The Quantum Thief

renegade I cooperated with for a while: the legend of the anomaly. The All-Defector. The thing that never cooperates and gets away with it. It found a glitch in the system so that it always appears as you. And if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

‘Oh yes,’ says the All-Defector, and pulls the trigger.

At least it’s not the warmind, I think when the bright thunder comes.

And then things stop making sense.

In the dream, Mieli is eating a peach, on Venus. The flesh is sweet and juicy, slightly bitter. It mingles with Sydan’s taste in a delicious way.

‘You bastard’, she says, breathing heavily.

They are in a q-dot bubble fourteen klicks above the Cleopatra Crater, a little pocket of humanity, sweat and sex on a rough precipice of Maxwell Montes. Sulphuric acid winds roar outside. The amber light of the cloud cover filtering through the adamantine pseudomatter shell makes Sydan’s skin run copper. Her palm fits the contours of Mieli’s mons Veneris exactly, resting just above her still moist sex. Soft wings flutter lazily in her belly.

‘What did I do?’

‘Lots of things. Is that what they taught you in the guberniya?’

Sydan smiles her pixie smile, little crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s kind of been a while for me, actually,’ she says.

‘My ass.’

‘What about it? It’s very nice.’

The fingers of Sydan’s free hand trace the silvery lines of the butterfly tattoo on Mieli’s chest.

‘Don’t do that,’ Mieli says. Suddenly, she feels cold.

Sydan pulls her hand away and touches Mieli’s cheek.

‘What’s wrong?’

All the flesh of the fruit is gone, and only the stone remains. She holds it in her mouth before spitting it out, a rough little thing, surface engraved with memory.

‘You are not really here. You’re not real. Just here to keep me sane, in the Prison.’

‘Is it working?’

Mieli pulls her close, kissing her neck, tasting sweat. ‘Not really. I don’t want to leave.’

‘You were always the strong one,’ Sydan says. She caresses Mieli’s hair. ‘It is almost time.’

Mieli clings onto her, the familiar feel of her body. The jewelled serpent on Sydan’s leg presses hard against her.

Mieli. The pellegrini’s voice in her head is like a cold wind.

‘Just a little while longer—’

Mieli!

The transition is hard and painful, like biting down on the peach-stone, the hard kernel of reality almost cracking her teeth. A prison cell, fake, pale sunlight. A glass wall, and beyond it, two thieves, talking.

The mission. Long months of preparation and execution. Suddenly, she is wide awake, the plan running through her head.

It was a mistake to give you that memory, says the pellegrini in her head. It is almost too late. Now let me out: it is getting cramped in here.

Mieli spits the peach-stone at the glass wall. It shatters like ice.

First, time slows down.

The bullet is an ice-cream headache, burrowing into my skull. I am falling, yet not falling, suspended. The All-Defector is a frozen statue beyond the blue line, still holding his gun.

The glass wall to my right shatters. The shards float around me, glinting in the sun, a galaxy of glass.

The woman from the cell walks up to me briskly. There is a deliberation in her step that makes it look like something she has rehearsed for a long time, like an actor who has received a cue.

She looks at me, up and down. She has short-cropped dark hair, and a scar on her left cheekbone: just a line of black against her deep tan, precise and geometrical. Her eyes are pale green. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ she says. ‘There is something for you to steal.’ She offers me her hand.

The bullet headache intensifies. There are patterns in the glass galaxy around us, almost like a familiar face —

I smile. Of course. It is a dying dream. Some glitch in the system: it’s just taking a while. Broken prison. Toilet doors. Nothing ever changes.

‘No,’ I say.

The dream-woman blinks.

‘I am Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘I steal what I choose, when I choose. And I will leave this place when I choose, not a second before. As a matter of fact, I quite like it here—’ The pain makes the world go white, and I can no longer see. I start laughing.

Somewhere in my dream, someone laughs with me. My Jean, says another voice, so familiar. Oh yes. We’ll take this one.

A hand made from glass brushes my cheek, just as my simulated brain finally decides it is time to die.

Mieli holds the dead thief in her arms: he weighs nothing. The pellegrini is flowing into the Prison from the peach-stone, like a heat ripple. She coalesces into a tall woman in a white dress, diamonds around her neck, hair carefully arranged in auburn waves, young and old at the same time.

That feels better, she says. There is not enough room inside your head. She stretches her arms luxuriously. Now, let’s get you out of here, before my brother’s children notice. I have things to do here.

Mieli feels borrowed strength growing within her, and leaps into the air. They rise up higher and higher, air rushing past, and for a moment she feels like she lived in Grandmother Brihane’s house and had wings again. Soon, the Prison is a grid of tiny squares beneath them. The squares change colour, like pixels, forming infinitely complex patterns of cooperation and defection, like pictures—

Just before Mieli and the thief pass through the sky, the Prison becomes the pellegrini’s smiling face.

Dying is like walking across a

desert, thinking about stealing. The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, watching the robot on the edge of the solar panel fields. The robot looks like a camouflage-coloured crab, a plastic toy: but there are valuable things inside it, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for them. And perhaps, just perhaps Tafalkayt will call him son again if he is like a man of the family—

I never wanted to die in a

prison, a dirty place of concrete and metal and bitter stale smells and beatings. The young man’s split lip aches. He is reading a book about a man who is like a god. A man who can do anything he wants, who steals the secrets of kings and emperors, who laughs at rules, who can change his face, who only has to reach out his hand to take diamonds and women. A man with the name of a flower.

I hate it so much when they catch you.

pull him up from the sand, roughly. The soldier backhands him across his face, and then the others raise their rifles—

not at all as much fun as

stealing from a mind made of diamond. The god of thieves hides inside thinking dust threaded together by quantum entanglements. He tells the diamond mind lies until it believes he is one of its thoughts and lets him in. up—

The people who are many have made worlds that shine and glitter, as if just for him, and he just has to reach out his hand and pick them up

It’s like dying. And getting out is like

a key turning in a lock. The metal bars slide aside. A goddess walks in and tells him he is free.

being born.

The pages of the book turn.

Deep breath. Everything hurts. The scale of things is wrong. I cover my eyes with vast hands. Lightning