Quarantine

I smear for ten minutes before taking the device from my pocket—my standard precaution against the disconcerting effects of losing the delusion of free will. The LED is still unlit. I stare at it for a while, but nothing happens. I’m puzzled by one thing: the probability of a malfunction causing the light to come on by now can’t be literally zero—so why hasn’t my smeared self seized upon a state in which that happens? Perhaps he’s cautious enough to wait for the states containing a working computer and a right answer to begin to emerge—and, hopefully, drown out the false signal.

I grow bored, then nervous, then bored again; I wish I could use P3. I ought to be able to mimic its effects—by choosing a state in which I ‘happen to’ feel exactly as if I were primed—but my smeared self never seems to bother. I can’t stop half-expecting to be interrupted by a shout from Po-kwai—but, thinking back on the times when I’ve woken her, there’s always been a trigger: a strong emotion, a shock. Staring at a black box, waiting for a light to come on, just doesn’t rate. And tomorrow? If I can manage to stay calm, perhaps I’ll be safe… whatever ‘manage to stay calm’ means, when the mere fact that I might wake Po-kwai, increasing her influence on everything that happens, must be taken into account to determine whether or not I actually do. Trying to trace out a linear chain of cause and effect is futile; the most I can hope for is successful rationalization along the way, and a kind of static consistency in the pattern of events, looking back on them afterwards.

It’s four seventeen when the LED finally glows, a steady, piercing blue. I hesitate before collapsing. The longest odds ever—so, how many versions of me die, this time? But those qualms have been all but ‘bred out’ of me. I still don’t know what to believe, but each time O come through the supposed holocaust unscathed, it grows ever harder to care. I tick the OFF switch —

— and… someone survives. My memories are consistent, my past is unique; what more can I ask for? And if, a second ago, ten-to-the-thirty-something living, breathing human beings really were sitting here, wondering when the LED would finally come on for them… well, the end was quick and painless.

In any case, Po-kwai is right; this is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been. Metaphor or reality, abstract quantum formalism or flesh-and-blood truth, there’s nothing I can do to change it.

I cut through Zeno’s Lethargy and choose sleep, with surprising ease. In the early afternoon, I deliver the computer to — of all places—the junk-nanotech stall where I picked up Hyper nova. (More of Lui’s bizarre notions of security; I swear to myself that, after tonight, I’m going to start sorting out that mess.) The LED is still glowing when I hand the thing over—an encouraging sign. Apparently, the program loops endlessly once it finds the factors, repeatedly confirming the result… so either I’ve caused some permanent corruption which is making the machine consistently lie, or the whole audacious scheme has worked—and an independent check on a second computer will soon settle the issue. Just what our sceptical clients will make of this impossible feat, I don’t know; in their place, I’d suspect I was being set up for a torrent of disinformation. Maybe they’ll decode great slabs of genuine data, and assume that it’s all designed to mislead them. I glance up at a patch of cloudless blue sky, and laugh.

Po-Kwai is on a rest day, but that’s no problem; I’ve used Ensemble successfully under these conditions three times before. The smeared Nick-and-(dreaming)-Po-Kwai clearly has it down to a fine art now, the requisite skills preserved between incarnations in some corner of my skull, or hers, or both.

I sit in the anteroom, primed, but nonetheless infected with a sense of anticipation—enough, at least, to keep me from sinking into a pure stake-out trance. I wonder idly, not for the first time, if in fact I could have ‘stolen’ Ensemble straight from Po-kwai’s skull, by sheer brute choice of eigenstate: selecting the ‘spontaneous’ rearrangement of my own neurons into a perfect copy of the mod. But I don’t see how my smeared self could have discriminated between a successful result and all the alternative, useless, neural rewirings possible; any test of efficacy would have required me to collapse first.

At dinner, Po-kwai seems morose. I ask her what’s wrong.

She shrugs. ‘Nothing new. I’m just sick of being bullied, and patronized, and gagged. That’s all.’

