‘So be careful when you talk to me about Paul Sernine,’ Marcel says. He narrows his eyes. ‘I’ve never noticed it before, but you look like him. Don’t tell me this is another one of his games.’
‘It’s not, I promise,’ Isidore says. ‘Quite the opposite. I’m trying to figure out why he did what he did. It’s important to know why he visited you. Would he have had access to your partner’s memories?’
‘Owl’s? What does he have to do with this?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. Please. It’s important. Not just to me, but to all of Mars.’
‘I see.’ Marcel runs a hand along his shaved scalp. ‘I suppose it’s possible. Not with my permission, but then he did give me that damned Watch. The tzaddikim told me that he hid things in my memories, somehow. And Owl and I shared everything: he had no secrets from me. So Paul could have accessed Owl’s memories through my gevulot. What good that would have done him, I do not know.’
Isidore takes a deep breath. ‘With your permission, I would like to take a look at those memories. The night of the Spike in particular. I have been trying to understand why the person you knew as Paul Sernine came back here, what he was looking for. There is a pattern, I can feel it, and it’s related to the Sobornost civil war, the Spike, what happened to the Earth – to everything. We need to understand it if Mars is to survive this.’
‘Hm.’ Marcel smiles a sad smile. ‘So you really think it’s worth it? Saving our world, even if it is built on a lie?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Isidore says. ‘Not all illusions are bad. Sometimes they are necessary. My father – my adoptive father – taught me that.’
Marcel looks at Isidore. Then he picks up his glass.
‘Very well. Please come and meet my love. His name is Owl Boy.’
Owl Boy sits by the window wrapped in a medfoam cocoon, looking out. There are fresh flowers in the room, and a faint lavender smell from scented candles. It is clearly the cleanest room in the house. The view is directly over the Martian desert. The city is passing through Hellas Planitia, and tendrils of orange dust worm along the rough surface behind it.
Owl Boy makes hollow metallic sounds in his throat, like a fingernail tapping a tin can. His Noble body is still young, but he has the face of an old man, slack-jawed and worn. His eyes are blank. The gevulot around him feels foggy, broken.
Marcel kisses his cheek. ‘I take it you know about his condition?’
‘I ’blinked it. His brain was altered by the Spike in ways that the Resurrection Men do not understand: there is a quantum condensate in his microtubules, something like the ancient theories of consciousness, but artificial. He can’t go to the Quiet, or the condensate might collapse, and they do not know what would happen then.’
‘Twenty years, he’s been like this.’ Marcel sighs. ‘I live in hope. Quantum states do not live forever. Perhaps he will come out of it. When he does, I will be waiting. So I live modestly, stretch out my days.’
‘Perhaps the zoku can help him. I could talk to—’
Marcel smiles sadly.
‘I do not put my trust in gods anymore,’ he says. ‘Please. Do what you came to do. It will be his bedtime soon.’
Isidore nods, holds the thief’s Watch in a tight grip and takes out the Key in his mind, the one that opens the doors of all memory.
Owl Boy’s exomemory unfolds before him, but Isidore closes his eyes to most of it, ’blinking for a night in a glider, over Noctis Labyrinthus. The night of the Spike.
And then he remembers being there, above Ius Chasma, laughing at Marcel’s fear at the aerial acrobatics.
Owl Boy thinks Marcel can be such a girl sometimes. To pacify him he takes the glider higher, to see the stars. It has been a good night. Sometimes he does not understand Marcel, his obsession with his work, his need to be alone. But up in the night sky, it feels like they are meant to be together.
And of course, that’s exactly when Marcel has to drop the bomb.
‘I’ve been thinking about going away,’ Marcel says.
‘Leaving?’ Owl Boy says. Somewhere, far away, Isidore tastes his disappointment, the bitter sting that pierces his chest. ‘Where would you go?’
Marcel gestures. ‘You know. Up. Out there.’ He presses his palm against the smooth, transparent skin of the glider.
‘It’s a stupid cycle here, don’t you think? And it doesn’t feel real here anymore.’
Owl Boy is angry now. Is that what I am, after all? A part of the stupid cycle. A diversion, something that you could play with before you go to do bigger and better things? He lets it come out in his words.
