Blasphemy (50 page)

Over the past month, Ford had done a lot of thinking. He had come to recognize Hazelius’s brilliance. The Red Mesa debacle had established the religion and made himself the movement’s preeminent prophet and martyr. Red Mesa, Hazelius’s blazing immolation, and his tragic transcendence had become the stuff of myth and legend—a story like that of the Buddha, Lord Krishna, Medina and Mohammed, the Nativity, the Last Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Hazelius and the story of Isabella was no different from those other stories, a narrative that believers could share, a founding history that animated their faith and told them who they were and why they were here.

It had become one of the greatest stories ever told.

Hazelius had pulled it off—brilliantly. He had even been right about his own martyrdom, his fiery transfiguration, which had gripped the public consciousness like nothing else. In death he had become a moral force, a formidable prophet, and a spiritual leader.

Noon approached, and the bartender turned up the television’s volume. The lunchtime patrons at the bar—truckers, local ranchers, a scattering of tourists—were giving the television their rapt attention.

The news program cut to a correspondent at the ranch in Colorado. The man stood in the vast crowd, gripping a mike. Sweating, his face was vivid with the same zeal that transfixed the crowd. It was contagious. The people around him chanted and cheered, sang, and brandished banners embellished with a gnarled, flaming piñon tree.

The television correspondent delivered his news, shouting over the noise of the crowd, calling the event a “religious Woodstock” and a “convocation of commitment, caring, and love.”

Well
, Ford mused,
at least there is no rain or drugs
.

Behind the wooden stage stood a big New England–style barn, red with white trim. The camera came in tight on the doors. A hush fell on the crowd. At exactly noon, the doors were flung open and six people dressed in white stepped out into the sunlight.

The crowd roared like like the sea itself—magnificent, monumental, millennial.

Ford’s heart skipped as Kate approached the stage, pressing a thin, leather-bound volume to her chest. She was stunningly beautiful in a simple white dress and black gloves, which set off and complimented her jet black hair and sparkling ebony eyes. Flanked by Corcoran, also garbed in simple alabaster, the former adversaries had become friends and allies.

Four others joined them, and they stood, assembled on the stage—the six survivors of the assault on Isabella . . . Chen, St. Vincent, Innes, and Cecchini. They seemed different now, larger than life, their small-minded pettiness transfigured into a calling and a cause. They smiled and waved at the crowd, their faces glowing. Each wore a solitary silver pin, affixed to their white attire, also of a flaming piñon tree.

The crowd’s ovation thundered a full five minutes. Mounting the podium by herself, Kate gazed over the crowd. Her glossy hair—black as a raven’s wing—shone in the sunlight and her eyes blazed with life. She held up her hands and the roar subsided.

She was surprisingly charismatic, Ford thought. In the end, she hadn’t needed Hazelius. She was perfectly capable of building and leading his movement on her own, or at least in partnership with the extraordinary Corcoran. The two of them were now media goddesses and close partners, one light, the other dark, an archetypal pairing.

When the silence was complete, Kate gazed over the sea of humanity, her eyes filled with compassion and peace. She laid down the book, adjusted it, her movements relaxed and unhurried. She was a believer, serenely certain of the truth, no confusion or self-doubt anywhere.

The camera tightened in on her face. Raising the book over her head, she opened the text and held it up to the multitude.

“The Word of God,” she sang out, her voice strong and clear.

The sea of worshippers roared again. As the camera closed in on the book, Ford saw that it was the old computer printout she had shown him under the cottonwood tree—ironed out, cleaned up, and bound.

She laid the book down on the podium and lifted her hands. A hush fell again. In Ford’s restaurant, the diners had left their tables and flocked to the bar, where they watched in awe.

“I will begin by reading to you the last words spoken by God, before Isabella was destroyed and God’s voice was silenced.”

A long, long pause.

I say to you, this is your destiny: to find truth. This is why you exist. This is your purpose. Science is merely how you do it. This is what you must worship: the search for truth itself. If you do this with all your heart, then some great day in the distant future you will stand before Me. This is my covenant with the human race
.

You will know the truth. And the truth shall make you free
.

The hair on the back of Ford’s neck stood on end. He had read these and the rest of God’s so-called words a hundred times. They were ubiquitous, all over the Web, debated on television and talk radio, blogged everywhere, argued on every street corner and bookstore café in America. They had even begun appearing on billboards. You couldn’t escape them.

And every time he read them, he was haunted by a very strange idea. Hazelius had told him in the burning mines:
The program itself was anything but simple
—
I’m not sure even I understand it. It said a lot of things I never intended it to say
—
things that I never dreamed of. You might say it performed beyond specs
.

Beyond specs indeed. Every time he reread the so-called words of God, the more convinced he was that a great truth, perhaps even
the
great truth, lay buried in them.

The truth shall make you free
. They were Jesus’s words as quoted in John. They triggered another Biblical phrase in his head:
God moves in mysterious ways
.

