The Quantum Thief

my teeth. ‘This is a huge mistake.’

‘It is not your call to make,’ Mieli says. ‘We have a job to do, and it’s my job to decide what the best way to do it is.’

‘You know,’ I say, ‘for a moment back there I thought you actually had some humanity.’ I try to stop the words but they come out like bullets from a machine gun. ‘But the Sobornost got into you. They have turned you into a robot. That singing – that was just the tune in a music box. A recording. A gogol.’ I clench my hands into fists. ‘I was in the Prison for an eternity. But they never broke me. What did whatever bastard it is you serve do to you?’

I take the half-empty glass that the cryptarch left, with the cigar stub floating in it. ‘Here. This is what it tastes like.’ I take a swig and spit it out to the floor. ‘Like ashes.’

Mieli’s expression does not change. She turns to leave. ‘I have work to do,’ she says. ‘I am going to study the Unruh data. We need insurance in case there is a problem.’

‘There is a problem,’ I say. ‘My glass is empty. I’m going to get drunk.’

‘Enjoy,’ Mieli says coolly. ‘If you try to contact your tzaddik friend, I will know. It will not go well for you.’

Bitch. Everything feels heavy. I am trapped. I curse my old self for the hundredth time, for making such a mess of things when there are perfectly straightforward ways to hide treasure, like burying it in a hole in the ground. Bastard.

Idiot, says a voice in my head. There is always a way out. No prison, except in your mind.

‘Wait,’ I tell Mieli. She looks at me like she looked at me on the ship on the first day after the Prison, full of disgust.

‘Let me talk to him. Her. It,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Let me talk to your employer. I know you are in touch. Let’s settle this. If we are going to do things your way, I want to hear it from the organ-grinder and not the monkey.’

Her eyes flash. ‘You dare to—’

‘Go ahead. Shut me down. Send me back to hell. I don’t care. I’ve been there already. I just want to say my piece. And then I’ll be a good boy.’ I swallow the rest of the foul, ashy liquid. ‘I promise.’

We stare at each other. Her pale green gaze does not flinch. But after a moment, she brushes her scar. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘You asked for it.’

She sits down on the couch and closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is someone else.

It is like she is wearing a mask. She looks older, and composed, not the warrior-like ascetic stillness, but someone who is used to being looked at and in control. And there is a serpent in her smile.

‘Jean, Jean, Jean,’ she says, in a musical voice that is hauntingly familiar. ‘What are we going to do with you, my little flower prince?’

Then she gets up, wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me.

Mieli is a prisoner in her own body. She wants to close her eyes, but can’t; wants to pull away from the thief, but can’t. She can smell the foul liquor in his breath. She can see where this is going to go, and suddenly there is nothing funny about it.

‘Help me,’ she tells Perhonen soundlessly. ‘Get me out of here.’

Poor baby. Here. Suddenly, comforting, cool blackness surrounds her. Whatever subroutine her mind has been demoted to, at least the ship still has access to it.

‘What is she doing?’

Mysterious ways and all that, the ship says. Are you all right?

‘No.’ Bodiless, voiceless, Mieli wants to cry. ‘He was right, I was wrong. But there was no choice, was there?’

No, there wasn’t. What the goddess there says, goes, and that’s the way it is, for now. I’m so sorry.

‘And I broke vows. I need to beg Ilmatar’s forgiveness.’

I’m sure she is understanding, as goddesses go. I’m sure you’ll do better with her than with the other one. Don’t worry. She and the thief deserve each other.

The voice of the ship is soothing and calm. ‘That’s right,’ Mieli says. ‘Besides, don’t we have work to do?’

Indeed.

Suddenly, the blackness around Mieli is no longer empty. She is in a datascape, vast and complex. It whispers to her, explaining itself: two vast trees of nodes and lines, superimposed, representing the two versions of Christian Unruh’s encrypted mind and memory.

Kissing Mieli’s body is like finally kissing that old friend you have always had sexual tension with. Except the kiss is nothing like I imagined: there is a ferocity and strength to it that takes my breath away. And, of course, she is much stronger than I am: I have to turn my head away to come up for air.

‘Who are you?’ I manage, out of breath.

She lets herself fall back onto the couch pillows, laughing like a little girl. Then she spreads her arms along the back and crosses her legs.

‘Your benefactor. Your liberator. Your goddess. Your mother.’ She sees my horrified expression and laughs even louder. ‘I am joking, darling. Although you could call me your spiritual mother. I taught you a lot of things a long time ago.’ She pats the pillow next to her. ‘Now sit down.’

Somewhat gingerly, I obey.

She runs her fingers down my cheek and to my open shirt collar, sending cold waves through me. ‘In fact, we should find out if you still remember them.’ She kisses my neck, hard, nibbling at my skin, and I find it difficult to focus on my rage. I tense.

‘Relax. You like this body, I know you do. And I made sure yours is … receptive.’ She whispers the last words, and her hot breath on my skin turns the anger into something else. ‘When you live a very long time, you become a connoisseur in all things. Especially those you get to sample seldom. Sometime, when this is over, I will show you how to live. These things are so heavy and clumsy: we can do better in the guberniyas. But it’s fun, don’t you think?’ She bites my earlobe, hard, and flinches.

‘Oh, this silly biot feed. Poor Mieli, so paranoid. I am going to turn it off. You are not going to go anywhere, are you?’

‘No,’ I breathe. ‘But we need to talk.’

‘Talk can come after. Don’t you think so too?’

And, God help me, I do.

Bear in mind I don’t understand all of this, Perhonen says. But the mathematics gogols do. This is one of the root nodes of his gevulot tree. To Mieli, the complex data structures look like the incomprehensible visions one has in the alinen. Her viewpoint hovers over an intersection of innumerable lines, connecting in a sphere full of symbols and three-dimensional sections of a brain. The changes took place here, here and here. The objects inside the sphere change colour. Mieli touches the sphere to absorb the information and considers it for a moment.

‘It’s his procedural memory,’ she says. ‘So in a certain situation, it would trigger him to act in a certain way. For example, voting for the Voice.’

Yes. There are other changes too, here and there, but nothing major. Now, the interesting thing is that we can actually trace where the edit came from.

The ship highlights one of the lines connecting to the node they are viewing. There is additional information attached to it as well: complex mathematical formulae. The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root.

‘Except that—’