I hesitate, then say, ‘And do you think—’
She says firmly, ‘I think my subconscious must have it in for me, that’s all I can say. I must have hit the right codes in my sleep, however hard that is to believe. Because if you’re wondering if the mod might have let me tunnel through a closed door—like an electron through a voltage barrier—the answer is, it can’t. Even if that were possible in theory, this mod was not designed to do any such thing. It was designed to work on microscopic systems. It was designed to demonstrate the simplest effects—nothing more.’
I imagine my reply so vividly that I can almost hear the words: ‘It wasn’t designed at all.’
But the machinery in my skull keeps me silent, and instead I nod and say, ‘I believe you—you’re the expert. And it was your dream, not mine.’
9
Lui says, ‘We can use this.’
‘Use it? I don’t want to use it, I want to put a stop to it! I want the Canon’s blessing to tell Po-kwai exactly what’s happening. I want to get the whole thing under control.’
He frowns. ‘Under control, yes, but you musn’t tell Po-kwai about Laura. Suppose Chen found out that you’d disobeyed her? Where would that leave us? Right now, I’m sure nobody even suspects the existence of the Canon; they have far too much confidence in the loyalty mod. Or far too little respect for it. They don’t seem to have realized just how powerful a combination intelligence and its antithesis could be. You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there’s nothing you can’t derive from it. I like to think of that as a metaphor for our distinctive kind of freedom. Forget Hegelian synthesis; we have pure Orwellian doublethink.’
I look past him irritably, across the crowded lawns of KowloonPark, to a flower bed shimmering in the heat. I have no one else to turn to, and I don’t seem to be getting through to him.
I say, ‘Po-kwai deserves to know the truth.’
‘Deserves? It’s not a matter of what she deserves, it’s a matter of what the consequences would be. I have the greatest respect and admiration for her, believe me. But do you really want to sacrifice the Canon, just to let her know that she’s been deceived? The sham Ensemble wouldn’t simply impose harsher mods on us, if that’s what you’re thinking; they’d write off their losses—they’d kill us. And what do you think they’d do to her, if she tried to back out now?’
‘Then we have to protect her, and protect ourselves. We have to bring the sham Ensemble down.’
Even as I say it, I realize how ludicrous a suggestion it is, but Lui says, ‘Eventually, yes. But that’s not going to happen on a whim. We need to act from a position of strength. We need to exploit whatever opportunities present themselves.’ He pauses—just long enough for my hesitant silence to sound like implicit consent—then adds, ‘Like this one.’
‘Po-kwai is losing control of her mod. I’m going insane. How is that an opportunity?’
He shakes his head. ‘You’re not “going insane”. Some of your mods are failing, that’s all. Why? P3 is designed to act as a barrier, confining you to certain, useful states of mind—and yet somehow you’re tunnelling through that barrier, into states that are supposedly inaccessible: boredom, distraction, emotional agitation. That ought to be highly unlikely—and yet you’re doing it. AH the diagnostics tell you that the mod is physically intact. Which means the system itself is undamaged… but the probabilities of the system are being changed. Remind you of anything?’
I shudder. ‘If you’re saying Po-kwai is manipulating me the way she manipulates the ions… how can she? Okay, she can alter the probabilities of a smeared system—like a silver ion whose spin is still a mixture of up and down—but what’s that got to do with me? I’m the very opposite of a smeared system: I collapse the wave, don’t I?’
‘Of course you do—but how often?’
‘All the time.’
‘What do you mean, “all the time”? Do you think you’re permanently collapsed? The collapse is a process—a process that happens to a smeared system. You think smearing is an exotic state—something that only happens in laboratories?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No. How can it be? Your whole body is built out of atoms. Atoms are quantum mechanical systems. Suppose—conservatively—that the average atom in your body, left uncollapsed for a millisecond, might do one of ten different possible things. That means, in a millisecond, it will smear into a mixture of ten eigenstates: one for each of the things it might have done. Some states will be more probable than others—but until the system is collapsed, all these possibilities will co-exist.
‘After two milliseconds, there’d be a hundred distinct combinations of things this atom might have done: any of the ten possibilities, followed by the same choice again. That means smearing into a mixture of a hundred different eigenstates. After three milliseconds, a thousand. And so on.
‘Add a second atom. For each possible state of the first atom, the second could be in any one of its own states. The numbers multiply. If one atom, alone, could have smeared into a thousand states, a system of two would have smeared into a million. Three atoms, and it’s a billion. Keep that up until you get to the size of a visible object—a grain of sand, a blade of grass, a human body—and the numbers are astronomical. And constantly increasing with time.’
I shake my head numbly. ‘So, how does it ever stop?’
‘I’m getting to that. When one smeared system interacts with another, they cease to be separate entities. Quantum mechanics says they have to be dealt with as a single system—you can’t lay a finger on one part without affecting the whole thing. When Po-kwai observes a smeared silver ion, a new system is formed: Po-kwai-plus-the-ion, which has twice as many states as Po-kwai had, alone. When you observe a blade of grass, a new system is formed: you-plus-the-blade-of-grass, which has as many states as you had, alone, multiplied by however many states the blade of grass had.
‘But a system which includes you includes the collapse-inducing part of your brain—which ends up smeared into countless different versions, representing all the different possible states of everything else: the rest of your brain, the rest of your body, the blade of grass, and anything else you’ve observed. When this part of your brain collapses itself—making one version of itself real—it can’t help collapsing the whole, combined system: the rest of your brain, the rest of your body, the blade of grass, and so on. They all collapse to a single state, in which just one of all the countless billions of possibilities actually “happens”. Then, of course, they all start smearing again…’
I say, ‘All right, I understand: people have to smear, in order to collapse. AH the possibilities have to be there—in a sense—in order for one to be chosen. The collapse is like… drastically pruning a tree—which has to grow out a little, in all directions, before we can choose which branch we leave uncut. But we must collapse so often that we don’t have time to be aware of being smeared, in between. Hundreds of times a second, at least.’
Lui frowns. ‘Why do you say that? How would we be “aware of being smeared”? Consciousness seems like a smooth flow, but that’s just the way the brain organizes perceptions; reality isn’t created continuously, it comes in bursts, in spasms. Experience must be constructed retrospectively; there’s no such thing as the present—it’s only the past that we succeed in making unique. The only question is the time scale. You say that if it was anything more than a few milliseconds, we’d somehow be aware of the process… but that’s simply not true. This is how subjective time arises, how the future turns into the past, for us. We’re in no position to discern how, or when, it happens.