Quarantine

by Greg Egan

  'Put on one pair of handcuffs. Behind your back.'

  When I've done this, he blindfolds me. Then he guides me out of the room, walking beside me, gripping the chain of the cuffs with one hand, holding the gun to the side of my chest with the other.

  I hear little along the way; snatches of conversation in Cantonese and English, passing footsteps on the carpet, equipment humming softly in the distance. I catch a faint scent of organic solvents. PS tracks my location precisely,

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  for what that's worth. When we come to a halt, I'm pushed down into an armchair, and the gun is shifted to my temple.

  Without any preliminaries, a woman says, 'Who hired you?' She's a couple of metres away, facing me directly. Ί don't know.'

  She sighs. 'What exactly are you hoping for? Do you think we're going to jump through all the technological hoops for you? Truth drugs, truth mods, neural maps - all in pursuit of memories that may or may not have been falsified, or erased? If you think you're buying time, you're wrong. I have no interest in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pissing around with your brain. If you tell us the truth, and your story checks out, we'll be lenient. But if you don't cooperate, here and now, we'll kill you, here and now.'

  She's calm, but not mod calm; her tone of pained condescension sounds like a failed attempt to be coolly intimidating. Which doesn't necessarily mean that she's bluffing.

  'I'm telling you the truth. I don't know who my client is; I was hired anonymously.' 'And you couldn't penetrate that anonymity?' 'It wasn't my job to try.'

  'All right. But you must have formed some kind of working hypothesis. Who do you suspect?'

  'Someone who believed that Laura was taken by mistake. Someone who was afraid that their own relative in the Hilgemann was the real target.'

  'Who, specifically?'

  Ί never came up with a likely candidate. Whoever it was, they would have done their best to hide the family connection. The whole idea that the kidnappers might have taken the wrong person would only make sense to someone who'd gone to great lengths to conceal their relative's identity. I didn't pursue it; I had better things to do.'

  She hesitates, then lets that pass. 'How did you trace Laura to us?'

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  I explain at length about the cargo X-rays, and the drug suppliers' records.

  'And who else knows all this?'

  Any invented confidant would easily be revealed as fictitious. I could claim to have software, running on a public network, camouflaged and invulnerable, ready to tell all to the NHK police in the event of my disappearance - but that wouldn't be much of a threat. If I'd had enough evidence to convince the cops, I would have taken it to them in the first place, instead of breaking in.

  'Nobody.'

  'How did you get into the building?'

  Again, I have nothing to gain by lying. They must have pieced together most of the details by now; confirming what they already know can only make me seem more credible.

  'What do you know about the work we do here?' 'Only what's advertised. Contract biological research.' 'So why do you think we're interested in Laura Andrews?' Ί haven't been able to work that out.' 'You must have a theory,'

  'Not any more.' There are specialist mods for lying convincingly - for responding like a normal human being confidently telling the truth, in terms of voice-stress patterns, skin temperature, heart rate, etcetera - but I have no need of one; P3 alone makes all such variables utterly opaque. 'Nothing that stands up to the facts.'

  'No?'

  I have no shortage of unlikely explanations to offer in support of my ignorance; I recount every hypothesis that's passed through my head in the last eight days, however lame - save Company X and its birth-defects suit, and Laura the escapologist. I almost go so far as to mention my fear of the Children's involvement, but I stop myself; it seems so ridiculous now that I'm sure it would sound like an obvious lie.

  When I finally shut up, the woman says, 'Okay' - but not to me. My guard takes the gun away from my head,

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  but doesn't move me from the chair, and I suddenly realize what's about to happen. I suffer a brief moment of pure frustration - unconscious most of the time, blindfolded the rest; how am I ever going to find out anything? -before P3 smothers this unproductive sentiment. The needle goes into the vein, the drug flows into my bloodstream. I don't fight it; there's no point.

  I wake on a bed, not even handcuffed. I glance around; I'm in a small, almost empty flat. A man I haven't seen before is sitting on a chair in a corner of the room, watching me expressionlessly, resting a gun on his knee. I can hear street sounds from below, maybe fifteen or twenty storeys down. It's seven forty-seven, January 6th.

  I rise, and head for the bathroom; the guard makes no move to stop me. There's a toilet, a shower, a sink; a non-opening window about thirty centimetres square, the pane dimpled so that it passes no clear image; a ventilation grille in the ceiling, half the size of the window. I urinate, then wash my hands and face. With the water still running, I quickly search the room, but there's nothing that could be remotely useful as a weapon.

  The rest of the flat is a single room, with a kitchen in one corner; a small refrigerator, unplugged, with the door ajar; a microwave and hotplates built into the counter top. There's a window above the sink, covered by closed Venetian blinds. I start towards this area, but the guard says, 'There's nothing there you need. Breakfast is on its way.' I nod and turn back. I pace beside the bed, stretching cramped muscles.