‘What’s Leung done now?’

‘Oh, nobody’s done anything. Nothing’s changed. It just… all seems even more stupid and oppressive than usual, today. I read an article in Physical Review this morning: a whole new treatment of the measurement problem. They add a few more dimensions to space-time; throw in a few nonlinearities, asymmetries and assorted fudge factors; and—miracle of miracles! — the collapse of the wave falls out the other end.’

I know I should have dutifully silenced her half-way through the word ‘measurement’—if only for the sake of appearances—but the hypocrisy would have been too much.

She says, ‘People are wasting valuable time, heading down paths that I know are blind alleys. That makes me a liar by default. I don’t expect Leung to divulge any commercial secrets—like neural maps, or details of the mod—but I don’t see why we can’t at least publish the results of the experiments.’ She makes a sound of pure frustration. ‘I signed the secrecy provisions freely; I have no one to blame but myself. Of course, they wouldn’t have hired me if I hadn’t signed, so in a sense I had no choice—but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it.’

I say blandly, ‘I’m sure ASR will release everything, in good time. How long has it been since your first result? Three months? Newton didn’t publish his work for years.’

‘Newton’s work,’ she says bitterly, ‘wasn’t this important.’

I deprime, smear, wait—the familiar routine. I spend some time trying to calm myself—until I realize that what I’m feeling is more excitement than fear. It’s an unfamiliar emotion; it’s a long time since I confronted anything challenging—let alone dangerous—without using P3 to neutralize the experience. I feel a surge of pure resentment: the zombie boy scout has cheated me out of half my life; stolen it, and then gone through the motions like a sleepwalker, not even truly living it for me… but I quash this maudlin bullshit. The zombie boy scout has saved my life a thousand times—and it was my choice to live that way. I never wanted excitement, I never wanted to be a mindless adrenalin junkie. I’ve been ‘cheated’ out of nothing but an early death.

And what ‘danger’ am I confronting now? I know I can bypass any amount of security hardware. I’ve proved that I can choose eigenstates as improbable as everything that lies ahead. What is there left to fear?

Only change.

I stare ‘out’ the fake window at a cluster of dark towers shrouded in sparks of golden light, and think: the city I have to cross tonight is no place I’ve ever known. In the real New Hong Kong, locked doors do not fall open, guards do not avert their gaze. I’ll be walking out into a dream city, where anything at all can happen.

I laugh softly. Anything at all, yes—but out of that infinite diversity, I’ll choose nothing but the smoothest, simplest burglary in history. Nothing but success, without complications or harm. Or change.

Walking unseen through the thirtieth-floor checkpoint is an easy start; if everything collapses now, all I’ve done is left my post for thirty seconds, to ask a colleague to take my place while I deal with an urgent bowel movement that my mods seem unable to delay. Not correct procedure, but nobody’s going to shoot me for that.

I glance at the guards, a young man and a middle-aged woman; they coyly look away. I wonder: Do they feel manipulated? Or are they rationalizing their actions (convenient beyond belief, for me—but not intrinsically all that bizarre) as easily as ever? If my smeared self chooses a state in which they’re visibly inattentive, but leaves the hidden details of their mental processes to chance, then I expect the odds are that the state also includes an elegant justification. If the brain can pull off that trick, so consistently, for eigenstates chosen purely at random, then surely the bias that I’m introducing—skewing their actions, but blind to their thoughts—shouldn’t spoil the effect.

Between the twelfth and eleventh floors, I hear a door below me fly open. I freeze, think of backtracking— but before I can move, a technician bounds up the stairs right past me, whistling tunelessly.

I slump against the wall. A few seconds later, the door of the thirteenth floor slams shut. Did he see me? He was in a hurry; he would have ignored me, regardless—so could my smeared self tell the states apart? (Why didn’t he keep the man out of the fucking stairwell altogether, until I’d passed?) Have I been collapsed, or not? I take out the dice generator, flick it on. Snake’s eyes. And again. And again. And again.