Chapter 15


Midmorning near Haiphong, Vietnam. The delta fog had boiled away, revealing a green and brown plain glittering toward the sea. The urban jungle was full of noise and motion.
  A massive cube on a ridge, the palace was part of the sky, pastel hues merging with the clouds. Minarets and cupolas surrounded a public park, where exotic animals stood around a reflecting pond that seemed to vanish from certain angles. Hidden bells and gongs tinkled and rang. Great forces were at work here.
  Outside the ornamental fence, pilgrims waited for today's first tour. Some chanted or stood in meditative poses, others leaned against the barrier or lay motionless on the pavement. The air was like a damp rag, a special effect for some. After years of waiting, they were numb with anticipation. The pilgrims would participate in ceremonies, have some questions answered, and get to visit simulated heaven.
  A stadium-sized highway overpass curved around the entrance. The surrounding buildings were set back a respectful distance. The drivers looking down felt superior, knowing they would never be fooled. The Master treated his disciples like an investment, claiming even the hardest life was a mere pinprick before eternal ecstasy.
  By 2040, 80% of humanity was unofficially atheist, but most weren't too happy about it. Doubt began in small ways, a cynical attitude, more Aztec than Christian. Worldwide days of prayer had failed to produce any divine signals. When someone prayed, the higher authority was a part of their own brain.
  The pilgrims waiting patiently knew better. Reality was a catastrophe without its own solution. Eventually, everything would become part of God, but some parts would be more important.

  The meditation sphere was bathed in golden light. Few visitors could come this far, and none knew its exact size or composition. At the focal point, the Supreme Master performed his daily control exercises. A study in serenity, his overflowing robe merged with the surrounding carpet, as beta-sounds filled the air.
  He was never at peace. A consumer activist in a previous lifetime, he led the planet's strictest hierarchy. Everyone was below him, but the lowest member still outranked all outsiders. Surrounded by courtiers and counselors, he had no reason to leave his palace.
  Zhu Chen, acolyte for external relations, number nineteen in the overall hierarchy, kneeled into the floor while addressing the Master. The sphere had good acoustics. He could hear his own heartbeat.
  "O Supreme Master, the UN has found a path to the Method. Finally, a sign."
  Chen was compact and solidly built, with a gambler's mind behind a stony facade. He loved the appearance of order, parting his hair straight down the middle. Chen ran the church's nonexistent covert operations group. Like the UN, he often worried about the end of the world. The Method had come to dominate his dreams.
  Chen continued: "I have proof the individual known as 'Persuader', whom we've targeted since 2036, does exist. He never responded to our appeals, but shared his knowledge with others. Your wisdom in allowing me to pursue him shames those who doubted me." He hid his excitement, but the Master saw all.
  "His path was destined to meet mine," the Master said, "I foresaw this moment." The echo of his voice sounded holy.
  Chen was awed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a mural with the intense detail of software art. A smiling family sat around a dinner table, the Master hovering overhead. Coldly elegant, it looked wrong in interesting ways, an equation that closely resembled a picture.
  "The profiles match perfectly," Chen said. "A genius dwarfed only by yourself, who deleted all earthly traces of his existence. I found nothing on the Shadow List." Chen hid his pride, living in the moment. "He trades ideas, sees similarities, absorbs the talents of his opponents. A firm called Decentralized Solutions hacked a backdoor into UN case UO5-21204. They offered to limit our risk profile." His forehead began to hurt. "We have already started . . . there was no time."
  The only response was the Master's famous decelerated laughter, like a backward recording. In his terror, Chen loved him. "Our front group will stay one step ahead of the UN. To avoid detection, we must capture and absorb the Method within 48 hours, pending your blessing."
  Maintaining his timeless pose, the Master willed his mind to encompass all reality. His fingers didn't tense, but his brow furled from side to side. "I will modify the universe," he said. "Do not move."

