Quarantine

I shake my head. ‘No. Versions of me might—while others wouldn’t. That’s… chaos, insanity. I couldn’t live that way: creating billions of copies of myself, just so that some tiny fraction of them could get what I wanted.’

Couldn’t I? I’ve done just that, tonight.

He hesitates, then says, ‘And you honestly don’t want a chance for someone—someone you’ll become—to go back to the night she died? To make things turn out differently?’

I open my mouth to deny it. Instead, I hear myself make a strange animal sound, a wail of pain escaping from subterranean depths.

He lunges forward. Startled, I take aim—too late. He has the flask by the neck, high above the table—if I shoot him, he’ll drop it for sure.

In one smooth motion, he flings it at the window. The pane is open; the insect screen tears.

I stand frozen for a second, pointing the gun at him, half prepared to blast a hole in him out of sheer anger at my own stupidity, then I rush to the window and look down. I set the laser to spotlight strength, and see shards of glass, a hint of dampness. I vaporize the puddle, and scorch the concrete around it.

Lui says, ‘You’re wasting your time.’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Someone sticks their head out of window directly below me; I scream at them, and they retreat. I play the beam in ever widening circles, thinking: There’s hardly any breeze, and diffusion is a slow process. I can kill them all; it’s not impossible. Compared to finding Lui in a city of twelve million people—

Then I finally swallow the truth: whether I’ve destroyed the Endamoeba or not makes no difference. Maybe I am one of the unlikely versions—out of all those created since the flask hit the ground—who were lucky enough to completely sterilize the spill. It doesn’t matter; none of us who screwed up this way are going to survive. When reality is chosen, Lui won’t have laid a finger on the flask.

I turn back into the room to face him. ‘You and I are history.’ I laugh. ‘So now you know what you put me through with your fucking padlocks.’

I close my eyes, try to contain my fear. A version of me will live—a version who succeeded where I failed. What more can I hope for? I wanted to be the one. But it’s too late for that.

I say, ‘If I killed you, would it be murder? Seeing as you’re already dead?’

He doesn’t reply. I open my eyes, holster the gun. I stare at him; he still says nothing. He doesn’t look much like a man who’s accepted defeat—or even martyrdom. Maybe he still believes that the true Ensemble can save him.

I say, ‘I’ll tell you about the past: I walked into this room, tied you to that chair and destroyed all the Endamoeba. And I’ll tell you about the future: I’ll set you free from the loyalty mod. You’ll be grateful. Between us, we’ll do the same for the rest of the Canon. With their testimony, the law will take care of ASR and BDI—and maybe bring down the whole Ensemble. Then we’ll both go our separate ways and live happily ever after.’

I leave the building, and skirt around the harbour, heading for the city centre, moving just for the sake of it, trying to keep my mind blank. I could invoke P3 and its perfect stoicism. I could invoke Boss and put myself to sleep. I do neither. After I’ve walked about three kilometres, I finally check the time: one thirteen.

The successful version of me must have been in the flat for at least forty minutes by now. I turn back and scream obscenities. The street is crowded, but nobody gives me a second glance. Suddenly exhausted, I sit down at the side of the road.

Habit overcomes disgust; I try to invoke Karen. Nothing happens. I run a MindTools inventory; the mod’s still there on the bus. I run diagnostics—and my skull explodes with error messages. I shut down the test and bury my head in my arms. Okay, I die alone. I just wish he’d get it over and done with.

After a while, I rise to my feet. I turn to a passing woman and ask, ‘What is this? The virtual afterlife?’

She says, ‘Not as far as I know.’

I take out the dice generator, put it away, take it out again. What can it prove? If I’m still smeared— and I must be—I’ll split thirty-six-fold at every toss, with one branch of me gradually becoming convinced of the truth… but all the others learning nothing.

I do it anyway.

Seven. Three. Nine. Nine. Two. Five.

What are you waiting for? Are you searching the city a second time, for hidden copies of the mod? Breaking into BDI again, to destroy the original?

But why would I do either—without collapsing in between, to make the night’s first miracle secure, and to reduce the risk of runaway smearing?

I glance up at the empty grey sky, then head on into the city.

By dawn, I can doubt it no longer: I’m collapsed, I’m the sole survivor. Any successful version of me would have tried to collapse by now; the mere fact that I still exist proves that my failure is real, and irreversible.

The sun rises quickly over the Gulf of Carpentaria, sending fierce bursts of light through cracks between the skyscrapers—and whichever way I turn, I find myself facing into dazzling reflections. My head throbs, my limbs ache. I don’t wish I was dead; I just wish I was someone else. How can I rejoice in my survival, when the cost is so high?

I keep searching for a way out. Maybe I haven’t failed—maybe I managed to kill all the spilt Endamoeba. But… how could my smeared self have known that I’d done so—and even if he could, why would he have chosen such an unlikely path to success, over the multitude of others in which the flask was simply never broken?

The answer must be: he didn’t. He deliberately chose a state in which the vector was released. He must have understood, Anally, what that would mean for him: no more intermittent resurrections from the hologram in my skull, like a genie let out of a bottle only to grant my impossible wishes. What did I expect? That he’d turn down the chance of ‘freedom’—or whatever alien concept he has of the world beyond The Bubble—for the sake of pleasing one cell in his body, one atom in his little finger, one irrelevant, infinitesimal part of his vast complexity?

I buy myself breakfast, leave a ten-thousand-dollar tip, then walk back to my flat to wait for the end of the world.

I monitor the news systems for some sign that the plague has begun, but scarcely notice what I’m reading. I alternate between fatalism and ludicrous hopes, between a heady wish to finally embrace the naked strangeness of the world, and moments of pure, stubborn disbelief. I gaze out of the window at the unremarkable city, and think: Even if humanity maintains this, microsecond by microsecond… after so many thousands of years, surely by now it must possess some kind of stability, some kind of inertia, some kind of independent reality.

But why should it? Do I think that by collapsing inanimate matter often enough, we’ve destroyed its ability to smear? Cowed it into submission, in an act of metaphysical imperialism? And do I hope that the solid macroscopic world we’ve created will, in turn, now anchor us to reality? The truth is, the instant we cease imposing uniqueness upon it, it will explode in a billion directions with a resilience unchanged since the birth of the universe.

Denial aside, I don’t know how to anaesthetize myself, how to make these last hours bearable. The old ways are lost; the mere thought of finding solace in a mod repels me—although I can’t ignore my memories: I can’t forget that the loyalty mod gave me a sense of purpose, or that Karen made me every bit as happy as if I’d been in love. And although I don’t wish for a moment to regain that synthetic happiness, that obscene travesty of love… I have nothing to take its place. How could I? I came into existence hours ago. I’m no repressed fragment of my previous self, no sublimated personality that’s ‘finally’ broken to the surface. I’m a stranger in my own life, an intruder in my own skull. Worse than an amnesiac, I remember the past—but I know that I have no claim to it.

The news systems patiently recount tales of ordinary madness: civil war in Madagascar; famine in the US north-west; another unexplained bombing in Tokyo; another bloodless coup d’etat in Rome. The local news is all trivia—corporate takeovers and minor political scandals. By nightfall, I’m prepared to abandon all pretence at having comprehended the events of the last