The Quantum Thief

‘Ship! I need to talk to Mieli!’ Still nothing.

The cabin is getting hot. I need to move. Outside, Perhonen’s wings are ablaze, like trapped aurora borealis, burning in space around us. The ship has so much acceleration that it actually has gravity now, at least half a g. But the directions are all wrong: below is somewhere towards the rear end of the central chamber. I scramble out of my cabin, grasp the axis handles and start hauling myself towards the pilot’s creche.

There is a blast of heat and a searing light: an entire segment of the cylinder spins out to the void below. The only thing separating me from the vacuum is a soap-bubble wall of q-dots that flashes into being. But it is too late to cut the infection out. Hot sapphire fragments swirl in the air around me: one leaves a painful bloody brushstroke on my forearm, razor-sharp.

It is hot now, and the sawdust stench is everywhere. The blackness in the walls is spreading: the ship is burning, burning into something else. Heart beating in my chest like there was a Notre Dame hunchback making it ring, I climb upwards.

I can see into the pilot’s creche through the sapphire: madly swirling utility fog like heat haze in the air, with Mieli suspended inside, eyes closed. I pound the door with my fist. ‘Let me in!’

I don’t know if her brain has been compromised yet. For all I know, she could already be in the Prison. But if not, I need her to get out of this. I try to get leverage from the pole and kick at the door with my heel. But it’s no use – unless either her or the ship tells the smart sapphire to open.

Sapphire. I remember her expression when I woke up with a hard-on. She is reading this body’s biot feed, but must be filtering it out. Unless there is a threshold—

Oh crap. Not hesitating makes it easier. I grab a long, sharp sapphire shard from the air and push the point through my left palm, between the metacarpal bones, as hard as I can. I almost black out. The shard scrapes the bones as it goes in, tearing tendons and veins. The pain is like shaking hands with Satan, red and black and unrelenting. I smell blood: it is pumping out of the wound, all over me and falling down into the void below, slowly, in large misshapen droplets.

It is the first time I feel real pain since the Prison, and there is something glorious about it. I look at the blue shard sticking out of my hand and start laughing, until the pain gets to be too much and I have to scream.

Someone slaps me, hard.

‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’

Mieli is looking at me in the doorway of the pilot’s creche, eyes wide. Well, at least she felt that. Inert utility foglets swirl around us, grey dust adding to the chaos: it makes me think of falling ash, in a burning city.

‘Trust me,’ I tell her, grinning madly, bleeding. ‘I have a plan.’

‘You have ten seconds.’

‘I can get it out. I can fool it. I know how. I know how it thinks. I was there for a long time.’

‘And why should I trust you?’

I hold up my bleeding hand and pull out the sapphire. There is more blinding pain, and a squelching sound.

‘Because,’ I hiss through gritted teeth, ‘I will rather put this through my eye than go back.’

She holds my eyes for a moment. And then she actually smiles.

‘What do you need?’

‘Root access to this body. I know what it can do. I need computing power, way more than baseline.’

Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘All right. Get that bastard off my ship.’

Then she closes her eyes, and something inside my head goes click.

I am root, and the body is a world-tree, an Yggdrasil. There are diamond machines in its bones, proteomic tech in its cells. And the brain, a true Sobornost raion-scale brain, able to run whole worlds. My own human psyche inside it is less than one page in a library of Babel. A part of me, the smiling part, thinks of escape immediately, using this wonderful machine to launch a part of it into space, to leave my liberators to my jailers. Another part surprises me by saying no.

I move through the dying ship, looking for the nanomissile, no longer a clumsy monkey but gliding smoothly in the air under my own power, like a miniature spaceship. There, my enhanced senses tell me: burrowing into a fabrication module in the other end of the cylinder, a point from which the Prison-matter spreads.

With one thought, I reach out and make a local copy of Perhonen’s spimescape. I tell the ship’s sapphire flesh to open. It becomes a soft wet gel. I push my hand deep into it, reach for the missile and pull it out. It is tiny, not much larger than a cell, but shaped like a black tooth with sharp roots. My body grasps it with q-dot tendrils. I hold it up: such a tiny thing, but with at least one Archon mind inside, looking for things to turn into Prisons.

I put it into my mouth, bite down hard and swallow.

The Archon is happy.

For a moment, there was an imperfection, when it tasted the thief, a sense of dissonance, like there were two Thieves, in one.

But things are strange outside the Mother Prison: out here, the games are not pure. The old ugly physics is not perfect like the game of the Archons, perfect in its simplicity, yet capturing all of mathematics in its undecidability. That’s why its task is to turn this matter into another Prison, to increase the purity of the Universe. This is what their Father the Engineer-of-Souls thought them to love. This is the way the world is made right.

And this is good matter to turn into a Prison. Its mouth waters in anticipation of the taste of the patterns that the iterated Dilemmas will make. Its copyfather discovered a defector pattern that tastes like pecan ice cream: a replicating strategy family like a flyer in a Game of Life. Perhaps it, too, will find something new here, on this little gameboard of its own.

Far far far away, its copybrothers whisper to it through their quptlink, still complaining about the gut- wrenching wrongness of finding out about the escape of the thief, and the other one, the anomaly. It tells them all is made well, that they will join the Mother Prison soon, that it will bring back something new.

It looks down upon the grid of cells where the little thieves and butterflies and Oort women live when it finds them in the sweet matter. And soon the Game will begin again, any moment now.

It will taste like lemon sherbet, the Archon thinks.

‘Magic,’ I tell her. ‘You know how magic tricks work?’

I am back to my human self again. The memory of the extended senses and computational power is fading, but still feels like a phantom ache of a lost limb. And of course, I have an Archon running inside me now, locked inside my bones, in computational deep freeze.

We are sitting in one of the cramped storage modules, spinning on a tether for gravity, while the ship repairs itself. But there is a sparkling river of spaceships all around us, scattered over thousands of cubic kilometres but magnified by Perhonen’s skin: overclocked fast zoku generation ships that dump waste heat madly, every day of a journey like a thousand years for them; whalelike calmships with green and miniature suns inside, Sobornost thoughtwisps everywhere like fireflies.

‘It’s quite simple, really – it’s all about neuroscience. Misdirected attention.’

Mieli ignores me. She is setting up a small table between us. There are Oortian dishes on it: odd purple transparent cubes and squirming synthlife and neatly cut sections of multicolored fruits – expertly fabbed – and two small glasses. Her movements in setting it up are formal and composed, ritual-like. Ignoring me, she produces a bottle from a wall compartment.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

She looks at me, expressionless. ‘We’re celebrating,’ she says.

‘Well, we should.’ I grin at her. ‘Anyway, it took me a long time to discover that: you can still induce inattentional blindness in Sobornost minds, would you believe? Nothing ever changes. So I swapped its sensory inputs, hooked it up to a sim based on Perhonen’s spimescape. It still thinks it’s making a Prison. Very, very slowly.’

‘I see.’ She frowns at the bottle, apparently trying to figure out how to open it. The lack of interest she