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.
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 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 I 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 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 only 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 independent 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.