Quarantine

Lee Hing-cheung, circumspectly, about his own mods. It turns out that he has only Sentinel, MetaDossier and RedNet—and apart from the original problem during the ion experiments, he’s had no trouble with any of them. My determination to uncover the cause of my own mods’ erratic performance fades; I can’t see the point in presenting myself to a doctor or neurotechnician when I have no symptoms—and I’m reluctant to risk disclosing the fact that I have a loyalty mod to people who aren’t meant to know. I promise myself to seek help at the first sign of dysfunction, but as each day passes with no relapse, the hope that the problem has ‘cured’ itself seems less and less unreasonable.

Having feared some ingenious, but ultimately mundane, explanation for Laura’s ‘telekinesis’—having dreaded the burden of one more contradiction, one more disparity between my feelings about the Ensemble and the truth about its activities—Po-kwai’s revelations are more than I could have hoped for. The Ensemble is probing the deepest questions of the nature of reality, the nature of humanity—and, possibly, the reasons for The Bubble as well. It fills me with shame to recall that I seriously entertained the notion that the sole purpose of this grand alliance might have been the grubby exploitation of Laura’s escapological skills. I should have known it was something higher.

But if it had been ‘grubby exploitation’, after all? The Ensemble would have remained the most important thing in my life; the loyalty mod guarantees that. Fearing disillusionment and rejoicing in the affirmation of my faith are equally absurd. I spin this observation in my head, but it leads nowhere.

I find Po-kwai’s staggering contention—that life on Earth might be intrinsically inimical to the rest of the universe—equally intractable. The notion that humanity is, or was, part of a kind of cosmic necrosis, depleting the universe of possibilities, committing inadvertent genocide on a scale beyond comprehension, is easy enough to hold in the mind—to state as an isolated, abstract proposition—but impossible to pursue. My sense of horror rapidly gives way to disbelief; I feel like I’ve been led through one of those bogus mathematical ‘proofs’ which claim to demonstrate that one is equal to zero. I back out of this mental cul-de-sac and hunt for a flaw in the argument. When I come on duty in the late afternoon, Po-kwai breaks off her reading, and we resume the debate.

I say, ‘You’ve admitted, yourself: it’s ludicrously geocentric’

She shrugs. ‘Only if we were the first. Maybe we weren’t; maybe it happened on a thousand other planets, a billion years before it happened on Earth. I don’t expect we’ll ever know. But having pinned down the parts of the human brain which collapse the wave function, what would be geocentric would be assuming that every other sentient creature in the universe does exactly the same thing.’

‘But I’m not convinced that you have pinned it down. You haven’t proved, conclusively, that you’re not still collapsing the wave; you’ve only shown that the mod intervenes before the collapse—whatever causes it. Maybe one of the old theories is right, after all—maybe the wave collapses whenever the system gets large enough, but the mod manages to act on a length scale just below the critical size… it squeezes in its interference trick at the last opportunity.’

‘Then what about the parts of the brain that the mod disables? What’s going on there?’

‘I don’t know. But if they look like they’re “designed” to have some quantum effect, then maybe they’re a crude attempt to do the very thing that the eigenstate part of the mod does—influence the way the wave collapses, rather than just accept the raw probabilities. Maybe evolution has given us all a small capacity to nudge the odds; you can’t deny that that would have some survival value. And if the wave function has always been collapsing at random, whenever the system grew large enough, ever since the universe began… then all we’re guilty of is beginning to evolve some control over the process.’

She’s sympathetic, but unmoved. ‘If I don’t invoke the collapse-inhibition part of the mod—if I don’t disable those natural pathways—the whole effect disappears; the ions revert to randomness. That’s the first thing we tested, the morning after the successful run. Okay, your theory might still be right—the natural pathways could interfere somehow with the mod’s effects on the eigenstates, even if they had nothing to do with collapsing the wave. But if people had some capacity to “nudge the odds”, I think it would have been discovered by now. I don’t doubt that there are other explanations for the ion experiment—but what about The Bubble?’

‘There’s no shortage of other explanations for that—I must have heard at least a thousand in the last thirty years.’

‘And how many did you think made sense?’

‘None, to be honest. But how much sense does this one make? If the Bubble Makers were so vulnerable to our observations, how could they have survived for so long? How far out could telescopes see, before The Bubble? Billions of light years!’

‘Yes, but we don’t know what kind of damage—what degree of observation—they could tolerate. When the universe was totally uncollapsed, maybe there were forms of life which relied on virtually all of that diversity—forms of life in which each individual was spread out across a large part of the entire span of eigenstates, occupying an enormous range of what we’d consider to be mutually exclusive possibilities. The first collapse, for them, would have been like… taking a thin slice out of a human’s body, and throwing all the rest away.’

‘So how have the Bubble Makers survived? By being very thin to start with?’

‘Exactly! They must require a much narrower range of states. Maybe, for them, the effect was more like… a deep ocean being made shallow. We may have observed galaxies billions of light years away—but we haven’t even collapsed the solar system down to the last fragment of meteor dust. Planetary systems of distant stars would still have had a lot of freedom. And maybe an individual Bubble Maker could survive just about anything, short of a face-to-face confrontation with a human being, but increasingly accurate human astronomy was depleting the wave function—“draining the ocean”—to such a degree that constructing The Bubble, to keep us from making things worse, was the only way they could preserve their civilization.’

‘I don’t know.’

She laughs. ‘I don’t know, either. And the whole point of The Bubble is that we never will know. I have other theories, though, if you don’t like that one. Maybe the Bubble Makers are made of cold dark matter—axions, or some other weakly interacting particle which we’ve never been able to detect with much efficiency. If that were the case, we might have done them relatively little harm—but they decided that our technology was getting uncomfortably close to the point where it could start to affect them. There were plenty of astronomers searching for cold dark matter in the twenties and the early thirties—and their equipment was becoming a little more sensitive, and a little more accurate, every year. Maybe we have them to blame.’

The abstractions can be put aside. Pressing my way through the streets, the idea that the crowd around me is collectively keeping the city from dissolving into a fog of simultaneous possibilities seems not so much unbelievable, as patently irrelevant. Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter- intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.

What I can’t put aside is the fact that the Ensemble is doing Bubble science—and it makes no difference whether or not their hypothesis is correct. It’s the idea that counts. The layers of security, the bodyguards for the volunteers, have nothing to do with any fear of commercial competition.

The Ensemble has precisely one enemy: the Children of the Abyss.

Boss wakes me smoothly in response to the knock on the door—leaving me clear-headed, but pissed off nonetheless; it’s just after midday, and I’ve only had two hours’ sleep. I give the HV an infrared command to display the image from the door’s electronic peephole. My visitor is Dr Lui. I dress quickly, baffled. If I was needed back on duty for some reason, surely I would have had a call from Tong or Lee.

I invite him in. He surveys the room with a kind of apologetic bewilderment, as if to say that he’d never imagined that it could have been this humble, but now that he knows, I have his deepest sympathy. I offer him tea; he declines, effusively. We exchange some pleasantries, then there’s an awkward silence. He smiles as if in agony, for a long half-minute, then finally says, ‘My life is for the Ensemble, Nick.’ It sounds half like a passionate affirmation, half like a self-loathing confession.

I nod, and then mumble, ‘So is mine.’ It’s the truth, I shouldn’t be ashamed of it—but Lui’s own signals are