He lowers his voice. ‘Let us be grown-ups here. We are aware of your background, Mieli. We offered you an opportunity to start again. Your quantum self is all that matters to us. If you feel any misplaced loyalty towards le Flambeur, I suggest you discard it quickly. You have formed your own zoku here already. There are people here who care for you. Do you want him to destroy all that?’
Barbicane hovers up from his chair and floats next to the thief-partial. It looks at him curiously, with uncharacteristic, infinite patience.
‘Let me tell you something about le Flambeur. You may think you know him, but you don’t. He will charm you. He will wear whatever face he needs to get what he wants. I knew him, when I was young and foolish, and he did that to me. But when the time comes, you are just another tool to him, to be used and discarded when you have served your purpose.
‘When he disappeared, I thought his sins had caught up with him, or that he had finally abandoned his profession. He reappeared a few days ago. He came to my old primary zoku, the Gun Club, in disguise, to steal an old ship of his. Making it was one of those youthful follies I regret. Making his escape, he killed one of the younger Gun Club members, a girl called Chekhova, not much older than you. A truedeath: all her jewels were destroyed with her mind. She got in his way.’ He leans closer to the partial. ‘I don’t think you can hear me, le Flambeur,’ he says, ‘but if you can, you are not going to get away with that.‘
He presses his gun arm against the partial’s head. There is a boom and a white flash, and the dull wet thump of falling simulated flesh.
Barbicane takes a deep breath. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I feel a little better now.’ He extends his manipulator arm to Mieli. ‘Shall we go and talk to the rest of the zoku now?’
In the Invisible Realm, fifty-six minutes is a long time. Mieli was expecting something like the battlespace virs of Sobornost, direct sensory awareness of vast and complex systems, a hub of coordination and control. Instead, it resembles nothing as much as a vast board game, played with thoughts; an endless black space, where colourful beads joined by silver string form a labyrinth of threads. She can zoom in to each of them with a thought, receive a qupt of the most recent thought in the chain, contribute her own insights, routed to where they matter the most by quantum coordination algorithms. It feels like being inside a vast song.
She picks a thread at random.
—Purpose. Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, devoted to the meme of crime in the posthuman context. What is his purpose, really? I do not believe this is the real le Flambeur but a work of conceptual art created by an as yet unidentified zoku—
—Conceptual art: our Martian agents have indicated that le Flambeur under the alias of Paul Sernine has a history of conceptual art—
Mieli feels lost in the torrent of thought, tells her gogols and metacortex to condense it as much as possible. The Realm allows her to glimpse the entire history of the zoku’s thought-web at will, and the current threads are thin and frayed compared to the vast, shining tapestries of the past.
She turns her attention back to the thread she was following. I do need to contribute. Barbicane is watching me. She looks for a connection and casts the first thought that comes into her mind into the mix. Other minds seize it immediately and devour it.
—Paul Sernine – in his case, the conceptual artwork was created to conceal stored quantum information—
She feels a pleasant tingle from her Great Game jewel: the contribution is successful, and she is rewarded with a modicum of entanglement.
—Stored quantum information: it would make perfect sense, he would find the Gringotts F-Ring project fascinating—
—F-Ring: Schroederian tech, with the goal of making a long-lived storage mechanism indistinguishable from nature. Possible connections to the Fermi Paradox spam zokus—
The thread branches into involved speculation about the nature of the Fermi Paradox, and if the absence of any visible alien life has anything to do with the thief is attempting to do. Mieli traverses back along the thought-beads, chooses one that actually provides more information about the ring itself.
—The F-Ring: what are the likely physical mechanisms for actually carrying out the theft? The ring has little distributed hardware. The primary retrieval mechanisms are on Pandora and Prometheus—
—Prometheus, Mieli qupts instinctively. Stealer of fire. Prometheus means something to him. Being Prometheus, that sort of thing.
—Prometheus. A thematic connection, a common feature of le Flambeur crimes. The sharp cool joy of more entanglement, like fruit juice on a hot day.