  Shortly afterwards, another man brings in a carton packed with assorted fast food, and coffee. I eat sitting on the bed. The guard doesn't join in, and ignores my attempts at conversation. His eyes move only to follow me, so at times he appears almost as if he's in a kind of stupor, but I know precisely how alert he really is; I've spent enough twelve-hour stake-outs in a similar condition. When a mod grants you vigilance, you're literally incapable of anything less; boredom, distraction and

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  impatience have simply become inaccessible modes of thought. Unprimed, I may joke about zombies - but primed, I have no doubt that this is where the real strength of neurotechnology lies: not in the creation of exotic new mental states, but in the conscious, deliberate restriction of possibilities, in focusing, and empowering, the act of choice.

  I half expect to be drugged yet again, as soon as I've finished eating, but this doesn't happen. I don't push my luck; I lie on the bed and gaze at the ceiling like a model prisoner, obviating any need for restraint. I have no intention of causing my captors the slightest difficulty, until the odds are a great deal better that it would do me some good.

  And if no such opportunity arises?

  What happens if I can't escape?

  Killing me would be the simplest choice in most respects. But what are the alternatives? What could my interrogator's promise of leniency entail - assuming, for the sake of speculation, that it meant anything at all?

  A memory wipe, perhaps. A crude one. If BDI aren't willing to spend a fortune mapping my brain to extract information for their own benefit, they're hardly going to do so out of concern for the integrity of my personality. Natural human memory didn't evolve with any reason to be easily reversible; eliminating a given piece of knowledge, while leaving everything else intact, is a massive computational task. The only way to be cheap and thorough is to cut a wide swath.

  Dead, brain-wiped, or free. In order of decreasing probability. So how do I change the odds? How can I hope to discover - or invent - a reason for my captors to keep me alive and intact, when I still don't know who they are and what they're doing? And how can I hope to find that out, when I have no means of gathering data?

  I still have Cufct's snapshots in my head. I go through them again, one by one, on the chance that I might have missed something crucial. All the shots of workstation screens are packed with information - but DNA

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  sequences, protein models and neural maps don't mean a lot to me. I can
'read' them - in the sense that a child can spell out the individual letters of even the most difficult piece of text - but I don't stand a chance of recognizing any of the structures portrayed, let alone deducing anything about their function or context.

  I'm fed again. The guard is changed. I shuffle the facts for hours, but nothing new crystallizes out of the contradictions. Escape remains as unlikely as ever. Rushing the guard would be suicide; crashing through the window and falling to the street would be marginally less likely to kill me - except that I'd probably be shot half-way across the room.

  As the possibilities thin out, P3 seems to be dragging me further and further into a state of detachment. It wants me to gather more data - but it knows that I can't. It wants me to concentrate on plausible strategies for survival - but acknowledges that there are none. What's it going to do when all of its goals have been ruled out, when all of its elaborate optimization criteria have been rendered meaningless? Shut down? Bow out? Leave me to make my own choice between equally futile options?

  Towards evening, the man who led me to the interrogation yesterday comes into the room. He tosses a pair of handcuffs onto the bed.

  'Put them on. Behind your back.'

  What now? More questioning? I stand, pick up the cuffs. The other guard aims his weapon at my forehead, and flicks it onto auto.

  'Where are you taking me?'

  Nobody replies. I hesitate, then snap on the cuffs. The first man approaches me, producing a hypodermic capsule. It all seems almost familiar by now.

  Yeah. The same old routine. Nothing to fear. What better way to do it? The capsule is the same pale blue as before, but his grip conceals the markings.

  'Can't you tell me where I'm going?'

  He ignores me, unsheathes the capsule. He looks right at me - but his mods have pared him down until there's nothing left for his eyes to betray.

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  Ί just -'

  He places two fingers on my neck and stretches the skin. I say evenly, Ί want to speak to your boss again. There's something I didn't tell her. Something important I have to explain.'

  No reaction. The gun is still on auto; if I struggle, I'm dead for sure. The needle goes in. There's nothing to do but wait.

  I open my eyes and blink at the bright ceiling, then look around. I haven't even been moved. I am deprimed, though. It's 16:03, January 7th. The guard's chair, still in place, is empty.

  I lie perfectly still for a while, feeling numb and disoriented. When I try to get to my feet, I find that I'm weaker than I realized; I sit on the edge of the bed, with my head on my knees, trying to clear my thoughts.

  A wave of pure, suffocating claustrophobia passes through me. / would have died like a good little robot. That's the worst of it: the way I calmly accepted the loss of hope, the narrowing of the possibilities, every step of the way. / would have dug my own fucking grave, if they'd asked me.

  But they didn't. So why am I still alive? What was I sedated for? If my memory has been tampered with, they've done a seamless job - an unlikely feat in a day. (Then again, maybe they've spent a year on it, and everything that persuades me otherwise is a fabrication.)

  I look up as the door opens. The guard who injected me yesterday comes in; he's armed, but his weapon is holstered, as if he knows what state I'm in. Maybe they've dissolved my priming mods. I query P3; it still exists. I stop short of invoking it.

  He tosses something at me. I don't even try to catch it; it lands at my feet. A magnetic key.

  'That's for the front door,' he says. I stare at him. He seems almost embarrassed; whatever behavioural mods I've seen him with before, I'd say they're shut down now. He grabs the chair from the corner of the room and puts it beside the bed, then sits facing me.

