Quarantine

by Greg Egan

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  worked - and an independent check on a second computer will soon settle the issue. Just what our sceptical clients will make of this impossible feat, I don't know; in their place, I'd suspect I was being set up for a torrent of disinformation. Maybe they'll decode great slabs of genuine data, and assume that it's all designed to mislead them. I glance up at a patch of cloudless blue sky, and laugh.

  Po-Kwai is on a rest day, but that's no problem; I've used Ensemble successfully under these conditions three times before. The smeared Nick-and-(dreaming)-Po-Kwai clearly has it down to a fine art now, the requisite skills preserved between incarnations in some corner of my skull, or hers, or both.

  I sit in the anteroom, primed, but nonetheless infected with a sense of anticipation - enough, at least, to keep me from sinking into a pure stake-out trance. I wonder idly, not for the first time, if in fact I could have 'stolen' Ensemble straight from Po-kwai's skull, by sheer brute choice of eigenstate: selecting the 'spontaneous' rearrangement of my own neurons into a perfect copy of the mod. But I don't see how my smeared self could have discriminated between a successful result and all the alternative, useless, neural rewirings possible; any test of efficacy would have required me to collapse first.

  At dinner, Po-kwai seems morose. I ask her what's wrong.

  She shrugs. 'Nothing new. I'm just sick of being bullied, and patronized, and gagged. That's all.' 'What's Leung done now?'

  'Oh, nobody's done anything. Nothing's changed. It just... all seems even more stupid and oppressive than usual, today. I read an article in Physical Review this morning: a whole new treatment of the measurement problem. They add a few more dimensions to space-time; throw in a few nonlinearities, asymmetries and assorted fudge factors; and - miracle of miracles! - the collapse of the wave falls out the other end.'

  I know I should have dutifully silenced her half-way

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  through the word 'measurement' - if only for the sake of appearances - but the hypocrisy would have been too much.

  She says, 'People are wasting valuable time, heading down paths that I know are blind alleys. That makes me a liar by default. I don't expect Leung to divulge any commercial secrets - like neural maps, or details of the mod - but I don't see why we can't at least publish the results of the experiments.' She makes a sound of pure frustration. Ί signed the secrecy provisions freely; I have no one to blame but myself. Of course, they wouldn't have hired me if I hadn't signed, so in a sense I had no choice - but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.'

  I say blandly, 'I'm sure ASR will release everything, in good time. How long has it been since your first result? Three months? Newton didn't publish his work for years.'

  'Newton's work,' she says bitterly, 'wasn't this important.'

  I deprime, smear, wait - the familiar routine. I spend some time trying to calm myself - until I realize that what I'm feeling is more excitement than fear. It's an unfamiliar emotion; it's a long time since I confronted anything challenging - let alone dangerous -without using P3 to neutralize the experience. I feel a surge of pure resentment: the zombie boy scout has cheated me out of half my life; stolen it, and then gone through the motions like a sleepwalker, not even truly living it for me. . . but I quash this maudlin bullshit. The zombie boy scout has saved my life a thousand times - and it was my choice to live that way. I never wanted excitement, I never wanted to be a mindless adrenalin junkie. I've been 'cheated out of nothing but an early death.

  And what 'danger' am I confronting now? I know I can bypass any amount of security hardware. I've proved that I can choose eigenstates as improbable as everything that lies ahead. What is there left to fear?

  Only change.

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  I stare 'out' the fake window at a cluster of dark towers shrouded in sparks of golden light, and think: the city I have to cross tonight is no place I've ever known. In the real New Hong Kong, locked doors do not fall open, guards do not avert their gaze. I'll be walking out into a dream city, where anything at all can happen.

  I laugh softly. Anything at all, yes - but out of that infinite diversity, I'll choose nothing but the smoothest, simplest burglary in history. Nothing but success, without complications or harm. Or change.

  Walking unseen through the thirtieth-floor checkpoint is an easy start; if everything collapses now, all I've done is left my post for thirty seconds, to ask a colleague to take my place while I deal with an urgent bowel movement that my mods seem unable to' delay. Not correct procedure, but nobody's going to shoot me for that.

