SATURDAY AND SUNDAY PASS BY in the same sort of way, with haphazard discussions and my growing sense that there’s a lot I don’t know, and that Burlem and Lura are trying to work out when to tell me something. We punctuate each day with tea, coffee and sandwiches, as if our lives are just one long conference. Each evening we all go into the church across the street before having our last cup of tea before bed. I get the impression that Burlem and Lura discuss me when I’m not there, and that Burlem’s still trying to persuade her to trust me. They are obviously still jumpy about me being here and pretty much put me under house arrest, apart from the visits to the church. Burlem tries to explain to me about his meditation and Lura mainly avoids me. In the evenings I sit up with Burlem and try not to flirt with him. I’m not sure what is going on with the two of them, but I don’t want to get in the middle of it. Every so often the phone goes, but Lura always lets the machine get it. I have the impression that they have a friend whom they’ve only recently fallen out with, but I don’t get any more details than that.
My room is small, white and cosy, with exposed beams and a short, fat, four-poster bed with a pink blanket over a white cotton duvet. I spend most of my time sitting on the bed, writing notes about the Troposphere. I mainly do this to keep my mind off my desperate need to go back there. But Burlem and Lura have forbidden me from going back in, at least for now. They’re worried about this mission that Apollo Smintheus has in mind for me, as am I. And it’s so clear that getting lost in it is a danger, although I’m sure that I can now get back any time I want, using the underground system. But Lura and Burlem seem unconvinced by this system, even though it must definitely exist. I wish they’d just tell me things directly instead of whispering in the kitchen and then stopping when I go in to make coffee. I know they want to get the book back from Faversham, but I don’t know how we could ever do that.
And I’m not sure exactly how I feel about everything. I’m warm, comfortable and well fed for the first time in ages, but in another sense my life is over. Not over, maybe, that’s a bit dramatic, but everything I thought I ‘had’ – my job, my PhD, my few friends, my flat, my possessions, my books – I’m pretty sure they’re all gone now. And unless Lura changes her mind about me, I’m not going to be able to stay here for ever.
On Sunday night I am having the same dream I have had since I got here, in which Apollo Smintheus is standing in front of me saying ‘You owe me.’ I am awoken by the rain pounding the skylight like an industrial machine, and the clock says that it’s four a.m. On Monday the sky is drum-metal grey, and the morning is broken up with sudden pulses of strip-light yellow lightning. At about midday there’s one crack of thunder, and then it stops raining. Burlem has the radio on for a while, and it warns of some huge storm coming, with winds of eighty miles per hour. But the storm doesn’t come.
On Tuesday morning the sky is as blue and sharp as a reflection in metal. I’m thinking, ‘Is this the calm? The eye?’ Lura decides to do some gardening and I just sit there smoking at the dining table while she locates her gardening gloves and goes outside without saying anything to me. Through the window I can see what looks like a falcon perching on one of the telegraph posts behind the house. I wonder if Lura’s seen it. It’s so beautiful; it’s more like something from a book than from real life. It’s more like a picture or a word than a thing. And I wonder: does language distance us from things so much that we can’t believe in them any more? Or is it just because I’ve been in the Troposphere so much that I’m in the habit of looking at things like that, like the falcon, and assuming that I invented it, and that it’s a metaphor for something else? I put out my cigarette. Maybe I should go and try to make peace with Lura. I haven’t had any fresh air for days.
She’s on her knees by one of the flower beds, turning the soil.
‘Hello,’ I say, walking towards her. ‘Can I help?’
‘No, it’s all right,’ she says, without looking up.
I should just go away, but I persist. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Let me help for a bit.’
She sighs. ‘Trowels are in the shed.’
I get a trowel and a piece of tarpaulin similar to the one Lura’s using to kneel on. I walk over and place my tarpaulin next to hers, and start copying what she’s doing. We stay like that for five minutes or so before I realise I’m going to have to start any conversation I want to have.
‘I’m sorry for turning up the way I did,’ I say.
‘Hm,’ she says back. The same short closing-down sound she always makes.