  He had ruled the Church of Ultimate Truth for a quarter century, earning automatic respect in that time. Giving up most of humanity, he only cared about the shrinking percentage of the world under his control: the True Path.
  Dozens of self-financed studies had shown members were the happiest group on Earth, second only to drugged terminal patients. The church brought order to their lives, and the will to change. As an extended family, they shared communal property. The bio-relatives' rage was a mere breeze to the Master.
  Resting on his marble plinth, he realized he had chosen the best time to inhabit this body. Most new sects appeared from nowhere, flourished for a few years, and then crashed. The first warning sign was a sense of unreality. The Master preferred a more boring world, and carefully rationed his miracles. Humanity needed him, but didn't realize it yet.
  The problems were immense. Philosophers argued that while religion should be true, it almost certainly wasn't. Reality was not unified, and God was logically impossible. The only way he might exist was through a logical anomaly: 1 + 1 = 3. Why hadn't religion predicted molecules, bacteria, the rings of Jupiter, or anything believers didn't already know? The Master would never trust such proof, suspecting a demonic influence.
  Some new mysteries had emerged in physics. Particles changed course as if they had hit unseen obstacles. Experiments failed for the craziest reasons, including multiple power failures. Scientists denied anything strange was going on. Nature followed the simplest laws, steadily erasing the past.
  The Church of Ultimate Truth wanted to unify every religion. Every believer would be accommodated, a self-reinforcing framework of supremely unlikely claims. Matrix theory and multiple dimensions would connect ancestor worship and karma, all the prophets, heaven and hell.
  The first Unity Conference in Jerusalem had attracted a thousand delegates on a bold mission to agree. Unfathomably polite, they agreed 100% that after death there was either a final judgment, or nothing, or something else. Schisms had developed with the inevitability of continental drift. A debate about allegory was really about control. Soon, there were more unification factions than there had been religions to begin with.
  At the moment, Buddhism was the largest traditional faith, followed by expanded Hinduism. Both were being overtaken by revised Unimism. Net trends were hard to monitor.
  A statue on a pedestal, the Master smoothed his flowing beard. Five years ago, his wealthiest disciple had defected to a small cult known as the Perfectionists, a quantum religion believing in many universes; so he'd sent Chen to infiltrate them. As part of his initiation, Chen had floated in space, surrounded by stars that were really atoms. There was so much detail when no one was watching. Was it all wasted?
  The Perfectionists believed the complexity was shared, as the universe split into endlessly different copies of itself. A piece of paper big enough to write down their number wouldn't fit inside any of them. When two universes became identical, they merged back. This happened less often in our low-entropy universe (a fact that would become part of the final revelation in Rick's UN investigation). Small regions did merge temporarily, and were shared by many realities.
  The Perfectionists thought that if one thing existed, why not everything, including all versions of heaven and hell, regardless of how perfect or horrible they were (though both options were statistically unlikely). This idea gave Rick terrible nightmares he fortunately forgot. He certainly never dreamt about the good possibilities. The biggest and only problem, it had even driven Nietzsche insane.
  Rick had the delusion that by suddenly waking up, he offered a statistical escape to reality's victims, an antropic off-ramp. He suspected this would become the closest thing to a universal religion, unless it became corrupted. One night, he had guessed the secret motive of the world's sole supervillain, only to reject the notion with a shudder. It had taken forever to get back to sleep.
  The Master found such thoughts exhilarating. On one occasion he had been woken by an incoherent shout. He'd turned on the lights and found his bedroom empty, but wrote down what he had heard. The only reference to the word was a fragmentary audio recording, accidentally made in the grooves of a clay pot three thousand years old. It was probably a curse.
  He sensed an infinite mind that knew everything; an unlimited number of such minds in fact, cool and composed beyond comprehension. If all realities existed, the good canceled out the bad, and everything was meaningless. As if there weren't enough problems already. Normal people only worried about their debts, and what they had already lost.