  I glance at the guards, a young man and a middle-aged woman; they coyly look away. I wonder: Do they feel manipulated? Or are they rationalizing their actions (convenient beyond belief, for me - but not intrinsically all that bizarre) as easily as ever? If my smeared self chooses a state in which they're visibly inattentive, but leaves the hidden details of their mental processes to chance, then I expect the odds are that the state also includes an elegant justification. If the brain can pull off that trick, so consistently, for eigenstates chosen purely at random, then surely the bias that I'm introducing -skewing their actions, but blind to their thoughts -shouldn't spoil the effect.

  Between the twelfth and eleventh floors, I hear a door below me fly open. I freeze, think of backtracking - but before I can move, a technician bounds up the stairs right past me, whistling tunelessly.

  I slump against the wall. A few seconds later, the door of the thirteenth floor slams shut. Did he see me? He was in a hurry; he would have ignored me, regardless - so could my smeared self tell the states apart? (Why didn't

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  he keep the man out of the fucking stairwell altogether, until I'd passed?)

  Have I been collapsed, or not?

  I take out the dice generator, flick it on.

  Snake's eyes. And again. And again. And again.

  I'm greatly relieved . . . but there's something perverse, something almost insane about this test. If I were collapsed then, yes, the odds against this pattern would be overwhelming . . . but if I'm smeared, all patterns occur -so I'm decreasing the intrinsic probability of the eigenstate that constitutes success, putting more demands on my smeared self, and creating ever more versions of myself who know that they won't be chosen.

  And proving that / will survive the final collapse? Or at least, someone who arises from me: a 'descendant', a 'son'? No, I'm not even doing that. Every version who used the dice has smeared into versions who witnessed every possible outcome; if a billion versions consulted the dice, then a billion of the subsequent 'offspring' will have seen four snake's eyes.

  I have no choice but to take it on faith that I'm the one who'll end up real.

  I continue.

  I'm linked to the technician now - and keeping him from collapsing Nick-and-Po-kwai-and-(at-least)-two-guards. What about the other people on his shift? My mind baulks, but I keep moving. Even if he 'hadn't' come into the stairwell - whatever that means when we're not yet collapsed - would the mere fact that he might have done so been enough to correlate our wave functions? I'm linked to Po-kwai, aren't I - without this version of me having observed her since I smeared.

  I leave the stairwell on the ground floor and cross the foyer, staring at the guards staring into thin air. I 'do all I can' to notice whether or not I've been seen, 'making it easier' for my smeared self to choose the correct state.

  The front doors slide open, and I step out onto the forecourt - set back from the street, and largely concealed by a cluster of food stalls, all closed at this hour. I can hear

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  people shouting and laughing nearby, and the whir of bicycles in the distance, but mercifully, there's nobody in sight as I move around the building to the laneway where the robot delivery van is parked. I glance back once, half expecting to find myself being pursued by a guard who snapped out of his trance a moment too soon. That must be happening to someone. But not to me.

  There's plenty of slack in the timetable; it's o
nly 01:07, and the van's not due to depart until 01:20. I climb into the back, and sit in the dark. My presence or absence will have no effect on the vehicle's actions; its route and schedule have been pre-programmed, so nobody observing its passage will be observing me - measuring me 'in' or 'out'. However, they will be collapsing the van itself -keeping it on a single, plausible, 'classical' trajectory from here to BDI - and it's comforting to have that restraint imposed. I'm not sure what difference it makes in the end. . .but it's good to know that the vehicle won't be free to take every possible path across the city. Somehow, the thought of versions of me arriving at the wrong destination entirely seems worse than any other kind of fate.

  When the van starts to move, the effects are barely perceptible; the motor is silent, the acceleration gentle. Sitting on the cool metal, smelling the faint odour of plastic from some recent cargo, everything is disconcertingly mundane.