‘And . . . Look. I’ve been wanting to say this for a few days. I really am sorry that I went into Burlem’s head to get here. I do know things about you that you probably don’t want me to know, and I’m so sorry I’ve intruded.’ I take a deep breath. ‘It’s one of those problems with the Troposphere that you don’t think about until it’s too late and you’ve already done it. I mean, all my experiences in there so far have really been experimental.’ I think again; that’s not quite true, and she knows it. I have to be honest if I want to connect with her at all. ‘OK, I guess the one time I did use it in a deliberate way was when I wanted to find Saul . . .’
‘Why do you call him “Burlem” sometimes?’ she asks me, still turning the earth.
‘Er, I just do,’ I say. ‘I think I picked it up at the university. A lot of people there call him “Burlem” rather than Saul.’
‘Surely they call him “Professor Burlem”,’ she says, frowning.
‘Not the other members of staff.’ I shrug. ‘Does it bother you?’
‘Yes. But I don’t know why.’
‘I’ll stop doing it. I really am sorry, you know.’
We both carry on turning the earth. I find an earthworm, which I carefully pick up and move somewhere safer. Lura watches me do this, but I have no idea what she’s thinking.
‘What did you find out about me when you were in Saul’s head?’
‘Hardly anything,’ I say. ‘I know you slept together in Germany – that’s the only intimate detail I do know. There were obviously a lot more details about the two of you, but remember I was just trying to find out where he was, not how he felt about anything, so I followed one set of memories rather than another.’
‘Hm.’
‘I really am sorry. Look, you’re welcome to go into my head if you want, any time you want. I’ve got some pretty sordid stuff in there, including some details I left out of my “story so far” I told you the other night.’
‘It’s OK. But thanks,’ she says, and goes back to turning over the reddish earth with her trowel. What I’ve said seems to have made no difference at all.
But then she smiles.
‘I always like to garden when I’ve got something to turn over in my mind,’ she says. ‘It’s repetitive and relaxing, don’t you think?’
My God. Has she actually just started a conversation with me?
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It is, actually.’
‘Saul has to do everything in a “Zen” way, at the moment. So he puts his whole being into turning the earth, if that’s what he’s doing. Not that he ever does the garden. But sometimes when he paints a fence, or wires a plug, you can see him doing it: giving up himself to the activity and not using it as an excuse just to think about something else.’
I wonder what she’s turning over in her mind. Probably how she’s going to ask me to leave. I don’t quite know what to say next. But I don’t want the conversation to end, either. For the first time since I’ve been here, I don’t feel as though Lura despises me.
‘Oh, there was another answerphone message earlier,’ I say.
‘Ah. The writer. Again.’
‘The writer?’
‘Yes. This is the problem I’m turning over in my mind.’ She sighs, and there’s a long pause. ‘Saul tells me you know a lot about thought experiments.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am – or maybe I should say “was” – doing my PhD on thought experiments.’
‘Hm. Would you say that a story can be a thought experiment?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say immediately. ‘I’d say all thought experiments are stories.’
‘That’s interesting. Why?’
‘Well, because all thought experiments take the form of a narrative. Well, the ones I understand do.’ I realise I’m talking to a real scientist, and suddenly see I need a disclaimer. ‘I’m sure you can tell me about thought experiments that aren’t stories. But . . .’
She’s frowning. ‘No. I like the idea of thought experiments being stories. I suppose if they’re not stories then they’re actually hard science, and not thought experiments at all. Einstein’s trains . . . Schrödinger’s cat. Hm.’
‘Yeah – they’re two that I’m studying quite closely.’
‘Well, we’ll have to talk properly about them at some point. But, for now, you agree that a thought experiment could be a story?’
‘Yes, definitely. Why?’
‘How about if I ran a thought experiment by you? It’s concerned with the Troposphere, and although it does exist as a story – with characters and so on – I haven’t actually seen the story, so I’ll just tell it as a kind of story but with no characters, if that makes any sense.’
It doesn’t really, but I nod. ‘Go on. I’m intrigued.’
‘What have you already worked out about the Troposphere?’ she says. ‘And I mean the very basics.’
‘Um,’ I say. ‘It’s a place made of language.’
‘More specifically.’
‘Well, thought,’ I say. ‘And it’s made in metaphor and . . .’
