The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  “Del Casal is in the poker room off the mezzanine,” she said.

  A shallow stream ran along the mezzanine, babbling low over crystal. Footsteps of quartz and glass stood above the surface, and they skipped across to a set of interconnected, high-ceilinged rooms. The poker wing.

  Belisarius surveyed the sea of tables hosting five-card and seven-card stud, draw games, and more exotic ones. Each of the three chambers contained sixty tables. The scattered, terse speech revived longings. He’d outplayed a lot of people in this casino.

  Casino games hadn’t changed much since the late nineteenth century. Technology had transformed many people, but it had done nothing to the cards except wrap them in counter-measures to protect the purity of the games. The Lanoix probably had more Faraday cages built into its walls than an Anglo-Spanish Bank. Low white noise generators worked in the ceilings, the walls, even the floors. EM interference engines worked the non-visual portions of the spectrum, especially thermal and UV. Much like the Puppet shipping business across their wormhole, casinos lived and died on their perceived integrity.

  “He’s in the third chamber,” Madelaine said. The highest stakes area.

  “This is where you’ll have to let me go,” Belisarius said. She gave him a disappointed look. “I want to be able to observe him for a bit before I talk business.”

  Her shoulders drooped. He slipped her a large tip and his glass.

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” she smiled, not entirely innocently. “I like how you’ve grown up, Bel.”

  “I promise.”

  She laughed at his lie. He passed through the mid-stakes chamber and into the high-stakes area.

  Antonio Del Casal sat at a five-card draw table, watching a hand play out. Like Belisarius, Del Casal traced his descent many generations back to Colombian roots. But where Afro-Caribbean and indigenous blood had circulated in Belisarius’s ancestry for centuries, Del Casal possessed colonial paleness, with only black eyes and hair hinting at deft mestizo additions.

  Belisarius moved to a set of chairs at the edge of the room, looking down at the games.

  Cards possessed a kind of purity. The apparent evenness of the probability was platonically untouchable. Politics, violence, foolishness, poverty and wealth meant nothing to probability. That was the Homo quantus in him. Gambling was like coming home.

  And cards possessed a kind of stability through time. By the sixteenth century, something like modern cards were already circulating in Europe, and their final form, with four suits of thirteen cards, had fallen into place by the nineteenth century. Then, like lizards and sharks and snakes, they ceased to change, not because of their charm, but because mimetic selection had perfectly adapted them to a sociological niche. It comforted him to be part of that stability, if only for what it told him about consciousness.

  As intelligence was an emergent property of life, so games of controlled chance were an emergent property of intelligence. Intellect was an adaptive evolutionary structure, allowing humanity not only to sense the world in space, but to predict future events through time. Games of chance tested that predictive machine—so much so that games of controlled chance discriminated consciousness from unconsciousness far better than Turing.

  Belisarius had never trusted the Turing test. It depended on emulating consciousness enough to deceive a conscious being. But conscious beings were very deceivable, so Turing skewed to false positives. Belisarius had played against computers and even AIs like Saint Matthew. Sooner or later, a good player would detect the rules laid down by the programmers, and Belisarius was a very good player. Changing styles at random, even randomizing the threshold values used to make decisions, all just masked the rules at the bottom, and only for a time. Playing against any computer, and by extension, against even a Homo quantus in the fugue, was playing against nothing but a set of decipherable algorithms.

  Del Casal rose and moved to a table on the bar overlooking the main concourse. Belisarius followed. A discordance of roulette wheel ticking, bet making, dealer calls, and cheers and groans travelled up to the bar, mixing in the wash of white noise.

  “Doctor, I’ve been hoping to speak with you,” Belisarius said in Anglo-Spanish.

  Del Casal surveyed Belisarius. Augments surely worked behind Del Casal’s eyes, without the characteristic glinting of light; Del Casal would have the most expensive ones, feeding directly to his visual cortex, skipping the retinal middleman. His eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Arjona,” he said. “You weren’t much more than a boy when I last saw you in the casinos, and I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.”

