The Quantum Thief (4 page)

I am back to my human self again. The memory of the extended senses and computational power is fading, but still feels like a phantom ache of a lost limb. And of course, I have an Archon running inside me now, locked inside my bones, in computational deep freeze.

We are sitting in one of the cramped storage modules, spinning on a tether for gravity, while the ship repairs itself. But there is a sparkling river of spaceships all around us, scattered over thousands of cubic kilometres but magnified by Perhonen’s skin: overclocked fast zoku generation ships that dump waste heat madly, every day of a journey like a thousand years for them; whalelike calmships with green and miniature suns inside, Sobornost thoughtwisps everywhere like fireflies.

‘It’s quite simple, really – it’s all about neuroscience. Misdirected attention.’

Mieli ignores me. She is setting up a small table between us. There are Oortian dishes on it: odd purple transparent cubes and squirming synthlife and neatly cut sections of multicolored fruits – expertly fabbed – and two small glasses. Her movements in setting it up are formal and composed, ritual-like. Ignoring me, she produces a bottle from a wall compartment.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

She looks at me, expressionless. ‘We’re celebrating,’ she says.

‘Well, we should.’ I grin at her. ‘Anyway, it took me a long time to discover that: you can still induce inattentional blindness in Sobornost minds, would you believe? Nothing ever changes. So I swapped its sensory inputs, hooked it up to a sim based on Perhonen’s spimescape. It still thinks it’s making a Prison. Very, very slowly.’

‘I see.’ She frowns at the bottle, apparently trying to figure out how to open it. The lack of interest she displays in my master plan irritates me.

‘See? It works like this. Look.’

I touch a spoon, grab it gently, make a motion like closing my hand around it, whereas in fact it’s already falling into my lap. Then I hold up both of my hands, opening them. ‘Gone.’ She blinks in astonishment. I close my left fist again. ‘Or, perhaps, transformed.’ I open it, and her ankle ringlet is there, squirming. I hold it out to her, an offering. Her eyes flash, but she reaches out, slowly, and takes it from my hand.

‘You will not touch that,’ she says. ‘Ever again.’

‘I promise,’ I tell her, meaning it. ‘Professionals from now on. Deal?’

‘Agreed,’ she says, with an edge to her voice.

I take a deep breath.

‘The ship told me what you did. You went to hell to get me out,’ I say. ‘What is it that you want so badly to do that?’

She says nothing, opening the bottle’s seal with a sudden twist.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘About that offer. I have reconsidered. Whatever it is that you need stolen, I will steal. No matter who you work for. I’ll even do it your way. I owe you that. Call it a debt of honour.’

She pours the wine. The golden liquid is sluggish, so it takes time. When she’s done, I raise my glass. ‘Shall we drink to that?’

Our glasses clink together: toasting in low-g is a skill. We drink. Thanisch-Erben Thanisch, 2343. A faint matchstick smell the older bottles of the stuff have: sometimes called Thaddeusatem, Thaddeus’s breath.

How do I know that?

‘It’s not you I need, thief,’ Mieli says. ‘It’s who you were. And that’s the first thing we have to steal.’

I stare at her, breathing in Thaddeus’s breath. And with the smell comes a memory, years and years and years of being someone else, being poured into me

like wine into a glass. ‘Medium full-bodied, robust, with a trace of eagerness’, he says, looking at her through the Riesling that is like liquid light, smiling. ‘Who are you calling full-bodied?’ she asks, laughing, and in his mind she is his.

But it is he who is hers for many years, years of love and wine, in the Oubliette.

He – I – hid it. Mind steganography. The Proust effect. Somewhere the Archons would not find it, an associative memory unlocked by smell that you would never come across in a prison where you never eat or drink.

‘I am a genius,’ I tell Mieli.

She does not smile, but her eyes narrow, a little. ‘Mars, then,’ she says. ‘The Oubliette.’

I feel a chill. Clearly, I have little privacy in this body, or in my mind. Another panopticon, another prison. But as prisons go, it is a lot better than the last one: a beautiful woman, secrets and a good meal, and a sea of ships carrying us to adventure.

I smile.

‘The place of forgetting,’ I say, and raise my glass. ‘To new beginnings.’

Quietly, she drinks with me. Around us, Perhonen’s sails are bright cuts in space, carrying us down the Highway.

