Quarantine

loyalty mod—but all have succeeded in convincing themselves that ‘the true Ensemble’ to which they owe allegiance is not the organization which goes under that name.

What, then, is ‘the true Ensemble’?

Every member of the Canon has a different answer.

The one thing they agree on is what it isn’t: the research alliance which calls itself the Ensemble is a counterfeit, a sham.

On my own, without Lui to keep propping up this bizarre way of thinking, I find myself wondering if I really have mastered the mental contortions required to sustain it. The Ensemble is not the true Ensemble— what kind of ridiculous, hair-splitting sophistry is that?

And yet… if I can somehow believe it, that’s enough to make it true. Common sense, everyday logic, simply don’t come into it: I have no rational reason to be loyal to the Ensemble—all I have is the anatomical fact of the loyalty mod. The true Ensemble that the mod refers to is whatever I’m physically capable of believing it to be —

That’s ludicrous, it’s nonsensical…

I pace the flat, trying to stay calm, hunting for a parallel, a metaphor—a model to guide me, however crudely, into some half-sane way of imagining what’s going on in my head. The Ensemble is not the true Ensemble. What is the true Ensemble, then? Whatever I honestly believe it to be.

This is insane. If every member of the Canon is free to interpret their allegiance precisely as they choose, as if it were a matter of private conscience, without regard to the existing authority… that’s anarchy.

And then it finally hits me.

I understand how I can make sense of this, how I can explain it to myself. I stop in mid-step and say out loud, ‘Welcome to the Reformation.’

My induction into the ranks of the Canon is a gradual process; Lui arranges meetings in various locations around the city, with one or two members at a time—some from BDI, some from ASR, some from organizations unnamed. At first, I can’t see what justification there could be for taking such risks; we discuss almost nothing that Lui hasn’t already disclosed to me, and there’d certainly be far safer ways to introduce me to the Canon. Eventually, though, I realize that this personal contact is essential to the cementing of my new loyalties; only by talking face to face with these people can they convince me—and I them—that we really do share the mod.

Of course, the very fact that the members of the Canon should wish to meet, to cooperate, to confer at all, is paradoxical. Consensus should be anathema to us: the true Ensemble is defined within our individual skulls; no one else’s opinion could possibly matter. Having freed ourselves from the lies of the sham Ensemble, why shouldn’t we each follow our own unique, separately perfect, vision?

Because alone, divided, we’d have no hope whatsoever of reforming the sham Ensemble, of rebuilding it as it should be. United, the prospect is daunting—but not quite unimaginable.

My work goes on as if nothing had changed. The temptation to confide in Po-kwai, to explain everything that I’m going through and everything that’s been concealed from her, is almost overpowering at times—but not when I’m actually in her presence, with P3 granting me limitless self-control. Chen’s instructions may no longer compel me to keep silent about Laura and BDI—but the need to protect the Canon now takes priority, and I find myself even more guarded with her than before. She seems puzzled by this at first, but then shrugs it off and withdraws into her reading. Our evening discussions of quantum metaphysics and invisible Bubble Makers come to an end. Primed, this makes no difference to me—but at home each morning, looking back on the featureless hours I’ve spent in the stake-out trance, I feel a strange, hollow ache in my chest, and it keeps me from choosing sleep.

The second phase of the experiment begins. Po-kwai returns to the ion room, her head full of radiolabeled glucose and neurotransmitter precursors, ringed by arrays of high-resolution gamma cameras. Very thoroughly observed—at least by the machinery. The data gathered by the gamma cameras, though, can be processed in a variety of ways, to reveal, or not to reveal, the operations of various parts of her brain—and the choice as to what will be shown to the experimenters (or rather, co-participants) on the control room screen will be made at random, at the last moment, by the computer.

‘It’s a bit like Aspect’s delayed-choice photon experiments of the nineteen eighties,’ she explains. ‘Leung has worked out a kind of souped-up version of Bell’s Inequality, a correlation between certain neurons firing or not firing, which ought to be below a threshold value—if all our assumptions are correct.’

The technicalities are over my head, but I get the gist of it easily enough: my hopeful alternative explanations for the role of the putative wave-collapsing pathways are about to be thoroughly demolished.

Meaning what? I’m going to have to swallow a universe where I’m the heir to an incomprehensible act of genocide? I contemplate this prospect more and more frequently, but it still leads nowhere. I try feeding myself comforting parallels from evolution: I never felt guilty about the dinosaurs, did I? In fact, if Po-kwai is right, then the dinosaurs might not even have existed—in the sense that modern animals exist—until some mammal came along and made the past definite and unique, collapsing all the countless possibilities into a single evolutionary pathway. It all begins to sound reassuringly like one of those fatuous, entirely untestable, metaphysical conjectures: ‘Maybe the universe was created this morning, complete with false memories for everyone, and perfectly faked archaeological, paleontological, geological and cosmological evidence for events spread over the last fifteen billion years…’

The only trouble is, the heart of Po-kwai’s conjecture is testable. And the unpursuable idea spins on in my head, untouched, unanswered.

This time, the ion room is kept soundproof, and if Po-kwai mutters the results to herself as an aid to concentration, we’re spared the ordeal of listening to her. Instead, the central console is the means by which Leung, Lui and Tse will collapse selected parts of her brain. I glance at the displays myself, now and then, but the PET scans, neural maps and histograms, colourful though they are, are too cluttered, and too cryptic to me, to capture my attention, and I have no trouble turning away.

I naively expected instant results, but there are flaws to be sorted out, in the equipment, in the software, in Po-kwai’s now rusty command of the mod. No longer awash in the data, and unable to decipher the displays, I virtually lose interest while I’m on duty, even shutting out the chatter of the scientists. Primed, this is how it should be. Whatever ruling the Canon might eventually make on the worth of these experiments, my present role is perfectly clear: I’m to do the job that the sham Ensemble expects of me, as diligently as if my allegiances were unchanged.

Off duty, deprimed, I find myself wondering: maybe the Canon—just like the Bubble, just like the truths of quantum ontology—makes no difference at all, in the end. Maybe, in practice, the real and the sham Ensembles will never diverge—and the distinction, crucial as it is to the members of the Canon, will remain an abstraction. Neither Lui nor anyone else has yet told me what the Canon would actually change, if it could control the sham Ensemble—and my own knowledge of the issues is still too hazy for me to have any firm opinions. I know I believe that Po-kwai ought to be told about Laura, and told how the mod was designed—but I stop short of doing so, realizing that I’m in no position to predict the consequences.

Maybe the Canon’s only real function is to make our ineffectual heresy seem more tangible to us. Maybe we’ll plot and conspire, to prove that we’re free to plot and conspire—but in the end it will be nothing but a conspiracy of obedience.

As I step out of the bedroom, in the middle of the nightly ritual check of the apartment, Po-kwai says casually, ‘We had a good set of data today. Virtually conclusive. Definitely publishable—if I can use that word under the circumstances. I didn’t tell you in the restaurant… you see, I’m learning to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘For what? Keeping my mouth shut?’

‘For the result.’

She scowls. ‘Don’t be so reasonable, it makes me sick. You didn’t want us to be right. I don’t expect you to slit your wrists, but can’t you at least be a little… sullen?’

‘Not on duty.’

She leans against the doorframe, sighing. ‘Sometimes, I really do wonder which of us is the least human— you on duty, or me when I’m smeared.’