Rui's eyes grew flared with blinding brightness as the red light within their depths grew grave.
The laminar integument's words only confirmed his worst fears.
The universe was conscious.
The structure of the cosmos resembled that of a brain to far too much of an eerie extent. He sensed integrated information that allowed the universe to think despite its scale and the limits of the speed of light and the speed of causality.
One of the greatest discoveries in quantum mechanics was that the universe was not locally real. It suggested that the very nature of reality was fundamentally not as rigid as they might have expected. Phenomena such as quantum teleportation, quantum tunneling, and even wormholes and other spatial phenomena allowed the universe to maintain the interconnectivity that it needed to in order to be conscious.
But just the fact that it was conscious was not in and of itself very explanatory of what the virus obtained from infecting it.