  “That’s true.” Belisarius took a drink from a waiter and moved closer.

  “You’re Homo quantus,” Del Casal said, one eyebrow rising curiously, “although not a very good one if you’re out here, with the rest of us.”

  Belisarius toasted the doctor.“Two things the quantum fugue doesn’t have are scotch and women.”

  Del Casal smiled and raised his own drink. “Might the fugue help with cards?” he asked.

  “Quantum perceptions, in their sum, give counter-intuitive results, which is why you don’t see investors breaking down the gates of the Garret to throw money at us.”

  “So I wonder why you’re here talking to me?” Del Casal said slowly. “Ten years ago, you were partners with William Gander.”

  “You have good sources.”

  “It pays to subscribe to the right information-scraping services.”

  “I haven’t worked with Gander in a while.”

  “He’s in jail now,” Del Casal said. “I guess he conned the wrong person.”

  “I deal in outsider art now.”

  “Yes,” Del Casal said, “although I doubt you’re here to sell me art.”

  “I’m an admirer of your work. I have a project that could use your skills, and I’m paying far more than market rates.”

  “There are many good geneticists,” Del Casal said.

  “Not on this work.”

  Del Casal’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe we should retire to someplace quieter,” he said. “I keep an apartment in the casino.”

  Belisarius followed Del Casal out of the concourses, past the restaurants, and over a bridged stream. Water lilies and fish glinted with bioluminescence in an ostentatious display of wealth. Belisarius’s brain sniffed at patterns. The bioluminescent flashes weren’t responding to mechanical disturbance. The plants and fish fluoresced in cascades of different colors. The patterns were beautiful, but also full of information. Simple signal transduction in an ecosystem, hidden in what any other tourist would see as a lightshow. Surely Del Casal’s work. What was the signal?

  They reached a garden of transparent and mercurially shining plants that climbed a sloping hill of sintered regolith. Another stairwell of the rigid-leaved plants led to a balcony.

  “Your work?” Belisarius asked.

  “The Lanoix is making its mark as one of the premiere casinos in civilization,” Del Casal said. “It needs unique beauty.”

  “These leaves,” Belisarius said, touching one gently with a finger, testing its hardness. “Is this glass?”

  “I inserted genes from extremophilic bacteria that dissolve silicates,” Del Casal. “I also engineered a silicate carrier system, and a mineral deposition pathway, mirroring the one used by oysters to make shells and pearls. They are fragile and beautiful, but nothing as complex as the Homo quantus.”

  “Are you an admirer?”

  “Of the craftsmanship,” Del Casal said. “Not of the project goal.”

  “We’re in agreement on that.”

  Belisarius didn’t ask about the silvered plants lining the stairway. They shone with another faint luminescence, all the way to Del Casal’s apartment. Del Casal opened the door and stepped in. Instead of overhead lights, the soft glow of fireflies lined the ceiling, arching above like stars haunting a dome. Del Casal crossed to the other side of the room, pulling down a bottle of wine from a rack. Belis
arius closed the door and grew still.

  “More of your work?” he asked.

  “I make things of beauty when beauty is called for, but nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw,” Del Casal said as he extracted the cork.

  The walls on either side of Belisarius were covered in what seemed to be cactus skin, but the needles, long and finger-thick, all pointed at him.

  “These are long of tooth,” Belisarius said. “Animal?”

  Del Casal poured one glass, but left the other empty. He sipped and turned.

  “All plant,” Del Casal said. “I added photoreceptors sensitive to infrared so that they are capable of tracking... targets. The bulbs at the base of each needle are pressurized bladders, designed like the explosive chambers some plants use to launch their seeds, although no natural plant is able to reach the pressure I have achieved. If you think of musket gunpowder, you’ll have some idea.”

  “What’s the trigger?”

  Del Casal tapped a finger to his head. “My own thoughts transmit a radio signal through neural augments. The base of the bulbs contain radio antennae, grown in fractal shape to reduce their size. They react only to one frequency and the rest, as they say, is signal transduction.”

  “An interesting greeting.”

