Quarantine

‘Smeared?’

‘Uncollapsed; in multiple states. That’s what we call it: smeared.’ She laughs. ‘That will be my claim to fame: the first human being in history to smear at will.’

The opportunity to contradict her, to mention Laura, hangs in the silence, tantalizing for a moment—but the risk of what it could lead to is too great. Which doesn’t mean that I can’t still probe around the edges. ‘At will, yes —but couldn’t someone have suffered neurological damage, and lost their ability to collapse the wave?’

She nods. ‘Good point. That might well have happened. The thing is, nobody would ever know, nobody could ever tell. Every time such a person interacted with someone who did collapse the wave, they’d be reduced to a single history, a single set of memories—and they wouldn’t even know, themselves, that anything was different.’

‘But—while they were alone…?’

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know what it means to ask that. I’ve told you, I end up with just one set of memories myself. The effects prove that I’ve been smeared, but of course someone with brain damage wouldn’t have the mod’s control over the eigenstates—so other people would collapse them according to exactly the same probability distribution that would have applied if they’d collapsed themselves. The end result would be the same.’ She laughs. ‘I expect Niels Bohr would have said that such a person was the same as everyone else. If there’s no way for anyone, the person included, to know what they “experienced” while they were unobserved, how can it be considered real? And I’d half agree with him: I mean, however long they went between contact with other people, each time an observation actually took place, all the states they’d occupied—all the multiple thoughts and actions they’d “experienced”—would collapse into one, perfectly mundane, linear sequence.’

‘What if they were left alone often? Left unobserved, most of the time? Do you think they could learn, somehow, to take advantage of what was happening? Force it to make a real, permanent difference—the way you can, with the mod?’

She seems about to dismiss the idea, but then she hesitates, ponders the question seriously—and suddenly smiles. ‘I wonder. How improbable is the configuration of neurons in the mod? If someone was smeared for long enough, they’d evolve all kinds of weird and unlikely neural structures—along with a whole lot of highly probable ones. Normally, that would have no effect—the most probable configurations would still be the ones chosen when the collapse took place; everything else would vanish. But if one of these unlikely versions of the brain had some ability to meddle with the eigen-states, maybe it could bootstrap itself to a higher probability.’

‘And once a version which could do that had been made “real”—’

‘— then the next time the person smeared, they’d have a double advantage. Not only would they have the eigen-state meddling ability, per se, but they’d be starting from a new baseline—other states with even greater skills would now be far more probable, far easier to reach. The whole thing could snowball.’ She shakes her head, enchanted. ‘Evolution in a single lifetime! Emergent probability with a vengeance! I love it!

‘So it really could happen?’

‘I doubt that very much.’

‘What? You just said—’

She pats my shoulder sympathetically. ‘It’s a beautiful idea. So beautiful I’d say it just about disproves itself. If it really could happen, where are the end results? Where are all the case histories of brain-damaged people juggling eigenstates at will? The first stage must be too hard to reach in any reasonable time. Eventually, I’m sure, someone will get around to calculating just how long it would take to perform the initial bootstrap—but the answer could easily be months, years, decades… it could be longer than a human lifetime. And how long does anyone spend alone?’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Well, I have to defend my place in history, don’t I? Such as it is.’ Karen says, ‘I like her. She’s intelligent, cynical, and only a little naive; the best friend you’ve made in years. And I think she can help you.’

I blink at her, and moan softly. The strange thing is, I don’t feel at all like I’ve suffered a sudden loss of control; rather, my featureless memories of the last three hours in stake-out mode seem to have evaporated, as if they’d never been anything but a delusion.

I say, ‘What do you want?’

She laughs. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want everything to go on as normal.’

‘Normal! First you were a slave to a bunch of kidnappers, and now you’re apparently worshipping the thing that enslaves you. The Ensemble in the head! It’s bullshit.’

I shrug. ‘I have no choice. The loyalty mod isn’t going to vanish. What do you expect me to do? Drive myself insane, trying to fight it? I don’t want to fight it. I know precisely what’s been done to me. I don’t deny that without the mod, I would want to be free of it—but where does that leave me? // I was free, I’d want to be free. And if I was someone else entirely, I’d want completely different things. But I’m not, and I don’t. It’s irrelevant. It’s a dead end.’

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She doesn’t reply; she turns and looks ‘out’ across the city, then raises a hand and—impossibly—signals the window to enhance the hologram’s contrast, cutting back the spill from the advertising signs, darkening the empty sky to the deepest black imaginable.

Karen controlling RedNet? Or has the hallucinatory process which conjures up her body started manipulating the rest of my visual field? I contemplate these equally improbable explanations with equally numb resignation. There’s no point hoping any more that this problem will cure itself. The neurotechnicians are going to have to take me apart.

I stare at the perfect darkness of the Bubble, unwillingly entranced by the sight of it, whatever kind of illusion—contrast-enhanced hologram, or pure mental fabrication—‘the sight of it’ is.

A faint pinprick of light appears in the blackness. Assuming that it’s nothing but a flaw in my vision, I blink and shake my head, but the light stays fixed in the sky. A high, slow-moving satellite, just emerged from the Earth’s shadow? The point grows brighter, and then another appears close by.

I turn to Karen. ‘What are you doing to me?’

‘Sssh.’ She takes my hand. ‘Just watch.’

Stars keep appearing, doubling and redoubling in number like phosphorescent celestial bacteria, until the sky is as richly populated as I remember it from the darkest nights of my childhood. I hunt for familiar constellations, and for a fleeting instant I recognize the saucepan shape of Orion, but it’s soon gone, drowned in the multitude of new stars coming into being around it. My eye finds exotic new patterns—but they’re as transitory as the rhythms in Po-kwai’s random chant, vanishing the moment they’re perceived. The satellite views on Bubble Day, the most baroque space operas of the forties, never had stars like this.

A dazzling tract of light—like an impossibly opulent version of the Milky Way—thickens to the point of solidity, then grows steadily brighter.

I whisper, ‘What are you saying? That the damage we’ve done can be… undone? I don’t understand.’

The band of light explodes, spreading across the sky until the perfect blackness becomes perfect, blinding white. I turn away. Po-kwai cries out. Karen vanishes. I spin back to face the hologram. The sky above the towers of New Hong Kong is empty and grey.

I hesitate at the door to the apartment, just listening for a while. I don’t want to startle her again, but I have no intention of becoming complacent. Nobody could have reached her without passing me… but what kind of state was I in, hallucinating cosmic visions, to know who or what might have walked right by me, unseen? The whole episode already seems completely unreal; if not for a lingering vision of the blazing sky, I’d swear that I had a seamless recollection of standing guard in stake-out mode, from the time I bid Po-kwai good night to the instant I heard her scream.

As I open the door, she’s stepping into the living room, hugging herself. She says drily, ‘Well, you’re not much use. I could have been murdered in my bed by now.’ Despite the joke, she seems far more shaken than last