The Quantum Thief

  ‘That hurt,’ Perhonen says.

  ‘I’m afraid that this will hurt a lot more.’

  She burns all the delta-v in their emergency antimatter in one burst, swinging the ship into the shallow gravity well of 2006RJ103. Perhonen’s flesh groans as the antiprotons from the magnetic storage ring turn into hot jets of plasma. She diverts some of the power to pumping up the binding energies of the programmable matter rods in the hull. The Archons follow without effort, approaching, firing again.

  Perhonen screams around Mieli, but the autism keeps her mind on the task at hand. She thinks a q-dot torpedo around the strangelet in Perhonen’s tiny weapons bay and fires it at the asteroid.

  There is a brief flash in the spimescape, gamma rays and exotic baryons. Then the rocky lump becomes a fountain of light, a lightning flash that does not end. The scape struggles to keep up, turns into white noise and goes down. Flying blind, Mieli spreads Perhonen’s wings again. The particle wind from the strange death of the asteroid grabs them and hurls them towards the Highway. The acceleration makes her heavy, suddenly, and the sapphire structure of the ship sings around her.

  It takes a moment for the scape to come back up and to filter out the particle noise and the madness. Mieli holds her breath: but no black fang-like ships emerge from the slowly expanding incandescence behind them. Either they were consumed, or lost track of their target in the subatomic madness. She lifts the autism to let herself feel a moment of triumph.

  ‘We made it,’ she says.

  ‘Mieli? I don’t feel so good.’

  There is a black stain spreading in the ship’s hull. And in the centre of it, is a tiny black shard, cold and dark. An Archon nanomissile.

  ‘Get it out.’ The fear and disgust taste like bile after the combat autism, raw and foul.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t touch it anymore. It tastes like the Prison.’

  Mieli shouts a prayer in her head, at the part of her mind that the Sobornost goddess has touched. But the pellegrini does not answer.

  Around me, the ship is dying.

  I don’t know what Mieli did, but, judging by the miniature nova that lit in space minutes ago, she is putting up a good fight. But now there is a spiderweb of blackness spreading into the sapphire in the walls. That’s what the Archons do: they inject themselves into you and turn you into a Prison. There is a burning sawdust smell as the nanites work, faster and faster, overcoming whatever immune systems the ship is throwing at it. There is a noise, too, the roar of a forest fire.

  It was too good to last, I suppose. Fair cop, guv. I try to remember the thrill of stealing Mieli’s jewel. Maybe I can take it with me. Or maybe it’s all another dying dream. I never left. This was just a prison within a prison, all along.

  Then I hear a mocking voice in my head.

  Jean le Flambeur, giving up. The Prison broke you. You deserve to go back. No different from the broken warminds and mad Sobornost toys and the forgotten dead. You don’t even remember the exploits, the adventures. You are not him, just a memory that thinks it is—

  Hell no. There is always a way out. You are never in a prison unless you think you are. A goddess told me that.

  And suddenly, I know exactly what I need to do.

  ‘Ship.’

  There is no answer. Damn it.

  ‘Ship! I need to talk to Mieli!’ Still nothing.

  The cabin is getting hot. I need to move. Outside, Perhonen’s wings are ablaze, like trapped aurora borealis, burning in space around us. The ship has so much acceleration that it actually has gravity now, at least half a g. But the directions are all wrong: below is somewhere towards the rear end of the central chamber. I scramble out of my cabin, grasp the axis handles and start hauling myself towards the pilot’s crèche.

  There is a blast of heat and a searing light: an entire segment of the cylinder spins out to the void below. The only thing separating me from the vacuum is a soap-bubble wall of q-dots that flashes into being. But it is too late to cut the infection out. Hot sapphire fragments swirl in the air around me: one leaves a painful bloody brushstroke on my forearm, razor-sharp.

  It is hot now, and the sawdust stench is everywhere. The blackness in the walls is spreading: the ship is burning, burning into something else. Heart beating in my chest like there was a Notre Dame hunchback making it ring, I climb upwards.

  I can see into the pilot’s crèche through the sapphire: madly swirling utility fog like heat haze in the air, with Mieli suspended inside, eyes closed. I pound the door with my fist. ‘Let me in!’

