Quarantine

I’m greatly relieved… but there’s something perverse, something almost insane about this test. If I were collapsed then, yes, the odds against this pattern would be overwhelming… but if I’m smeared, all patterns occur—so I’m decreasing the intrinsic probability of the eigenstate that constitutes success, putting more demands on my smeared self, and creating ever more versions of myself who know that they won’t be chosen.

And proving that I will survive the final collapse? Or at least, someone who arises from me: a ‘descendant’, a ‘son’? No, I’m not even doing that. Every version who used the dice has smeared into versions who witnessed every possible outcome; if a billion versions consulted the dice, then a billion of the subsequent ‘offspring’ will have seen four snake’s eyes.

I have no choice but to take it on faith that I’m the one who’ll end up real. I continue.

I’m linked to the technician now—and keeping him from collapsing Nick-and-Po-kwai-and-(at-least)-two- guards. What about the other people on his shift? My mind baulks, but I keep moving. Even if he ‘hadn’t’ come into the stairwell—whatever that means when we’re not yet collapsed—would the mere fact that he might have done so been enough to correlate our wave functions? I’m linked to Po-kwai, aren’t I—without this version of me having observed her since I smeared.

I leave the stairwell on the ground floor and cross the foyer, staring at the guards staring into thin air. I ‘do all I can’ to notice whether or not I’ve been seen, ‘making it easier’ for my smeared self to choose the correct state.

The front doors slide open, and I step out onto the forecourt—set back from the street, and largely concealed by a cluster of food stalls, all closed at this hour. I can hear people shouting and laughing nearby, and the whir of bicycles in the distance, but mercifully, there’s nobody in sight as I move around the building to the laneway where the robot delivery van is parked. I glance back once, half expecting to find myself being pursued by a guard who snapped out of his trance a moment too soon. That must be happening to someone. But not to me.

There’s plenty of slack in the timetable; it’s only 01:07, and the van’s not due to depart until 01:20. I climb into the back, and sit in the dark. My presence or absence will have no effect on the vehicle’s actions; its route and schedule have been pre-programmed, so nobody observing its passage will be observing me—measuring me ‘in’ or ‘out’. However, they will be collapsing the van itself—keeping it on a single, plausible, ‘classical’ trajectory from here to BDI—and it’s comforting to have that restraint imposed. I’m not sure what difference it makes in the end… but it’s good to know that the vehicle won’t be free to take every possible path across the city. Somehow, the thought of versions of me arriving at the wrong destination entirely seems worse than any other kind of fate.

When the van starts to move, the effects are barely perceptible; the motor is silent, the acceleration gentle. Sitting on the cool metal, smelling the faint odour of plastic from some recent cargo, everything is disconcertingly mundane.

I find myself at a loss to know how to pass the time. I don’t want to dwell on the dangers ahead; there’s nothing to be gained by contemplating the ‘improbability’ of success. I can’t go into stake-out mode, but I distract myself by concentrating on trying to judge the van’s progress—without aid from P5, without even consulting the route marked out on Deja Vu’s street map. The ride is smooth, but taking a corner is unmistakable, and I plot each turn-off on a vaguely imagined map, summoned from memory alone. I notice occasional, faint decelerations as the van avoids other traffic—deviations from the predetermined schedule, yes, but still entirely independent of me. I was wrong: outside the van there’s no dream city, just the same New Hong Kong as always. And inside?

I can’t help myself; I take out the dice generator and run it again. The machine is too smart for its own good; the holograms it creates are always scrupulously consistent with ambient light, and so, in the darkness, the dice are rendered realistically invisible. Another chance to decide not to throw the dice… and risk not being chosen? I use a flashlight to watch the snake’s eyes fall—and whatever the logic, the sight is powerfully reassuring. I shut the thing down after witnessing six tosses—having reduced my eigenstate’s probability by a factor of about two billion.

The van takes frequent, gentle turns as it moves through the clusters of branching streets towards BDI. I lose track of where I am; the pathological layout here is too complex to recall in detail, unaided. When the van finally halts, I wait thirty seconds, to convince myself that it hasn’t merely paused for some unforeseen obstruction. I climb out, and find myself standing almost on the spot where I released Culex, back in January. Memories of the night flood back, with perfect clarity—but the process feels more like voyeurism than nostalgia; I have no right to stare so brazenly into the life of that dead stranger.

It’s three minutes past two. I have fifty-seven minutes. I glance up at the grey sky, at The Bubble weighing down on me, oppressive as a blanket of thunderclouds. From nowhere comes an irritable thought: I should have waited for Lui to pay me. Five hundred thousand dollars. And then decided if my commitment to the true Ensemble really demanded this piece of lunacy.

I could crawl back into the van.

I don’t, though—and any versions of me who did are as good as dead, and they surely know it. How do they feel about that? How do they rationalize that?

I head for the fence.

I climb over as I did before; the prospect of unnecessary miracles on open ground makes me uneasy—and my smeared self, as always, complies with my expectations. Or vice versa.

I have no idea who’s on duty tonight, but I picture Huang Qing and Lee Soh-lung. Preferably playing cards, not bothering to glance at the monitors. I still don’t know at what point I sabotage this kind of observation: in the camera’s sensor chip, the cable, the display—or the retina, or brain, of the watcher. Whatever gets me by unnoticed; all I can choose is the outcome, and who knows what mechanism is most likely?

I enter by the same window, but this time there’s no need to cut; it slides open at my touch. I climb through, and make my way slowly across the lab, hands outstretched, wishing I still had the wireframe map that guided me the last time. I bump into a stool, then a bench, but I don’t send any glassware crashing. Those of me who did might as well slit their wrists on the fragments. I move down the hallway, and into the stairwell. The vault, according to Li Siu-wai, is on the fourth floor, in the back of Chen Ya-ping’s office; in fact, even after all this time, I think I can recall a blue no data region in the Culex map in just that spot.

Half-way up the stairs, doubt hits me like a blow to the chest. Po-kwai is twenty kilometres away. Fast asleep. We’re not ‘linked’, we’re not ‘smeared’, she’s not helping me ‘choose reality’. How could I have ever swallowed all that quantum-mystical voodoo? It’s bullshit. Lui set me up; it’s as simple as that. The Canon is a trick, to test my loyalty. He sabotaged my mods. Planted a rigged dice generator in a stall near my home. Conspired with Po-kwai, and the guards here, and at ASR.

And the padlock? How could he have known that I’d try something as ridiculous as 9999999999, first time?

But if he’s screwed around with my mods, there’s no telling what else he’s done inside my skull. For all I know, Hypernova might grant him absolute control over everything I do, everything I think. He could have made me guess the right combination.

I lean against the wall, trying to decide which is the most insane: believing in this pointless, farcical, massively implausible conspiracy… or seriously thinking that I can open locks by splitting into ten billion people.

I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell. And the true Ensemble? The mystery I’m living for? Is that nothing but another lie? I know it’s nothing but the loyalty mod, the way my brain’s been wired, but —

I search my pockets for something coin-like, something Lui can’t possibly have interfered with. The best I can do is the flashlight’s spare button-shaped power cell; there’s a plus sign engraved on one side and a minus sign on the other. I crouch on the landing, the flashlight beam making a wedge of brightness on the concrete.

‘Five plus signs,’ I whisper. ‘That’s all.’ The odds are one in thirty-two; not much of a miracle to ask for.

Plus. Plus.