The Observer Effect. November 6

Today I dreamed of Sergey.

Not the one lying on the slope, but another one — transparent as water, yet dense as stone. He wasn’t lying on the rocks. He was floating in a gray, airless void, like an astronaut whose tether had snapped. He wasn’t dead. He was fading. First, the toxic blue of his jacket vanished, as if washed away by an invisible rain. Then the lacquered cherry of his blood evaporated. Only a black-and-white figure remained, like on a negative. And then the black and white began to mix, turning into a single, faceless gray mass that slowly dissolved into the surrounding grayness.

During the day, I found Alexey. He was sitting on the porch, scratching something into the frozen earth with a stick — some formulas, diagrams, resembling kabbalistic signs. He spoke for a long time, and his speech sounded like the raving of a madman. Or a revelation.

He talked about some Vecherovsky, a friend of his grandfather’s, who was also a physicist. About a theory of his, which they used to discuss at night in a smoke-filled kitchen while their children slept.

“Vecherovsky said that the universe rests upon two pillars,” Alexey began, not looking at me; his gaze was glued to his own drawings. “On the law of non-decreasing entropy, which leads everything to chaos, and on the development of reason, which strives for order. If there were only chaos, everything would fall apart. But if reason prevailed — omnipotent, continuously developing — the structure of the universe would also be disrupted. It would become something else entirely, because such a mind could have only one goal: altering the nature of Nature itself.”

He spoke more quietly than the crunch of frost beneath his stick. He wasn’t explaining — he was illustrating.

“The world has two opposing pulls,” he drew a line, “toward decay and toward order. If you leave only one, everything rots and crumbles. If you give absolute power to the other, everything becomes glassy and motionless, like a display case. The world holds on in the middle, like the pan of a scale: it trembles — and therefore it is alive.”

He circled one of his symbols.

“That is why the essence of ‘Vecherovsky’s Law,’ as my grandfather called it, is the maintenance of equilibrium. Balance. Homeostasis. That is why, he said, there are no and can be no supercivilizations in space. Because a supercivilization is a mind that is already overcoming entropy on a cosmic scale. And that is a threat to the equilibrium. And what is happening to us right now, my grandfather would say,” — for the first time, he raised his eyes to me, and they were absolutely mad and absolutely lucid — “is nothing less than a reaction. The Universe is defending itself. It is… editing us.”

As he spoke, I envisioned two old men in a smoke-filled Soviet kitchen, constructing grandiose, paranoid theories about the Universe because their own lives were too cramped and boring. My grandfather probably would have fit perfectly into their company.

Alexey, after a pause, erased his drawings with his foot.

“But I think they were both wrong,” he said quietly. “Both my grandfather and his Vecherovsky. They thought too highly of mankind. They saw us as a threat, a growing intellect. But we… we are too self-absorbed. We prefer to speak rather than listen. When we ask ‘how are you?’, it’s merely a formality, a prelude to talking about ourselves, our achievements, fears, feelings. We… each of us… is a closed system. We have forgotten how to observe the world; we observe only our own reflection.”

He smiled bitterly.

“And if that’s true, why would the Universe hinder us? Why defend itself against something that poses no threat? We aren’t a virus. We are simply… an unnecessary part of the system. An obsolete program, consuming resources but yielding no output. And we don’t need to be deleted as punishment. We just need to be archived. For being entirely superfluous.”

And I didn’t know what to answer him.

November 7 →
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← Paths
← The River