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  'Take it easy, okay. My name's Huang Qing. I've got something to tell you.'

  'What?' I'm beginning to think I know the answer. And I think again about priming - to cushion the blow, to keep myself from going into shock - but then it occurs to me that there's probably no need.

  He says, warily, 'You've been recruited. By the Ensemble.'

  'The Ensemble.' The phrase dances through my head, pushing buttons and tripping switches. For an instant, all this sparkling new machinery is clearly visible to me: perfectly delineated, separate and comprehensible -although maybe this is just a delusion, a side-effect, a glitch. In any case, a moment later the insight (or mirage) is gone, and I could no more describe the minutiae of what's been done to me than I could determine, by introspection, which neurons make my bowels move or my heart beat.

  'You okay?'

  'I'm fine.' And it's true, I am. I feel a kind of abstract horror, and a remote, almost dutiful, outrage - but the sheer relief of finally knowing my fate, and understanding the sense of it, outweighs both.

  This is what they meant by leniency. I'm alive. My memory is intact. Nothing has been taken away from me -but something has been added.

  I have no idea what the Ensemble is - except that it's the most important thing in my life.

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  PART TWO

  5

  When Huang leaves, I spend a few minutes wandering about the flat, making a mental list of the things I'll need to buy. The clothes I was wearing when I broke into BDI have been destroyed, but my wallet has been returned to me, intact. Then I recall that I still have clothes in my room at the Renaissance - and that I'm still running up a bill there. I pocket the front-door key and take the stairs down, then I find a street sign and get my bearings. I'm only a few kilometres south of the hotel, so I walk.

  I can't help imagining what I'd be doing right now, if my old priorities still held sway - and the new mod does nothing to censor these speculations. Scenarios run through my head, unbidden; absurd fantasies of 'subduing' the mod by some heroic effort of will, long enough to put myself in the hands of a neurotechnician who could set me free. I have no doubt that this is what I 'would have' wanted - but I'm equally certain that it's not what I want, now. The disparity is irritating, but not unfamiliar; my superseded goals nag at me like insistent, but insincere, pangs of conscience.

  The humidity is stifling, and the streets are jammed with people; I weave my way through the Saturday-night crowds with a kind of mechanical persistence. I pass right through a youth gang, sixty or more teenagers of both sexes, all with identical sneering faces modelled on the same cult video star, all with the same shimmering, luminescent tattoos, cycling through the same psychedelic patterns in perfect synch. Not looking for trouble, says Deja Vu. Just looking to be seen.

  When I reach the hotel, there's no reason to linger. I quickly pack and check out. I detour past the airport on the way back; I'm not entirely sure why. In part, I'm just curious to know if I'm being tracked or followed, curious

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  to know exactly how much faith BDI now have in me. I think about marching into the passenger terminal and buying a ticket, just to see if anyone stops me, but then that seems like a childish thing to do, and I walk on.

  I keep half expecting to start hearing voices or seeing visions, although I know full well that such crude techniques are obsolete. Loyalty mods don't whisper propaganda in your skull. They don't bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don't cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn't an agent of change; it's the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh - or rather, flesh made into belief.

  What's more, the neurons involved are 'hardwired' -rendered physically incapable of further change. The belief is unassailable.

  I can't decide if knowing all this makes my condition more bizarre, or less. The mod takes no action to stop me thinking about its effects; presumably, the advantages of allowing
me to understand what's happened are seen to outweigh any conflict between the sincerity of my feelings and my awareness of their origins. After all, if I had no idea why I felt this way about the Ensemble, I'd probably go insane trying to work it out. No doubt the mod could have been designed to conceal itself, and to take steps to keep me from even wondering what had hit me - but censorship like that can be difficult to make seamless, without whittling the user down to a state approaching idiocy. Instead, I've been left with my reason and memory intact (so far as I can tell), free to find my own way to come to terms with the situation.

  The Ensemble, Huang explained, is an international alliance of research groups. BDI is a leading member of this alliance. The work they're doing is ground-breaking-

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  and I'm going to play a small part in ensuring that it continues. I'm still suffering the numbness of mild shock, but as that fades, I begin to realize how excited I am at the prospect. The Ensemble is important to me, and the fact that this is due to nanomachines having rewired part of my brain, rather than more traditional reasons, doesn't make it any less true.

  Sure, fucking with people's brains against their will is abhorrent - generally speaking - but for the sake of something as vital as the Ensemble's security, it was entirely justified. And sure, I may have seen BDI as my adversaries, twenty-four hours ago - but that wasn't exactly the cornerstone of my identity. I'm the same person I've always been - with a new career, and new allegiances, that's all.

  I stop off for a meal in a small, crowded food hall, for the sake of the distraction as much as anything else. I find that the longer I refrain from pointlessly dissecting my situation, the better I feel about it. I'm going to work for the Ensemble! What more could I want? And perhaps this is conditioning, after all - the mod rewarding me for taking the right attitude - but I don't think so. Surely it's the most natural human response, to grow weary of analysing the reasons for happiness.