Quarantine

‘Don’t you mourn the versions of yourself who persuaded Po-kwai to use Ensemble for you?’

‘No. Why should I?’

‘They must have been close, I think. Lovers, perhaps.’

I’m shaken by the thought, but I say calmly, ‘It means nothing to me. He was never real. She has no memory, I have no memory—’

‘But you can imagine how happy they might have been. What do you call the end of that happiness, if not death?’

I shrug. ‘People die every day. I can’t change that.’

‘But you can. Immortality is possible. Heaven on Earth is possible.’

I laugh. ‘Heaven on Earth? What are you now—a millenarian? You can’t know any more than I do what permanent smearing would be like. But if Heaven on Earth is part of it, it will co-exist with Hell. If no eigenstate is destroyed, then every conceivable kind of suffering—’

He nods, unfazed. ‘Oh yes. And every conceivable kind of happiness. And everything in between. Everything:

‘And the end of choice, the death of free will—’

‘The death of nothing. How can restoring the diversity of the universe be seen as taking something away?’ I shake my head. ‘I honestly don’t care. Just—’

‘So you’d deny everyone else the choice?’ I laugh with disbelief. ‘You’re the lunatic who planned to force your will—’

‘Not at all. Once the planet is smeared, everyone will be linked. The smeared human race can decide for itself whether or not to recollapse.’

‘And you’d call the judgement of this… infant collective consciousness… a fair way to decide the fate of the planet? Even the Bubble Makers had more respect for humanity than that.’

‘Of course they have respect for humanity. They comprise human beings themselves.’

‘Laura comprises—’

No: all of them. What do you think they are? Some exotic lifeform from another planet? Do you think they could have programmed Laura’s genes to keep her from collapsing, to give her the ability to manipulate eigen-states, if they weren’t smeared humans themselves?’

‘But—’

‘The collapse has a finite horizon; there are always eigenstates beyond it. Do you think none of them contain human beings? The Bubble Makers are the residues of ourselves—they’re made up of versions of us so improbable that they’ve escaped the collapse. All I want to do is give us the chance to rejoin them.’

My head is throbbing; I glance down at the flask again. It may be sealed, but I’ll be a lot happier once it’s been consigned to an acid bath or a high-temperature incinerator.

I gesture with the gun. ‘Go and sit in the chair. I’m afraid I’m going to have to tie you up while I find out how to get rid of this shit.’

‘Nick, please, just—’

I say evenly, ‘Listen: if you make trouble, I’m not going to wound you; I can’t risk having you thrashing around the room. If I shoot you, I’ll have to kill you. So go and sit in the chair.’

He makes as if to comply, but then hesitates. I suddenly realize that he’s closer to the table than I thought; not within arm’s reach of the flask, but only a step away.

He says, ‘Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking! There must be states beyond The Bubble full of the most incredible things! Miracles. Dreams.’ His face glows with pure rapture, all traces of the old turmoil and self-disgust abolished. Maybe he’s put an end to the doublethink after all; maybe the part of him who knew that ‘the true Ensemble’ was nothing but a neurological aberration couldn’t bear the contradictions any longer. Maybe the loyalty mod has finally destroyed the old Lui Kiu-chung forever.

I say gently, ‘I’ve had about all the miracles I can stand.’

‘And there must be states where your wife—’

I cut him off. ‘Is that what all this “Heaven on Earth” crap was leading up to? Emotional blackmail?’ I laugh wearily. ‘You really are pathetic. Yes, my wife is dead. But I’ve got news for you: I don’t give a shit.’

He’s visibly shaken—and I’m not surprised; if he really thought he might have swayed me, I’ve just crushed his last hope. But then a kind of resignation, almost tranquillity, seems to take hold of him.

He looks me in the eye and says, ‘No, you don’t.’

He lunges forward, right arm outstretched. I burn a hole in his skull and he topples sideways, crashing to the floor, scarcely bumping the table.

The flask sits undisturbed, the magnet silently spinning.

I walk around the table and squat down beside him. The wound is just above the eyes, a charcoal-rimmed well a centimetre wide, stinking of cooked flesh. My guts are squirming; I’ve never killed anyone before—and never even fired a gun, or been near a corpse, unprimed. And I shouldn’t have had to kill him; I should have taken more care.

Fuck it, none of this was his fault. The Ensemble’s, yes. Laura’s, yes. Laura the aloof visitor, the passive observer. She of all creatures should have known there was no such thing.

/ should have taken more care; moved him right away from the table, at once— And maybe I did.

The thought sets my skin tingling with fear. Maybe I did. Almost certainly I did. So, who will my smeared self choose? Me—or the cousin who was smart enough to do things right?

Who do I want him to choose?

I stare down at Lui’s bloody face. I hardly knew him… but what would I have to give up, to raise him from the dead? Two minutes of my life, that’s all. An eyeblink of amnesia. How many hours, added up over the years, have I lost from memory by now—have vanished as completely as if they’d never happened? And how many versions of me have died while I was primed, so that the one who made the optimal decisions could be real? This will be nothing new; I’ve been dying for the sake of getting things right, all my life.

It’s not my decision to make, but as I invoke Hypernova, I whisper aloud: ‘Choose someone else. Let him live. I don’t care.’

I hit the OFF button—and nothing changes. (Nothing would.)

I walk over to the room’s only chair, slump into it, close my eyes and wait. Karen stands beside me, silent but reassuring.

After fifteen minutes—long enough, surely, for anyone who handled Lui more efficiently than I did to have tied him up and chosen to collapse — I invoke CypherCIerk. I have no idea what to do with a flask of the world’s most infectious protozoans, but Doctor Pangloss is sure to have a few suggestions.

‘Just think about it, that’s all I ask. There must be states beyond The Bubble full of the most incredible things. Miracles. Dreams. There must be states where your wife is still alive.’

For a moment, his words are electrifying, but—‘You don’t know that. You don’t know that the Bubble Makers are human; it’s all just speculation.’ He ignores this, and just repeats, softly, ‘Think about it.’

Unwillingly, I do. Karen, alive. No more mod-generated hallucinations, no more solipsistic travesties. Everything we had, restored—with all its problems, all its failings… but at least it would be real.

I recoil from these emotions, dizzy and confused. How high a price have I paid, in escaping the loyalty mod? A new-found distaste for mods is one thing—but Karen should still be rendering these sentiments physically impossible.

I should shut him up, ignore him. I say, ‘Even if you’re right… what could it possibly mean? It could never be real for me. Eigenstates diverge, they split—they don’t recombine.’

‘No? Once the world stops collapsing, anything is possible.’ He smiles beatifically. ‘The collapse is the source of time asymmetry; you might be able to tunnel back to a time before her death—’