Quarantine

to this, I know, but… nothing could have made me more confident that whatever happens now, I will come through.’

He nods solemnly. ‘Operating the mod isn’t the challenge. The challenge is learning how to think about it. You have to find a frame of mind which lets you pass through these situations, untroubled. We can’t have you succumbing to metaphysical terror in the middle of your raid on BDI.’

‘No.’ I laugh again, more successfully this time. ‘Mind you, I don’t think I’ll find many locks in BDI with such easy combinations. Ten nines, in real life? Hardly.’

Lui shakes his head. ‘Easy combinations? What does that mean? For you, they’re all easy, now.’

It takes me another week to master locks that ought to need keys. Lui shows me his calculations: the odds against a few quantum-dot transistors in a lock’s microchip spontaneously obliging me with all the right malfunctions are no worse than the odds against one hundred consecutive snake’s eyes. The fact that neither event would normally be expected to occur in the entire history of the universe (if such a time scale can be so glibly invoked, when it’s likely that nothing at all Occurred’—in the human sense—for most of that history) is beside the point. The point is, I’ve convinced myself that it can be done—and the smeared Nick Stavrianos seems to find that helpful.

Security cameras still worry me, though.

‘If I’m observed, I’m collapsed. Collapsed at random, by whoever’s watching the monitor.’

Lui says, ‘Not at random. You still have control of the eigenstate mod. And not collapsed—not if you make the probability small enough. You don’t collapse yourself when you don’t want to, do you? Even though that’s certainly a possible event. Stop thinking of your smeared self as this fragile, defenceless, precarious system which can’t survive a single glance.’

‘But one glance will destroy—’

No. Can, not will. One glance can collapse you, certainly. And dice can fall in all kinds of ways—but they don’t, if you don’t let them. Observation, in itself, doesn’t collapse the wave. You don’t become blind when you smear, do you? The collapse is a distinct process. If someone observes you, the two wave functions interact—they become a single entity. That gives the observer the power to collapse you—but it also gives you the power to manipulate the observer and prevent the collapse.’

‘So we battle for the fate of the wave function? Just when I’ve stopped worrying about struggling against all my own hypothetical selves, I have to face a tug-of-war for reality with someone who’s indisputably as real as I am.’

‘Think of it that way, if you like—but it won’t be much of a competition. Your “opponents” won’t even know what the wave function is, let alone have any capacity to manipulate it.’

‘That hasn’t stopped several billion people from collapsing it, a few thousand times a day.’

‘Collapsing themselves, and inanimate objects, and other—equally ignorant, equally powerless—people. They’ve never faced anything like you.’

‘People have faced Laura Andrews.’

Lui smiles. ‘Exactly. And yet she still managed to break out of the Hilgemann twice, didn’t she? What more proof do you need?’

The first night that I abandon my post, I remain on the level of Po-kwai’s apartment, and confine myself to rooms and corridors that are—plausibly—deserted. I wander through the fields of a dozen cameras and motion detectors; my colleagues in the central security room should, at the very least, demand an immediate explanation, but no coded infrared message blasts down from the ceiling transceivers. Proving what? That I’ve ‘caused’ the cameras and sensors to malfunction discreetly? That I’ve ‘made’ the guards inattentive? Or that I’ve merely kept any sign that I’ve been observed from reaching me—that I’ve fended off the consequences until after the collapse?

I walk past the silent apartments of the other volunteers, wondering—jealously—if any of these people have begun to master Ensemble. Lui thinks not, but he can’t be certain. I can live with my need for Po-kwai’s unconscious intercession, but the thought of anyone else gaining access to the mysteries of the true Ensemble fills me with disgust. Nobody in the world shares the insight that the loyalty mod has granted me; only I have the right to travel this path. I hold this belief side by side with the knowledge that my ultimate aim is to deliver Ensemble to the Canon, but the contradiction seems superficial, an irrelevant abstraction.

I return to the anteroom, collapse—and wait to see if I’ve achieved invisibility, or mere ostrich-like self- deception. Could my smeared self tell the difference between states where I truly went unnoticed and states where I fooled nobody but myself? Which is the least probable: to walk past a camera unseen—or to distort my own memories and perceptions to convince myself that I’ve done so?

I don’t know—but nobody arrives to accuse me of dereliction of duty. The hours pass as uneventfully as ever. Then again, maybe I’m already huddled, catatonic, in a corner of some basement prison cell, and tonight’s apparent success is the product of nothing but my smeared self selection of a version of me with extraordinary hallucinatory skills. How can I rule that out? The fact that it’s ‘unlikely’ no longer means anything at all. If I can succeed against spectacular odds, I can fail in the very same way.

Lee Hing-cheung takes over. I sit in the train home, staring at the other passengers, daring this contrived vision to decay into surreal anarchy. But the carriage remains solid, the people stare back at me coolly, the stations appear through the windows in just the right order, at just the right times. It’s hard to believe that there’s room for so much clockwork in my head.

By the time I’m home, every hint of doubt has evaporated. I’m not hallucinating anything—or at least, no more than usual. As I lie in bed listening to the familiar street sounds, the mundanity of the world enfolds me, more comforting—and more strange—than ever before. I stare up at the ceiling, and every crack in the plaster, every patch of sunlight, seems patient beyond comprehension, a miracle of endurance defying belief. I could keep watch for a billion years, waiting for some sign of the underlying truth to reveal itself, and still be spared. How can I call this feat an illusion, a lie?

The light dims, and there’s a sudden burst of rain against the window. And for a moment I wonder: which did we really create? The unique, solid, macroscopic world of experience? Or the multi-valued, smeared, quantum world that seems to underpin it? Po-kwai believes that our ancestors collapsed the universe… but if the reverse were true—if the twentieth-century creators of quantum mechanics didn’t so much discover the laws of the microscopic world, as bring them into being—would we even know the difference? Is it any harder to believe that the human brain might have manufactured the quantum world from the classical, than it is to believe the opposite? And with all our—inescapably—anthropocen- tric experiments, can we ever hope to discover the objective, inhuman truth?

Maybe not. But I still know which trait seems most human to me.

A crowd of children on their way to school, caught in the rain on the street below, start squealing. I choose sleep.

I arm myself with a dozen excuses before setting out to challenge ASR’s security by leaving the thirtieth floor. There’s no need for explanations, though; the two guards at the security station avert their eyes as I pass, a perfectly choreographed moment that leaves me wanting to laugh with delight—or sink gibbering to the floor at this final proof of my complete derangement. Instead, I close my eyes for a moment and tell myself, unconvincingly, that it’s no stranger than one hundred consecutive snake’s eyes.

I decide to take the stairs rather than the elevator; both are monitored, but it strikes me that the elevator might ‘link’ me with anyone whose passage through the building is affected in some way by my use of it.

I decide to take the stairs? Maybe I have no choice in the matter; maybe every last detail of my thoughts and actions has been, or will be, selected by my smeared self. But the illusion of free will remains as compelling as ever, and I can’t (literally can’t?) help thinking that the choice was mine.

I descend to the sixth floor, which is meant to be completely sealed off at this hour—but the door from the stairway behaves precisely as if it were unlocked. The security station is unmanned, and heavy steel shutters block the way; they begin to glide apart before I even glance at the control box—which ought to require two magnetic keys, and central authorization.

I step through, giddy for a moment with a mixture of megalomania and paranoia; I really don’t know whether