Blood Music

Nothing will ever be the same again.

Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway?

No, perhaps not. Not until now.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”

“Very evocative. He seems to be confirming what I said last year—that the universe really has no underpinnings, that when a good hypothesis comes along, one that explains the prior events, the underpinnings shape themselves to accommodate and a powerful theory is born.”

“Then there is no ultimate reality?”

“Apparently not. Bad hypotheses, those that don’t fit what happen on our level, are rejected by the universe. Good ones, powerful ones, are incorporated.”

Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?

Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten.

It was in the blood, the flesh,

And now it is forever.

Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her.

“I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.”

“What’s that?”

“Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.”

“Sounds wonderful. Which car?”

“The Quantum, of course.”

“Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.”

“And the steering went out?”

“Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”

He may not have had time, but even allowing him the time, Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences.

But wasn’t that true of every creator?

Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?

Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them.