  “One that is occasionally necessary. So tell me, Arjona. Why are you here? You are no art dealer.”

  “I’ve got a job. A big one. And I need a geneticist.”

  “There are many geneticists.”

  “Could any of them duplicate your work with the Numen?” Belisarius asked.

  Del Casal watched Belisarius in still silence for long moments. “Now I have to compliment your sources. What kind of a confidence scheme are you hatching, Arjona?”

  “I want to penetrate the Forbidden City and some secure facilities at Port Stubbs.”

  “How?”

  “I want you to engineer someone to smell like a Numen.”

  It sounded dirty when he said it. The Numen were the second most reviled people in all of civilization.

  “You are wasting my time,” Del Casal said.

  “I know that you’ve been blocking the pheromones in the descendents of escaped Numen.”

  “I have been able to reduce the pheromones, mostly through the disruption of metabolic intermediates. I have not cured anyone.”

  “I’m looking for you to try, and I can offer you something special,” Belisarius said. “A real Puppet, one of the exiles.”

  “I thought exiles were only mutants who could not detect the pheromones from the Numen.”

  “I’d like him fixed too. He’s going to help penetrate the Puppet defenses.”

  Del Casal sipped his wine. “Correct a genetic flaw in a Puppet and create a false Numen. You have not come all this way without knowing that what you ask is impossible? The best that can be done with both is to make forgeries. The original designers created entirely novel sub-cellular organelles with unique molecular and genetic structures, as well as novel symbiotic microbiomes to alter biochemistry, immunity and neural responses. Even with authentic examples I cannot replicate either the Numen or the Puppets.”

  “I know,” Belisarius said. “This is an exercise in engineered mimicry. How close do you think your forgeries can get?”

  Del Casal’s eyes narrowed. He swirled his wine slowly, watching the wash cling to the inner surface of the glass.

  “As in all things,” Del Casal said, “the more money spent, the better the product, but I doubt you could afford even a distant approach.”

  “The take is seven figures, in francs. You’d be surprised at my financial backing.”

  Del Casal’s eyebrows rose appreciatively. “In that case, no doubt the forces prepared to kill you would not surprise me either?”

  “None of the patron nations have any reason to have noticed me,” Belisarius said. “I’m not only going to be working with a mutant Puppet and a false Numen. I have two Homo quantus on the team. That’s a lot of genetic models to learn from.”

  Del Casal looked mildly intrigued. “I might be interested in seeing some of the modifications made to the Homo quantus.”

  “Easily arranged,” Belisarius said.

  “Shame your team does not include a mongrel. You would have a whole set of the human family.”

  “Funny you should say that. I’m headed out to meet one after this. Have you ever been to The Deepest Mess in Civilization?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE BEST PLACE to barrack the Congregate’s special pilots, the Homo eridanus, was under the crust of an ice world. Two astronomical units from Oler, circling the brown dwarf Epsilon Indi Bb, was the dwarf planet Claudius. Upon arrival, Belisarius and Del Casal bought two expensive tickets for a specially pressurized elevator to take them to a party twenty-three kilometers beneath the surface of the ice.

  The elevator was as big as a house, and other party-goers packed its divans and settees, mostly Congregate officers and some of their nouveau riche civilian friends. Moments of sober terror punctuated the nervously brave mood whenever their chamber creaked or the sounds of snapping tectonic ice vibrated in their bones.

  At twenty-two kilometers below the surface, the view opened on one side. The tower of carbon containing their elevator carried them past slush dotted with moving icebergs, and then into the dark, open water of a protected bay.

  At this depth, the frame of the elevator creaked as it endured eight hundred atmospheres of pressure. If any of the systems failed, they would be crushed instantly. At the bottom of the elevator shaft, the chamber’s airlock made a hard seal with the visitors’ section of The Deepest Mess in Civilization.

  The party-goers cheered and toasted the descent. The guide gave each person a pin in the shape of an ocean vent smoker. Bragging rights, even though they were still a dozen kilometers above the smokers of the ocean floor. They stepped into a great circular room perhaps seventy meters in diameter. It was a Congregate officer’s mess with expensive stuffed chairs and real wood tables, a bar, pool tables and VR battle simulators.

