A crank theory of Enoch Root’s connection to Anathem
(Originally posted on Twitter.)
After the Third Sack, the string-pullers come together and say: something has to change. They know a message went out down-wick. They know the captain of the Daban Urnud got it.
But there are so very many cosmi. The Daban Urnud does not have much control over where it gets shunted to as it climbs upwick. Presumably, it gets shunted to whichever cosmi is “closest” after excluding everything that would violate causality.
It is easy to imagine the Daban Urnud climbing the wick, closer to Arbre “vertically,” while also making “lateral” moves that leave it far away.
If that kept happening, it might completely sidestep Arbre as it climbed upwick. How to prevent this?
What do they need? They need to be all but assured that, when the Daban Urnud gets shunted to the nearest cosmos whose Hylaean Flow light cone does not permit causality violations, that there is one such cosmos much closer in Hemn space, and so much more likely to be shunted to.
You can think of the Daban Urnud as a frog in a stream, jumping from lily pad to lily pad. The frog jumps to lily pads based on what is reachable, and broadly in the direction the frog wishes to go, but the lily pads are distributed randomly on the stream surface.
The Arbrans want to build a lily pad road: a series of lily pads, positioned to make it extremely likely the frog will jump on them in sequence, and then land on Arbre’s lily pad.
What does it mean to move a cosmos through Hemn space like a lily pad on a stream? It means steer it toward some Hemn space coordinate. How? By guiding history, by propagating ideas to its consciousnesses, that bring it closer to the target.
The string-pullers hatch a plan. They identify the candidate cosmi. By hook or by crook, they come to have an agent in the world, who they have some spooky connection to. That agent’s mission is simple: steer the primitive world into position by the time the Daban Urnud is getting shunted around there. It will take centuries.
This would be around 1,000 Arbran years before Anathem opens. Each Advent lasts between 20 and 200 years1, and there were two Advents (including Earth’s) between “50 years after the death of Gödel” and the opening of Anathem.
Squint here, and it seems like Enoch Root shows up on Earth right around the time of the Third Sack on Arbre, around (Earth calendar) 1500 A.D. He gets to work, and the world starts developing incredibly rapidly. Someone like Enoch Root would have been on Fthos, presumably.
This is who Enoch Root was—an agent of the Arbran string-pullers on Earth. It’s hinted at in the names: “Arbre” means “tree,” “Earth” means “earth,” and “root” is part of the tree, but located in earth. What was he doing? Steering our world, getting it compatible, technologically and ideologically: preparing the way for the Daban Urnud.
Epilogue
Just to conclusively wrap this up, though, this was developed before the release of Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which answered most Enoch Root questions. Here’s Stephenson’s own hand refuting it, after I asked him at a book signing for Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.
“But in every cosmos they visit, there is upheaval. The Advent lasts anywhere from twenty to a couple of hundred years. With or without your cooperation, the Daban Urnud will be rebuilt completely.” (part 10, MESSAL, Syntactic Faculties)