—Put an agent there. Someone who knows him. Me. She attempts to weave her volition to that of the zoku, push at it with all her new-found entanglement. I need to at least try to get a message to him. And find out about Perhonen. A flash of anger comes when she thinks about the last moments on the ship, staring down the thief and the pellegrini both. They are alike. Barbicane was right. They will do whatever is necessary to get what they want. But I need to know what happened.
A flash of insight comes directly from her zoku jewel. A compulsion to be on Prometheus, as soon as possible.
The jewel is pulling her away, filling her mind with the need to allocate her resources to best serve the zoku. She fights it with her metacortex, tries to reach out to the bead game, to find at least a hint of the Kaminari jewel. Sensing her will, the zoku sends her a thread fragment.
Should we reconsider it?
To expose it to an individual’s volition? Never. And the resources required to access it would be prohibitive, especially in the case of invasion.
Resources: a better way required to transfer information between branes. Spooky-zoku has been harvesting dark matter particles entangled with the Planck brane, required for superdense inter-brane communication. The original jewel storage operation exhausted all the resources so far, but a new collection has been assembled at—
A personal qupt comes directly from Barbicane, and she pulls hastily away. The severed thread scatters random thoughts in her mind, like a rubber band, snapping at her painfully. A flash of the sheet of light, far away and close.
Mieli? A word, if you please, the Great Game Elder says.
Barbicane smiles at Mieli, his mouth a waxy line.
‘I noticed what you were doing, my dear,’ he says. ‘I do need to remind you that a decision on the subject of the Kaminari jewel has already been made, and the zoku volition will not allow it to be used. You will see what I mean if you try to pursue that line of thought further.
‘But—’ Mieli starts to protest. Barbicane holds up his manipulator hand.
‘Bear with me, my dear. I was not finished. Perhaps you do not take me seriously. Perhaps you laugh at the body I wear, at the Circles I choose. I do it because I celebrate what I lost. You of all people should understand.
‘I was a soldier, in the Fedorovist War. I believed I was protecting my people, fighting for my comrades. And then the Collapse came. Everything breaking. Chaos. An enemy we could not fight. All because of a tiny quantum effect we could not anticipate. Because we made a thing that was bigger than us.
‘Mieli, I think you know what it feels like when the world you love suddenly lurches and turns into something utterly alien, into something you never knew at all. You of all people should want to prevent that from happening to anyone else.
‘That is where my love of guns comes from, you see. Guns are predictable. Guns make sense. In a gun, you channel the destruction. You aim it. You make it do work. Or you use it as a threat, to maintain balance. With things like the Kaminari jewel, you can’t. To think otherwise is folly.
‘Le Flambeur is the same. When I was younger, I thought he could be aimed and controlled. We used him to attack a Sobornost sunlifter mine. The operation succeeded – but he used the mine for his own purposes. And now his scheme has brought the Sobornost upon us.
‘The Great Game’s purpose is to remove elements of chaos. Today, le Flambeur is one
of them, just like the jewel. Do you understand?’
Slowly, Mieli nods.
Barbicane smiles. ‘Capital! In that case, my dear, we both have work to do!’
Prometheus.
The rings are a tilted mirror sea, glinting razor blades with dark gaps between them. Saturn itself is a vast sunrise that fills the sky. A silvery spiral of aurora borealis gleams near its south pole. The interwoven threads of Supra City’s Strips and the larger hexagonal blue-and-white shapes of the Plates are like a harlequin mask on the giant planet’s face.
She clings to the surface of Prometheus. The moon’s twin, Pandora, is a clumpy shape in the distance, nearly motionless, synchronised to the orbit of its brother, its partner in shepherding Saturn’s outermost ring.
Prometheus itself is subtly alive beneath her. On the surface, it looks just like a lifeless moon, elongated in shape, with large craters, barely enough gravity to hold her down. But in the spimescape, Mieli can see the hidden interfaces to the picotech embedded in the moon’s atoms, designed to last for aeons. When Supra City itself is gone, Saturn will survive – and the zoku legacy will be hidden inside it, there for some unimaginable archaeologist to discover in the distant future.