‘Thought,’ she repeats. ‘Excellent. Yes. It’s a place made out of thought. So we might want to pose the question: what is thought? Would you agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘And our experience of the Troposphere shows us that thoughts aren’t just invisible, imaginary nothings. They are inscribed as soon as they happen and, in that sense they become entities. Would you agree with that?’
‘Yes. I’d agree with that.’
We’re still turning the earth, although this bit is really done now.
‘Right. So we want to consider this idea that thoughts have substance.’
I remember something from Apollo Smintheus’s first document.
‘Thought is matter, perhaps,’ I say.
‘Yes! Exactly. But it’s hard to visualise how thoughts are matter, exactly.’
‘Yes. I must admit that I haven’t been able to see it.’
Although the sky is still completely blue, a couple of raindrops fall on my face. I look up to see where they’re coming from, but there aren’t any clouds.
Lura smiles at me. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Here’s the story. The thought experiment. What would you think of the following scenario? Imagine a computer, with a vast hard drive memory. There’s a program running on the computer – maybe a little like a game, with characters and locations. Now, the little characters in this program are written in binary code. Say they’re part of a simulation game. You must have seen the type of thing I mean, where you create, say, a little town for them to live in, and then the software generates effects like rain and droughts and wars?’
‘Yeah. I know the kind of thing you mean,’ I say.
‘All right, well, this next bit takes a leap of faith. What do you know about artificial intelligence?’
‘I know that Samuel Butler was concerned that machines could become conscious as easily as humans did,’ I say. ‘That machine consciousness is as inevitable as human consciousness.’
‘This is interesting. Go on.’
‘He argued that consciousness is just another part of evolution. It’s a random mutation that could happen to anything. And after all, machines are made out of the same stuff we’re made out of . . . And we feed machines all the time. We feed them fuel, and language . . .’
‘Yes!’ She taps the soil with her trowel. ‘Good. But don’t jump ahead.’
Since I don’t know where this is going, I’m not sure how I can stop myself jumping ahead by accident. But I turn over some more earth and just say, ‘OK, sorry. Go on.’
‘Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simulation. The little characters become conscious. Now. What would their thoughts be made of ?’
I visualise my laptop sitting on a desk, with this game playing out on it. I imagine what it would be like to be one of these digital, binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of ? How would you interact with other characters? I think about what this world is made of – basically zeroes and ones – and then I realise that in this little world everything would be zeroes and ones. The little characters may not be able to see them, but everything, including their thought, would be made from the same thing.
‘Their thoughts would be made from the same code their world is made from,’ I say to Lura. ‘Zeroes and ones.’ But I’m already beginning to feel sick.
‘Yes, very good. Now tell me,’ she says. ‘The grass and trees in our binary world. What are they made from?’
‘Zeroes and ones,’ I say.
‘And the houses, and the water, and the air?’
‘Zeroes and ones.’
‘And what happens to thought in this world, once it has happened?
Does it disappear?’
‘It gets stored on the hard drive.’ I pause, thinking about temporary caches and the difference between RAM and ROM. ‘Does it?’
‘Yes. It’s information rendered in zeroes and ones, just like everything else in this world. So would you agree that the hard drive is expanding at the rate that these beings think?’
I think about this. I’ve stopped using the trowel, so I put it down and sit back on the tarpaulin. Another couple of raindrops fall from nowhere: the same invisible cloud in the sky.
‘Yes?’ I say. ‘I’m not sure about this one. It sounds like it’s potentially a trick question.’
‘Yes. It is. The hard drive itself doesn’t expand, or change, or gain mass, or anything like that. But the information on it changes. It gets written on all the time. If you thought the hard drive was just empty space to be written on, you’d think it was expanding. But if you realised that it was just information being coded so it made sense – but not more or less information altogether – then you wouldn’t think it was expanding. You might argue that there is no empty space in this scenario.’
‘OK.’
‘So. What do you think so far?’
‘I think I feel a bit sick.’
‘OK. But why?’
‘Because what you say makes perfect sense. The Troposphere is like a hard drive that we wouldn’t normally have access to, although in theory we could, as it’s on the same machine . . . And. Oh, shit.
We’re living in a computer simulation. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Good. That’s interesting. No. I don’t believe we are living in a computer simulation. The computer is a metaphor.’
‘A metaphor for?’