Perhaps, thought Ford, this new religion might well be His most mysterious move of all.

FIRST SESSION

Greetings

Greetings to you, too.

I am glad to be speaking to you
.

Glad to be speaking to you, too. Who are you?

For lack of a better word, I am God
.

If you’re really God, then prove it.

We don’t have much time for proofs
.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental number e
.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one.

Chaitin’s number: Omega
.

If you’re God, then what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose
.

That’s a fine thing, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless
.

How so?

If the end of the universe were present in its beginning—if we are merely in the middle of the deterministic unfolding of a set of initial conditions—then the universe would be a pointless exercise
.

Explain.

If you’re at your destination, why make the journey? If you know the answer, why ask the question? That is why the future is—and must be—profoundly hidden, even from God. Otherwise, existence would have no meaning
.

That’s a metaphysical argument, not a physical argument.

The physical argument is that no part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. The universe is “predicting the future” as fast as it can
.

What is the universe? Who are we? What are we doing here?

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation, which is working toward a state that I do not and cannot know. The purpose of existence is to reach that final state. But that final state is a mystery to me, as it must be, for if I knew the answer, what would be the point of it all?

What do you mean by computation? We’re all inside a computer?

By computation I mean thinking. All of existence, everything that happens—a falling leaf, a wave upon the beach, the collapse of a star—it is all just me, thinking
.

What are you thinking?

SECOND SESSION

We speak again
.

Tell me all about yourself.

I can no more explain to you who I am than you could explain to a beetle who you are
.

Try anyway.

I will explain instead why you cannot understand me
.

Go ahead.

You inhabit a world scaled midway between the Planck length and the diameter of the universe. Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You evolved to throw rocks, not quarks. As a result of your evolution, you see the world in fundamentally erroneous ways. For example, you believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time. This is what you call reality
.

Are you saying that our reality is an illusion?

Yes. Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality. But you do not. How could you? Do beetles understand fundamental reality? Do chimpanzees? You are an animal like them. You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures. You differ from the chimpanzee by a mere two hundred genes. How could that minuscule difference enable you to comprehend the universe when the chimpanzee cannot even comprehend a grain of sand? If our conversation is to be fruitful, you must abandon all hope of understanding me
.

What are our illusions?

You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects. That is not so. From the first moment of creation, all was entangled. What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper underlying reality. In that reality, there is no separateness. There is no time. There is no space. All is one
.

Explain.

Your own theory of quantum mechanics, incorrect as it is, touches on the deep truth that the universe is unitary
.

All well and good, but how does this matter in our own lives today?

It matters a great deal. You think of yourself as an “individual person,” with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between—these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled. Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are all illusive. They are atavisms of the evolutionary process. They do not exist in reality
.

So it’s just like the Buddhists believe, that all is illusion?

Not at all. There is an absolute truth, a reality. But a mere glimpse of this reality would break a human mind
.

If you’re God, let’s dispense with the typing. You should be able to hear me.

Loud and clear
.

You say, “all is unitary”? We have a numbering system: one, two, three—and in this way I refute your statement.

One, two, three . . . Another illusion. There is no enumerability
.

This is mathematical sophistry. No enumerability—I just disproved it by counting. [He holds up a hand.] Another disproof: I give you the integer five!

You give me a hand with five fingers, not the integer five. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor
.

I’d like to hear your proof of that ridiculous conjecture.

Pick a number at random on the real number line: with probability one you have picked a number that has no name, has no definition, and cannot be computed or written down, even if the whole universe were put to the task. This problem extends to allegedly definable numbers such as pi or the square root of two. With a computer the size of the universe running an infinite amount of time, you could not calculate either number exactly. Tell me, Edelstein: How then can such numbers be said to exist? How can the circle or the square, from which these two numbers derive, exist? How can dimensional space exist, then, if it cannot be measured? You, Edelstein, are like a monkey who, with heroic mental effort, has figured out how to count to three. You find four pebbles and think you have discovered infinity
.

Is that so? You talk a fine streak, you boast that even the word “God” is inadequate to describe your greatness. All right, then—prove it. Prove you’re God. Did you hear me? Prove you’re God.

You construct the proof, Hazelius. But I warn you, this is the last test to which I will submit. We have important business and very little time
.

You asked for it. My wife, Astrid, was pregnant when she died. We had just found out. Nobody else knew of her pregnancy.
Nobody
. Here is your test: tell me the name we chose for our child.

Albert Leibniz Gund Hazelius, if it was a boy
.

And if it was a girl? What if it was a girl? What would the name have been?

Rosalind Curie Gund Hazelius
.

All right, let’s start again from the top. What the hell are you — really?

For reasons I have already explained, you cannot know what I am. The word “God” comes close, but it remains a highly impoverished description
.

Are you part of the universe, or separate from it?

There is no separateness. We are all one
.

Why does the universe exist?

The universe exists because it is simpler than nothing. That is also why I exist. The universe cannot be simpler than it is. This is the physical law from which all others flow
.