The Quantum Thief (3 page)

‘I thought you wanted to get to know me,’ Perhonen says, offended.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Just, you know, making sure I’m presentable. You don’t spend much time in the company of ladies in the Prison.’

‘Why were you there, anyway?’

Suddenly, it feels amazing that I haven’t thought about it for so long. I have been too preoccupied with guns, defection and cooperation.

Why was I in the Prison?

‘A nice girl like you should not worry about such things.’

Perhonen sighs. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should not be talking to you. Mieli would not like it if she knew. But it’s been so long since we had anyone interesting onboard.’

‘This certainly does not seem like a lively neighbourhood.’ I indicate the starry field around us. ‘Where are we?’

‘The Neptunian Trojan belt. Arse-end of nowhere. I waited here for a long time, when she went to get you.’

‘You have a lot to learn about being a criminal. It’s all about the waiting. Boredom punctuated by flashes of sheer terror. Sort of like war.’

‘Oh, war was much better,’ she says, excitedly. ‘We were in the Protocol War. I loved it. You get to think so fast. Some of the things we did – we stole a moon, you know. It was amazing. Metis, just before the Spike: Mieli put a strangelet bomb in to push it out of orbit, like fireworks, you would not believe—’

Suddenly, the ship is silent. I wonder if it realised it has said too much. But no: its attention is focused elsewhere.

In the distance, amidst the spiderweb of Perhonen’s sails and the spimescape vectors and labels of habitats far away, there is a jewel of bright dots, a six-pointed star. I zoom in in the scape view. Dark ships, jagged and fang-like, a cluster of seven faces sculpted in their prows, the same faces that adorn every Sobornost structure, the Founders: god-kings with a trillion subjects. I used to go drinking with them.

The Archons are coming.

‘Whatever it was that you did,’ Perhonen says, ‘looks like they want you back.’

THE THIEF AND THE ARCHONS

What did I do?

Mieli’s heart pounds as the pilot’s crèche embraces her. Something went wrong in the Prison. But it was just like the sims. Why are they after us? She summons the combat autism the pellegrini built into her. It enfolds her like a cool blanket, turns the world into vectors and gravity wells. Her mind enmeshes with Perhonen’s, thinking fast thoughts.

Objects: Perhonen.

Scattered Trojan asteroids, clustered around 2006RJ103, a two-hundred k nugget of rock, inhabited by slow-brained synthlife.

The Prison, a diamond doughnut thirty lightseconds behind them, the origin of Perhonen’s current vector, dense, dark and cold.

The Archon bladeships, coming in fast at a .5g, much more delta-v than the gentle tug of Perhonen’s lightsail. The torches of their antimatter engines are fiery pillars of backscattered mesons and gamma rays in the spimescape.

The Highway, twenty lightseconds away, their next way-point. A constant torrent of ships, one of the few rare ideal invariant surfaces in the N-body Newton’s nightmare of the Solar System, a gravitational artery that lets you travel fast and easy with the gentlest of pushes. A safe haven, too far away.

All right, breathes Mieli. Combat mode.

The hidden Sobornost tech beneath the Oortian sapphire coral wakes up. The spidership reconfigures itself. The scattered modules pull themselves together along their tethers and fuse together into a tight, hard cone. The q-dot winglets transform from a perfectly reflective material into a diamond-hard firewall.

Just in time, before the Archons’ nanomissiles hit.

The first volley is just a series of thistledown impacts that fail to penetrate. But the next batch will adapt and optimise, and so will the ones after that, over and over and over until either the software or the hardware of the firewall collapses. And after that—

We need to get to the Highway.

The engines in her mind prune the game-theoretic branches like diamond-bladed chainsaws. There are many paths through this, like meanings in an Oortian song, and she only needs to find one—

Another barrage, innumerable needles of light in the spimescape. And this time, something gets through. One of the storage modules blossoms into a misshapen sapphire growth. Calmly, she ejects it, watches it drift away, still mutating and shifting in slow motion like a malignant tumour, forming strange organs that fire molecule-sized spores at Perhonen’s firewall until she burns it with the anti-meteorite lasers.

‘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 things 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?’