all went back to an experience he had as a child. One day, when he was alone in his room, he’d seen something so odd that he couldn’t help but wonder what it was. In the midafternoon, in broad daylight, he saw a region near the corner of his room begin to waver and shimmer, almost like water waves colliding to form ripples rather than any type of air movement. When he got closer to have a better look, he felt a burst of cold air that stopped him from advancing any farther. He was bewildered, and as he watched, the region began to slowly expand and contract in a way that appeared to pulsate. Within it, he could see what he perceived as twinkling “slices,” each containing images that unfolded as separate scenes, much as they would appear in four dimensions. Together they seemed to be like a stack of multidimensional celluloid images that advanced through an expository sequence at varying speeds—some slowly but others more quickly. Within each was a wide splay of colors that blended at their margins into what appeared like a continuum. But before he could do anything more to evaluate them, the shimmering region disappeared. The episode lasted for only a few moments, but the experience was enough to shape the rest of his life.
He told his parents about what he’d seen, but they were convinced he’d simply fallen asleep and had a dream. He knew that what he’d seen was real, but there was no point in his pressing the issue. As an only child, he was dependent on his friends and acquaintances for his social companionship, and he wanted to fit in with them at all costs. It would only make him seem peculiar if he confided his experience in them, and that was exactly what he didn’t want. Accordingly, he decided there would be no good way for him to communicate what he’d seen until he could prove it. And he recognized that the only way for him to do so would be to find incontrovertible evidence to support his account of what had happened.
Even though he was still early in his schooling, he had already begun to learn about science and the scientific method. Based on that, he realized that assembling the proof he needed would be a long process that would require many years of study and investigation. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it; he realized he’d been given a glimpse into the underlying basis of reality that few people had ever been fortunate enough to see. That made him feel that he’d somehow been chosen to do the hard work of proving that there was more to existence than everyone seemed to assume.
For the time being, he went about his ordinary life, making friends, growing up, and learning life’s lessons, until he was finally able to revisit his ideas about what he’d experienced. Although he didn’t mention it to anyone, he went about assembling the compendium of information he needed to prove the existence of what he’d seen, step by step. His goal was to make his understanding of what he’d experienced have a significant practical value so that he could demonstrate to others that it wasn’t a mere illusion or a mirage. What he had seen existed, and it sat in the background of the reality that people thought they knew. Despite that, it had occurred under special conditions that were just right for him to have witnessed it; under more ordinary circumstances, it would remain cloaked from the rest of humanity. Because of that, he recognized that he was one of the privileged few who had been in the right place at just the right time to have the opportunity to view it.
Although he understood the importance of what he’d seen, it would take many years for him to find out exactly what it represented and what it meant. He decided to dedicate his life to the pursuit of that goal, and for that he was willing to forego the many other niceties of life—comfort, marriage, children, and social status. His work became his life, and it continued that way until he was finally able to build his machine, the device that allowed him to both read and influence the Network. As far as he was concerned, its power needed to be in full display for others to develop enough of an interest to believe in what he’d witnessed as well as the insights it had given him. To do that, he needed to show them what it could do in order not to be written off as just another theorist or a quack. And that was what his invention allowed him to do.
It took more than a decade of work for him to develop his machine, and once it was operational, he knew that it was time. He started to use it in ways that would give him visibility to people in the proper strata of society who could be of help to him in disseminating his message, including key financiers, industrialists, and politicians. His strategy for gaining acceptance of his insights and capabilities depended on his being able to garner progressively greater degrees of influence over them, and his plan was beginning to work. One by one, they started to pay attention to what he could do by using the power of the Network, and they were even trying to understand the nature of the underlying reality that stood behind it. Slowly at first and then more quickly, they were beginning to open their minds to the possibilities of what the universe actually was and how it was designed. That was something they’d never done before. But still, they weren’t yet ready to appreciate the full array of implications, including the one that was most important: that those features were intimately tied to its trajectory and, through that, to its purpose.
Even though none of them knew it, everything was progressing exactly according to plan. Their reactions were precisely what he’d expected they’d be, and they were all behaving in ways that would precipitate what he wanted to have happen.
ONCE MR. GREGORY UNDERSTOOD THE WAY THE Network was organized and how it operated, he still needed to develop a way to examine its nodes and their information content. Moreover, he needed to have a means to deliver energy to selected nodes to modify the amount of information they contained to make the Network’s outputs generate the effects he wanted in four dimensions. Given the Network’s vast size, scale, and complexity, this was no easy task.
Fortunately, he knew that everything that happened in the Network needed to conform to the laws of physics. One consequence was that all of its nodes had spontaneous energy emissions that depended on their energy density; the greater it was, the farther the frequency distribution of what the nodes radiated was shifted to the right. By looking across the electromagnetic spectrum for the relative differences in the emissions from the Network’s different regions, Mr. Gregory could monitor it for hot spots that indicated where its energy density was the highest. Once he identified those, the next step was to focus on specific regions of nodes with more resolution to assess what types of functions they were involved in and to learn what they were about to precipitate.
There was a catch, however. Because the Network was arranged in layers that were convoluted and overlapping in a multitude of dimensions, a correction always needed to be made for how close the observed hot spots were to what was of interest—not only in space and in time but also in dimensionality and scale. Mr. Gregory called this a node’s “Network distance” from whatever the specific items of interest were in four dimensions. If the nodes were very distant from where their effects would occur, their influences would be delayed and could undergo significant changes before they actually happened. However, if the nodes were closer, their influences would transit the intervening distance more quickly and with a lesser degree of change. That was when they exerted their most predictable influences in terms of location, timing, and magnitude.
Based on the available technology, Mr. Gregory settled on a variant of an interferometer as the base device from which to design his machine to visualize the Network. The instrument could compare the differences in the frequencies and amplitudes of electromagnetic signals, and he modified it so that it could be coupled to the lens he invented. That allowed him to focus it on the emissions that originated from different regions of the Network to determine which nodes were the “hottest” compared to others in terms of their energy density. Moreover, he provided it with an exceptionally wide-angle aperture that could be adjusted to varying focal lengths and tuned to different scales in multiple dimensions.
In addition to measuring the energy density of the Network’s nodes, the device could also evaluate the nodes’ energy content relative to their capacity, which was a crucial parameter that depended on two things: how much information