  However, no one paid any attention to the inside. The outer wall of the mess was floor-to-ceiling windows of glass so thick it distorted the view beyond. The windows also magnified the tiny vibrations of icebergs grinding against one another, like tympanic membranes. Moments of conversational stillness opened the mess to the long, rumbling thunder. Spotlights glared beyond the windows, lighting the swirling sediment and bulky gray shapes darting past.

  Holograms projecting from the ceiling showed a schematic of the mess, the downthrust spear of ice it occupied, and the sub-surface sea that surrounded it, as well as a series of red dots. Each dot marked the position of a member of the sub-species Homo eridanus, the mercenary shock pilots of the Congregate navy. Haloing these markers were names, depths, speed, pressure, temperature and racing statistics.

  The dots plunged hundreds of meters past the mess. They exchanged positions, all but one, the leader who could not be overtaken, Vincent Stills.

  Stills’ name was a transliteration. The Homo eridanus, engineered to live at benthic depths of another world, had no organs for human speech. It was rumored, perhaps apocryphally so, that the Venusians had insisted that the Homo eridanus select French names for transliteration. If that was ever the case, the mercenaries hadn’t leapt to name themselves Jacques, Emmanuelle or François.

  The Homo eridanus were bitterly ugly, man-sized, having no human features at all. Whale-like skin covered layers of insulating fat so thick they could wholly retract their inhuman gray arms into their blubber. Instead of legs, they had thick tails that might have looked more suitable on walruses. And where humans had faces, the Homo eridanus had been engineered with wide fish mouths, large enough to gulp anoxic water and force it over starved gills. They had electroplaques beneath their skin, like the Homo quantus did, for navigation and speech. Two black eyes, as big as eight balls, placed to optimize binocular vision, had no capacity to emote.

  Their featu
res were so monstrous and their genetic heritage so mixed, with genes from so many species, that they called themselves The Tribe of the Mongrel or The People of the Dog. And although they called themselves this, they wouldn’t let anyone else call them dogs. Another urban myth told of an early mongrel pilot ramming her fighter into a Congregate troop transport, killing herself, the troops, and the officer who had called her chien.

  The holographic displays showed Stills racing deeper and deeper, two kilometers beneath them now. Past the icy prominences that thrust through bottom layers of grinding icebergs and slush, Stills pressed into the unobstructed oceanic currents of the big moon. His nearest competitors hesitated at the bottom of the floating ice fields, just shy of the strong currents of the open ocean.

  A signal went to racers that the race had been won. They began swimming back. The depth numbers around Stills’ icon paused, and then resumed their frenetic flipping as he plunged deeper. Stills was fast, sustaining forty-five kilometers per hour. The pressure gripping him topped a thousand atmospheres and a swift current now carried him away, far faster than he could swim.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said in français 8.31, “Monsieur Stills appears to be on the trail of a Claudian tuna, a big one. The house will accept bets on whether he catches it, as well as on whether he makes it back to the mess. Odds are listing now.”

  Locals and members of the tourist party turned quickly to pads, wrist controllers or implants to place bets. Bookies were giving four to one odds against Stills catching the fish. The odds of Stills returning at all from the depth he’d reached were a bit better than even.

  “What do you think of the odds?” Belisarius asked Del Casal.

  “I am surprised he is still alive past a thousand atmospheres,” Del Casal said. “I doubt he is coming back.”

  “I’ll take that bet, and the one on him catching the fish,” Belisarius said. “Sixty francs?”

  “Done.”

  As the other mongrel racers returned, their holographic icons winked out. Stills’ icon grew to cover the ceiling. The statistics were not promising. The ocean current at his depth held steady at sixty kilometers per hour, in the direction he chased the Claudian tuna. A rolling server with a tray of small bottles, syringes and smokables beeped to them. Del Casal took a bottle. Belisarius waved it away. A cheer filled the mess. The tuna had escaped.