David had grown up with Einstein's ghost.
Every physicist did. The icon staring from posters in undergraduate hallways, the wild hair and gentle eyes, the man who had reimagined the universe twice before he was forty. And then the long decline—thirty years at Princeton, chasing a unified field theory that receded like a mirage, dying with pages of equations on his nightstand that led nowhere.
The lesson every physics student absorbed: even Einstein failed. The universe was not unified. The dream of a single framework underlying everything was beautiful and false.
David stood before the whiteboard where Susan had written the equations, and felt that lesson unraveling.
Gμν = (8πG/c⁴)(Tμν + Φμν)
The information-stress tensor. Φμν. The piece Einstein never found, because he was looking for a way to unify forces when the actual unification required a different category entirely. Not a fifth force. Not a geometric trick. Information itself, curving spacetime through its mere existence.
"Run me through it again," Amara said. "Information curves spacetime. What does that actually mean?"
"Einstein showed that mass-energy curves spacetime," David said. "The sun doesn't pull the Earth; it curves the spacetime the Earth moves through. The new part is that mass-energy isn't the only thing with geometric consequences. Organized information—coherence—does too."
"How can patterns curve spacetime?"
