Quarantine

to feel empowered, or manipulated. I’m not doing any of this… and yet, there’s no doubt that it is exactly what I want. From the very first dice trick, my smeared self has done my bidding. Clearly, all my fears of mutiny were unfounded; those early mod failures, those visions of Karen, must have been nothing but an aberration. And that’s hardly surprising: I had no—conscious—idea what I was doing, so no wonder I had no control.

Every lab, every storeroom, is open to me. I wander from room to room at random, heedless of locks and cameras—at first, fighting a growing sense of unreality, but then willingly succumbing to it. I don’t believe for a moment that I’m literally dreaming, but it’s easier to let this dreamlike mood overtake me than to keep up the battle between ingrained common sense and the elaborate, intellectual reasons why all of these bizarre miracles are permitted in the waking world. Lui was right: the challenge—for me—isn’t operating the mod, but finding ways to stay sane while it happens.

And it is a lot like dreaming. Doors open because they should open; I remain undetected because the logic of the dream demands it. And like any dream protagonist, I can’t expect free will, I don’t presume to be in control. In Room 6191 hesitate, and idly wish for the chair beside the main console to levitate, or slide across the floor towards me—but I’m not at all surprised when it does neither. Not because I doubt that it’s possible; just because it wouldn’t be right.

I know, in the manner of dreams, when it’s time to leave the sixth floor and trudge back up the twenty-four flights of stairs. The exertion this requires is scrupulously realistic, and my numbness gradually clears—enough to let me grow anxious again. All those doors, all those locks, all that surveillance hardware… multiplying out the probabilities makes the whole exercise seem dangerously fragile and precarious.

I baulk at the exit to the thirtieth floor, afraid that these doubts might rebound on me-that I might be punished for my lack of faith. I wait for my breathing to grow quieter, knowing how absurd that is, but pandering to my obsolete instincts for the sake of peace of mind.

Finally, I steel myself and open the door—one more casual miracle to prove that all is well, or one more improbability piled upon a tottering edifice—and step through.

The guards contrive not to see me, as efficiently as before (and I think I have problems with free will). I walk through the checkpoint with my eyes straight ahead, and turn the corner without looking back. The moment I’m out of their (potential) sight, I very nearly collapse—desperate to set the night’s events in concrete, to make my impossible luck indisputably, irreversibly real—but as the Hypernova menu pops into my mind’s eye, I recall that I’m still in the field of view of at least two cameras.

As a gesture to normality, I open the door to the anteroom in the ordinary way: with a coded RedNet pulse, a thumbprint and a magnetic key. Then I wonder—too late—if this authorized event is more likely to be logged in the building’s security computer than all the illicit entries that I know went unnoticed. I slam the door behind me, muttering, ‘I’m getting sloppy. I’ve got to take more care.’

Po-kwai laughs. ‘I wouldn’t say that. But I was surprised when I found you weren’t here.’ She frowns. ‘What’s wrong?’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing. I thought I heard an intruder. It was a false alarm, though; there’s nothing to worry about.’

‘An intruder? Where?’

‘Out in the corridor.’

‘But aren’t there cameras? How could anyone…?’

I shrug. ‘Hardware can be undermined. In theory. But forget it, there was nobody there.’

‘You look like you raced this “nobody” to the roof and back.’

I realize I’m visibly sweating, and it’s not from climbing the stairs. I wipe my forehead apologetically. ‘I did check the staircase, a few levels up and down. I must be getting out of condition.’

‘I’m surprised your mods actually allow you to perspire.’

I laugh weakly. ‘It’d be very dangerous not to. Appetite suppression is one thing, but screwing up thermoregulation would be… suicidal.’

She nods, and says nothing. She seems more baffled than suspicious; if she doubts my story, I expect she thinks that I’ve played down the incident, not invented it. I try to think of a way to keep her from innocently asking Lee Hing-cheung about last night’s excitement, but nothing comes to mind. Don’t tell anyone about this, because… what? Because I don’t want to seem like an idiot, chasing phantoms? She knows that the guards at the checkpoint ‘must’ have seen me.

More importantly: how long has she been awake? Since before I walked through the checkpoint, surely; it can’t have taken me more than twenty seconds to get from the stairway to this room. So how did I get past the guards? Has she collapsed herself, collapsed me, broken my link to Ensemble— or are we both still smeared? And if we are… what happens if I shut off the collapse- inhibiting mod now? Is the past I remember already irrevocable? Or if I collapse now, do I risk some other sequence of events—chosen at random, or chosen by Po-kwai’s smeared self-taking its place?

I have to stay smeared until she’s asleep again—or predominantly asleep. I have to be certain that the choice of eigenstate is mine.

I move into the anteroom. All I have to do is stay calm, make small talk, wait for her to grow tired. ‘What woke you?’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ Then she changes her mind and says sheepishly, ‘Another stupid dream.’

‘What about? If you don’t mind me—’

‘Nothing very exciting. Wandering around on the sixth floor. Sneaking from lab to lab, like some kind of burglar—but I didn’t steal anything. I just wanted to prove that I could go wherever I pleased.’ She laughs. ‘No doubt acting out my resentment over the way I’ve been shut out of the scientific side of the work here. I’m afraid my dreams are usually like that—pretty transparent.’

‘So what happened to wake you?’

She frowns. ‘I’m not sure. I was coming up the stairs, and… I don’t know, I was afraid of something. Afraid of being caught out. I was headed back here, and for some reason I was terrified that someone would see me.’ She pauses, then adds, deadpan, ‘Maybe that’s what you heard in the corridor. Me on my way back.’

I know she’s joking, but my skin crawls. Who’s choosing this conversation? My smeared self? Her smeared seip The joint wave function of the two of us?

‘Yeah? So you’ve been quantum-tunnelling through walls again? And floors. Why bother taking the stairs? Why not just move from A to B?’

‘Well, in dreams, who knows? I expect my subconscious lacks the imagination to face the whole truth about quantum physics. And the courage.’

‘Courage?’

She shrugs. ‘Maybe that’s not the right word. Courage? Honesty? I don’t know what’s needed. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the… part of me… that’s lost when I collapse. And it’s stupid, I know—but when I try to accept the fact that there are… women almost exactly like me, who exist for a second or two, experience something that I don’t, and then vanish…’ She shakes her head dismissively, almost angrily. ‘Pretty precious, isn’t it? Worrying about the death of my virtual alternatives. How many lives do I want?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Just one, personally—but I expect those other selves wouldn’t mind one each, as well.’ She shakes her head again, decisively. ‘But it’s crazy thinking that way. It’s like… shedding tears over dead skin. It’s what we are, it’s the way we function. Humans make choices; we “murder” the people we might have been. If the work I’m doing makes that uncomfortably explicit, it still doesn’t change anything; we can’t live any other way. And now that The Bubble protects the rest of the universe, we just have to come to terms with ourselves.’

I recall my own previous scepticism, and say belatedly, ‘Assuming that all of this is true. There may be nothing to come to terms with.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Listen, don’t worry: ASR aren’t about to announce to the world at large that The Bubble’s purpose is to defend the universe against human depletion of alternatives. People went crazy enough about The Bubble itself, sans explanations. The truth is so loaded that I’m not even sure which would be more dangerous: people misunderstanding it, or people getting it right. Human perceptions have decimated the universe. Life consists of constantly slaughtering versions of