"Whoops," I say, smiling. "I forgot all about phenomenology there and almost became an empiricist."
Burlem smiles back. "Indeed."
"And the question isn't whether or not Apollo Smintheus exists, but what existence is."
"Exactly, and, for now, Apollo Smintheus isn't consistent with the laws of physics, so he's consigned to the Troposphere. He can't exist in the physical world because he wouldn't make sense here."
"Which probably isn't a bad thing," Lura says.
"But didn't Einstein's theories go against Newtonian physics?" I say. "I mean, they were probably more against the laws of physics than Apollo Smintheus."
"Yes, but he thought them in machine code," she says. "Or, to put it another way, in mathematics. Einstein was able to think relativity into existence because he could think it into the very fabric of the universe. And of course his theories were plausible. They went with what had come before, even if they seemed counterintuitive."
I make a little gasping noise. "Mathematics. Of course." That's what machine code is made from. That's what makes the laws of physics.
"Yes."
"And that's what you see when you go into the Troposphere, isn't it?" I say.
Lura doesn't catch my eye. "Yes," she says.
But my mind is racing on.
"So what if someone who could think in this code thought about God?" I say. "I mean, didn't Einstein even say that he was trying to read the mind of God? He believed in God—so how come that didn't make God a physical being?"
"Because you can't create your own creator," Lura says simply.
"You can't create anything outside the system," Burlem says.
"But ... So how come God exists in the Troposphere? I'm still not sure I get that. I can see how an entity like Apollo Smintheus would end up there. But God with a capital 'G': He's supposed to be the creator—just like you said."
"God has other functions," Lura says. "As you pointed out the other day, God is simply a collection of people's thoughts about how we should live and what the world means. I expect that if you met God in the Troposphere he wouldn't claim to have created the whole thing. You have to sit outside something to create it. And we just don't know what's outside."
I think about Jim Lahiri's book again, and the argument I got so excited about when I was talking to Adam and Heather. I can't help thinking about those questions about the beginnings of everything. Is there a multiverse? Or is God sitting beyond the laptop; the entity that switched the whole thing on?
"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. "But there does seem to be the possibility that these theories have backwards effects ... Or am I going nuts?"
"No. That's very sophisticated," says Lura. "You could give that some more thought. Of course, the other possibility is that the way the world works is always changing." 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 will 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."
She shrugs: a small, almost imperceptible movement.
"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.
Chapter Twenty-five
I'm sitting on my bed with my thoughts flapping in my mind like chaotic butterflies.
Oh fuck.
Now I understand why Apollo Smintheus took a special interest in me.
So I can change things in people's minds—just like the KIDS can. I can make people like Martin Rose want to go to the toilet so badly that he leaves his stakeout. And I made Wolf refuse to tell Adam where the book was when the Project Starlight men were surely in Adam's mind, listening in. But I thought everyone could do that. I didn't think there was anything special about me. Now it turns out that there is. Lura also thinks I could probably think in machine code; that I have that potential. And that's why Apollo Smintheus wants me to seek out Abbie Lathrop and, through her, to change history. So now Burlem and Lura want me to go even farther back and convince Lumas not to write the book at all. They say I can have as long as I want to plan my journey—after all, once the book is gone then the knowledge is gone. The Project Starlight men will never find the book in the priory because the book will not be there anymore. There won't be any Project Starlight. But I am bothered by paradoxes again: They are pinning me down by my wings. If I had already done this and been successful, then I wouldn't need to go. And I don't have all the time in the world, really. Martin and Ed could come here tomorrow and blow my brains out. The fact that they're here, in this world, and they want to do this—surely that implies that I have already been unsuccessful.
Except ... I'm not sure that time works in exactly the way we all think.
But maybe I'd better not think about that too much ... I'm actually a bit scared of thinking anything, now I know what my thoughts potentially are.
So I wanted knowledge, and I got it. But did I ever want this kind of knowledge? Did I ever want to know that there is no God: that we are God? That there's not necessarily a creator or a reason? We make reason and only dream of creators: That's all we can do. But I knew this all along, right? Maybe. But how awful this is: How awful to be proved right; for someone to demonstrate to you that yes, there's no Daddy up there who's going to approve of you because you got the puzzle right. No supreme being is going to clap and give you a special place in heaven because you understood some of Heidegger. God might be up there in the Troposphere, but the Troposphere is simply our thought. And there really is nothing outside of that. Our thoughts spin quarks up and down and smear electrons into whatever we want them to be.
Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking and that every single action in the universe could be predicted—if you had something powerful enough on which to do the prediction. There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known. In that world I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes. It's what happens when you try to combine God with science. It's narrative, pure and simple. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is. And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.