in the higher-dimensional Network to what occurred in four dimensions. He did that by adding them in as inputs to his pattern-reconstruction machinery so that the four-dimensional objects and events could be correlated with their higher-dimensional representations. However, he found that he was able to do it only if they were reasonably closely related; the farther away they were, the fuzzier the relationships and their associated information densities became and the longer it took to identify them. While he could still make out some of the more distant nodes that were linked to the objects and events in four dimensions, it was difficult to elucidate anything more about their details. Moreover, the farther away the origins of the overlapping signals were, the less well the order of their sequences could be distinguished.
A few days later, Mr. Gregory woke up after a fitful night’s sleep with a revolutionary thought: What if the higher-dimensional Network represented the equivalent of both the information, or the “data,” and the structure, or the “programming,” to generate everything in existence? If so, it would mean that the Network encoded for not just the underlying information of everything that existed but also for the dynamics that governed all of their trajectories as well. That sum total of information would define not only everything in the universe but also the entire universe’s evolution.
To investigate that possibility, Mr. Gregory invented a new information-processing paradigm that he called the Language of Inner Forced Evolution, or LIFE for short. This revolutionary new analytical system was able to parse the interference data from his lens by converting the photonic signals into the equivalent of clusters and sequences that could be interpreted as four-dimensional objects and events. Once he had the system working, he automated it so that its analyses could be performed in nearly real time. Then he could watch the representations of the four-dimensional universe as they evolved in the higher-dimensional Network—just like a dubbed movie.
Nevertheless, despite the efficiency of his machine’s operation, there was an important constraint he had to accept: the information he received through the lens required time to process, so it could never be interpreted instantaneously. That meant that the transient nature of objects and events—as reflected by the Network’s ongoing evolution—always occurred on a faster time scale than he could know about. The consequence was that no matter how much he might improve the processing speed of his device, he would still need to make predictions about where the Network’s states were headed. Nevertheless, the faster his device could analyze the information it received through his lens, the closer its interpretations would get to what was about to happen—both in other places and in the future. That was valuable because predictions were always easier to make—and more accurate—when they were closer rather than longer range.
In the next phase of Mr. Gregory’s experiments, he went beyond the passive observation of information in the higher-dimensional Network. His goal was to try to influence the ways in which the information was channeled and distributed in the system. To do that, he decided to deliver energy back to the nodes to affect what would occur. Early on, Mr. Gregory had discovered that he was able to use his LIFE system to identify triggers for when to buy stocks at low prices and sell them at higher ones. So, to carry out his first interventional experiments with the Network, Mr. Gregory began by focusing on nodes that were linked to the financial markets.
At first, he didn’t have a good idea of how to interact with the nodes behind his lens except to inject photons that would be absorbed by the ones he targeted. Since he didn’t know exactly what would happen as a result of his injections, he needed to create a comprehensive catalog of input-output response profiles by observing the changes that occurred in four dimensions due to his interventions. By using those relationships, he was able to calibrate his LIFE compiler and adjust its interpreter to reflect the higher- to lower-dimensional relationships properly.
Next, he experimented with tens of millions of photon configurations, sequences, and intensities that were representative of the full array of possibilities. He found that the effects of his injections were usually graded but were punctuated by occasional unexpected outcomes due to the presence of chaotic domains that involved particular seminal nodes that he identified as being “central” within the Network. However, as long as his energetic injections were properly placed at locations close to the outputs that he was trying to influence—which included the stock prices he was interested in—he could correlate them with their impacts in four dimensions.
After he had everything working, he returned to what had gotten him started on his investigations in the first place. He discovered that the actual distances between objects and events in the higher-dimensional Network were different from the four-dimensional projections that everyone knew, which meant that what people observed was routinely either foreshortened or elongated. Those transformations together with the overlapping of the signals that were apparent in four dimensions were what allowed the Network’s convoluted topology to be represented in the concise forms that everyone was familiar with—as objects and events as well as the relationships and dynamics that governed their evolution. What he’d discovered was that their appearance was just a wavering footprint of the oscillations from the higher-dimensional space of the Network that impinged on the lower-dimensional boundary of where people existed.
Accordingly, Mr. Gregory concluded that the appearance of nonlocality, which was represented in four dimensions as quantum entanglement, was the result of the overlapping projections of the distribution of information within the higher-dimensional Network. That Network, like a big brother, was wrapped around the four known dimensions and presented itself to humans on the tiny edge that was the only part of it that they could observe. The resulting entanglements—which appeared to people as the connections between things in four dimensions that were otherwise inexplicable—arose because of a higher-dimensional equivalent of a hall of mirrors, where the same image had components dispersed in a holographic type of fashion in a multitude of locations simultaneously.
The overlapping signals that were projected onto four dimensions from the higher-dimensional Network also explained the other puzzling issue of wave-particle duality. Although the different realms of the Network’s activity didn’t appear to be intrinsically interconnected in the representations that everyone could observe in four dimensions, everything about them originated from the same source, which was the higher-dimensional Network. Since consistency of the Network’s internal states was obligatory, all of the objects and events that people recognized in four dimensions had connections to each other at their deepest, most fundamental levels within the Network’s higher-dimensionality, including those that related to the dual wave and particle characteristics of radiation. Consequently, the duality observed in four dimensions was the result of a boundary effect; the compacted information that had originated in the higher-dimensional space of the Network was converted into a form that could be conveyed in a projection onto four dimensions.
What Mr. Gregory had discovered was that the universe he had been taught about in school was the equivalent of only a tiny translucent film that was held together by the much larger dimensionality of the Network. By using his newly invented lens and LIFE analytical system, he was able to explain two of the major inconsistencies in scientific thought that had bothered him the most. He wasn’t sure if his ideas concerning the Network’s higher-dimensional “sheaves” of nodes and connectors were the best way to describe its actual physical composition, but they allowed him to make sense of many of the experimental facts in four dimensions that had previously been an enigma.
Even though the underlying structure of space-time that Mr. Gregory was able to recognize was beautiful, it was also exceedingly complex, which made it extremely difficult to decipher and to comprehend. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that what he’d discovered represented the foundation for everything that existed in the four-dimensional world.
AFTER MR. GREGORY HAD HIS DEVICE WORKING, HE began to conduct