‘Isn’t that supposed to be your job? Feeling unreal?’
‘No,’ Marcel says. ‘It’s about making unreal things real, or real things more real. It would be easier, up there. The zokus have machines that turn thoughts into things. The Sobornost say that they are going to preserve every thought ever thought. But here—’
Here it comes, thinks Isidore, clinging onto his self, trained by his Kingship to sustain the flow of his own consciousness in the river of memory, looking at Owl Boy’s frozen thoughts one by one. Is this why Marcel clings to him? Because the last thing he told him was about going away?
The time in the memory slows down. Marcel’s fingers are pressed against the glass. A bright Jupiter winks between his fingers. And then there is another memory, a sudden discontinuity, a knife-cut through the thread of Owl Boy’s thoughts.
Marcel can be such a girl sometimes. Jupiter is bright between his fingers. A sudden discontinuity—
Isidore remembers remembering, is caught in a memory of the memory itself, an infinite mirror tunnel that draws him in. Marcel’s fingers move more and more slowly. Time flows sluggish and cold, as if he was swimming against an icy current.
Of course. The thief would have left a trap for anyone who tried to follow. A memory pit that traps you in the infinite moment.
But Isidore is not anyone. He is everyone. He is the King of Mars, and exomemory holds no secrets for him.
Struggling against the memory flow, he takes out the Key again, and reluctantly summons its other function: accessing the back doors of memory that allows them to be edited, changed and manipulated. It burns red-hot against the ice of the memory trap and melts it away. Time leaps forward like a dog from a snapped leash.
Jupiter explodes in Marcel’s hand and turns his fingers into red glowing pillars. There is a rain of stars in Owl Boy’s eyes. And then the quantum gods speak to Isidore.
*
The first voice belongs to a child. A tiny hand holds his own, by two fingers.
You live on an island called causality, the voice says. A small place, where effect follows cause like a train on rails. Walking forward, step by step, in the footprints of a god on a beach. Why do that when you could run straight into the waves and splash water around?
Laughter. He feels the joy of water droplets flying up, glittering in the sun, toes digging into the sandy bottom, and he knows that he could leap up and fall and all it would do is create a big splash.
Causality. It’s a lens through which we see things. An ordering of events. In a quantum spacetime, it is not unique. It’s just one story among many.
Listen. We’ll explain.
You have to understand before you can be us.
A different voice, an older male voice, a tone that sounds like Pixil’s tanglemother the Eldest, with the same hint of ancient weariness.
It was an idea they already thought of in the twentieth century, that spacetime could compute. They tested it, in the last days of the Large Hadron Collider, when they learned how to make tiny black holes. Encode computations into their event horizons, then probe the information paradox by smashing them together, see if quantum gravity is more powerful than Turing Machines or their quantum cousins. Something to do for the humming LHC, still warm from finding the first Higgs.
Fragments of lifestreams come, images of blackboards and huge humming machines in tu
nnels, distraught faces pointing at screens. The frustration he knows all too well when two shapes do not fit together, when there is no pattern.
No one expected to find something wrong in the starbursts of the collisions. At first, what came out seemed like noise. It took many experiments, but the data was clear. The answers were there, but they were encrypted. Spacetime was not just a computer, it was a trusted quantum computer. To run anything on it, you needed a key, to open Planck-scale locks.
It was thought it was another law of nature, another speed limit, another second law of thermodynamics. It was forgotten for a long time. Until we were born.
Who are we and how did we come to be?
A third voice joins in, a female voice, warm and rich like Marcel’s cognac. It makes Isidore feel safe.
We are the Kaminari: the fireflies, the short-lived, those drawn to light.
When the Collapse came and no one could afford to live on Earth anymore, we took care of our own. We piled our fleshbodies into the cargo holds of asteroid-mining ships hastily augmented with life support, moved our minds and early jewels – clumsy ion traps or diamonds that held slow light – strapped them to rockets that we launched to Jupiter and Saturn like little glittering Kal-Els as the world tore itself apart around us.
And that’s when the adventure really began.
