’re having this conversation. Anything else?’

Cornelius said, ‘A final possibility is that
even our bodies are simulated,
so that the boundary of reality is drawn around our very consciousness. We can already think of crude ways of doing this.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘For example, the fashionable implants in the corpus callosum that allow the direct downloading of virtual-reality sensations into the consciousness.’

‘If that was so,’ said Della, ‘how could we ever tell?’

Cornelius shook his head. ‘If the simulation was good enough, we could not. And there would be nothing we could do about it. But I don’t think we are in that situation.’

‘How do you know?’

‘
Because the simulation is going wrong.
Alpha A-4, the evaporation of the Oort Cloud, Neptune, the vanishing of Saturn’s rings …’

Kate hadn’t heard about Saturn; she found room for a brief, and surprising, stab of regret.

‘I think,’ said Cornelius, ‘that we should assume we are in a planetarium of the second type I listed. We are “real”. But not everything around us is genuine.’

Della turned and leaned on her desk, her knuckles white. ‘Cornelius, whatever the cause, this wave of anomalies is working its way towards us. There is going to be panic; you can bet on that.’

Cornelius frowned. ‘Not until the anomalies are visible in our own sky. Most of us have remarkably limited imaginations. The advance of the anomaly wave is actually quite well understood. Its progression is logarithmic; it is slowing as it approaches the sun. We can predict to the hour when effects will become visible to Earth’s population.’ His cool gaze met the Vice President’s. ‘That is, we can predict when the panicking will begin.’

Kate asked, ‘How long?’

‘Five more days. The precise numbers have been posted.’ He smiled, cold, analytical. ‘You have time to prepare, madam Vice President. And if it is cloudy, Armageddon will no doubt be postponed by a few hours.’

Della glowered at him. ‘You’re a damn cold fish, Cornelius. If you’re right – what do you suggest we do?’

‘Do?’ The question seemed to puzzle him. ‘Why – rejoice. Rejoice that the façade is cracking, that the truth will soon be revealed.’

A phone chimed, startling them all. Malenfant looked abstractedly into the air while an insect voice buzzed in his ear.

He turned to Kate. ‘It’s Saranne. She’s gone into labour.’

The meeting broke up. Kate followed Malenfant out of the room, frustrated she hadn’t gotten to ask the most important questions of all:

What
controllers?

And, what do they want?

Her own voice wafted out of the dark.

You know who’s really taking a bath over this? The astrologers. Those planets swimming around the sky are turning their fancy predictions into mush. And if this is the end of the world, how come none of them saw it coming? …

It was the fourth day after the Alpha echo had failed to return. Three days left, if Cornelius was right, until …

Until what?

‘Don’t talk about astrology,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me about reality.’

…
Okay. Why do we believe that the universe is real? Starting with Bishop Berkeley, the solipsists have wondered if the apparently external world is contained within the observer’s imagination – just as this virtual abyss we share is contained within the more limited imagination of a bank of computers.

‘I don’t see how you could disprove that.’

Right. But when Boswell asked Dr Johnson about the impossibility of refuting Berkeley’s theory, Johnson kicked a large rock and said, ‘I refute it thus.’ What Johnson meant was that when the rock ‘kicked back’ at his foot, he either had to formulate a theory of physical law which explained the existence and behaviour of the rock – or else assume that his imagination was itself a complex, autonomous universe containing laws which precisely simulated the existence of the rock – which would therefore, imagination plus rock, be a more complex system. You see? If we’re
in a planetarium there must be some vast hidden mechanism that controls everything we see. It’s simpler to assume that what looks real is real.

‘Occam’s razor.’

Sure. But Occam’s razor is a guide, not a law of physics … And turn it around. What if the universe
is
a simulation? Then we can use Dr Johnson’s criterion to figure out what is required of the controllers.

‘I don’t understand.’

The model universe must have a lot of industrial-strength properties. For instance it must be consistent. Right? In principle, anybody anywhere could perform a scientific experiment of the finest detail on any sample of the universe and its contents, and find the fabric of reality yielding consistent results. The rocks have always got to ‘kick back’ in the same way, no matter where and how we kick them. So you have to build your cage that way. Expensive, right
?

And the environment has to be self-contained: no explanations of anything inside should ever require the captives to postulate an outside. Kate, I bet if you had been born in this darkness you could figure out there has to be something beyond. How could your consciousness have emerged from this formless mush
?

And so on. The technical challenge of achieving such a deep and consistent simulation should not be underestimated – and nor should the cost … Oh. It just reached Jupiter. Wow, what a spectacle. You want to see
?

Her field of view filled up abruptly with fragmentary images, bits of cloud fractally laced, stained salmon pink.

She turned away, and the images disappeared.

Strange thought, isn’t it? What if Cornelius is right? Here you are in one virtual reality, which is in turn contained within another. Layers of nested unreality, Kate …

Kate felt a sudden revulsion. ‘Wake up, wake up.’

For long minutes she immersed herself in gritty reality: the pine scent that came from the open window of her bedroom, the song of the birds, the slow tick of the old-fashioned clock in the wall.

Reality?

On impulse, she closed her eyes. ‘Wake up. Wake up.’

The clock continued to tick, the birds to sing.

Civil defence programmes were activated, Cold War bunkers reopened, food stocks laid down. Various space probes were hastily launched to meet the advancing anomaly. There was even an extraordinary crash programme to send an astronaut team to orbit the Moon, now seen as the last line of defence between Earth and sky.

Kate knew the government had to be seen doing something; that was what governments were there for.