THE DETECTIVE AND THE CHOCOLATE DRESS

It surprises Isidore that the chocolate factory smells of leather. The conching machines fill the place with noise, echoing from the high red-brick walls. Cream-coloured tubes gurgle. Rollers move back and forth in stainless-steel vats, massaging aromas from the chocolate mass inside with each gloopy, steady heartbeat.

There is a dead man lying on the floor, in a pool of chocolate. A beam of pale Martian morning light from a high window illuminates him, turning him into a chocolate sculpture of suffering: a wiry pietá with hollow temples and a sparse moustache. His eyes are open, whites showing, but the rest of him is covered in a sticky layer of brown and black, spilled from the vat he is clutching, as if he tried to drown himself in it. His white apron and clothes are a Rorschach test of dark stains.

Isidore ’blinks, accessing the Oubliette exomemory. It lets him recognise the man’s face like it belonged to an old friend. Marc Deveraux. Third Noble incarnation. Chocolatier. Married. One daughter. It is the first fact, and it makes his spine tingle. As always in the beginning of a mystery, he feels like a child unwrapping a present. There is something that makes sense here, hiding beneath chocolate and death.

‘Ugly business,’ says a raspy, chorus-like voice, making him jump. It is the Gentleman, of course, standing on the other side of the body, leaning on his cane. The smooth metal ovoid of his face catches the sun in a bright wink, a stark contrast against the black of his long velvet coat and top hat.

‘When you called me,’ Isidore says, ‘I didn’t think it was just another gogol pirate case.’ He tries to sound casual: but it would be rude to completely mask his emotions with gevulot, so he can’t stop a note of enthusiasm escaping. This is only the third time he has met the tzaddik in person. Working with one of the Oubliette’s honoured vigilantes still feels like a boyhood dream come true. Still, he would not have expected the Gentleman to call him to work on mind theft. Copying of leading Oubliette minds by Sobornost agents and third parties is what the tzaddiks have sworn to prevent.

‘My apologies,’ the Gentleman says. ‘I will endeavour to arrange something more bizarre next time. Look closer.’

Isidore takes out his zoku-made magnifying glass – a gift from Pixil, a smooth disc of smartmatter atop a brass handle – and peers at the body through it. Veins and brain tissue and cellular scans flash into being around him, archeology of a dead metabolism floating past like exotic sea creatures. He ’blinks again, at the unfamiliar medical information this time, and winces at the mild headache as the facts entrench themselves in his short-term memory.

‘Some sort of … viral infection,’ he says, frowning. ‘A retro-virus. The glass says there is an anomalous genetic sequence in his brain cells, something from an archeon bacterium. How long before we can talk to him?’ Isidore never looks forward to interrogating resurrected crime victims: their memories are always fragmented, and some are unwilling to overcome the traditional Oubliette obsession with privacy, even to help solve their own murder or a gogol piracy case.

‘Perhaps never,’ the Gentleman says.

‘What?’

‘This was an optogenetic black box upload. Very crude: it must have been agony. It’s an old trick, pre-Collapse. They used to do it with rats. You infect the target with a virus that makes their neurons sensitive to yellow light. Then you stimulate the brain with lasers for hours, capture the firing patterns and train a black box function to emulate them. That’s where those little holes in his skull are from. Optic fibres. Upload tendrils.’ The tzaddik brushes the chocolatier’s thinning hair carefully with a gloved hand: there are tiny black dots in the scalp beneath, a few centimetres apart.

‘Produces enormous amounts of redundant data, but gets around gevulot. And of course completely scrambles his exomemory. Kills him, if you like. This body eventually died of tacyarrhythmia. The Resurrection Men are working on his next one, but there is not much hope. Unless we can find out where the data went.’

‘I see,’ Isidore says. ‘You are right, it is interesting, for a gogol pirate case.’ Isidore can’t suppress a note of distaste in his voice at the word gogol: a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, anathema to anyone from the Oubliette.

Usually, gogol piracy – upload without the victim’s knowledge, stealing their mind – is based on social engineering. The pirates worm their way into the victim’s confidence, chipping away at their gevulot until they have enough to do a brute-force attack on their mind. But this – ‘A Gordian knot approach. Simple and elegant.’

‘Elegant is not the word I would use, my boy.’ There is a trace of anger in the tzaddik’s voice. ‘Would you like to see what happened to him?’

‘See?’