We grew and we fragmented and became many. We forged jewels to house those things that defined us, our relationships to each other, those things that could not be copied, only given or stolen. We built Realms to play in. We covered the great planets in smartmatter. We fought wars with the Sobornost. We made little suns to warm the Oortians.
And now we are old. The game of being Kaminari has lost its thrill. But the Planck locks remain, teasing us. We think we know what lies beyond.
The voices become a chorus, speaking in unison.
A dreamtime. The infinite, sunlit sea.
We have done most of the work. We found a solution in the most unlikely place: in the Collapse, in our own genesis. A beginning hidden inside an ending.
We just need your help to make it real.
If you want to leave the island, give us your hand. Accept our entanglement. Join your volition to ours.
So we can be you. So we can all swim out to the sea.
Isidore sees three figures standing in the light, reaching out to him, stars shining in the palms of their open hands. He opens his arms to embrace them, to accept the bright thought they are offering him. His fingers entwine with theirs and then it is like he is not one but many, a node in a web of light stretching across the System, a part of something that he does not understand but which he can touch through the light of Jupiter in the sky, between Marcel’s fingers.
The entangled web grows at the speed of light, stretches from Mars to Earth to Saturn and beyond, as billions of minds accept the Kaminari’s offer. He does not understand how, but on Jupiter, their shared brightness is used to make a key, and it is turning in the lock.
No. Stop. The Kaminari chorus cries out. Isidore feels it, too, a wrongness in the weave, a hidden thread in the web that tightens, suddenly, like a noose. A trap. A betrayal.
The web unravels and catches fire. Far away, the Kaminari struggle to contain it. For Isidore/Owl Boy it is too late. The light consumes him as Jupiter dies in the sky.
*
Isidore opens his eyes and blinks at the light, but it is only Phobos that shines on his face, in the zenith of its rapid journey across the sky, casting golden beams through the dust curtains of Hellas Planitia. He is back in Owl Boy’s room. The mystery of the Spike flows through his thoughts like an inverted avalanche, pieces assembling themselves into something larger than he could have ever imagined.
He grabs his zoku qupter and sends a dense thought to the thief. Jean! You can’t believe what I found! He wraps the vision of the Kaminari in the qupt as a co-memory. It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to look at this!
The link breaks. Something is wrong. The room is too silent. There is a faint smell of ozone in the air. Marcel stands still next to him, eyes wide, mouth half-open, frozen.
And Isidore’s connection to the exomemory is gone.
The silence is so overwhelming that it takes him a moment to notice the fourth person in the room – or more like a person-shaped disturbance, a black and faceless shadow that does not catch the light properly. There is a silver rocket-shaped q-gun floating in the air above its left shoulder. The weapon’s sharp end glimmers dangerously, tracking Isidore’s every movement.
‘I apologise for any inconvenience caused,’ the shadow says. Its voice is vaguely male, but metallic and distorted. ‘Did I say that right?’
Isidore does a quick calculation in his head. He is not sure how much time has passed – only a few minutes, perhaps – and it should only take his bodyguard of the night, the Futurist, a few more to find him. He probes the exomemory to see if he could get a message out, but there is simply nothing there, the same empty feeling he has only experienced before while visiting the zoku colony in the Dust District.
‘You should have left things alone,’ the shadow says. ‘But it is not too late to make it right. Just give me the Cryptarch Key, and I’ll help you forget.’
‘Why?’
‘What you found is dangerous. It’s much better for all of us if I erase it for good, both from the exomemory and your mind.’
‘You are too late. I already sent it out.’
‘Ah. Well. That situation is already being dealt with, I’m told. Above my paygrade, in any case. It does not concern you. Please, I am asking nicely. Give me the exomemory key. I know you don’t want it anyway.’
‘It is not mine to give,’ Isidore says. I need to buy time. ‘Not many people know about the Key. You are somebody from Pixil’s zoku, aren’t you?’
‘Yes and no. We have sleepers in every zoku.’
‘But why are you doing this?’
The shadow fidgets with its hands. ‘Because we have to protect you. We keep things stable. We keep things sane.’