  I don’t know if her brain has been compromised yet. For all I know, she could already be in the Prison. But if not, I need her to get out of this. I try to get leverage from the pole and kick at the door with my heel. But it’s no use – unless either her or the ship tells the smart sapphire to open.

  Sapphire. I remember her expression when I woke up with a hard-on. She is reading this body’s biot feed, but must be filtering it out. Unless there is a threshold—

  Oh crap. Not hesitating makes it easier. I grab a long, sharp sapphire shard from the air and push the point through my left palm, between the metacarpal bones, as hard as I can. I almost black out. The shard scrapes the bones as it goes in, tearing tendons and veins. The pain is like shaking hands with Satan, red and black and unrelenting. I smell blood: it is pumping out of the wound, all over me and falling down into the void below, slowly, in large misshapen droplets.

  It is the first time I feel real pain since the Prison, and there is something glorious about it. I look at the blue shard sticking out of my hand and start laughing, until the pain gets to be too much and I have to scream.

  Someone slaps me, hard.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’

  Mieli is looking at me in the doorway of the pilot’s crèche, eyes wide. Well, at least she felt that. Inert utility foglets swirl around us, grey dust adding to the chaos: it makes me think of falling ash, in a burning city.

  ‘Trust me,’ I tell her, grinning madly, bleeding. ‘I have a plan.’

  ‘You have ten seconds.’

  ‘I can get it out. I can fool it. I know how. I know how it thinks. I was there for a long time.’

  ‘And why should I trust you?’

  I hold up my bleeding hand and pull out the sapphire. There is more blinding pain, and a squelching sound.

  ‘Because,’ I hiss through gritted teeth, ‘I will rather put this through my eye than go back.’

  She holds my eyes for a moment. And then she actually smiles.

  ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Root access to this body. I know what it can do. I need computing power, way more than baseline.’

  Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘All right. Get that bastard off my ship.’

  Then she closes her eyes, and something inside my head goes click.

  I am root, and the body is a world-tree, an Yggdrasil. There are diamond machines in its bones, proteomic tech in its cells. And the brain, a true Sobornost raion-scale brain, able to run whole worlds. My own human psyche inside it is less than one page in a library of Babel. A part of me, the smiling part, thinks of escape immediately, using this wonderful machine to launch a part of it into space, to leave my liberators to my jailers. Another part surprises me by saying no.

  I move through the dying ship, looking for the nanomissile, no longer a clumsy monkey but gliding smoothly in the air under my own power, like a miniature spaceship. There, my enhanced senses tell me: burrowing into a fabrication module in the other end of the cylinder, a point from which the Prison-matter spreads.

  With one thought, I reach out and make a local copy of Perhonen’s spimescape. I tell the ship’s sapphire flesh to open. It becomes a soft wet gel. I push my hand deep into it, reach for the missile and pull it out. It is tiny, not much larger than a cell, but shaped like a black tooth with sharp roots. My body grasps it with q-dot tendrils. I hold it up: such a tiny thing, but with at least one Archon mind inside, looking for thi
ngs to turn into Prisons.

  I put it into my mouth, bite down hard and swallow.

  The Archon is happy.

  For a moment, there was an imperfection, when it tasted the thief, a sense of dissonance, like there were two Thieves, in one.

  But things are strange outside the Mother Prison: out here, the games are not pure. The old ugly physics is not perfect like the game of the Archons, perfect in its simplicity, yet capturing all of mathematics in its undecidability. That’s why its task is to turn this matter into another Prison, to increase the purity of the Universe. This is what their Father the Engineer-of-Souls thought them to love. This is the way the world is made right.

  And this is good matter to turn into a Prison. Its mouth waters in anticipation of the taste of the patterns that the iterated Dilemmas will make. Its copyfather discovered a defector pattern that tastes like pecan ice cream: a replicating strategy family like a flyer in a Game of Life. Perhaps it, too, will find something new here, on this little gameboard of its own.