‘I visited him earlier. The Resurrection Men are working on him. It’s not pretty.’

‘Oh.’ Isidore swallows. Death is much less gruesome than what happens after, and thinking about it makes his palms sweat. But if he ever wants to be a tzaddik, he can’t afford to be afraid of the underworld. ‘Of course, if you think it’s useful.’

‘Good.’ The Gentleman passes the co-memory to him, opening both hands. Isidore accepts it, momentarily tickled by the intimacy of the gesture. And suddenly he remembers being in a room with the dark-robed Resurrection Men, in the underground spaces where they restore minds from the exomemory into freshly printed bodies. The remade chocolatier lay in the synthbio vat as if taking a bath. Dr Ferreira touched the still form’s forehead with the ornate brass Decanter. The sudden flash of eye whites, the reverbrating scream, the flailing limbs, the pop of a dislocating jaw—

The leather smell makes Isidore nauseous. ‘That’s … monstrous.’

‘Unfortunately, it is very human,’ the Gentleman says. ‘But there is some hope. If we can find the data, Dr Ferreira thinks they can cut the noise from his exomemory and restore him properly.’

Isidore takes a deep breath. He lets the anger dissolve into the calm pool of mystery.

‘But can you guess why you are here?’

Isidore feels around with his gevulot sense – an Oubliette citizen’s acute awareness of privacy settings in the intelligent matter all around. The factory feels slippery. Trying to reach into exomemory for things that happened here is like trying to clutch air.

‘This was a very private place for him,’ Isidore says. ‘I don’t think he would have shared the gevulot even with his close family.’

Three little synthbio drones come in – large, dextrous spiders, bright green and purple – and adjust levers and dials of the conching machine. The heartbeat sound goes up a notch. One of them stops to examine the Gentleman, spindly limbs brushing its coat. The tzaddik gives it a sharp poke with his cane, and the creature scutters away.

‘Correct,’ the Gentleman says. He takes a step forward, standing so close to Isidore that he can see his own reflection in the tzaddik’s silver oval face, distorted. His curly hair is in disarray, and his cheeks are burning.

‘We have no way to reconstruct anything that happened here, except the old-fashioned way. And, as much as it pains me to admit it, you do seem to have the talent for it.’

Up close, the tzaddik has a strange, sweet smell, like spices, and it feels like the metal mask radiates heat. Isidore takes a step back and clears his throat. ‘I will do what I can, of course,’ he says, pretending to look at his Watch – a simple copper disc on his wrist, with a single hand, ticking down to his time as a Quiet. ‘I expect it to be quick,’ he says, nonchalance spoiled by the quiver in his voice. ‘I have a party to go to tonight.’

The Gentleman says nothing, but Isidore can imagine the cynical smile beneath the mask.

Another factory machine sputters into life. This one looks much more sophisticated than the stainless steel conching machines. The ornate brass lines hint at a Kingdom-era design: a fabber. An intricate clockwork arm dances above a metal tray, painting a neat row of macarone into being with a series of neat atom beam brushstrokes. The drones pack the sweets into small boxes and carry them away.

Isidore raises his eyebrows disapprovingly: a traditional Oubliette craftsman is not really expected to rely on technology. But something about the device does fit in the nascent shape that he can feel forming in his mind. He examines it more closely. The tray is covered in thin strips of chocolate residue.

‘I will need whatever else you have, of course, to begin with,’ he says.

‘His assistant says she found the body.’ With a flick of a white-gloved hand, the Gentleman passes Isidore a small co-memory: a face and a name. He recalls her like a passing acquaintance. Siv Lindström. Dusky skin and a pretty face, dark hair arranged in a swirl of dark cocoa. ‘And the family has agreed to speak to us – what are you doing?’

Isidore puts a piece of the chocolate from the fabber tray in his mouth, ’blinking as fast as he can, cringing at the headache of alien memories. They let him recognise the faint red berry taste and bitterness, and the strange terroir of the soil in Nanedi Valley. There is something wrong about it, about the fragility. He walks over to the chocolatier’s body and tries some of the chocolate from the vat he is holding. And that, of course, tastes exactly right.

Unbidden, the shape of the chocolatier’s story emerges in his mind, brushstroke by brushstroke, like the macarone a moment before.

‘Detecting,’ Isidore says. ‘I want to see the assistant first.’

The walk back to town leads Isidore and the Gentleman across the Tortoise Park.