Isidore stares at him. ‘It was you, whoever you are. You caused the Spike. You interfered with what the Kaminari were doing. That’s what destroyed Jupiter. That’s what broke this poor man’s mind. And you have been covering your tracks ever since. Why would you tamper with data from Chen’s attack on Earth? Who are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Look, Isidore, if you don’t cooperate, we will have to take more drastic measures. If we can’t edit the exomemory, we’ll have to … erase it. The situation in the System is too unstable to risk the information you have falling into the wrong hands. Please, it’s just a few edits for the greater good, you won’t even notice it.’
‘No.’ Suddenly, Isidore is full of a righteous fury. ‘The Cryptarch deceived us long enough, with the zoku’s help, no less. We are not doing that again.’
‘You don’t understand.’ The shadow’s metallic voice is almost desperate. The q-gun brightens. ‘I don’t want to do this, you understand, but I have to follow the zoku volition, I don’t have a choice. I’m going to take the Key from your mind, Isidore. I’ll try to make this painless.’
‘Pixil said you always have a choice, that you are always free to leave.’
The shadow sighs. ‘She is too young, not entangled enough. She’ll learn. It’s no use trying to distract me, Isidore. Your tzaddikim won’t make it here in time. We built their technology, remember? I can control what they see. And afterwards, their memories will change, too.’
Isidore blinks. One more piece falls into place. ‘You’re one of the Elders. You’re Sagewyn.’
The shadow explodes into a zoku trueform, a swirling mandala of foglets and jewels, with Sagewyn’s face in the middle, still wearing a lopsided, pointy-eared mask. ‘One more thing for you to forget,’ he says.
Isidore takes the thief’s Watch from his pocket. It is cold and heavy in his hand.
‘Wait.’
‘You can’t fl
ee into the Quiet, Isidore,’ Sagewyn says. ‘I have blocked your access to the exomemory. Just close your eyes. It will be over soon.’
‘It’s not my Watch,’ Isidore says, ‘although it was Justin the Watchmaker who modified it for me. We of the Oubliette are not zoku or Sobornost, but we have our own crafts. I have known for a long time that someone would come for the Cryptarch Key, so I took precautions.’ There is a knot in his belly, and his hand shakes, but he holds the blazing trueform’s gaze. ‘It has a Mach-Zehnder trigger, coupled to my brain. And a microgram of antimatter. It should be enough to take out us both. Certainly enough to burn the Key.’
Sagewyn swirls back into the form in which Isidore first met him, a heavyset man in a blue cape with a ragged edge. His shoulders sag, and he looks tired. He smells faintly of stale sweat.
‘I was worried there would be something like that. I like you, Isidore. I like all of you. I wanted to give you a chance.’
‘We’ll stop you,’ Isidore says. ‘Whatever you are planning, it won’t work.’
Sagewyn sighs and clasps his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels.
‘We already did it, thirty-five minutes ago.’
The zoku Elder smiles wistfully. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’ He turns to look at the sky. ‘They’ll blame the Sobornost for it, of course. It’s all part of the game. Nothing is without purpose.’
Sagewyn becomes a black ragged silhouette against a white light outside. The silence disappears, and the exomemory is back in Isidore’s head. Phobos arcs down towards Hellas Planitia, a sharp, sudden sunset. A chorus of panic and fear echoes through the exomemory, rushing into Isidore like a tsunami. A white pillar rises in the horizon. Everything shakes. The city stumbles.
The last thing Isidore sees is Marcel, a hand squeezing Owl Boy’s shoulder, looking at the light, a sad look in his eyes, as if he knew he was right all along.
Like a drowning man, Isidore reaches out to the exomemory. His mother, in the Gentleman’s guise, floating far above the city’s rooftops. Pixil, walking through an agora of the Permanent Avenue with her friend Cyndra. His Quiet foster father, toiling in the footsteps of the city, looking up from the wall he is building as the light grows brighter. There is no time for words. Their minds meet, and for a moment, they fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Pixil’s rage, her hand on her sword; Raymonde’s futile attempt to create a foglet shield around the city, his father’s Quiet calm as he places a final regolith brick on top of the unfinished wall and turns to face the light, and suddenly, he is not alone in the maelstrom of fear anymore.