  When the Master meditated long enough, he began to chuckle, softly at first, then a more hysterical sound, the laughter rising in pitch and tempo. Great gales rolled forth, a delirious chorus. The recordings were sold to church members at great profit.
  There was no finite solution: reality was too vast to sample in any meaningful way. If everything balanced out, did pleasure automatically create an equal amount of pain, or could there be a moral law to create as much pleasure as possible? Perhaps, he thought, intelligence could control everything, create good universes to balance the bad, or eliminate them altogether. History was just a bad dream. In that case God was the result, not the cause. A purely rational religion like Unimism, the best logic supporting the highest aspirations, still had as many errors as any other.
  The Perfectionists had decided to redefine God. His job was not to create the multiverse, which had caused itself. Instead, God's role was to prevent certain bad things from existing. That was all he did. God was the gaps.
  If he did interfere, electron transitions, radioactive decay, and elementary statistics would all have been slightly different. There had been experiments to see if God could topple a balanced pencil, or move a tiny lever in a sealed box (assuming he was willing to play along with mankind's silly games). After a while, the testers began to suspect that all the forces in existence, working together, couldn't reliably move the lever one millimeter. If the lever had to move to save the earth, it still wouldn't.
  The Perfectionists realized it was up to them to fine-tune reality. If every less-than-perfect universe deleted itself, only the perfect ones would remain, containing happy versions of everyone alive. Sadly, the inhabitants of this imperfect Earth refused to go along. The Perfectionists would have to help them, for their own good.
  True or false, it was the most dangerous idea in the world. Even Kant wouldn't have known how to reply.
  Analyzing his reports, Chen's hired experts had concluded the Perfectionists were developing new forms of terrorism. The group had split its research into modules, disguised as a failed greenhouse project. They were altering the photosynthesis of blue-green algae to "leak" hydrogen. The atoms in every water molecule had already been part of countless cells. In a geological instant, the oceans' hydrogen would vanish into space. The seafloors would become deserts, while the mountains burned.
  If that didn't work, the Perfectionists were also developing new Bunya viruses, alternative DNA base pairs, phages that turned intestinal e-coli into tiny meat grinders, and more.
  The Master understood the power of fear. He had called Millipol, Earth's top security agency, and was connected to a patient listener.
  They already knew, of course. The nightmare combinations were a mere coincidence, the agent had explained. They wouldn't work anyway. The new algae were very inefficient, and most of the hydrogen would be reabsorbed. The projects were meant to scare new converts, and they actually made the world slightly safer. Perhaps the group was preparing a new ad campaign, or a mass suicide. Nothing to worry about.
  The Master was impressed. The Perfectionists had used a hoax as their first line of defense, a false alarm to drown out the truth. He should have thought of it himself.
  He had been too trusting, and was unprepared for what happened next. The Perfectionists suddenly became extremely paranoid. Chen was the first member to be kicked out, but he retained some contacts inside. Arguments had erupted over arcane doctrine. Rival committees denounced each other, and were ruthlessly purged. Show trials escalated to hysterical proportions, while membership plummeted. The inquisition sustained itself to the very end, when the last member presumably excommunicated himself. The religious end status was the end of change.
  The Master had recognized the work of a secret Millipol division. The Perfectionist research might ultimately be harmless, but their ideas weren't. Someone had decided to make an example of them.
  Thus began the church's golden age. The authorities had shown their gratitude by forgetting it existed. The Master stimulated tourism in the Delta region, and performed the occasional service. He never made anyone disappear, but had assisted certain agents who had.
  With his face pressed firmly against the floor, Chen considered his own worries. As a senior member he believed absurd things that were logically possible. The endless details had convinced him.
  The Master communicated with living balloons in the atmosphere of Neptune. They cast long shadows between parallel clouds, emerging from the smog like sky islands. Giant minds that lived a billion years and were only killed by meteors, they had told the Master how the world would end: It could happen right now.