‘That’s what I want you to think about for a while,’ she says. ‘You’ve already helped me with my conundrum about the writer. But now I want you to think about something else. In this computer simulation, if thought and matter are made of the same thing, then how is matter made?’
The rain starts coming down more heavily now, even though there are still no clouds. Lura gets up.
‘Maybe it’s this famous storm,’ she says. ‘Let’s go in.’
Once we’re inside, Lura goes off towards her study.
‘Think about it,’ she says to me again.
So I do. I sit on my bed and I think it all through. I spend all day doing it: playing the thought experiment to the end, with a little more detail each time. If thought and matter are the same thing, then how is matter made? I think about matter, and what it is – just quarks and electrons – and I wonder how quarks and electrons are really different from zeroes and ones. In both of these possible worlds, they ‘make matter’ in the same way. The universe, just like the computer world, comprises the same amount of matter. Quarks and electrons can be combined to form anything you like in the physical world: a seed, a tree, carbon. And then things rot and get made again, out of the same stuff.
In the computer world, you could make something from zeroes and ones – a pornographic picture, for example – and then you could overwrite it with something else entirely, if you had the right software that let you fiddle around with the memory on the level of zeroes and ones. You could make it look as though the image had never been there: that it was unwritten space all along, or a document about a tree. But you might leave a trace; fossils, for instance, are traces. Quarks and electrons frozen in time, refusing to be broken down and made into something else.
So, how is matter made?
* * *
Later, over a dinner of mushrooms on toast, the discussion starts again.
‘I told Ariel about my book,’ Lura says to Burlem. ‘Or at least, that thought experiment about the computer.’
‘That’s the only bit I really understand,’ he says. Then, to me: ‘The rest is mostly maths.’
‘I haven’t answered your question yet,’ I say to Lura. ‘“How is matter made?”’
Burlem laughs. ‘That’s a nice conundrum to set someone for a rainy afternoon.’
The sky has been darkening all day, and by three o’clock I wasn’t sure what was happening outside: whether it was night, or the storm. At about five o’clock I was making a coffee, and I saw Burlem trying to entice Planck out of the door. But all the dog would do was reverse back into the house. It was the quickest way to get out of the rain, but it looked faintly comical.
‘I didn’t expect you to,’ Lura says, with a friendly smile.
‘But I get that quarks and electrons are just like zeroes and ones,’ I say. ‘And it seems obvious to me now that thought is matter . . .’ Except I have a bit of a problem with this. If thought is matter, then everything is real. But I thought that nothing was real. Derrida’s différance; Baudrillard’s simulacra. If thought is matter, then everything becomes real. But if you turn the equation around – if matter is actually thought – then nothing is real. Can both of these ideas be true at the same time? Can this equation work in the same way as ‘energy equals mass’?
‘Although thought doesn’t make more matter,’ Lura says, ‘neither thought nor matter can come from nowhere.’
‘No. I can see that, I think. But thought kind of . . . shapes . . .’
‘Encodes,’ Lura says. ‘Thought encodes matter.’
‘Which means what?’ I take a sip of red wine and my hand trembles.
‘When you think, you potentially change things.’
I think about this, and everything she’s said. I imagine the little binary people in their world where all the stuff they see around them, and all their thoughts, are made of the same thing. Presumably, in this world, you could create things just by thinking them. There’d be no difference between a thought of rain and rain itself. But surely that doesn’t follow in this world?
‘Are you saying that if I think a tree, I can make a tree?’ I say to Lura, unconvinced.
‘Not in this world,’ she says.
‘But in the computer world? In the thought experiment?’
‘Sort of,’ she says. She looks at Burlem. ‘She has a very good knack for simplification,’ she says.
‘Not a skill you really need in an English department,’ he says. ‘But, yes.’
‘Why “sort of ”?’ I ask Lura. ‘Why can I only sort of make a tree by thinking it, if I’m one of these beings?’
‘Because it depends on what sort of code you’re thinking in,’ she says. ‘Whether you can think in machine code or just within the software program.’
‘I’m having trouble with this,’ I say, frowning.
I can barely taste my food. I’m so aware that this is reality we’re talking about: this is the room I’m in, and the chair I’m sitting on, and my mind and my dreams and everything that makes me exist. I have the bizarre sensation that if I get any of these questions wrong, things will start melting around me: that the existence of everything depends on this.
