Schild’s Ladder

fraction of the billions wandering by than would have been stopped by a galaxy’s-worth of lead.

Gravitational waves passed through anything, so the only antidote was a second train of waves, tailored to cancel out the first. There was nothing to be done about sporadic cataclysms?—?supernovae, or black holes gorging on star clusters in the centers of distant galaxies?—?but the most persistent gravitational waves, coming from local binary stars, were cyclic, predictable, and faint. So the Quietener was ringed with countersources, their orbits timed to stretch space at the center of the device when the bodies they mimicked squeezed it, and vice versa.

As Cass passed within a few kilometers of one of the counter-sources, she could see the aggregate rocky surface that betrayed its origins in Mimosa’s rubble of asteroids. Every scrap of material here had been dragged out of that system’s gravity well over a period of almost a thousand years, a process initiated by a package of micron- sized spores sent from Viro, the nearest inhabited world, at ninety percent of lightspeed. The Mimosans themselves had come from all over, traveling here just as Cass had once the station was assembled.

The scooter’s smooth deceleration brought her to a halt beside a docking bay, and she was weightless again. Whenever she was close enough to either the station or the Quietener to judge her velocity, it seemed to be little more than that of a train, giving the impression that in the five-hour journey she might have traveled the width of a continent on Earth. Not to the moon and back, and more.

One wall of the bay had handholds. As Cass pulled herself along, Rainzi appeared beside her. The Mimosans had dusted projectors and cameras all over the walls of the places she visited in the Quietener, rendering guest and host mutually visible.

“This is it!” Rainzi said cheerfully. “Barring untimely supernovae, we’ll finally get to see your graph complete.” The software portrayed him with a jet pack, to rationalize his ability to follow her uneven progress up the wall without touching anything.

Cass replied stoically, “I’ll believe it when it happens.” In fact, from the moment Ilene had scheduled the run, twelve hours before, Cass had felt insanely confident that no more hurdles remained. Eight of the fourteen previous targets had been achieved at the first attempt, making the prospect of one more tantalizingly plausible. But she was reluctant to admit to taking anything for granted, and if something did go wrong it would be easier to swallow her disappointment if she’d been pretending from the start that her expectations had always been suitably modest.

Rainzi didn’t argue, but he ignored her feigned pessimism. He said, “I have a proposition for you. A new experience you might like to try, to celebrate the occasion. I suspect it will be against all your high-minded principles, but I honestly believe you’d enjoy it. Will you hear me out?”

He wore a look of such deadpan innocence that Cass felt sure he knew exactly how this sounded in translation. If that was his meaning, the idea wasn’t entirely absurd, or unwelcome. She’d grown fond of Rainzi, and if he’d never been quite as solicitous or as eager to understand her as Darsono, the truth was, that made him more intriguing. If they could find enough common ground to become lovers, it might be a fitting way to bid Mimosa farewell: sweeping away the mutually distorted views they had of each other. To remain loyal to the ideals of embodiment, here, she’d been forced to adopt a kind of asceticism, but that was definitely not a quality to which she’d ever aspired, let alone one for which she hoped to be remembered.

She said, “I’m listening.”

“For special events like this, we sometimes go nuclear. So I thought I’d ask whether you’d like to join us.”

Cass froze, and stared at him. “Nuclear? How? Has someone solved all the problems?” Femtomachines built from exotic nuclei had been employed as special-purpose computers ever since the basic design had been developed, six thousand years before. For sheer speed, they left every other substrate in the dust. But as far as Cass knew, no one could make a femtomachine stable for more than a few picoseconds; they could perform a great many calculations in that time, but then they blew themselves apart and left you hunting through the debris for the answer. Gamma-ray spectroscopy could only extract a few hundred kilobytes, which was orders of magnitude too small even for a differential memory?—?a compressed description of experience that could be absorbed by a frozen reference copy of the person who’d actually lived through it. Cass might have missed the news of a breakthrough while she’d been on her way here from Earth, but if word had reached Mimosa Station at all she should have heard by now.

“Nothing’s changed in the technology,” Rainzi said. “We do it freestyle. One-way.”

Freestyle meant implementing your mind on a substrate that underwent quantum divergence. One-way meant none of the end products of any version of the computation could be retrieved, and transferred back into your usual hardware. Rainzi was asking her to clone herself into a nuclear abacus-cum-time-bomb that would generate a multitude of different versions of her, while holding out no prospect of even one survivor.

Cass said haltingly, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t join you.” So much for feeling smugly unshockable for daring to contemplate cross-modal sex. She joked, “I draw the line at any implementation where I experience detectable weight changes every time I learn something.” Femtomachines shuffled binding energies equivalent to a significant portion of their own mass; it would be like gaining or losing half a kilogram several times a second, from the sheer gravity of your thoughts.

Rainzi smiled. “I thought you’d say no. But it would have been discourteous not to ask.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“But you’d see it as a kind of death?”

Cass scowled. “I’m embodied, not deranged! If a copy of my mind experiences a few minutes' consciousness, then is lost, that’s not the death of anyone. It’s just amnesia.”

Rainzi looked puzzled. “Then I don’t understand. I know you prefer embodiment, for the sake of having honest perceptions of your surroundings, but we’re not talking about immersing you in some comforting simulation of being back on Earth. Your experiment should last almost six picoseconds. Running on a strong-force substrate, you’d have a chance to watch the data coming in, in real time. Of course, you’ll receive a useful subset of the same information eventually, but it won’t be as detailed, or as immediate. It won’t be as real.”

He smiled provocatively. “Suppose the ghost of Sarumpaet came to you in your sleep, and said: I’ll grant you a dream in which you witness the decay of the Diamond Graph. You’ll travel back in time, shrink to the Planck scale, and see everything with your own eyes, exactly as it happened. The only catch is, you won’t remember anything when you wake. You say you don’t believe that the dreamer would be dying. So wouldn’t you still want the dream?”

Cass let go of one handhold and swiveled away from the wall. There wasn’t much point objecting that he was offering her a view billions of times coarser than that, of a much less significant event. It wasn’t a ringside seat at the birth of the universe, but it was still the closest she could hope to get to an event for which she’d already sacrificed seven hundred and forty-five years of her life.

She said, “It’s not the fact that I wouldn’t remember the experience. If you’ve lived through something, you’ve lived through it. What worries me is all the other things I’d have to live through. All the other people I’d have to become.”

Cass dated the advent of civilization to the invention of the quantum singleton processor. The Qusp. She accepted the fact that she couldn’t entirely avoid splitting into multiple versions; interacting with any ordinary object around her gave rise to an entangled system?—?Cass plus cloud, Cass plus flower?—?and she could never hope to prevent the parts that lay outside her from entering superpositions of different classical outcomes, generating versions of her who witnessed different external events.

Unlike her hapless ancestors, though, she did not contribute to the process herself. While the Qusp inside her skull performed its computations, it was isolated from the wider world?—?a condition lasting just microseconds at a time, but rigidly enforced for the duration?—?only breaking quarantine when its state vector described one outcome, with certainty. With each operating cycle, the Qusp rotated a vector describing a single alternative into another with the same property, and though the path between the two necessarily included superpositions of many alternatives, only the final, definite state determined her actions.

Being a singleton meant that her decisions counted. She was not forced to give birth to a multitude of selves, each responding in a different way, every time she found her conscience or her judgment balanced on a knife edge. She was not at all what Homo sapiens had actually been, but she was close to what they’d believed themselves to be, for most of their history: a creature of choice, capable of doing