  I find myself at a loss to know how to pass the time. I don't want to dwell on the dangers ahead; there's nothing to be gained by contemplating the 'improbability' of success. I can't go into stake-out mode, but I distract myself by concentrating on trying to judge the van's progress - without aid from P5, without even consulting the route marked out on Deja Vu's street map. The ride is smooth, but taking a corner is unmistakable, and I plot each turn-off on a vaguely imagined map, summoned from memory alone. I notice occasional, faint decelerations as the van avoids other traffic - deviations from the predetermined schedule, yes, but still entirely indepen-

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  dent of me. I was wrong: outside the van there's no dream city, just the same New Hong Kong as always. And inside?

  I can't help myself; I take out the dice generator and run it again. The machine is too smart for its own good; the holograms it creates are always scrupulously consistent with ambient light, and so, in the darkness, the dice are rendered realistically invisible. Another chance to decide not to throw the dice . . . and risk not being chosen? I use a flashlight to watch the snake's eyes fall -and whatever the logic, the sight is powerfully reassuring. I shut the thing down after witnessing six tosses - having reduced my eigenstate's probability by a factor of about two billion.

  The van takes frequent, gentle turns as it moves through the clusters of branching streets towards BDI. I lose track of where I am; the pathological layout here is too complex to recall in detail, unaided. When the van finally halts, I wait thirty seconds, to convince myself that it hasn't merely paused for some unforeseen obstruction. I climb out, and find myself standing almost on the spot where I released Culex, back in January. Memories of the night flood back, with perfect clarity - but the process feels more like voyeurism than nostalgia; I have no right to stare so brazenly into the life of that dead stranger.

  It's three minutes past two. I have fifty-seven minutes. I glance up at the grey sky, at The Bubble weighing down on me, oppressive as a blanket of thunderclouds. From nowhere comes an irritable thought: I should have waited for Lui to pay me. Five hundred thousand dollars. And then decided if my commitment to the true Ensemble really demanded this piece of lunacy.

  I could crawl back into the van.

  I don't, though - and any versions of me who did are as good as dead, and they surely know it. How do they feel about that? How do they rationalize that?

  I head for the fence.

  I climb over as I did before; the prospect of unnecessary miracles on open ground makes me uneasy - and my

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  smeared self, as always, complies with my expectations. Or vice versa.

  I have no idea who's on duty tonight, but I picture Huang Qing and Lee Soh-lung. Preferably playing cards, not bothering to glance at the monitors. I still don't know at what point I sabotage this kind of observation: in the camera's sensor chip, the cable, the display - or the retina, or brain, of the watcher. Whatever gets me by unnoticed; all I can choose is the outcome, and who knows what mechanism is most likely?

  I enter by the same window, but this time there's no need to cut; it slides open at my touch. I climb through, and make my way slowly across the lab, hands outstretched, wishing I still had the wireframe map that guided me the last time. I bump into a stool, then a bench, but I don't send any glassware crashing. Those of me who did might as well slit their wrists on the fragments. I move down the hallway, and into the stairwell. The vault, according to Li Siu-wai, is on the fourth floor, in the back of Chen Ya-ping's office; in fact, even after all this time, I think I can recall a blue no data region in the Culex map in just that spot.

  Half-way up the stairs, doubt hits me like a blow to the chest. Po-kwai is twenty kilometres away. Fast asleep. We're not 'linked', we're not 'smeared', she's not helping me 'choose reality'. How could I have ever swallowed all that quantum-mystical voodoo? It's bullshit. Lui set me up; it's as simple as that. The Canon is a trick, to test my loyalty. He sabotaged my mods. Planted a rigged dice generator in a stall near my home. Conspired with Po-kwai, and the guards here, and at ASR.

  And the padlock? How could he have known that I'd try something as ridiculous as 9999999999, first time?

  But if he's screwed around with my mods, there's no telling what else he's done inside my skull. For all I know, Hypernova might grant him absolute control over everything I do, everything I think. He could have made me guess the right combination.

