“You really should be,” he chided. “I don’t use one, but I could recommend a good enhancement. Martian-made.”

“No thank you. Not right now.” I made sure the others were still out of hearing. “But I’m curious. How did you manage all this?”

Charles leaned forward, face as bright and eager as a child’s, and placed his hands on the table. “I’ve always wrestled with stupid problems — the really big problems. It’s stupid to wrestle with them, because many of them circle back to the language used to state them — and that’s a fool’s chase.

“But one problem seemed truly big and truly interesting — fundamental. Mathematics is powerful. We can create equations to use as tools to describe nature. We can use them to predict what will happen. What gives mathematics such power? It took me years to come to a conclusion, and when I did, I told nobody — because the conclusion was so simple, and I was too young, and there was no way to prove anything.

“So I waited. I studied the Ice Pit, all I could find about William Pierce and his work, his fatal discovery. I knew that my simple solution fit into his theories — explained and supplemented them, in fact. I joined other people who seemed in tune with me, worked with them and prodded them… My ideas became testable.

“Mathematics is made of systems of rules. The universe seems to operate by a set of rules, as well — not so precisely, but then, measurements aren’t ever precise in nature. That in itself should have given everybody a clue.

‘The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine. We can design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a computational system. The computer’s operation is not so different from math itself — it’s math operating in light and matter. And math is useful in describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules. Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.

“When we do math in our heads, we store results — and the rules themselves — in our heads or on paper, or in other kinds of memory. Our brains become the computer.

“The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules, — a habit built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics.

“The results change if the rules change. Our universe evolved ages ago out of a chaos of possible rules… An original foundation or ground that simply bubbled with possibilities. Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they were not consistent — they could not survive against more rigorous, meaningful sets. I don’t mean ‘survive’ in time, either — they simply canceled and negated in a time-free eternity. But sets of rules did come into existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as free-standing, computational matrixes.

“Those which strongly contradicted — whose rules could not produce long-lived results — were simply not ‘recorded.’ They vanished. Those whose results could interact and not contradict, at least for a while, survived.

“The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules, and the rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.

“Mathematics is a computational matrix. Its power to describe and predict is no puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix. No mystery — a fundamental clue.”

I listened to him carefully, trying to follow his reasoning. Some of it was clear enough, but I could not track his leaps of intuition.

Charles squinted up at the ceiling. “I’ve never told anybody that before,” he said. “You’re looking at my theoretical underwear, Casseia.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said. “I hardly know what I’m seeing.”

“We’ve been around and around about responsibility for discovery, about the problems descriptor theory has caused you and everybody else. I thought I’d tell you more about my excuses. God is not necessary in all this — but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been searching for God. I just haven’t found the key yet. Maybe there isn’t any. But when I contemplate these things, when I work on these problems, that is the only time I feel worthy.

“I’ve lived my life well enough, and I’m no monster, but I have sufficient emotional problems for any human. When I work, I transcend those problems. I am pure. It’s like a drug. I can’t stop thinking just to become responsible and put a halt to change. I need the purity of that kind of thought, that kind of discovery. I may never know a redemptive love, I may never have complete self-understanding, but I will have this, at the very least: the moments when I’ve asked questions about reality and gotten meaningful answers.”

“When did you first think your theory was justified?” I asked.

“I put the Olympians together. Stephen was crucial with the politics, especially when we went to work for Cailetet. First, we duplicated William Pierce’s experiment. We redesigned his apparatus, improved field damping, used more efficient force disorder pumps. We used a smaller sample of atoms. And we brought the atoms down to absolute zero. At zero temperature, the Bell Continuum becomes coextensive with space-time. They merge. Descriptors within particles can be changed.”

“That’s all?” I asked.

“That’s something all by itself,” Charles said. “But you’re right. It still wouldn’t be enough… Earth thinks descriptors are simple yes-no switches. But I decided they couldn’t be simple. First, I tried to think of them as smoothly varying functions. That didn’t work, either. They weren’t yes-no toggles, but they weren’t smooth waves, either. They were codependent. Each referred to the others. They networked. Every particle having mass contains the same number of descriptors. But that number is not an integer. It isn’t even rational. Descriptors obey Quantum Logic from beginning to end.” He looked at me with some concern. “Am I boring you?”

“Not at all,” I said. I found myself attracted by the sound of his voice, boyishly enthused and powerful at once. Children playing with matches. The fascination of fire.

“If you want to tweak a descriptor, you must first persuade it to exist,” Charles said. “You have to separate it out from the cloud of potential descriptors, all of them codependent. And to do that, you need a QL thinker.”

“But how do you reach them?” I asked.

“Good question,” Charles said. “You’re thinking like a physicist.”

“More like mud pies to me,” I said.

He smiled and tapped my hand with his finger. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”

I withdrew my hand. “How?” I asked.

“When we bring a sample of atoms down to zero, the coextensive space around it takes on the characteristics of a single large particle, what we call a Pierce region, or a ‘tweaker,’ ” he said. “It has its own charge and spin and mass, e times the mass of the original sample of atoms. Its extra mass is pseudo, of course, and the traits are pseudo as well. We suspended the pseudo-particle, the tweaker, in a vacuum. We found that when we manipulated the tweaker, we were actually choosing a descriptor, pulling it from the cloud, and changing it directly. But nothing happened. The accident was stumbling upon the unique identity descriptor that keeps a particle separate from all others.”

“So?”

“Tweaking unique identity could convert our pseudo-particle into any particle, anywhere. The pseudo-particle itself doesn’t actually exist in the matrix — the matrix doesn’t recognize it. So another particle takes on the traits we assign. It can be a single particle far away — or all the particles within a well-defined volume.”