And then I think, ‘Don’t be stupid: it’s just a theory.’
But I’ve seen the evidence for it. I’ve been in the Troposphere.
But the Troposphere could mean anything, surely?
‘Trouble?’ Burlem says, laughing. ‘Oh, join the club.’
‘I mean, it’s as though the whole world is turning, I don’t know . . .’
‘Upside down?’ Lura says.
‘Yeah. But in more dimensions than just four. I can’t . . .’ What do I want to say? I’m not sure. ‘So what is machine code?’ I ask. ‘And why can’t I think trees?’
She takes a sip of wine. ‘My whole book is about what this “machine code” possibly is. I’m not sure myself yet. I’ve got my hypothesis that it exists, but I’m still looking for the mathematics that completely explains it . . . I think I’m probably seventy-five per cent there.’ She puts her wine down. ‘You know, of course, that in the real world, you can’t make something just by thinking it. You can’t create a ten-pound note when you’re poor, or a sandwich when you’re hungry. The mind just can’t do that.’
‘It’s a shame,’ Burlem says.
‘But we also know – or we’ve agreed for the time being – that thought is matter. Thought is encoded; thought never goes away. Everyone’s thoughts exist in another dimension, which we are experiencing as the Troposphere.’
‘Yes,’ I say, putting my fork down.
‘We know thought is matter because it is happening in a closed system, in which everything is made from matter. Just like in the computer program in our thought experiment. There’s nothing in there that isn’t written in code because, well, you just can’t have something on a computer that isn’t written in code. Anything outside the system by definition couldn’t exist within it. But we also know that thought doesn’t create more matter . . .’
‘I can see that,’ I say. ‘The computer beings couldn’t just will more RAM into existence, for example.’
‘Good,’ Lura says. ‘But the matter that is there can be manipulated.’
Where have I heard the term ‘spoon bending’ recently? This is what comes into my mind, but I don’t say anything. I’m not even sure spoon bending really happens, and there don’t seem to be any examples of people thinking of a goldfish, for example, and making one appear. Magicians who seem to turn silk scarves into doves don’t really do it: it’s just an illusion.
Lura keeps talking. She describes the two levels of code on the metaphorical machine: machine code and the software code. Machine code makes the machine work, and tells the software code what to do. The way she speaks is focused and urgent, as if she’s trying to talk down a passenger who’s been left to fly a plane in a disaster. For a second I get the impression that she thinks she’s going to die soon. Then the thought’s gone.
‘So, in our world, what is written in machine code?’ Lura asks me.
‘The laws of physics?’ I say, wondering if I’m the passenger who’s supposed to land the plane, and whether or not I’m going to crash.
‘Yes. Excellent. And?’
‘And . . . ?’ I think for a few minutes. While I’m thinking, Burlem finishes eating; then he clears the plates away and stacks them in the dishwasher.
‘What about philosophy?’ Lura prompts me. ‘Metaphysics?’
I nod slowly. ‘OK. So . . . What are you saying? That some people think in this machine code?’
‘Possibly,’ she says. ‘Who do you imagine would think in machine code?’
‘You mean as opposed to the more “ordinary world” kind of code?’
‘Yes.’
‘So the code of the ordinary world is basically language, and machine code is the thoughts of . . . um . . . Scientists? Philosophers?’
‘Yes. Now think of a historical figure. Someone who would be capable of this.’
I sip my wine. ‘Einstein?’
‘Good answer. But now I’ve got the hardest question of all. When Einstein came up with his relativity theories, was he just describing the world as it was already or . . .’ She raises her eyebrows and leaves a space for me to finish her sentence.
‘Making it work like that,’ I say. ‘God.’
‘Do you see it?’ Lura asks. ‘It’s odd, don’t you think, that Einstein found exactly what he was looking for, even though it shouldn’t have made sense? It was a brilliant theory, of course, but so outlandish compared with Newtonian physics. Then Eddington went off to look at the eclipse, and Einstein’s predictions were proven. They keep being proven. You can’t build a GPS system now without taking relativity theory into account. And even the cosmological constant, which Einstein rejected and said was his biggest mistake – even that refuses to go away completely. And then there’s quantum physics, which is basically the study of things you shouldn’t be able to see,’ she says. ‘It’s the study of things no one has ever looked at, or thought about very much. And what happened when people did look?’