  Their first warning had involved two neutron stars circling each other like metronomes, one lightyear from Earth. Perfectly black, invisible from any distance, they were surrounded by dark-matter accretion disks. After their day-long final approach sequence, a wall of radiation would fry the earth, killing all life in twelve hours.
  A second prophecy claimed all the uranium in the earth's mantle would sink under its own weight, forming a molten layer around the core. Micro-tremors would rock the world for months without end. When they suddenly stopped, everyone would fall down, their last moment of peace. The subsequent concussion would blow the oceans sky-high, turn the crust to dust, and even shatter bacteria.
  As he recounted these tribulations, the Master's voice rose like the lava seas that would sweep the continents, as glowing ashes rained from the sky. Only church members would be saved.
  Five years ago, Chen began to sense the same problems that had killed the Perfectionists. Outsiders claimed the warnings were obviously bogus. Most of Earth's uranium was locked in lightweight molecules, and Neptune's furious winds were unsuitable for balloons of any kind. The planet's sharp-edged clouds were as flat as boards. As for the neutron stars, astronomers objected that tidal buckling would have caused detectable X-rays.
  Chen had approached the Council of Elders, an intentionally divisive body famous for its close votes. He stood in the pit looking up at the light. What if the Master made false predictions to test his followers? Chen asked. He was obviously correct in every way that mattered, but humanity might kill him anyway. The church needed a bonafide miracle to silence the critics.
  The elders had debated in a furious whisper, and a single droning voice. The answer fell from the sky: "Proceed."
  That first year, Chen had spent thousands of hours looking for a new way to control large groups. What was loyalty's true source? Could it be fear? Ideally, they wouldn't even know they were being controlled. Four servants were at his disposal, and he had the authority to change the truth as needed. He finally realized the answer had been in the very first search result.
  Ten years ago, every resident of a small town near Eureka, North California, had been placed under total surveillance. The town was a self-contained psychiatric facility, designed for the ultimate sociological experiment. All the streets looped back, with inward-facing buildings, a false hillside, impenetrable hedges. All the patients were high-functioning hard cases. One diminutive Cambodian had briefly controlled a quarter of the world's wealth, and believed he still did. Others were lost in their own inimitable ways: addicts, liars, mad artists.
  The study director studied social networks, but even he was surprised at the speed with which they had formed, when the patients discovered they could manipulate each other. Like a chemical reaction, they had evolved a city-state with laws, monopolies, in-crowds and outcasts. There were statues and festivals, currencies and inflation. Like most status-based economies, it soon split into smaller groups.
  The director became immersed in his experiment. He spoke of deep structures, the level below the subconscious.
  Finally, he had learned too much. One morning, the director began to speak a new language, using phonemes only found in a few African dialects. Word counts suggested a constantly changing meaning. He was terrified of his own image in mirrors and screens, and covered his face with mud. He wouldn't give meaningful replies, and was eventually diagnosed with auto-impostor delusional syndrome. He became a patient at his own facility.
  The case was too strange to be what it seemed. Despite the absence of evidence, it met Chen's search criteria. He believed a research assistant had somehow eliminated his boss, and stolen his knowledge. Chen wanted to find this assistant, now known as the Method. The church needed his knowledge. He had to hurry, before the Russians or the UN found him first.

  The Master sincerely prayed to be error-free in his thoughts. He finally spoke, his voice reflected at the back of Chen's head. "I'm concerned about the Method," he said resonantly. "I wish there were a way to ensure his intentions were correct."
  Chen understood. By law, the Master had to report his actions, but not his thoughts. "I pledge my life," he replied, crawling backward. Then his image flickered out. Chen was in a small booth in an airliner in flight.
  After Chen had left, the Master thought about the coming hours, each second as heavy as gold. Since Moscow, every cult had been infiltrated by Millipol. By now they almost trusted him. Ultimately, the Master didn't want to work for a higher authority, but to become one. The only one. He slowly sunk into his plinth, the carpet folding over his head before pulling smooth.