  Far far far away, its copybrothers whisper to it through their quptlink, still complaining about the gut-wrenching wrongness of finding out about the escape of the thief, and the other one, the anomaly. It tells them all is made well, that they will join the Mother Prison soon, that it will bring back something new.

  It looks down upon the grid of cells where the little thieves and butterflies and Oort women live when it finds them in the sweet matter. And soon the Game will begin again, any moment now.

  It will taste like lemon sherbet, the Archon thinks.

  ‘Magic,’ I tell her. ‘You know how magic tricks work?’

  I am back to my human self again. The memory of the extended senses and computational power is fading, but still feels like a phantom ache of a lost limb. And of course, I have an Archon running inside me now, locked inside my bones, in computational deep freeze.

  We are sitting in one of the cramped storage modules, spinning on a tether for gravity, while the ship repairs itself. But there is a sparkling river of spaceships all around us, scattered over thousands of cubic kilometres but magnified by Perhonen’s skin: overclocked fast zoku generation ships that dump waste heat madly, every day of a journey like a thousand years for them; whalelike calmships with green and miniature suns inside, Sobornost thoughtwisps everywhere like fireflies.

  ‘It’s quite simple, really – it’s all about neuroscience. Misdirected attention.’

  Mieli ignores me. She is setting up a small table between us. There are Oortian dishes on it: odd purple transparent cubes and squirming synthlife and neatly cut sections of multicolored fruits – expertly fabbed – and two small glasses. Her movements in setting it up are formal and composed, ritual-like. Ignoring me, she produces a bottle from a wall compartment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

  She looks at me, expressionless. ‘We’re celebrating,’ she says.

  ‘Well, we should.’ I grin at her. ‘Anyway, it took me a long time to discover that: you can still induce inattentional blindness in Sobornost minds, would you believe? Nothing ever changes. So I swapped its sensory inputs, hooked it up to a sim based on Perhonen’s spimescape. It still thinks it’s making a Prison. Very, very slowly.’

  ‘I see.’ She frowns at the bottle, apparently trying to figure out how to open it. The lack of interest she displays in my master plan irritates me.

  ‘See? It works like this. Look.’

  I touch a spoon, grab it gently, make a motion like closing my hand around it, whereas in fact it’s already falling into my lap. Then I hold up both of my hands, opening them. ‘Gone.’ She blinks in astonishment. I close my left fist again. ‘Or, perhaps, transformed.’ I open it, and her ankle ringlet is there, squirming. I hold it out to her, an offering. Her eyes flash, but she reaches out, slowly, and takes it from my hand.

  ‘You will not touch that,’ she says. ‘Ever again.’

  ‘I promise,’ I tell her, meaning it. ‘Professionals from now on. Deal?’

  ‘Agreed,’ she says, with an edge to her voice.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘The ship told me what you did. You went to hell to get me out,’ I say. ‘What is it that you want so badly to do that?’

  She says nothing, opening the bottle’s seal with a sudden twist.

  ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘About that offer. I have reconsidered. Whatever it is that you need stolen, I will steal. No matter who you work for. I’ll even do it your way. I owe you that. Call it a debt of honour.’

  She pours the wine. The golden liquid is sluggish, so it takes time. When she’s done, I raise my glass. ‘Shall we drink to that?’

  Our glasses clink together: toasting in low-g is a skill. We drink. Thanisch-Erben Thanisch, 2343. A faint matchstick smell the older bottles of the stuff have: sometimes called Thaddeusatem, Thaddeus’s breath.

  How do I know that?

  ‘It’s not you I need, thief,’ Mieli says. ‘It’s who you were. And that’s the first thing we have to steal.’

  I stare at her, breathing in Thaddeus’s breath. And with the smell comes a memory, years and years and years of being someone else, being poured into me

  like wine into a glass. ‘Medium full-bodied, robust, with a trace of eagerness’, he says, looking at her through the Riesling that is like liquid light, smiling. ‘Who are you calling full-bodied?’ she asks, laughing, and in his mind she is his.

  But it is he who is hers for many years, years of love and wine, in the Oubliette.

  He – I – hid it. Mind steganography. The Proust effect. Somewhere the Archons would not find it, an associative memory unlocked by smell that you would never come across in a prison where you never eat or drink.