It is not just the moon that is seething with hidden activity. The space around Prometheus is full of metacloaked Great Game and Ganimard-zoku ships. Even though Mieli does not want to admit it, there is something satisfying about how during an operation, the zoku fulfils even her unconscious wishes. She is heavily armed, with an array of q-guns and a rather satisfying replica of a Sobornost multipurpose cannon.
Five minutes left to the thief’s deadline. Even without her enhancements or spimescape, she can see the F-ring itself in greater detail now, a twisting, kinked string of ice and dust.
The wait has been long: she has spent much of it in quicktime, engaged in collaborative planning with Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, mapping out the space of possible trajectories that could intersect with the F-ring. The Great Game agrees that to actually retrieve any quantum information from the rubidium atoms scattered around the ring’s icy objects, the thief will require access to the hardware on Pandora and Prometheus. The Gringotts-zoku is spinning further layers of cryptography around the data retrieval systems. Watching the entire circumference of the ring is difficult, but not impossible. With the resources the zoku has deployed, any attempted theft seems like madness.
Waiting. Always waiting. She allows herself to wonder what Zinda is doing, and regrets it immediately: even a fleeting thought of the zoku girl makes the wound inside her chest bleed something bitter and black. She almost tells her metacortex to extinguish the feeling, but decides against it. She needs to stay sharp, now more than ever. It will be walking on a razor edge: appearing as if she is acting in the best interests of the zoku, making sure the thief is not captured, sending him a message if possible. Damn you, Jean. What are you doing?
Three minutes. Prometheus is swinging closer to the F-ring. Its gravitational field sends a wave through the white weave of ice, makes it twist and dance. After a moment, Pandora follows, right behind its twin, adding its own smooth ripple to the ring’s movement.
One minute.
Perhaps it is a trick. Perhaps the real crime is happening somewhere else.
There is a sudden shiver in the F-ring that is not due to Pandora or Prometheus. Mieli’s systems, linked to the Great Game, find solutions to the inverse problem, look for gravitational sources that could explain the anomaly. That can’t be right. Several huge masses, approaching fast. Seven of them.
Guberniyas. Not now, not yet. He is working with them. This was all just a distraction.
The spimescape goes white with zoku chatter. The ripple in the rings grows into a tear. Mieli’s systems register something impossibly blue-shifted for an instant.
Then a vast knife slices through Saturn’s rings.
There is a wedge-shaped disturbance that plows through the silver bands of F, D, C and B, leaving behind a deformed cut, fraying at the edges, pulling icy bodies behind it. Then, a single flash of light on Saturn’s surface.
The Sobornost just hit a Plate with a kinetic weapon, she thinks. No matter. It’s just another level boss, like Zinda said. All of Supra City will join the war zoku. Already, she can feel a new thread in her q-self, pulling at her will, and she gets ready to flow in the cool stream of the zoku volition, anticipates the heat of battle.
A discontinuity. A flash of a scintillating web, overlaid on the face of Saturn. Then, a sudden emptiness.
It takes her a moment to realise all her zoku jewels are dead, devoid of entanglement. The sudden utter freedom in her head is like falling, naked, from a great height, towards the abyss of Saturn. A great terror rises within her. Is this what Zinda felt like? And she still did it for me?
The spimescape fills with the white noise of non-qupt chatter. All quptlinks are broken. All entangled states in zoku jewels have decohered. All zoku – the Great Game and the Ganimard and the Notch and the Evangelion alike – are in utter disarray, their perfect quantum order dissolving into chaos, like melting ice.
And the Sobornost is coming.
What have they done?
The nova of her anger surprises her. She pushes herself off Prometheus on her suit’s thrusters. The raions and nanomissiles will be coming soon. She launches autonomous q-dots in a sphere around her to form a defensive perimeter. Something drops a metacloak near her and triggers them almost immediately.
