Quarantine

uncontrollable hallucinations.

I close my eyes, calm myself. It’s simple: tomorrow, I’ll go to ASR’s occupational health unit, explain the symptoms and let the experts sort it out. Whatever’s wrong with me, they’ll know how to fix it.

The prospect of having my skull inventoried by strangers is humiliating, but that’s just too bad. I’ll have to explain about Karen… and the loyalty mod? I’ll fudge that, somehow; they don’t have to know all the details. What matters in the end is serving the Ensemble, and I can’t do that if I’m falling apart.

I open my eyes. Karen hasn’t moved.

I say, ‘Well, if you’re going to hang around, what do you want to do? Stand guard with me?’ No.’

‘What, then?’

She reaches down and touches my cheek. I take hold of her other hand—more starkly aware than usual of the mod contriving to restrain me from putting my fingers through her non-existent flesh. I slide my thumb across the back of her hand, pausing on the familiar shape of each knuckle.

‘I do miss you. You know that.’

She doesn’t reply.

There has to be a way to get her back. Maybe I can learn to keep her from blaspheming against the Ensemble; learn to control her more tightly—without entirely destroying the illusion of her autonomy. Or… maybe I can have her modified, constrained—give her a ‘loyalty mod’ of her own. Why didn’t I think of that before? Mods can be adapted. Anything is possible.

I look up and meet her eyes. The calm, untroubled love that she engenders seems to waver slightly, like an image reflected in a mirror-smooth lake, subtly distorted by some hidden current in the depths. A chill of anticipation hits me; I feel no forbidden emotion—no grief, no guilt, no anger. But the mere thought that this mod might fail, too—that everything it rules out, everything from which it shields me, might become possible again—leaves me momentarily light-headed with fear.

I let go of her hand, and she —

She fills the room.

She spreads, smears, replicates, like some holographic paintbox gimmick gone wild. I leap to my feet, knocking over the chair, as the space around me grows thick with ever more copies of her illusory body. I shield my face, but I can still feel her brushing against me on all sides. A droning rises up from all directions, garbled and incoherent, but unmistakably her voice.

I cry out —

— and she vanishes, completely.

In the abrupt silence, memory echoes the last moments of sound—and I realize that my own cry almost masked another voice.

Po-kwai.

I enter the apartment, weapon drawn. Advertising signs in the mock windows’ cityscape—holograms of holograms—light the way. P2 claims it can’t localize the shout—that the data is ambiguous—but I suffer the bizarre conviction that I know it came from the bedroom. Obvious first call, anyway. The door is ajar; I kick it wide open. Po-kwai, standing in a far corner of the room, spins round, startled. I freeze for a moment, trying to read her face, hoping for a signal—a flick of the eyes giving away the intruder’s location—but she merely looks alarmed, and baffled, by my presence. I step into the room.

‘You’re alone?’

She nods, and then manages a nervous, angry laugh. ‘What are you doing? Trying to frighten me to death?’

‘Didn’t you call out?’

She scowls, and seems about to deny this vehemently—but then she catches herself, and looks about the room, as if suddenly unable to account for her surroundings. ‘I think… I must have had a nightmare. Maybe I yelled in my sleep. I don’t know.’ She puts a hand to her mouth. I’m sorry. You must have thought—’

It’s all right.’ I holster the gun; it’s clearly making her uneasy.

‘Nick, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be; there’s no harm done. I’m sorry that I startled you.’ With the pressure off, I have time to observe: I’m primed again, P3 is functioning normally. Which is good news—but as inexplicable as everything else.

She shakes her head, still apologetic. ‘I don’t even remember getting out of bed.’

‘Do you sleepwalk?’

‘Never. Maybe I had such a shock, in the dream, that I leapt out of bed, shouting… but only really woke once I was on my feet. I honestly can’t remember.’

I glance at the bed; it doesn’t look much like she ‘leapt’ out of it. I don’t argue, though; if she sleepwalks, that’s worth knowing, but there’s nothing to be gained by embarrassing her if she doesn’t want to admit it.

‘Yeah. Well—sorry about the intrusion. I’d better let you get some sleep.’ She nods.

Back in the anteroom, I can hear her moving restlessly about the apartment. I sit and wait for P3 to fail, for Karen to appear and go berserk again, but nothing happens. Hoping that the glitch has miraculously vanished is just wishful thinking; the truth is, for all I know it might recur at any time—and I’d rather confront the doctors as a babbling wreck, smothered by the ghost of my dead wife, than have them probe me superficially and offer the same bland reassurances as the mods themselves: no faults detected.

Ten minutes later, Po-kwai emerges. ‘Would you mind—if I sat out here for a while?’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s too late to go back to sleep, it’s too early to eat breakfast; I don’t know what to do with myself.’ She brings out a second chair and sits, bent forward, still visibly agitated. I say, ‘Maybe I should get you a doctor.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Tranquillizers—’

‘Wow! I’m fine. I’m just not used to armed guards bursting into my room waving guns, that’s all.’ I start to apologize, but she silences me. ‘I’m not complaining. I’m glad you’re doing your job. It’s just that I’m—finally—coming to terms with the fact that your job is necessary. They were perfectly frank at the interview, they explained precisely what the security arrangements would be; it’s entirely my fault if I shrugged it off as paranoia.’

‘But what’s changed your mind? Me, overreacting? I’m sorry; I should have handled things more calmly. But you have no reason to feel besieged; the chances are that nobody outside of ASR even knows that the project exists.’

‘Yeah. It’s just… now that I know I’m not the control, now that the thing is actually working… and if I think about how much R&D investment I now… embody…’ She shakes her head. ‘I got into this for the physics—I thought I’d be more of a collaborator, not just a guinea pig. Leung treats me like an idiot. Tse is an idiot. Lui treats me like some kind of fragile minor deity; I don’t know what his problem is. And nothing’s going to be published for years. This ought to be on the front screen of Nature tomorrow: role of the observer in qm confirmed—and modified!’

‘Role of the—?’

‘Observer. In quantum mechanics.’ She looks at me as if I’d said something blatantly disingenuous, and then it dawns on her: ‘They haven’t even told you, have they?’ She makes a noise of disgust and disbelief. ‘Oh, yeah. Nick’s just a bodyguard, just a minor flunkey—why should anyone bother to let him know what he’s risking his life for?’

I shake my head. ‘I’m not risking my life. And if I don’t need to know, maybe it’s better—’

‘Oh, crap! I mean it.’

P3 keeps me calm—but I can observe, dispassionately, a kind of spiritual vertigo building up inside me. I don’t want to hear the Ensemble’s secrets; I don’t want to hear the final, worldly, explanation; I don’t want to pierce the veil.

Primed, though, it’s a remote and insubstantial panic; it doesn’t belong to me. Primed, I’m content with a literal-minded obedience—and I’ve had no instructions to maintain my reverential ignorance. The quasi-mystical