‘And once a version which could do that had been made “real”—’
‘— then the next time the person smeared, they’d have a double advantage. Not only would they have the eigen-state meddling ability, per se, but they’d be starting from a new baseline—other states with even greater skills would now be far more probable, far easier to reach. The whole thing could snowball.’ She shakes her head, enchanted. ‘Evolution in a single lifetime! Emergent probability with a vengeance! I love it!
‘So it really could happen?’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘What? You just said—’
She pats my shoulder sympathetically. ‘It’s a beautiful idea. So beautiful I’d say it just about disproves itself. If it really could happen, where are the end results? Where are all the case histories of brain-damaged people juggling eigenstates at will? The first stage must be too hard to reach in any reasonable time. Eventually, I’m sure, someone will get around to calculating just how long it would take to perform the initial bootstrap—but the answer could easily be months, years, decades… it could be longer than a human lifetime. And how long does anyone spend alone?’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Well, I have to defend my place in history, don’t I? Such as it is.’ Karen says, ‘I like her. She’s intelligent, cynical, and only a little naive; the best friend you’ve made in years. And I think she can help you.’
I blink at her, and moan softly. The strange thing is, I don’t feel at all like I’ve suffered a sudden loss of control; rather, my featureless memories of the last three hours in stake-out mode seem to have evaporated, as if they’d never been anything but a delusion.
I say, ‘What do you want?’
She laughs. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want everything to go on as normal.’
‘Normal! First you were a slave to a bunch of kidnappers, and now you’re apparently worshipping the thing that enslaves you. The Ensemble in the head! It’s bullshit.’
I shrug. ‘I have no choice. The loyalty mod isn’t going to vanish. What do you expect me to do? Drive myself insane, trying to fight it? I don’t want to fight it. I know precisely what’s been done to me. I don’t deny that without the mod, I would want to be free of it—but where does that leave me? // I was free, I’d want to be free. And if I was someone else entirely, I’d want completely different things. But I’m not, and I don’t. It’s irrelevant. It’s a dead end.’
‘It doesn’t have to be.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
She doesn’t reply; she turns and looks ‘out’ across the city, then raises a hand and—impossibly—signals the window to enhance the hologram’s contrast, cutting back the spill from the advertising signs, darkening the empty sky to the deepest black imaginable.
Karen controlling RedNet? Or has the hallucinatory process which conjures up her body started manipulating the rest of my visual field? I contemplate these equally improbable explanations with equally numb resignation. There’s no point hoping any more that this problem will cure itself. The neurotechnicians are going to have to take me apart.
I stare at the perfect darkness of the Bubble, unwillingly entranced by the sight of it, whatever kind of illusion—contrast-enhanced hologram, or pure mental fabrication—‘the sight of it’ is.
A faint pinprick of light appears in the blackness. Assuming that it’s nothing but a flaw in my vision, I blink and shake my head, but the light stays fixed in the sky. A high, slow-moving satellite, just emerged from the Earth’s shadow? The point grows brighter, and then another appears close by.
I turn to Karen. ‘What are you doing to me?’
‘Sssh.’ She takes my hand. ‘Just watch.’
Stars keep appearing, doubling and redoubling in number like phosphorescent celestial bacteria, until the sky is as richly populated as I remember it from the darkest nights of my childhood. I hunt for familiar constellations, and for a fleeting instant I recognize the saucepan shape of Orion, but it’s soon gone, drowned in the multitude of new stars coming into being around it. My eye finds exotic new patterns—but they’re as transitory as the rhythms in Po-kwai’s random chant, vanishing the moment they’re perceived. The satellite views on Bubble Day, the most baroque space operas of the forties, never had stars like this.
A dazzling tract of light—like an impossibly opulent version of the Milky Way—thickens to the point of solidity, then grows steadily brighter.
I whisper, ‘What are you saying? That the damage we’ve done can be… undone? I don’t understand.’
The band of light explodes, spreading across the sky until the perfect blackness becomes perfect, blinding white. I turn away. Po-kwai cries out. Karen vanishes. I spin back to face the hologram. The sky above the towers of New Hong Kong is empty and grey.
I hesitate at the door to the apartment, just listening for a while. I don’t want to startle her again, but I have no intention of becoming complacent. Nobody could have reached her without passing me… but what kind of state was I in, hallucinating cosmic visions, to know who or what might have walked right by me, unseen? The whole episode already seems completely unreal; if not for a lingering vision of the blazing sky, I’d swear that I had a seamless recollection of standing guard in stake-out mode, from the time I bid Po-kwai good night to the instant I heard her scream.
As I open the door, she’s stepping into the living room, hugging herself. She says drily, ‘Well, you’re not much use. I could have been murdered in my bed by now.’ Despite the joke, she seems far more shaken than last time.
‘Another nightmare?’
She nods. ‘And this time, I remember… what it was about.’
I say nothing. She scowls at me. ‘So stop being a fucking robot, and ask me what I dreamt.’
‘What did you dream?’
‘I dreamt that I lost control of the mod. I dreamt that I smeared. I dreamt that I… filled… the whole room, the whole apartment. And I don’t sleepwalk, you know—’ Suddenly, she starts shivering violently.
‘What—’
She reaches out and grabs me by the arm, leads me down the corridor towards the bedroom. The door is closed. She points me at it bodily, takes a second to catch her breath, then says, ‘Open it.’
I try to turn the handle. It doesn’t move.
‘It’s locked. That’s how paranoid I am. I lock it every night now.’
‘And you woke…?’
‘Outside. Half-way up the corridor.’ She positions herself at the spot. ‘After hitting one eight-digit combination to open the thing, and another to lock it behind me.’
‘Did you… dream of doing that? Did you dream of operating the lock?’
‘Oh, no. In the dream, I didn’t need to touch the lock — I was already outside the room. Inside and outside. I didn’t need to move… I just had to strengthen the eigenstate.’