‘They found uncertainty,’ I say.
‘No one had ever said what this tiny stuff should be doing,’ Burlem says. ‘So when they looked at it, they found it was doing whatever the fuck it liked.’
‘Oh, you do paraphrase in an awkward way,’ Lura says. ‘Matter doesn’t “do what it likes”. Quantum matter just had no laws. No one had decided whether or not light was waves or particles. And then people were surprised when they found that it was both at once. In terms of my theory, perhaps it’s not a surprise to find that, on that level, the electron is everywhere at once until you decide where it is – and therefore what it is. It fits the theory. Matter has to be coded before it can mean anything. And thought is what encodes matter. Thought decides where the electron is.’
We move onto the sofas with a cafetière full of coffee. Lura knits as she speaks: pale green cashmere turning from something that looks like string into something that looks like the sleeve of a cardigan as the grey needles click-click-click in her lap. I wonder who she’s knitting for. I have a strong feeling that it’s either herself or no one at all. While she knits, she explains to me the way in which she believes the laws of the physical world are constructed. She says that there was never any a priori existence: no sense that matter was anything, or obeyed any laws, until there was consciousness to perceive it. But, because consciousness is also made from the same matter, the two areas that we always think are distinct – the human mind and the world of things – started working together to create, refine and mould each other. Conscious beings started looking at things and deciding what things were and how they worked. Thus, the first fish didn’t just chance upon the weed it needed to survive: it created it. And no one ‘found’ fire by a lucky accident. Someone just had to think fire and, as long as the thought was in this ‘machine’ code, there it was. And, for a while, things worked exactly the way everyone assumed they did. And there were no competing laws, so everything was simple. The sun did revolve around the Earth, and magic did exist. But then other people came along – also people able to think in this machine code – and decided that the world worked differently. The sun became the centre of something called a ‘solar system’, and the stars stopped being the burnholes of the saints. Magic gradually faded.
We talk about chaos theory, and how butterflies suddenly acquired the power to cause hurricanes; and we talk about evolution. Lura explains her theory – part of her whole project – that once someone has thought something into being via this machine code, that theory has to survive. Some do and some don’t. Newton’s theory had some small glitches that were worked out in Einstein’s theory. Einstein’s theory was a mutation, but it was stronger. It survived. But something’s bothering me about this.
‘What about time?’ I say.
‘What about it?’ says Lura.
‘Well, no one thinks that relativity only existed from 1905, or whenever it was. People think that there was always relativity, but no one noticed it before.’
‘What do you think?’ says Lura.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
‘Maybe time doesn’t work quite the way you think it does,’ Lura says. But she doesn’t say anything else for a minute or so, and when I look at her lined face, it seems tired.
‘Who’s the writer you were talking about before?’ I ask. ‘The one who keeps leaving all the messages?’
‘Ah,’ says Burlem.
‘Oh,’ says Lura. ‘She’s interested in my theories, and she’s condensed some of them into a short story. She’s having it published in Nature magazine, but I wasn’t sure I wanted her to. She offered to put my name on the piece, but I’m not sure I want to put my name to all of this just yet. And as for my book . . .’
Lura’s eyes drift away from mine and settle somewhere on the table.
‘What’s your book called?’ I ask her.
‘Poststructuralist Physics,’ she says. Now the click-click-click noise stops. She sighs and puts her knitting in her lap. ‘It’ll never be published, of course,’ she says.
‘Why not?’ I say.
‘Because there’s no evidence for anything I’ve said tonight. There is no such thing as poststructuralist physics. I can just imagine trying to explain it to my old colleagues. They’d think I’d gone mad. It happens to people after they retire sometimes. They . . .’ She shrugs: a small, almost imperceptible movement. Burlem and me both wait for her to continue the sentence, but all she says is, ‘Well.’ Then Burlem reaches over and picks up the ball of wool that must have dropped without me realising onto the floor and rolled under Lura’s chair.
‘What about the Troposphere?’ I say.
‘The Troposphere is going to be gone,’ Burlem says.
‘Gone? But . . . How?’
‘You’re going to destroy it,’ he says.