Quarantine

isn’t important; it’s happened.’

‘What do you mean, too many people?’

‘They found a bomb. About twenty minutes ago.’

‘Oh, shit. The Children. Po-kwai…?’

‘She’s fine. They defused it. Nobody’s been hurt—but the building went on full alert, they swept every corner… you can imagine. They found three other devices. And they found you missing. Maybe you just couldn’t juggle all the possibilities—keeping the bombs undetected and unexploded. I don’t know. But you have to leave the city.’

‘What about you? And the others?’

‘I’m going to stay. The Canon will have to keep a low profile—but they still don’t know we exist. I expect ASR will assume that the Children got to you somehow. A puppet mod…’

‘If the Children had put a puppet mod in my skull, I would have stayed in the fucking building and made sure that the bombs went off.’

He scowls impatiently. Okay. I don’t know what ASR will think. It doesn’t matter. You have to leave. The rest of the Canon aren’t implicated; we can look after ourselves.’ He steps away from the van; it speeds off into the darkness. Then he takes a card from his shirt pocket and hands it to me. ‘Five hundred thousand dollars. Pure, anonymous credit, drawn on an orbiting account. Go to the harbour, not the airport; ASR will find it harder to pull strings there. And with this, I expect you can out-bribe even them.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t go.’

‘Don’t be stupid. If you stay, you’re dead. But with the eigenstate mod, the Canon stands a chance of staying one step ahead. You did get it?’

I nod. ‘Yes. But you can’t use the mod; the risk is too great.’

‘What do you mean?’

I recount my experience in the vault. He listens to the entire revelation with remarkable equanimity; I wonder if he believes a word of it. When I’m finished, he says, ‘We’ll be careful—we’ll only use it for short periods. You’ve smeared for over four hours, without any kind of trouble.’

I stare at him. ‘You’re talking about gambling with…’ I can’t find the right words. The planet? Humanity? Neither would exactly be lost… just embedded in something larger. But that’s not the point.

‘You’ve proved that it’s safe, Nick. An hour or two can do no harm. What do you want to do—bury the data? Undiscover it? You can’t. The sham Ensemble still have their copies—do you want them to keep their ascendancy, after all they’ve done to you? One way or another, every question the mod raises is going to be explored. I thought that was important to you.’

I say, automatically, ‘Of course it is.’

And then realize that I don’t mean it at all. I don’t give a fuck about the mystery of the true Ensemble. Stunned, I wait for the backlash, the denial.

There’s nothing but silence. The loyalty mod is gone; I’ve tunnelled right out of its constraints. I close my eyes expecting my purposeless soul to evaporate and diffuse into the air.

‘Nick?’

I shake my head, open my eyes. ‘Sorry. I was… dizzy for a second; some side-effect of the collapse.’ I take off my gloves and reach into the pocket where the chip reader is, the copy of Ensemble still plugged in. Without removing the device from my pocket, I invoke RedNet and Cypher Clerk, and start copying data into Cypher-Clerk’s buffers.

Lui says, ‘We can’t waste time arguing. Give me the data, and get moving.’

‘I told you, the mod’s too dangerous.’ So why am I copying it before erasing it? Do I really trust myself to use it wisely—to make a modest fortune breaking codes, without imperilling Life As We Know It? The arrogance is breathtaking. But I don’t stop the flow of data.

Lui says quietly, ‘Phone a bank, verify the card. Half a million dollars. That’s what we agreed on.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t care about the money.’ I almost hand the card back, but if I do it with my free left hand, he may wonder what I’m doing with my right hand.

Lui looks away, sad and tortured as ever. I think: Making money from the mod is important to him—and people get nasty if you mess with their religion. I prime, and reach for my gun; left-handed, too late. I feel a targeting beam on my forehead, and freeze; a moment later, two armed women emerge from the alleyway in front of us. Neither are aiming their weapons at my head; a third person, the source of the beam, must still be in the shadows covering them.

Lui says, ‘Put your hands on your head.’

The copy is ninety per cent done. I stall. ‘I didn’t expect this kind of—’

He grabs my arms and jerks them into place. The zombie boy scout observes helpfully: I should have done an erase-with-copy, wiping everything as it was transmitted.

Lui takes my gun, searches me, and quickly finds the reader. As he takes it from my pocket, I broadcast an erase command, but the positioning is bad. CypherClerk gives me an error message from RedNet, then a ‘tutor’ icon appears in my head and starts delivering a lecture on troubleshooting infrared connections. I shut it down.

Lui says, ‘The card is valid. Half a million dollars. I haven’t cheated you. Head for the docks, and you’ll be out of this mess by dawn.’

I say, ‘You don’t believe me, do you? About Laura, the Bubble Makers, any of it?’

He looks me in the eye and says softly, ‘Of course I believe you. I worked out most of it myself, six months ago. Why do you think the sham Ensemble were searching for the pattern of events that led them to Laura? They’d guessed the reason for The Bubble—and they hoped the Bubble Makers might have given us a key: an example of what we had to become, if we wanted to leave the prison they’d built around us.’

He steps aside, and one of his goons approaches. I wait, with a strong sense of dija vu, for a tranquillizing spray, or a hypodermic in the neck.

Instead, the woman draws a nightstick and swings it towards the side of my head.

12

As I come round, PI reports bruising and mild concussion, but nothing requiring treatment. I feel no discomfort; pain is converted into pure information. I stagger to the side of the road, and deprime—but still feel nothing; acting on standing orders, Boss takes over the role of anaesthetist.

I call the PanPacific Bank’s verification service, and plug the card into my SatPhone. It seems to be precisely what Lui claimed it was: half a million dollars of transnational liquid funds; fully cleared, no strings attached. I order a sequence of transactions which sends the money hurtling around the globe a few hundred times—losing a little value with every orbit, but losing any chance of being traced or recalled even faster—and surviving the scrutiny of over a thousand separate financial institutions. It comes to a halt after ten minutes, depleted by five per cent, but indisputably real, and irreversibly mine, now.

Why? He came prepared to take the data from me by force, so why pay me a cent? True, he’ll be able to earn enough from Ensemble to make a mere half-million seem irrelevant—and the payment does make it more likely that I’ll leave him to do that in peace. It’s a bribe, to get me out of the way. He could easily have killed me instead; I should count myself lucky.

And I should take his advice. Head for the docks. Bribe my way out of the country. There’s nothing to keep me here.

Nothing? I think back over the last few hours, trying to pin down the instant of my liberation from the loyalty mod—but I can recall no tortuous struggle to assert my ‘true’ identity, no triumphant feat of mental agility that finally unravelled the knot. But then, nor was there any such battle for my loyalty, the day the mod was imposed. It was always a matter of brain physiology—not logic, not strength of will. Exactly what changed that physiology—whether the minority of versions of me who’d tunnelled through the mod’s constraints somehow swayed my smeared self into choosing one of their number to survive the collapse (namely, me), or whether the crisis at ASR simply left him with so many factors to juggle that he ceased even