Quarantine

neurons, en masse. I’ve swayed him a hundred times before; surely one more miracle isn’t unthinkable—especially when I’m so sure that I’m almost unanimous in wanting it. What versions of me could possibly wish for Lui to succeed?

I wait ten minutes, then step out of the room.

I had some fantasy of slinking unseen through side streets and back alleys, but a fantasy is all it was. Midnight is peak hour for tourists, and everyone who trades with them; the side streets and alleys are packed. I push through the crowds, thinking: Either I’ve been collapsed, long ago—or I’m practically doing Lui’s work for him. If I’m preventing the collapse of everyone who observes me, and everyone who observes them… and that’s true for every version of me as I spread out across the city… then how long before the whole planet is smeared? Supposedly a day or two, for Laura—but I can’t count on the same time frame applying to me. She might have had ways to minimize the effect, techniques to focus her presence. Me, I’ve set out to scour the city; I’m not focused at all.

There’s a busker at the entrance to the underground, wearing old-fashioned force-sensor gloves and playing a virtual violin—very skilfully, too… if she really is causing the sound, and not just miming to it. On the escalators down, I take out the dice generator, throw six decahedrons, and feed the results into my map-dividing program.

Throwing dice to find a madman? Why not consult Lui’s horoscope? Why not consult the fucking Ching!

But I stifle my last vestiges of common sense, press on into the crowded station, and buy a ticket for my random destination.

My target is a drab block of flats in a strip of residential land poking into the warehouse district north of the harbour. I approach with as much hope and caution as I can muster, torn between the clear understanding that the odds that I will be the one to find Lui are still only one in a million… and my irrelevant, but compelling, memories of having survived the collapse—‘despite the odds’—so many times before.

The front entrance is locked, with a video paging system for visitors; the door slides open as I approach. I glance back over my shoulder as I step through into the foyer, shaken by a brief, but vivid, fantasy of the alternative: standing outside, waiting in vain for a miracle that’s never going to come.

Thirty storeys, with twenty flats each. I toss three decahedrons without thinking—and get eight, nine, five; I almost panic, but then I shake my head, laughing. I’m not giving up that easily; I can play this game any way I like. I subtract six hundred and head for the stairs. If there are more of me in some flats than others, that’s hardly the end of the world.

I take the stairs quietly. The building is all but silent; there’s faint music from the third floor, and a child crying on the seventh; the occasional shudder of running water and flushing toilets. The banality of it all is, absurdly, reassuring—as if by some fanciful law of conservation of implausibility, those of me destined to fail might be hearing some freakish proof that their luck has been wasted… like the same incarnation of Angela Renfield’s ‘Paradise’ being played, coincidentally, in every flat.

By the tenth floor, I’ve made up my mind: if Lui’s not in 295, AQ search the whole building from top to bottom. I have nothing to lose. And if he’s nowhere in the building? Then I’ll search the entire street.

I see movement ahead as I step out onto the fourteenth floor, but it’s only a squat cleaning robot gliding along the corridor, vacuuming the ragged carpet and sucking graffiti off the walls.

I hesitate outside Room 295, but only for a moment. I draw my gun and try the door.

It opens.

13

Lui is standing beside a table cluttered with laboratory glassware, watching the liquid in a culture flask being stirred by a spinning magnet. He looks up angrily, then his expression suddenly softens, and—in almost welcoming tones—he says, ‘Nick. I didn’t recognize you.’

‘Step back, and put your hands on your head.’

He complies.

Do I collapse now—to seal my victory, to make it irreversible? Not yet. This is no time to be complacent; I don’t know what further improbable feats might be required.

I take a deep breath. ‘Have you released the Endamoeba?’ He shakes his head innocently. ‘If you’re lying, I’ll—’

What? And how would I know? The neighbourhood hasn’t visibly dissolved into a quadrillion versions—but then, neither have I, visibly.

‘Why not?’

He gives me a slightly bemused look, as if he can’t quite believe that I need to ask. ‘The strain sent to NeoMod was attenuated. I had no way of knowing what tests they might have done on it; I couldn’t risk sending them anything too far out of the ordinary. A place like that may be willing to bend the rules—to make a puppet mod for one gangster to slip into another’s drink—but if they’d found out they were dealing with something that could spread like the plague, they’d hardly have gone ahead and integrated the nanomachines.’ He nods at the flask being stirred. ‘I’m culturing it with a retrovirus that puts a crucial promoter sequence back into the genome. The version they saw was no more spectacular than any of the standard illegals. This is the real thing.’

I have no reason to believe him—but why else would he be messing around with this equipment, instead of wandering the streets, spreading the vector? I glance down at the flask; it looks like it’s thoroughly sealed, which seems bizarre… but then, he wouldn’t have wanted to risk smearing himself while engaged in something so crucial—just as I chose to stay collapsed during the synthesis of Ensemble.

I ask, ‘Who else has copies of the mod?’

‘No one.’

‘Yeah? There’s nobody else in the Canon who you persuaded to see things your way?’

‘No.’ He hesitates, then says matter-of-factly, ‘You were the only one who might have understood.’

I laugh drily. ‘Don’t waste your breath. I’m not part of the Canon any more; I seem to have tunnelled out of that particular asylum.’ And you’ll be following me, soon enough—albeit by more conventional means.

He shakes his head. ‘The loyalty mod has nothing to do with it. You’ve smeared—and collapsed—often enough to understand what there is to be gained.’

‘Gained?’ The truth is, I can’t begin to grasp the magnitude of what’s been averted; perhaps if I’d caught him with something more innocuous—like a medium-sized lump of plutonium — I might have been able to feel an appropriate sense of reprieve.

I say, ‘I do understand: this is your vision of the true Ensemble—and the loyalty mod has everything to do with that. I don’t blame you for being unable to stop yourself — I remember what that doublethink is like—but admit it: you know the whole idea is obscene beyond belief. You’ve known that all along. You’re talking about blasting twelve billion people into some kind of metaphysical nightmare—’

‘I’m talking about the end of twelve billion people dying every microsecond. I’m talking about the end of the death of possibilities.’

‘The collapse isn’t death.’

‘No? Think about those versions of yourself who didn’t find me—’

I laugh, bitterly. ‘You’re the one who taught me not to. But I’ll grant you that: for them—if they experience anything at all—it must seem like impending death. But not for ordinary people. And not for me, not ever again. People make choices; only one eigenstate survives. That’s not a tragedy, that’s who we are, that’s the way it has to be.’

‘You know better than that.’

‘But I don’t.’