Ratio

Ratio Tile, having negotiated ultra-awkwardly for some time away from Jorge—having pressed the point, in his opinion an inarguably sound one, that spending time around Jorge did not seem to be doing much good for either of them—now finds himself having one of the best scientific conversations of his life.

He had arranged with Cecelia to head over to her quarters at the break of floorday, not even having coffee or breakfast beforehand, so that they could spend the entire day in synchronized contemplation of their marvelous and fearsome new friend, who goes by the curious name “reinteg_plume.mat”. This is the relatively tiny data set collected by Maria’s submarine in the moments just after the giant heteropneum—which Miranda, perhaps transported by stress onto some never-before-seen plane of cloying whimsy, had insisted on officially naming “Fluffy”—had turned tail and fled. The data from Fluffy itself has been plenty interesting, all right. But what had happened after Fluffy, and before Maria had returned to the Sphere, is far more enticing to the pneuma-data connoisseur.

There had been a sudden and massive pneumatech pulse, a vast pillar or, as the technical lingo would have it, plume. Unseen or at least unremembered by Maria herself, but dutifully captured by her sub’s sensors. It had lasted for 143.2 seconds and had apparently been emitted from the very same chasm that Maria had later found on her scouting mission, now the only pneumatic phenomenon for miles around. Ratio of course feels some frustration that this prodigy was not captured on the Sphere’s full sensor array, still inactive even now. But what he and Cecelia have is enough—indeed, more than enough.

Cecelia has been Ratio’s best friend for the last two years. There is no romantic aspect to this whatever, at least on Ratio’s side—Ratio is, as he prefers to put it, a full six on the Kinsey scale—and they don’t even quite have aligned interests beyond pneuma science, Cecelia favoring punk over prog, mysteries and thrillers to sci-fi, and whiskey to beer. What they have is a perfectly aligned intellectual partnership, an ability to work together on a high level without posing, posturing, trying to one-up each other, or getting involved in any of the status bullshit that the rest of the pneuma science community is 95% composed of by weight. They have injokes; they tacitly share assumptions it would take hours of tedious argument to get anyone else to begin considering as options; they speak in a patois that even other pneuma scientists have trouble understanding, at this point.

They complement each other perfectly, too. Ratio is such a pure-theory guy that he can sometimes miss the trees for the forest; Cecelia is capable of joining him at every new level of theoretical rarefaction but also keeps him grounded in real-world implications, orders of relative magnitude, technological possibilities. Cecelia hails from a long line of engineers, people whose business was fundamentally about making stuff happen. She likes to tell stories about bonding with her otherwise distant father by letting him take her on long drives into the middle of nowhere, at which point they would, together, use not-always-legal things to make very large explosions. Cecelia’s mind, though quite indifferent to power in human relations, seems to have, at a basic level, a fascination with power in the purely physical sense, with the pure fact that matter can be made to dramatically change its form in the blink of an eye.

Ratio, for his part, can interface with the other scientists in a way Cecelia has never been able, or at least willing, to do. This isn’t because the rest of them don’t find Ratio insufferable, which they do—but they find him insufferable in a manner they can understand. He’s a standard archetype of scientific conferences, chipper, relentless, oblivious. He greets status bullshit with an undimmed smile and an infuriating unwillingness to back down. Cecelia, though, is more deeply frustrated with the entire dynamic of the community, and prefers to abstain from meetings when she can, refuse to argue even when she’s sure she’s right, express herself only in the occasional, impeccable preprint posted to one of the pneuma science lists. It’s not, for instance, that Ratio loathes Cept any less than Cecelia does—but Ratio can convert his loathing into actual face-to-face arguments with Cept, where Cecelia simply can’t fucking deal with him at all. They both know that a lot of what are thought of as “Ratio’s theories” deserve dual credit at best, and that the pneuma science community drastically underrates Cecelia. But after all, Ratio’s the one who shows up. And Cecelia prefers it that way.

Now Ratio and Cecelia, on hour six of their colloquy, have recognized a number of important things about this latest very large explosion, reinteg_plume.mat. (It has become their latest injoke to always pronounce the name of the dataset in full, “reinteg” running aground awkwardly in the mouth, underscore mercifully left silent, “dot mat” always crisply voiced.) But all these recognitions boil down to one basic fact: reinteg_plume.mat is full of branch loops. Beautiful, undeniable, textbook-diagram-perfect branch loops.

Indeed, reinteg_plume.mat is so vivid it doesn’t just confirm branch-loop theory, R&C’s favorite among their pet alternatives to soul coherence: it confirms a highly specific sub-variant of branch-loop theory. All at once, parameters have fallen into place, the range of alternatives has winnowed, and the last variant standing has passed every test, explained every curlicue of the reinteg_plume.mat data. It’s only been six hours and Ratio and Cecelia are feeling oddly empty: they have essentially solved all of theoretical pneuma science, and there are still many hours left until floornight.

At this point Cecelia asks the question, the obvious question: “so, in this final framework, what’s the best way to produce power?”

Of course it’s the question she would ask. But it’s also the question that needs to be answered. The heteropneums generate their intense fields somehow. R&C have devised many explanations. This theory implies one. Which is it?

The essence of soul coherence theory, explained in non-mathematical terms, is as follows. A pneuma is “composed,” in a nebulous and approximate sense, of various subsidiary parts, which break down into sub-parts and sub-sub-parts and so forth, all the way down to the hard limit reached by the eigensoul decomposition. The exact nature of the breakdown, the way in which a soul breaks down into simpler souls, varies from moment to moment, and the jangling discourse of these ever-rearranging parts constitutes the dynamics of the mind. But every time a branch occurs, it involves a split in one soul and one only, and reintegration sews together that soul and that soul only. That’s why only the soul in question—Maria, say—can remember the ghostly trace of the road not taken.

Most alternatives to soul coherence theory invoke a kind of coupling between distinct souls associated with every branching event. At the core of the Soul Coherence Axioms is a theoretical contrivance which says that, in essence, reality keeps track of which pneuma is a piece of whom: that every sub-sub-Maria, taking a trip along some detour in branch-space, is tagged inexorably as a Maria, always slated to return eventually to the mothership. In alternative theories, there is no such tagging. Marias can, in principle, recombine promiscuously with Ratios or Cecelias or anyone else. (Were it possible, that is, for R or C to branch at all, which given current technology it isn’t—otherwise they’d be splitting with wild abandon for the purpose of theorizing in parallel.)

What’s more, if no one’s soul-parts are tagged, then reintegration can proceed arbitrarily, without regard to who’s reintegrating with whom. The usual procedure for fission power is: split a soul (producing a small amount of power), wait a while (letting the branches drift), then reintegrate the soul (using the accrued distance between the parts to produce more power). But what if all distance between souls could be a potential power source? Branching one soul was just a particularly weak special case of a general principle. Forget the energy we can get from exploiting and bridging the difference between you and slightly-different you—what about the energy we can get from exploiting and bridging the difference between you and me?

And in this newly confirmed theory, this is not only possible, it is a matter of observed fact. That’s what reinteg_plume.mat is: a picture of a whole spectrum of highly different souls recombining again and again, shooting off huge bursts of energy with each new bout of unification. Ratio and Cecelia have discovered the energy source of the heteropneums, and of the future.

And inside Ratio’s head, he hears: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together . . .