  ‘I am a genius,’ I tell Mieli.

  She does not smile, but her eyes narrow, a little. ‘Mars, then,’ she says. ‘The Oubliette.’

  I feel a chill. Clearly, I have little privacy in this body, or in my mind. Another panopticon, another prison. But as prisons go, it is a lot better than the last one: a beautiful woman, secrets and a good meal, and a sea of ships carrying us to adventure.

  I smile.

  ‘The place of forgetting,’ I say, and raise my glass. ‘To new beginnings.’

  Quietly, she drinks with me. Around us, Perhonen’s sails are bright cuts in space, carrying us down the Highway.

  3

  THE DETECTIVE AND THE CHOCOLATE DRESS

  It surprises Isidore that the chocolate factory smells of leather. The conching machines fill the place with noise, echoing from the high red-brick walls. Cream-coloured tubes gurgle. Rollers move back and forth in stainless-steel vats, massaging aromas from the chocolate mass inside with each gloopy, steady heartbeat.

  There is a dead man lying on the floor, in a pool of chocolate. A beam of pale Martian morning light from a high window illuminates him, turning him into a chocolate sculpture of suffering: a wiry pietá with hollow temples and a sparse moustache. His eyes are open, whites showing, but the rest of him is covered in a sticky layer of brown and black, spilled from the vat he is clutching, as if he tried to drown himself in it. His white apron and clothes are a Rorschach test of dark stains.

  Isidore ’blinks, accessing the Oubliette exomemory. It lets him recognise the man’s face like it belonged to an old friend. Marc Deveraux. Third Noble incarnation. Chocolatier. Married. One daughter. It is the first fact, and it makes his spine tingle. As always in the beginning of a mystery, he feels like a child unwrapping a present. There is something that makes sense here, hiding beneath chocolate and death.

  ‘Ugly business,’ says a raspy, chorus-like voice, making him jump. It is the Gentleman, of course, standing on the other side of the body, leaning on his cane. The smooth metal ovoid of his face catches the sun in a bright wink, a stark contrast against the black of his long velvet coat and top hat.

  ‘When you called me,’ Isidore says, ‘I didn’t think it was just another gogol pirate case.’ He tries to sound casual: but it w
ould be rude to completely mask his emotions with gevulot, so he can’t stop a note of enthusiasm escaping. This is only the third time he has met the tzaddik in person. Working with one of the Oubliette’s honoured vigilantes still feels like a boyhood dream come true. Still, he would not have expected the Gentleman to call him to work on mind theft. Copying of leading Oubliette minds by Sobornost agents and third parties is what the tzaddiks have sworn to prevent.

  ‘My apologies,’ the Gentleman says. ‘I will endeavour to arrange something more bizarre next time. Look closer.’

  Isidore takes out his zoku-made magnifying glass – a gift from Pixil, a smooth disc of smartmatter atop a brass handle – and peers at the body through it. Veins and brain tissue and cellular scans flash into being around him, archeology of a dead metabolism floating past like exotic sea creatures. He ’blinks again, at the unfamiliar medical information this time, and winces at the mild headache as the facts entrench themselves in his short-term memory.

  ‘Some sort of … viral infection,’ he says, frowning. ‘A retro-virus. The glass says there is an anomalous genetic sequence in his brain cells, something from an archeon bacterium. How long before we can talk to him?’ Isidore never looks forward to interrogating resurrected crime victims: their memories are always fragmented, and some are unwilling to overcome the traditional Oubliette obsession with privacy, even to help solve their own murder or a gogol piracy case.

  ‘Perhaps never,’ the Gentleman says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This was an optogenetic black box upload. Very crude: it must have been agony. It’s an old trick, pre-Collapse. They used to do it with rats. You infect the target with a virus that makes their neurons sensitive to yellow light. Then you stimulate the brain with lasers for hours, capture the firing patterns and train a black box function to emulate them. That’s where those little holes in his skull are from. Optic fibres. Upload tendrils.’ The tzaddik brushes the chocolatier’s thinning hair carefully with a gloved hand: there are tiny black dots in the scalp beneath, a few centimetres apart.