Quarantine

It strikes me that there’s one thing which I’m certain that I can’t define away: the true Ensemble must be concerned with the exploration of Laura’s strange talent, by whatever means. A double- walled room in a basement. Po-kwai’s ion experiments. And now… my own bizarre entanglement with the eigenstate mod. And the only way for me to serve the true Ensemble is to participate in that exploration, as fully as I can.

It’s a shock, put so bluntly—but having uttered the truth, I find it impossible to retract. The logic is ineluctable. The fact that the whole idea of smearing still terrifies me only makes the conclusion all the more compelling: if I had nothing to fear, nothing to lose, what kind of loyalty would that be?

I glance around the room, from face to face. I realize, now, that there’s no need at all to force myself to care about these people’s quixotic plans—any more than they care about each other’s. I’ll steal the eigenstate mod’s specifications for them—but I’ll do it for my own reasons.

Chan Kwok-hung concludes, ‘— and so I believe that, on balance, it’s worth the risk. My advice is to go ahead.’

Lui nods at Yuen Lo-ching. Her eyes unglaze, and she embarks upon her own justification for the conclusion that she knows she has to reach. Yuen Ting-fu and Li Siu-wai do the same in turn; I listen carefully, trying to pick up the rules, trying to learn the balancing act. There must be a fiercely personal view of the Ensemble, blatantly contradicting every other view expressed—and it must lead to agreement on the action to be taken.

Only Lui seems at all conciliatory. He simply says, ‘Well, you know my position; there’s no need for me to elaborate. It’s up to you, Nick. It’s your decision.’

I state my reasons carefully. The members of the Canon listen, stony-faced, to the proof that their own visions are unique and uncompromising. I insult no one with the slightest concession—I don’t take issue directly with anyone’s arguments, but I do make it clear that I find all of them irrelevant. The true Ensemble, I proclaim, is the mystery of Laura’s gift; everything else is peripheral.

‘So we can’t pass up this opportunity, whatever the risks. We need the eigenstate mod—not for any tactical advantage in some meaningless power struggle, but because it embodies everything the Ensemble is about. And what better way can there be to obtain it, than by using the very process that lies at the Ensemble’s heart? I’m willing to do whatever I have to, to make this work. With or without your support.’

Lui and I remain after the others have departed. I sit in silence for a while, feeling drained and confused. I still don’t know if I’m convinced that the Canon can actually function, or whether all we’ve achieved is some kind of delusion of consensus. Consensus without compromise—a nice Orwellian oxymoron.

At least I’ve finally decided what the Ensemble in the skull means to me—although I have an uneasy feeling that in a week, or a month, or a year, it might mean something else entirely.

I say, ‘Tell me, honestly: suppose I do pull it off. Suppose I get the data, and you construct the eigenstate mod.’ I wave a hand at the empty chairs. ‘How long do you really think all this can hold together?’

Lui shrugs. ‘Long enough.’

‘Long enough for what?’

‘Long enough for everyone to get what they want.’

I laugh. ‘You may be right. Maybe it can go on this way indefinitely: everyone backing the same moves, for entirely different reasons. All we really need to disagree on is the theory, and the long- term future.’ I shake my head, bemused. ‘And what’s your reason? You’re the one who’s making everything happen, but you never really said why.’

He gives me that mildly puzzled frown. ‘I just told you, didn’t I?’

‘When?’

‘Five seconds ago.’

‘I must have missed it.’

‘All I want,’ he says, ‘is for everyone to be satisfied. It’s as simple as that.’

Three days after the meeting, I take a small detour on my way home from the underground. I drop in at a stall which sells downmarket consumer pharmaceuticals and nano-ware: smart cosmetics, active tattoos, ‘natural’ sex aids (meaning, they act on nerves in the genitals, not the brain), muscle ‘enhancements’ (painless short cuts to dysfunctional hypertrophy), and the kind of neural mods that belong in cereal packets. I don’t know which backstreet manufacturer Lui employed to create his collapse-inhibiting mod, but collecting the finished product from a place like this doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I quote the order number Lui gave me, and the stall owner hands me a small plastic vial.

Before going to bed, I spray the vial’s contents into my right nostril, and a heavily modified version of Endamoeba histolytica—the protozoans responsible for amoebic meningitis, amongst other delights—carry their burden of nanomachines into my brain. I lie awake for a while, thinking about the daunting navigational and constructional feats that the virus-sized robots are expected to perform—and wishing I’d asked Lui just how much experience he’s had with mod design. For all I know, the manufacturers might have used the most reliable, modern hardware available to build and program the things—but even perfectly constructed nano-machines can do perfectly fatal damage, if they’re following a design that turns vital brain centres into neural spaghetti.

Eventually I give up worrying. I’m doing all I can to serve the true Ensemble, and if I can’t find peace in that alone…

I stare up at the ceiling, at a thin strip of morning sunlight breaking in through a crack in the blinds. I choose sleep.

Boss wakes me three hours early, as requested. Well, I’m not dead, paralysed, deaf, dumb or blind. Yet. I run integrity checks on all my other mods, and none have been damaged—but then, that’s the least likely mistake of all. Neurons that are already part of existing mods are tagged with cell-surface proteins which no correctly functioning nanomachine could miss—and are also altered in other ways which would need to be deliberately reversed before they could be stimulated into changing their synaptic connections.

Lui gave me no name to invoke, so I have MindTools (Axon, $249) perform an inventory; it can’t ‘scan’ my whole skull by any means, but it can send a standard ‘announce yourself’ request down the inter-mod neural bus, and list the replies it gets back. Only the loyalty mod remains silent, refusing to name itself, or even to admit its presence.

The collapse-inhibiting mod turns out to be camouflaged, hidden inside a cheap-and-nasty games mod called Hypernova (Virtual Arcade, $99). Hypernova is to von Neumann what, in my childhood, a dedicated games machine was to a personal computer. I flip through its menus and help text. It can be loaded with software from ROMs or on-line libraries, either through an IR mod like RedNet, or the crude, old-fashioned way: modulated visible light.

I might as well make the camouflage plausible; nobody has a games mod with nothing in it. I phone Virtual Arcade’s library. The current best-seller is an historical war game for brain-dead weapons fetishists called Basra 91, boasting authentic missile’s-eye views of the genocide. I pass on that, and download last week’s favourite, Metachess. ‘Every configuration of pieces generates a unique set of rules.’

I play the game for a while (losing badly on novice level), trying to invoke all of the mod’s facilities in turn, but after twenty minutes I still haven’t found the trapdoor into the real thing. I’m beginning to wonder if some elaborate sequence of commands is necessary, when I realize that there’s still one function that I haven’t touched. I go back to the downloading menu and invoke the archaic visible light option. Instead of receiving the expected complaint—that I’m not staring at an appropriate data source—a new menu appears, bearing only two words: OFF and ON. There’s a tick mark beside OFF.

I hesitate, but the fucking thing has to be tested, sooner or later—and if it’s going to malfunction horribly, I’d rather find out about it here and now than in the anteroom of Po-kwai’s apartment.

The distinction between idle visualization and an active command to a mod is hard to describe—but it’s as easily mastered, and forgotten, as the difference between real and imagined actions of the body. Only under stress does it cease to feel like second nature. As I picture the tick mark reappearing beside the word ON, I’m acutely aware of the fact that the mental image I’m manipulating is the menu itself.