A ship. In quicktime, she has a brief flash of its shape, a blue, elongated droplet of smartmatter, like the petal of a flower. She fires her cannon at it.
The newcomer’s EM field grabs her, hard. The 20G acceleration shakes her like a leaf in a hurricane. Prometheus becomes a pinpoint in an instant. What is it doing? Through the acceleration strain, she tries to scan the ship, target something she can hurt with the tiny antimatter payload in her cannon. It is pulling her in.
Wait. Wait. She tries to keep her weapon steady. The EM field pulls her closer. Her gogols are making sense of the ship’s structure now, a strange zoku-Sobornost hybrid, high-end picotech and a micro-singularity somewhere inside. Well, this should at least hurt. She gets ready to fire the antimatter pellet, targets it to burrow into the ship’s core. If the Hawking radiation containment breaks, it will take them both, but the fire in Mieli’s mind wants something to burn.
Just before she presses the mind-trigger, a qupt comes.
Hello, Mieli. There is something familiar about this. Except this time, you were the one in a prison.
She hesitates for an instant. The EM field pulls her in, and the midnight skin of the ship swallows her.
16
THE THIEF AND MIELI
Mieli appears in the pilot’s cabin of the Leblanc, just like she does in my fondest memories: wearing a furious expression.
‘You,’ she hisses. She is how I remember her from Perhonen, a compact woman in a black toga, her only ornament the jewelled chain around her ankle, a gift from an Oortian lover. The sudden rush of familiarity almost makes me embrace her. Still, I keep my distance: we may be in a Realm under my control, and I was prudent enough to delete her weapons when qupting her into the virtual space inside the ship, but Mieli is still one of the most dangerous individuals I know.
I grin. ‘Me. Welcome aboard the Leblanc. As you have probably figured out by now, I didn’t come here to steal Saturn’s ring. I came here to steal you. I have a small Great Game jewel, and managed to slip some ideas into the zoku volition, so I could make sure you were somewhere I could find you. In case you had any ideas from someone called Lenormand, that was me. I had a strangelet bomb set up on Pandora as a distraction. Turns out I didn’t have to use it, thanks to the exceedingly well-timed Sobornost invasion. Tell me, how does it feel to be free?’
Her hands clench and unclench. Then she moves faster than I can react. A silver filigreed blade shimmers into being in her hand, and then its point is inches away from my eyeball, her othe
r hand firmly around my throat. Of course. Zoku enhancements. Adapt to Realms. How silly of me to overlook that.
‘Wait,’ I gasp.
‘What makes you think I want to hear what you have to say? Get me back out there. Right now. I have a war to fight.’
This is going better than I thought. At least I still have a tongue.
‘What did they tell you? That you would be free to leave any time? They lie about that, you know. I had to help you. The only way to do it was to break the whole system, to give you back your free will.’ My eyes widen. ‘Or … don’t tell me you are still working for the pellegrini? I didn’t see that one coming. What happened to the copy in your head, by the way?’
She throws me to the floor. I sit up slowly, massaging my throat.
‘She is gone,’ Mieli hisses. ‘Just like the entire Supra City will be soon. What in the Dark Man’s name did you do to the volition system?’
I smile sadly. ‘The Spooky-zoku and the Great Game have known about this for some time, but they have worked very hard to keep it a secret. It’s the reason why they destroyed Mars. I’ll give you the crib notes: the Collapse was caused by quantum mechanics breaking down. It turns out there is a bound for the size of entangled quantum states: create anything bigger than that, and things get even more crazy than usual. The whole zoku quantum jewel system has been teetering close to the boundary a while. So I just gave it a little push.
‘You may have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of spam zokus recently. I have been generating them algorithmically, with Sobornost-derived gogol minds. It’s amazing what you can do if you look past ideological differences and combine technologies in creative ways.’
I stagger upright. Mieli is standing with her back turned to me, still opening and closing the fingers of one hand, rotating the Realm-knife in the other.