The Quantum Thief

‘No one else will remember or know what we are going to say here,’ she says. ‘Even I will forget, unless you let me remember.’ She smiles. ‘This is the way things work here. No one has to be a stranger.’

‘It’s like you have a portable confession booth.’

‘Something like that.’

Paul sits down on the ground next to Xuexue, looking up at the robot.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘it is rare to meet a genuinely altruistic person. That is quite admirable.’

Xuexue smiles. ‘You don’t consider yourself to be one?’

‘I took a different turn on the evolutionary highway, quite far back. Somewhere between the dinosaurs and the birds.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she says. ‘Especially here.’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘This is the Oubliette. The place of forgetting. Here, you can meet a Kingdom tyrant or a Revolution leader and never know. Or sit next to someone worse, like me.’ She sighs.

He looks up at her, eyes wide. She peels her gevulot open like an onion and offers him a memory.

Xuexue sold immortality. She went to towns and villages ravaged by earthquakes or mudslides, to fishing villages by dried-up lakes. She looked at children’s brains with the MRI scanner in her phone and talked to their desperate parents about life without flesh. She showed the children videos from Heaven, where gods and goddesses spoke about eternal life as gardeners of code. The children laughed and pointed. In every village, there were a few who wanted to go. She gathered them in automated trucks with the help of company drones and took them to the Iridescent Gateway of Heaven.

The Gateway consisted of hastily erected barracks in the Ordos desert, covered in camouflage cloth. The latrines smelled. The camp beds were dirty.

They did not have a shower for the first two weeks, but Xuexue and the other instructors – most of them faces on the display screens of the teleoperated drone guards – said that it did not matter, that soon they would transcend the needs of the flesh.

The first stage of the transformation took place in the classroom. The children wore itchy skullcaps that told the company machines what they were thinking. Xuexue watched over them through the harsh training: hours and hours of programming, forming code blocks and sequences of symbols in their minds, receiving orgasmic jolts of pleasure through the cap’s transcranial magnetic stimulator for every success and experiencing a little hell for being slow or failing. There was no talking in class, only chorused cries of agony and ecstasy.

Usually, they were ready within six weeks, permanent burns on their shaved, hollow-templed heads, half- closed eyes twitching like in REM sleep. Then she took them to the Celestial Doctor one by one, telling them that they would now get their peach of immortality. No one ever returned from the Doctor’s tent. In the evening Xuexue would set up the superdense datalink to the company satellite, sending up the petabytes harvested from young brains, fresh gogols to spin code in the cloud software farms.

Afterwards, she allowed herself a brief oblivion, achieved with cheap rice wine and drugware, before setting out to the world again.

Ten years of work for the company, and she would have true immortality of her own. A high-fidelity Moravec upload, no break in her consciousness, a slow surgery in which her neurons would be replaced by artificial emulations, one by one: a true transformation into something digital. A Realm of her own design, in the cloud.

It was going to be worth it, she told herself.

She had just arrived with a new group of recruits when the Western micro UAVs came down from the sky in angry buzzing clouds, burning everything. For a moment, it felt right, and she just stood there, watching the Gateway die. Then the black terror of death came, and she did the only thing she could: ran into the Doctor’s tent.

Her second birth inside is lost to her even now, except for a sea of bright red pinpoints, a clamp around her skull, a grinding sound.

Xuexue opens her eyes. The memory pours off her like cold water. Paul stares at her, eyes wide.

‘What happened then?’ he whispers.

‘Nothing, for a long time,’ she says. ‘I was brought here with the King’s billion gogols. I woke up as a Quiet. The Revolution was good for me. We really did something new. We made a place without little immortals.’ She looks at the robot. ‘I suppose I’m still trying to make up for them. It will never be enough, but it’s good to try. One thing at a time.’

‘Maybe it is,’ Paul says. He smiles at her, and there is genuine warmth in his eyes this time. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Xuexue says. ‘I’m here every week. Come by again if you decide to stay.’

‘Thanks,’ Paul says. ‘Maybe I will.’

They sit together and look at the robot. Slowly, her smile returns. She listens to the young man’s breathing. Maybe she will break her record today.

6 THE THIEF AND PAUL SERNINE

‘Time, just a little Time, please, miss—’

‘I am going to be a Quiet for the third time, I have paid my debts, please help—’

‘I am a craftsman, a tailor, you can have my mind for a little Time, it will fetch a good price—’

Mieli is struggling in the crowd of Time beggars. Some are naked like the first one, others look just like everybody else on the Avenue, but they all share a look of hunger and desperation. Some wear masks and hoods. They are pushing at each other to get to her, a tangled ring of heaving bodies tightening around her, and some of her more autonomous defence gogols are waking up. I need to get out of here before I blow my cover.

She pushes one beggar aside, rams another with her shoulder: they go down, in a mess of limbs. She rushes past. One of the beggars on the ground grabs her leg. She falls. One of her elbows makes a painful impact with the pavement. An arm tightens around her throat. A voice hisses in her ear.

‘Give us Time or we’ll see if the Resurrection Men will bring you back, offworld bitch.’

‘Help!’ she shouts. Her vision goes black, and her temples start pounding. Her metacortex wakes up and muffles the pain, slows time down and starts waking the rest of her systems up. It would be so easy to sweep this rabble aside like so many rag dolls—

A wind rises. The pressure around her throat disappears. Someone screams, and running feet echo in the agora. She opens her eyes.

There is a man in black and silver floating in the air, perfectly polished shoes two metres above the ground, holding a cane. A living wind dances around him, a heat ripple, full of the telltale ozone smell of combat utility fog. They should not have that here, she thinks.

Hands made from heat haze hold the masked beggars on the ground – countless nanites, forming invisible structures that are the extensions of the black-clad man’s limbs. Other beggars make a run for it past the boundary of the agora and turn into gevulot blurs, disappearing into the crowd.

‘Are you all right?’ the man says, in a strange rasping voice. He comes down next to Mieli, shoes hitting the marble with a sharp tap. He is wearing a polished metal mask that covers his entire head: Mieli is fairly certain it is a q-dot bubble. He holds out a white-gloved hand. Mieli takes it and allows herself to be helped up.

A tzaddik. Great. The Sobornost database she studied during the journey had scant details on the Oubliette vigilantes. They have been active for two decades or so, and clearly have access to technology from outside Mars. Sobornost vasilevs – infiltrator agents – operating with the local gogol pirates, speculate they have something to do with the zoku colony established on the planet after the Protocol War.

‘I’m fine,’ Mieli says. ‘Just a little shaken.’

My, my, Perhonen says. Who is this? A handsome prince on a white horse?

Shut up and figure out how I avoid blowing my cover.