  I lean against the wall, trying to decide which is the

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  most insane: believing in this pointless, farcical, massively implausible conspiracy ... or seriously thinking that I can open locks by splitting into ten billion people.

  I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell. And the true Ensemble? The mystery I'm living for? Is that nothing but another lie? I know it's nothing but the loyalty mod, the way my brain's been wired, but -

  I search my pockets for something coin-like, something Lui can't possibly have interfered with. The best I can do is the flashlight's spare button-shaped power cell; there's a plus sign engraved on one side and a minus sign on the other. I crouch on the landing, the flashlight beam making a wedge of brightness on the concrete.

  'Five plus signs,' I whisper. 'That's all.' The odds are one in thirty-two; not much of a miracle to ask for.

  Plus.

  Plus.

  I laugh. What did I expect? The true Ensemble would never abandon me. Minus.

  A strange numbness spreads through me, but I toss the cell again, quickly - as if what follows might somehow undo the past, if only I act swiftly enough.

  Plus.

  Minus.

  I stare at the final verdict - and realize that it proves nothing. Everything I've been living for might still be either true or false.

  Either way, though, there's no point going on.

  I bound up the last two flights of stairs, jubilant, invulnerable. If those five simple plus signs haven't purged me of every last trace of doubt and paranoia, then nothing will.

  Once I'm in Chen's office, I switch on the flashlight -unsure why I didn't 'risk' using it when crossing the lab on the ground floor, but confident now that there is no danger. I could turn on every light in the building and scream at the top of my voice, and nobody would know I was here.

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  What looks like a normal connecting door leads to a small room fronting the vault itself: an unimposing construction of dull grey polymer composite - harder to cut, abrade, melt or burn than a metre or two of solid steel, but about a thousand times lighter. The control panel has a thumb-scanning window, a numeric keypad, and three slots for keys. I hesitate, half expecting to have to wait a while for the lock to smear sufficiently, but a green light on the panel shines almost at once. Of course -the thing has been smeared since long before I walked in; every unobserved inanimate object does so. All I've done is observed it without collapsing it - and hence smeared myself still further into different versions, a whole new lineage for each eigenstate of the lock, giving me the power to choose its state when I choose my own.

  I grasp the hand
le and tug it, far harder than I need to; with a soft click the door flies open, almost hitting me in the face. I step round it, and walk into the vault.

  Six by six metres, and most of it empty space. I play the flashlight beam across the far wall; there's a rack of shelves going up to the ceiling. Eight shelves, each bearing twenty neat plastic ROM boxes - the kind that hold two hundred chips.

  I move in closer. Most of the boxes are labelled with ranges of serial numbers: 019200-019399, and so on. The boxes on the lowest two shelves, and the rightmost two on the third shelf, are unlabelled and empty, but the rest seem to be full. That makes a total of twenty-three thousand, six hundred chips.

  I take the dice generator from my pocket - why shouldn't I make this easy on myself? - but then change my mind and put it away. Will one of my sons survive - or one of their cousins, who used the dice? Both are capable of success. I reach out quickly and grab a box. It has a simple, purely mechanical lock. Perhaps I could make even this slide open by pure choice - my first ever feat of truly macroscopic quantum tunnelling - but I don't. I open it with a skeleton key, which takes almost a minute. I resist the temptation to close my eyes before lifting a chip

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  from its cavity on the moulded tray - and resist the temptation to put it back and choose again, when I realize that I've taken one from the very edge of the tray.

  I plug the ROM into a reader with an IR transceiver, then I invoke RedNet and CypherCIerk, and talk to the reader.

  I say, 'Show me the ID page, in English.'

  The shadows of the vault fade almost to blackness, and a window of vivid blue-on-white text rushes towards me from the centre of my visual field:

  ENSEMBLE'

  Neural Modification Algorithm © Copyright 2068, biomedical development international

  Unauthorized reproduction of this software by any method, in any media, is a violation of the Intellectual Property Covenant of 2045, and is punishable under the laws of the Republic of New Hong Kong, and other signatories to the covenant.