Quarantine

to care about anything so trivial as his collapsed selfs religion—I’ll never know. Maybe the smeared Po-kwai intervened. Whatever the reason, it’s happened —

Has it? Lui claimed that I’d been collapsed… and probably believed it… but the only collapse that works is the one that makes itself real. Maybe I’m still smeared, as is Lui, and every one of ASR’s guards, and the whole incident—the bombs being found, Lui coming to warn me, everything up to and including this moment—is part of an eigenstate that will be discarded, part of the extravagant cost of the night’s unlikely success.

Fighting down panic, I invoke Hypernova and hit the OFF button… then realize that doing so proves nothing: billions of versions of me must have done the very same thing—ineffectually—throughout the night. For a moment, the whole question seems intractable: how can I ever know that I’ve become irreversibly real?

The schedule, that’s how. It’s 04:07—and if everything had gone according to plan, I’d be back on duty, and collapsed, by now. I laugh with nervous relief. My failure is an irrevocable part of the unique past—and so is my liberation. And however many versions of me would have remained in the grip of the loyalty mod… I’m alive, and they’re dead.

So I have no reason to stay. The Ensemble, ‘true’ or otherwise, means nothing to me.

As for the dangers of using Ensemble, Lui may be greedy, but he’s not stupid. If he really has known about the risks all along, then no doubt he’ll take great care to keep them under control. I may not like entrusting the fate of the planet to his dubious expertise—but I have no choice. I can’t go to the authorities; ASR will have set me up as the prime suspect for planting the bombs—and they might even believe that themselves. What do I do? Send an anonymous message to the NHK police, claiming that technology which might undermine the nature of reality has fallen into unsafe hands?

The trouble is… even if Lui himself could be trusted to use the mod cautiously, there’s the question of proliferation. What happens when one of his code-breaking clients grows curious about his technique and decides to cut out a few of the intermediaries, or ensure that the competition won’t have access to the same service? With Lui’s quaint ideas of security, it’d take them about a week to find out everything. Ensemble in the hands of gangsters—or, worse, Ensemble in the hands of the intelligence agencies of the PRC, or the USA. And even if they, too, understood the risks and exercised enough restraint to keep the planet from runaway smearing… reality shaped by Beijing, or Washington? Life wouldn’t be worth living.

Karen appears beside me. I hesitate, afraid to speak in case she vanishes—or explodes—but then I find the courage to say, ‘It’s good to see you. I’ve missed you.’

Have I? I hunt for some memory of doing so, but then abandon the search as irrelevant. What matters is, I would have.

She says grimly, ‘You’ve screwed up.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘What can I do? I’m now a suspected terrorist. I have nowhere to stay, no resources—’

‘You have half a million dollars.’

I shake my head. ‘That’s something, but—’

‘And you have ninety-five per cent of Ensemble.’

I laugh bitterly. ‘Ninety-five per cent might as well be nothing. You can’t feed a swarm of nanomachines ninety-five per cent of a mod specification, and just hope that the rest doesn’t matter.’

‘No? What about ninety-five per cent of two mod specifications?’ Two?’

Then it hits me: Ensemble performs two completely independent functions: inhibiting the collapse, and manipulating the eigenstates. There’s no reason for the two parts of the mod, responsible for these two separate functions, to have any overlap, any neurons in common. And if there’s no overlap, either part should be able to stand alone. The only question is…

I invoke CypherClerk and start wading through the data in the buffers. After a few dozen pages of preamble, I find:

START SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL';

I search for the next occurrence of ‘eigenstate control’. Several hundred thousand pages later:

END SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL' (checksum: 4956841039);
/* ********************************************** */
START SECTION: 'COLLAPSE INHIBITION';

Karen says, ‘You have half a million dollars. You have all you need of Ensemble… Hypernova makes up for the rest. And you have more experience of being smeared than anyone else on the planet, short of Laura herself. So much for having no resources.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t trust my smeared self. That was part of Laura’s warning: he’s played along with me so far, but I don’t know what he’ll do if he gains more strength.’

‘Yeah? And who would you rather trust: him—or Lui’s clients, and their smeared selves?’

I realize that I’m shivering. I laugh. ‘I’m afraid. Don’t you understand? I could turn into anyone. I just lost what used to be the most important thing in my life. Gone, dissolved, in an instant. You know what that means. I might lose anything. I might lose you.’

She says bluntly, ‘My specification will still be on file; Axon will have archived it somewhere. If you lose me, you can always get me back.’

‘I know.’ Then I look away; I can’t bear to say it to her face. ‘But I’m afraid that if I lose you, I won’t want you back.’

Many of the small traders start opening for business around dawn, and I manage to buy a batch of cosmetic nanomachines and a change of clothes before the streets begin to grow crowded. I hide in the stall of a public toilet while the nanomachines take effect, breaking down a significant proportion of the melanin in my skin. The change is almost fast enough to perceive, and I stare, transfixed, at my hands and forearms as they fade from the deep black UV-belt norm to an olive complexion, reminiscent of photographs of my grandfather in his twentieth-century youth. An hour later, my kidneys have extracted the metabolites, and I urinate a surreal dark stream. It’s absurd—but pissing away my skin colour is at least as disorienting as anything else that’s happened in the last twelve hours. Whatever’s changed inside my skull, up until now at least I looked the same.

I check my appearance in a mirror, dragging my thoughts back to practicalities. Merely rendered pale, pattern-recognition soft-ware could still match me with ASR’s records, but at least I’m no longer vulnerable to every bystander who might have seen my face splashed about the news systems.

In fact, when I access The NHK Times, there’s no mention of a foiled bombing attempt, by the Children or anyone else. The global news systems are the same. It looks like ASR have kept the whole thing to themselves; perhaps they don’t want the NHK police pondering the mystery of exactly why the Children chose to target them.

This cheers me up a little. I’m hardly out of danger — the Ensemble will have put me on a dozen private hit lists—but it’s still nice to know that I’m not going to end up framed as a member of the Children of the Abyss…

Sitting on a park bench in a patch of—reflected—morning sunlight, plugged into the world via Cypher-Clerk, RedNet, and my SatPhone, I hire an online nanoware expert system to deal with the ragged edges of my partial copy of Ensemble. Just as well; apart from simply discarding the incomplete second section, the preamble needs to be edited to reflect the change from two sections to one. Nanoware is never treated lightly; a neural mod specification with the slightest inconsistency would be rejected outright by the nanomachine synthesizer.

I delete the copyright notices, copy the final specification from the CypherClerk buffers to a memory chip, ready to hand over the counter, and search the directory for the closest manufacturer. There’s a place called Third Hemisphere, barely a kilometre away.

The premises, at the end of a drab blind alley, look like shit, but once inside, I catch sight of the synthesizer—a genuine Axon model, complete with prominent authorized franchise sign. Or a convincing imitation. The woman in charge plugs my specification chip into a costing system. ‘Thirty thousand dollars,’ she says. ‘The nanoware for your mod will be ready in a fortnight.’

According to the expert system, the synthesis should take eight hours at the most. Any further delay is