Tangle in the Dark - Kassidor

around without some people knowing about it. He lookedover Thom’s results by following his user path to them rightin public space.Today he was looking for the details of the instrumentsthat were detecting the signals he was analyzing. Thom haddesigned the equipment purely at the user level, it was allstandard packages connected to one another. There wereantimatter traps, nondestructive quantum-state sensors,particle sources and a magneto-cancellation chiller, all aimedat a vacuum chamber no bigger than a pea.Whatever the theory was behind this, it wasn't somethingAlan was familiar with. He looked up the control softwareand found it was pretty deeply buried. He finally found it andcouldn’t figure out what it was doing because most of it wasabstract mathematical operations with no documentation. Hesmacked his fingers on the board in frustration. It has littleplastic dots bulging out of the holes. They were solid plasticand didn’t move at all and didn’t feel a thing. He did.He could find no notes connecting Thom's device to anytheory of physics. Either he kept that in his head, or his noteswere well hidden. Without that connection, Alan had no wayto verify any of the data Thom was collecting. We have toknow the truth, are these state changes conductinginformation or just random noise like energy produces? Orwas Thom doing just what he had done, generating a falseuniverse and pretending it is real data? Or was he generatinga false universe and believing it was real data? Without63