Quarantine

they’ve done a seamless job—an unlikely feat in a day. (Then again, maybe they’ve spent a year on it, and everything that persuades me otherwise is a fabrication.)

I look up as the door opens. The guard who injected me yesterday comes in; he’s armed, but his weapon is holstered, as if he knows what state I’m in. Maybe they’ve dissolved my priming mods. I query P3; it still exists. I stop short of invoking it.

He tosses something at me. I don’t even try to catch it; it lands at my feet. A magnetic key.

‘That’s for the front door,’ he says. I stare at him. He seems almost embarrassed; whatever behavioural mods I’ve seen him with before, I’d say they’re shut down now. He grabs the chair from the corner of the room and puts it beside the bed, then sits facing me.

‘Take it easy, okay. My name’s Huang Qing. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘What?’ I’m beginning to think I know the answer. And I think again about priming—to cushion the blow, to keep myself from going into shock—but then it occurs to me that there’s probably no need.

He says, warily, ‘You’ve been recruited. By the Ensemble.’

‘The Ensemble.’ The phrase dances through my head, pushing buttons and tripping switches. For an instant, all this sparkling new machinery is clearly visible to me: perfectly delineated, separate and comprehensible— although maybe this is just a delusion, a side-effect, a glitch. In any case, a moment later the insight (or mirage) is gone, and I could no more describe the minutiae of what’s been done to me than I could determine, by introspection, which neurons make my bowels move or my heart beat.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’ And it’s true, I am. I feel a kind of abstract horror, and a remote, almost dutiful, outrage—but the sheer relief of finally knowing my fate, and understanding the sense of it, outweighs both.

This is what they meant by leniency. I’m alive. My memory is intact. Nothing has been taken away from me—but something has been added.

I have no idea what the Ensemble is—except that it’s the most important thing in my life.

PART TWO

5

When Huang leaves, I spend a few minutes wandering about the flat, making a mental list of the things I’ll need to buy. The clothes I was wearing when I broke into BDI have been destroyed, but my wallet has been returned to me, intact. Then I recall that I still have clothes in my room at the Renaissance—and that I’m still running up a bill there. I pocket the front-door key and take the stairs down, then I find a street sign and get my bearings. I’m only a few kilometres south of the hotel, so I walk.

I can’t help imagining what I’d be doing right now, if my old priorities still held sway—and the new mod does nothing to censor these speculations. Scenarios run through my head, unbidden; absurd fantasies of ‘subduing’ the mod by some heroic effort of will, long enough to put myself in the hands of a neurotechnician who could set me free. I have no doubt that this is what I ‘would have’ wanted—but I’m equally certain that it’s not what I want, now. The disparity is irritating, but not unfamiliar; my superseded goals nag at me like insistent, but insincere, pangs of conscience.

The humidity is stifling, and the streets are jammed with people; I weave my way through the Saturday- night crowds with a kind of mechanical persistence. I pass right through a youth gang, sixty or more teenagers of both sexes, all with identical sneering faces modelled on the same cult video star, all with the same shimmering, luminescent tattoos, cycling through the same psychedelic patterns in perfect synch. Not looking for trouble, says Deja Vu. Just looking to be seen.

When I reach the hotel, there’s no reason to linger. I quickly pack and check out. I detour past the airport on the way back; I’m not entirely sure why. In part, I’m just curious to know if I’m being tracked or followed, curious to know exactly how much faith BDI now have in me. I think about marching into the passenger terminal and buying a ticket, just to see if anyone stops me, but then that seems like a childish thing to do, and I walk on.

I keep half expecting to start hearing voices or seeing visions, although I know full well that such crude techniques are obsolete. Loyalty mods don’t whisper propaganda in your skull. They don’t bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don’t cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn’t an agent of change; it’s the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh—or rather, flesh made into belief.

What’s more, the neurons involved are ‘hardwired’—rendered physically incapable of further change. The belief is unassailable.

I can’t decide if knowing all this makes my condition more bizarre, or less. The mod takes no action to stop me thinking about its effects; presumably, the advantages of allowing me to understand what’s happened are seen to outweigh any conflict between the sincerity of my feelings and my awareness of their origins. After all, if I had no idea why I felt this way about the Ensemble, I’d probably go insane trying to work it out. No doubt the mod could have been designed to conceal itself, and to take steps to keep me from even wondering what had hit me—but censorship like that can be difficult to make seamless, without whittling the user down to a state approaching idiocy. Instead, I’ve been left with my reason and memory intact (so far as I can tell), free to find my own way to come to terms with the situation.

The Ensemble, Huang explained, is an international alliance of research groups. BDI is a leading member of this alliance. The work they’re doing is ground-breaking—and I’m going to play a small part in ensuring that it continues. I’m still suffering the numbness of mild shock, but as that fades, I begin to realize how excited I am at the prospect. The Ensemble is important to me, and the fact that this is due to nanomachines having rewired part of my brain, rather than more traditional reasons, doesn’t make it any less true.

Sure, fucking with people’s brains against their will is abhorrent—generally speaking—but for the sake of something as vital as the Ensemble’s security, it was entirely justified. And sure, I may have seen BDI as my adversaries, twenty-four hours ago—but that wasn’t exactly the cornerstone of my identity. I’m the same person I’ve always been—with a new career, and new allegiances, that’s all.

I stop off for a meal in a small, crowded food hall, for the sake of the distraction as much as anything else. I find that the longer I refrain from pointlessly dissecting my situation, the better I feel about it. I’m going to work for the Ensemble! What more could I want? And perhaps this is conditioning, after all— the mod rewarding me for taking the right attitude—but I don’t think so. Surely it’s the most natural human response, to grow weary of analysing the reasons for happiness.

It’s just after midnight when I get back to the flat. Karen says, ‘Tell me: are you in love? Or have you got religion?’ I send her away.

Lying in the dark, though, I can’t help trying to think it all through one more time:

Loyalty mods are obscene—but the Ensemble is doing important work, they had to protect themselves, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Why do I think that their work is important, when I don’t even know what it is? Because of the loyalty mod, of course.

Knowing that my feelings have been physically imposed makes them no less powerful. Part of me finds this paradoxical, part of me finds it obvious. I can contemplate this contradiction until it drives me mad—or begins to seem utterly mundane—but there’s nothing I can do to change it.

And I don’t believe I’ll go mad. I’ve lived with P3. I’ve lived with Karen. I’ve never had a mod forced on me, but the principle is the same. Deep down, I must have swallowed the fact, long ago, that my emotions, my desires, my values, are the most anatomical of things. On that level, there are no paradoxes, no