There’s nothing but silence. The loyalty mod is gone; I’ve tunnelled right out of its constraints. I close my eyes expecting my purposeless soul to evaporate and diffuse into the air.
‘Nick?’
I shake my head, open my eyes. ‘Sorry. I was… dizzy for a second; some side-effect of the collapse.’ I take off my gloves and reach into the pocket where the chip reader is, the copy of Ensemble still plugged in. Without removing the device from my pocket, I invoke RedNet and Cypher Clerk, and start copying data into Cypher-Clerk’s buffers.
Lui says, ‘We can’t waste time arguing. Give me the data, and get moving.’
‘I told you, the mod’s too dangerous.’ So why am I copying it before erasing it? Do I really trust myself to use it wisely—to make a modest fortune breaking codes, without imperilling Life As We Know It? The arrogance is breathtaking. But I don’t stop the flow of data.
Lui says quietly, ‘Phone a bank, verify the card. Half a million dollars. That’s what we agreed on.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t care about the money.’ I almost hand the card back, but if I do it with my free left hand, he may wonder what I’m doing with my right hand.
Lui looks away, sad and tortured as ever. I think: Making money from the mod is important to him—and people get nasty if you mess with their religion. I prime, and reach for my gun; left-handed, too late. I feel a targeting beam on my forehead, and freeze; a moment later, two armed women emerge from the alleyway in front of us. Neither are aiming their weapons at my head; a third person, the source of the beam, must still be in the shadows covering them.
Lui says, ‘Put your hands on your head.’
The copy is ninety per cent done. I stall. ‘I didn’t expect this kind of—’
He grabs my arms and jerks them into place. The zombie boy scout observes helpfully: I should have done an erase-with-copy, wiping everything as it was transmitted.
Lui takes my gun, searches me, and quickly finds the reader. As he takes it from my pocket, I broadcast an erase command, but the positioning is bad. CypherClerk gives me an error message from RedNet, then a ‘tutor’ icon appears in my head and starts delivering a lecture on troubleshooting infrared connections. I shut it down.
Lui says, ‘The card is valid. Half a million dollars. I haven’t cheated you. Head for the docks, and you’ll be out of this mess by dawn.’
I say, ‘You don’t believe me, do you? About Laura, the Bubble Makers, any of it?’
He looks me in the eye and says softly, ‘Of course I believe you. I worked out most of it myself, six months ago. Why do you think the sham Ensemble were searching for the pattern of events that led them to Laura? They’d guessed the reason for The Bubble—and they hoped the Bubble Makers might have given us a key: an example of what we had to become, if we wanted to leave the prison they’d built around us.’
He steps aside, and one of his goons approaches. I wait, with a strong sense of dija vu, for a tranquillizing spray, or a hypodermic in the neck.
Instead, the woman draws a nightstick and swings it towards the side of my head.
12
As I come round, PI reports bruising and mild concussion, but nothing requiring treatment. I feel no discomfort; pain is converted into pure information. I stagger to the side of the road, and deprime—but still feel nothing; acting on standing orders, Boss takes over the role of anaesthetist.
I call the PanPacific Bank’s verification service, and plug the card into my SatPhone. It seems to be precisely what Lui claimed it was: half a million dollars of transnational liquid funds; fully cleared, no strings attached. I order a sequence of transactions which sends the money hurtling around the globe a few hundred times—losing a little value with every orbit, but losing any chance of being traced or recalled even faster—and surviving the scrutiny of over a thousand separate financial institutions. It comes to a halt after ten minutes, depleted by five per cent, but indisputably real, and irreversibly mine, now.
Why? He came prepared to take the data from me by force, so why pay me a cent? True, he’ll be able to earn enough from Ensemble to make a mere half-million seem irrelevant—and the payment does make it more likely that I’ll leave him to do that in peace. It’s a bribe, to get me out of the way. He could easily have killed me instead; I should count myself lucky.
And I should take his advice. Head for the docks. Bribe my way out of the country. There’s nothing to keep me here.
Nothing? I think back over the last few hours, trying to pin down the instant of my liberation from the loyalty mod—but I can recall no tortuous struggle to assert my ‘true’ identity, no triumphant feat of mental agility that finally unravelled the knot. But then, nor was there any such battle for my loyalty, the day the mod was imposed. It was always a matter of brain physiology—not logic, not strength of will. Exactly what changed that physiology—whether the minority of versions of me who’d tunnelled through the mod’s constraints somehow swayed my smeared self into choosing one of their number to survive the collapse (namely, me), or whether the crisis at ASR simply left him with so many factors to juggle that he ceased even to care about anything so trivial as his collapsed selfs religion—I’ll never know. Maybe the smeared Po-kwai intervened. Whatever the reason, it’s happened —
Has it? Lui claimed that I’d been collapsed… and probably believed it… but the only collapse that works is the one that makes itself real. Maybe I’m still smeared, as is Lui, and every one of ASR’s guards, and the whole incident—the bombs being found, Lui coming to warn me, everything up to and including this moment—is part of an eigenstate that will be discarded, part of the extravagant cost of the night’s unlikely success.
Fighting down panic, I invoke Hypernova and hit the OFF button… then realize that doing so proves nothing: billions of versions of me must have done the very same thing—ineffectually—throughout the night. For a moment, the whole question seems intractable: how can I ever know that I’ve become irreversibly real?
The schedule, that’s how. It’s 04:07—and if everything had gone according to plan, I’d be back on duty, and collapsed, by now. I laugh with nervous relief. My failure is an irrevocable part of the unique past—and so is my liberation. And however many versions of me would have remained in the grip of the loyalty mod… I’m alive, and they’re dead.
So I have no reason to stay. The Ensemble, ‘true’ or otherwise, means nothing to me.
As for the dangers of using Ensemble, Lui may be greedy, but he’s not stupid. If he really has known about the risks all along, then no doubt he’ll take great care to keep them under control. I may not like entrusting the fate of the planet to his dubious expertise—but I have no choice. I can’t go to the authorities; ASR will have set me up as the prime suspect for planting the bombs—and they might even believe that themselves. What do I do? Send an anonymous message to the NHK police, claiming that technology which might undermine the nature of reality has fallen into unsafe hands?
The trouble is… even if Lui himself could be trusted to use the mod cautiously, there’s the question of proliferation. What happens when one of his code-breaking clients grows curious about his technique and decides to cut out a few of the intermediaries, or ensure that the competition won’t have access to the same service? With Lui’s quaint ideas of security, it’d take them about a week to find out everything. Ensemble in the hands of gangsters—or, worse, Ensemble in the hands of the intelligence agencies of the PRC, or the USA. And even if they, too, understood the risks and exercised enough restraint to keep the planet from runaway smearing… reality shaped by Beijing, or Washington? Life wouldn’t be worth living.