"Um," I think quickly. What tells our world how to work? Do we even know? "The laws of physics?"
"Yes. Excellent. And?"
"And...?"
"This is impressive," says Burlem. "It took me longer than this."
I think for a few minutes. While I'm thinking, Burlem finishes eating and tops up everyone's wine; 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.
"I think so. You're saying that Einstein came up with relativity theory as an explanation for the world, but what he was actually doing was constructing it? So when he said that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, he wasn't observing nature's speed limit but actually setting it."
"Yes."
I roll up a cigarette for Burlem and then one for myself. I do it almost in slow motion, my brain using 99 percent of its processing power to think over what Lura is saying, and most of the remaining 1 percent just keeping me alive while I do that. There's very little left for self-destruction. But still, I manage to light my cigarette, and Burlem lights his.
"Have you ever thought just how fucked-up twentieth-century physics is?" he asks me.
"Yeah. Obviously. You know that's one of my interests."
"It's odd, don't you think," Lura says, "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 Einstein didn't like," I say.
"Hmm. Yes. Well, what's the one main thing we know about quantum physics?"
"It's absolutely crazy?"
"Yes." She laughs. "And?"
"Um..."
"It's 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?"
"They found that everything's messed up and uncertain," I say.
"Uncertain. That's the key word," she says.
I frown. "How do you mean?"
"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."
"But didn't Newton's laws apply to everything?" I say. "I mean, once they were invented."
"Ah," says Lura. Then she doesn't say anything else.
"Sorry?" I say.
"This is where it gets complicated."
"In what way?"
"Well, I'll tell you in a minute over coffee. But for a moment, think about this. There is a possibility that the quantum level is fundamentaclass="underline" that when you look at subatomic particles you are actually looking at the most basic parts of the physical—and mental—world. I suppose you might call them the basic building blocks. And 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 gray needles click-click-click in her lap. 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 mold 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. Earth did revolve around the sun, 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 center of something called a "solar system" and the stars stopped being the burn holes 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.
"So knowledge or, at least, its effects are democratic?" I ask.
"Yes, but not in the way you might think from what I've just said."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's not belief that keeps things in the physical world—the Enlightenment took care of that. You can see only what can be proved. Everything else just haunts the Troposphere. This mouse god of yours must be one of many. I've been thinking about this since you got here and told us about what you'd seen. Everything's recorded in the Troposphere, of course, and if enough people believe in one thing, then the energy seems to come alive. I think that there are conscious beings in the Troposphere made out of this energy. Ghosts, gods ... And they have omniscience because we've given them that power. But they can't act in the way we can. They are not agents. Omniscience implies infinite knowledge—but not necessarily the possibility for any action. That's why, when Apollo Smintheus's cult prays to him, he has to get you to do his task for him. You see, you just can't have gods in the physical world. In the physical world you have to be able to prove things exist."
"But if Apollo Smintheus was standing right here, we'd have proved that he existed," I say.
"No. Think about it," Burlem says. "All you could prove is that you could see him. Even if you took a photograph, people would say it was a forgery."