It’s three minutes past two. I have fifty-seven minutes. I glance up at the grey sky, at The Bubble weighing down on me, oppressive as a blanket of thunderclouds. From nowhere comes an irritable thought: I should have waited for Lui to pay me. Five hundred thousand dollars. And then decided if my commitment to the true Ensemble really demanded this piece of lunacy.
I could crawl back into the van.
I don’t, though—and any versions of me who did are as good as dead, and they surely know it. How do they feel about that? How do they rationalize that?
I head for the fence.
I climb over as I did before; the prospect of unnecessary miracles on open ground makes me uneasy—and my smeared self, as always, complies with my expectations. Or vice versa.
I have no idea who’s on duty tonight, but I picture Huang Qing and Lee Soh-lung. Preferably playing cards, not bothering to glance at the monitors. I still don’t know at what point I sabotage this kind of observation: in the camera’s sensor chip, the cable, the display—or the retina, or brain, of the watcher. Whatever gets me by unnoticed; all I can choose is the outcome, and who knows what mechanism is most likely?
I enter by the same window, but this time there’s no need to cut; it slides open at my touch. I climb through, and make my way slowly across the lab, hands outstretched, wishing I still had the wireframe map that guided me the last time. I bump into a stool, then a bench, but I don’t send any glassware crashing. Those of me who did might as well slit their wrists on the fragments. I move down the hallway, and into the stairwell. The vault, according to Li Siu-wai, is on the fourth floor, in the back of Chen Ya-ping’s office; in fact, even after all this time, I think I can recall a blue no data region in the Culex map in just that spot.
Half-way up the stairs, doubt hits me like a blow to the chest. Po-kwai is twenty kilometres away. Fast asleep. We’re not ‘linked’, we’re not ‘smeared’, she’s not helping me ‘choose reality’. How could I have ever swallowed all that quantum-mystical voodoo? It’s bullshit. Lui set me up; it’s as simple as that. The Canon is a trick, to test my loyalty. He sabotaged my mods. Planted a rigged dice generator in a stall near my home. Conspired with Po-kwai, and the guards here, and at ASR.
And the padlock? How could he have known that I’d try something as ridiculous as 9999999999, first time?
But if he’s screwed around with my mods, there’s no telling what else he’s done inside my skull. For all I know, Hypernova might grant him absolute control over everything I do, everything I think. He could have made me guess the right combination.
I lean against the wall, trying to decide which is the most insane: believing in this pointless, farcical, massively implausible conspiracy… or seriously thinking that I can open locks by splitting into ten billion people.
I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell. And the true Ensemble? The mystery I’m living for? Is that nothing but another lie? I know it’s nothing but the loyalty mod, the way my brain’s been wired, but —
I search my pockets for something coin-like, something Lui can’t possibly have interfered with. The best I can do is the flashlight’s spare button-shaped power cell; there’s a plus sign engraved on one side and a minus sign on the other. I crouch on the landing, the flashlight beam making a wedge of brightness on the concrete.
‘Five plus signs,’ I whisper. ‘That’s all.’ The odds are one in thirty-two; not much of a miracle to ask for.
Plus. Plus.
I laugh. What did I expect? The true Ensemble would never abandon me. Minus.
A strange numbness spreads through me, but I toss the cell again, quickly—as if what follows might somehow undo the past, if only I act swiftly enough.
Plus.
Minus.
I stare at the final verdict—and realize that it proves nothing. Everything I’ve been living for might still be either true or false.
Either way, though, there’s no point going on.
I bound up the last two flights of stairs, jubilant, invulnerable. If those five simple plus signs haven’t purged me of every last trace of doubt and paranoia, then nothing will.
Once I’m in Chen’s office, I switch on the flashlight—unsure why I didn’t ‘risk’ using it when crossing the lab on the ground floor, but confident now that there is no danger. I could turn on every light in the building and scream at the top of my voice, and nobody would know I was here.
What looks like a normal connecting door leads to a small room fronting the vault itself: an unimposing construction of dull grey polymer composite—harder to cut, abrade, melt or burn than a metre or two of solid steel, but about a thousand times lighter. The control panel has a thumb-scanning window, a numeric keypad, and three slots for keys. I hesitate, half expecting to have to wait a while for the lock to smear sufficiently, but a green light on the panel shines almost at once. Of course—the thing has been smeared since long before I walked in; every unobserved inanimate object does so. All I’ve done is observed it without collapsing it—and hence smeared myself still further into different versions, a whole new lineage for each eigenstate of the lock, giving me the power to choose its state when I choose my own.
I grasp the handle and tug it, far harder than I need to; with a soft click the door flies open, almost hitting me in the face. I step round it, and walk into the vault.
Six by six metres, and most of it empty space. I play the flashlight beam across the far wall; there’s a rack of shelves going up to the ceiling. Eight shelves, each bearing twenty neat plastic ROM boxes—the kind that hold two hundred chips.
I move in closer. Most of the boxes are labelled with ranges of serial numbers: 019200-019399, and so on. The boxes on the lowest two shelves, and the rightmost two on the third shelf, are unlabelled and empty, but the rest seem to be full. That makes a total of twenty-three thousand, six hundred chips.
I take the dice generator from my pocket—why shouldn’t I make this easy on myself? — but then change my mind and put it away. Will one of my sons survive—or one of their cousins, who used the dice? Both are capable of success. I reach out quickly and grab a box. It has a simple, purely mechanical lock. Perhaps I could make even this slide open by pure choice—my first ever feat of truly macroscopic quantum tunnelling—but I don’t. I open it with a skeleton key, which takes almost a minute. I resist the temptation to close my eyes before lifting a chip from its cavity on the moulded tray—and resist the temptation to put it back and choose again, when I realize that I’ve taken one from the very edge of the tray.
I plug the ROM into a reader with an IR transceiver, then I invoke RedNet and CypherCIerk, and talk to the reader. I say, ‘Show me the ID page, in English.’
The shadows of the vault fade almost to blackness, and a window of vivid blue-on-white text rushes towards me from the centre of my visual field:
ENSEMBLE
Neural Modification Algorithm © Copyright 2068, biomedical development international
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