Quarantine

of your brain—which ends up smeared into countless different versions, representing all the different possible states of everything else: the rest of your brain, the rest of your body, the blade of grass, and anything else you’ve observed. When this part of your brain collapses itself—making one version of itself real—it can’t help collapsing the whole, combined system: the rest of your brain, the rest of your body, the blade of grass, and so on. They all collapse to a single state, in which just one of all the countless billions of possibilities actually “happens”. Then, of course, they all start smearing again…’

I say, ‘All right, I understand: people have to smear, in order to collapse. AH the possibilities have to be there—in a sense—in order for one to be chosen. The collapse is like… drastically pruning a tree—which has to grow out a little, in all directions, before we can choose which branch we leave uncut. But we must collapse so often that we don’t have time to be aware of being smeared, in between. Hundreds of times a second, at least.’

Lui frowns. ‘Why do you say that? How would we be “aware of being smeared”? Consciousness seems like a smooth flow, but that’s just the way the brain organizes perceptions; reality isn’t created continuously, it comes in bursts, in spasms. Experience must be constructed retrospectively; there’s no such thing as the present—it’s only the past that we succeed in making unique. The only question is the time scale. You say that if it was anything more than a few milliseconds, we’d somehow be aware of the process… but that’s simply not true. This is how subjective time arises, how the future turns into the past, for us. We’re in no position to discern how, or when, it happens.

‘Granted, in the experiments with Po-kwai when she didn’t use the collapse- inhibiting part of the mod, she was unable to influence the eigenstates—but that’s no proof of anything. Even if she failed because she collapsed herself-plus-the-ions before she could change the probabilities—and that’s by no means the only explanation—you can’t generalize from one person, in a laboratory, to the whole human race, all of the time. Depending on their state of mind, depending on whether they’re in groups or alone, people might go for seconds, or even minutes, between collapsing. There is no way of knowing.’

I feel like grabbing hold of him and shaking the metaphysical stuffing out; instead I say evenly, ‘I’m asking you to help me. I don’t care howexperience is constructed. I don’t care if time is an illusion. I don’t care if nothing’s real until it’s five minutes old. It all adds up to normality —or it ought to. It used to. And don’t tell me everyone smears a hundred times a day; everyone does not suffer hallucinations, mod failures —’

‘Maybe they do. Maybe they “suffer” precisely the kind of experiences you’ve been through—amongst countless others—but they simply don’t remember them. They can’t; their brains, their bodies, the world around them, contain no evidence that any of it ever took place. The events never become real for them; each time they’re collapsed, their unique past contains something far more probable.’

‘Then why do I remember?’

‘You know why. Because Po-kwai is involved—and she has the eigenstate mod. She can change the probabilities.’

‘But why would she deprime me? Why would she make Karen appear? Why would she want to do any of that? She doesn’t even know that Karen exists!’

Lui shrugs. ‘I say “Po-kwai” is involved, and “Po-kwai” manipulates the probabilities… but what I should say is: “The eigenstate mod is involved.”’

I laugh derisively. ‘So now the mod is autonomous? It has goals of its own? It’s to blame for depriming me?’

‘No, of course not.’ He waits patiently for a young couple, laughing and kissing, to pass us—an absurd precaution; if the Ensemble wanted to know what we were saying, they’d hardly go about it by sending a pair of fake lovers strolling by. I feel a surge of dismay; I’d assumed from the start that the details of the Canon’s security measures were being concealed from me—but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anything to conceal.

Lui continues, ‘If anyone is making a conscious choice, it’s you. Or rather, the combined system of you-and- Po-kwai, to be pedantic—but since she’s predominantly asleep at the time, I’d say you’re the best place to look for motives.’

‘Predominantly asleep?’

‘Yes.’

I stop walking, and say numbly, ‘She has the mod—but I’m using it?’

‘Crudely speaking, yes. When you and Po-kwai smear, you smear into every possible state that either of you could be in—however unlikely. There’s no reason why that shouldn’t include states where you influence the use of the eigenstate mod.’

I can’t seem to summon up the energy to argue against this preposterous assertion; common sense has been rendered indefensible, naive, irrelevant. I finally say, pleadingly, ‘But I don’t want any of the things that happen!’

Lui frowns with mild puzzlement, and then breaks into a rare smile. ‘No, of course you don’t. But apparently, you very easily might. Versions of you who want these things may be unlikely, per se—but once they have access to the eigenstate mod, they can change the whole meaning of what’s likely and unlikely.’

I’m about to reply that yes, that’s exactly it, that’s exactly what I need to put a stop to, when he adds:

‘And if you think what you’ve done so far is astounding, you very easily might do a great deal more—in the service of the true Ensemble.’

The Canon doesn’t seek to compel me; merely to advise. The decision will be mine alone—and I cannot make the wrong choice—but surely the views of others who share the loyalty mod can’t be entirely irrelevant?

The truth is, the very idea of trying to determine the Ensemble’s interests by consensus is absurd. And the truth is, nothing could be more terrifying than the prospect of having to make such a judgement, alone. I swallow the contradiction easily enough. I think I’m beginning to understand what Lui meant by our distinctive kind of freedom. The mental knot the loyalty mod has created can’t ever be untangled—but it can be endlessly deformed.

Over a week, meetings are held between members of the Canon whose free time overlaps, and at each stage, delegates are chosen whose shifts are successively closer to my own. Po-kwai is resting again, after her latest success, and, as before, this brings a respite in the eigenstate mod’s effects on me.

It’s hard to feel conspiratorial at nine in the morning. When I enter the apartment—borrowed for the day, Lui assures me, from someone with no links whatsoever to the Canon or the Ensemble—the scene is so mundane, so innocuous, that I might have wandered in on a residents’ action committee, or some kind of parochial, lower- middle-class political group. The six of us sit in the tiny living room, surrounded by the absent owner’s Buddhist- flavoured domestic kitsch, sipping tea and debating the best way of gaining control of the international alliance which believes we’re its perfect slaves.

Li Siu-wai is a medical imaging technician at BDI. She often worked the night shift when I was there, and we must have exchanged pleasantries dozens of times—but it’s hardly surprising that neither of us ever guessed what we had in common.

Chan Kwok-hung is a physicist with ASR, working on a team similar to Lui’s, but with an experimental set-up involving single-atom spectroscopy in place of the silver ion spin measurements. They’ve yet to achieve success, so they don’t yet know which of their volunteers has the genuine mod. I recall Po-kwai’s joke: she turned out not to have been the control, ‘because’ it would have made her so angry. What worries me is, the way things are going, that’s almost beginning to sound plausible.

Yuen Ting-fu and Yuen Lo-ching are brother and sister, both mathematicians (topologists, to be more precise—although I gather even that is a crude generality), university lecturers who unwisely declined a lucrative offer to work for the sham Ensemble voluntarily.

Lui begins. ‘I already have enough data to construct a mod which suppresses the wave collapse indefinitely. By itself, of course, that’s useless; we need to get our hands on the second half, the eigenstate selector. BDI have the specifications for that—on a ROM locked away in a vault. There’s no prospect whatsoever of a hacker reaching