Karen appears beside me. I hesitate, afraid to speak in case she vanishes—or explodes—but then I find the courage to say, ‘It’s good to see you. I’ve missed you.’
Have I? I hunt for some memory of doing so, but then abandon the search as irrelevant. What matters is, I would have.
She says grimly, ‘You’ve screwed up.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘What can I do? I’m now a suspected terrorist. I have nowhere to stay, no resources—’
‘You have half a million dollars.’
I shake my head. ‘That’s something, but—’
‘And you have ninety-five per cent of Ensemble.’
I laugh bitterly. ‘Ninety-five per cent might as well be nothing. You can’t feed a swarm of nanomachines ninety-five per cent of a mod specification, and just hope that the rest doesn’t matter.’
‘No? What about ninety-five per cent of two mod specifications?’ Two?’
Then it hits me: Ensemble performs two completely independent functions: inhibiting the collapse, and manipulating the eigenstates. There’s no reason for the two parts of the mod, responsible for these two separate functions, to have any overlap, any neurons in common. And if there’s no overlap, either part should be able to stand alone. The only question is…
I invoke CypherClerk and start wading through the data in the buffers. After a few dozen pages of preamble, I find:
START SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL';
I search for the next occurrence of ‘eigenstate control’. Several hundred thousand pages later:
END SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL' (checksum: 4956841039);
/* ********************************************** */
START SECTION: 'COLLAPSE INHIBITION';
Karen says, ‘You have half a million dollars. You have all you need of Ensemble… Hypernova makes up for the rest. And you have more experience of being smeared than anyone else on the planet, short of Laura herself. So much for having no resources.’
I shake my head. ‘I can’t trust my smeared self. That was part of Laura’s warning: he’s played along with me so far, but I don’t know what he’ll do if he gains more strength.’
‘Yeah? And who would you rather trust: him—or Lui’s clients, and their smeared selves?’
I realize that I’m shivering. I laugh. ‘I’m afraid. Don’t you understand? I could turn into anyone. I just lost what used to be the most important thing in my life. Gone, dissolved, in an instant. You know what that means. I might lose anything. I might lose you.’
She says bluntly, ‘My specification will still be on file; Axon will have archived it somewhere. If you lose me, you can always get me back.’
‘I know.’ Then I look away; I can’t bear to say it to her face. ‘But I’m afraid that if I lose you, I won’t want you back.’
Many of the small traders start opening for business around dawn, and I manage to buy a batch of cosmetic nanomachines and a change of clothes before the streets begin to grow crowded. I hide in the stall of a public toilet while the nanomachines take effect, breaking down a significant proportion of the melanin in my skin. The change is almost fast enough to perceive, and I stare, transfixed, at my hands and forearms as they fade from the deep black UV-belt norm to an olive complexion, reminiscent of photographs of my grandfather in his twentieth-century youth. An hour later, my kidneys have extracted the metabolites, and I urinate a surreal dark stream. It’s absurd—but pissing away my skin colour is at least as disorienting as anything else that’s happened in the last twelve hours. Whatever’s changed inside my skull, up until now at least I looked the same.
I check my appearance in a mirror, dragging my thoughts back to practicalities. Merely rendered pale, pattern-recognition soft-ware could still match me with ASR’s records, but at least I’m no longer vulnerable to every bystander who might have seen my face splashed about the news systems.
In fact, when I access The NHK Times, there’s no mention of a foiled bombing attempt, by the Children or anyone else. The global news systems are the same. It looks like ASR have kept the whole thing to themselves; perhaps they don’t want the NHK police pondering the mystery of exactly why the Children chose to target them.
This cheers me up a little. I’m hardly out of danger — the Ensemble will have put me on a dozen private hit lists—but it’s still nice to know that I’m not going to end up framed as a member of the Children of the Abyss…
Sitting on a park bench in a patch of—reflected—morning sunlight, plugged into the world via Cypher-Clerk, RedNet, and my SatPhone, I hire an online nanoware expert system to deal with the ragged edges of my partial copy of Ensemble. Just as well; apart from simply discarding the incomplete second section, the preamble needs to be edited to reflect the change from two sections to one. Nanoware is never treated lightly; a neural mod specification with the slightest inconsistency would be rejected outright by the nanomachine synthesizer.
I delete the copyright notices, copy the final specification from the CypherClerk buffers to a memory chip, ready to hand over the counter, and search the directory for the closest manufacturer. There’s a place called Third Hemisphere, barely a kilometre away.
The premises, at the end of a drab blind alley, look like shit, but once inside, I catch sight of the synthesizer—a genuine Axon model, complete with prominent authorized franchise sign. Or a convincing imitation. The woman in charge plugs my specification chip into a costing system. ‘Thirty thousand dollars,’ she says. ‘The nanoware for your mod will be ready in a fortnight.’
According to the expert system, the synthesis should take eight hours at the most. Any further delay is nothing but queuing.
I say, ‘Fifty thousand. And it’ll be ready by ten o’clock tonight.’ She thinks it over. ‘Eighty thousand. By nine.’
‘Done.’
I buy a gun; virtually an exact replacement for the laser taken from me this morning. Weapons are one thing NHK is not relaxed about, and black-market prices reflect that; at fifty-seven thousand, someone is collecting a de facto tariff of about three hundred per cent. I still find the generosity of Lui’s bribe unsettling, but I can see why he’d want to ease my way out of the city, rather than risk having me betray him to the Ensemble… and no doubt he was lying about his code-breaking fee, perhaps by one or two orders of magnitude.
I need somewhere to stay, but hotels are far too computerized to be safe. It takes me most of the afternoon, but I manage to rent a small flat in a mildly run-down district in the south-west—and with a suitable bribe, no ID is required. When the agent hands me the key and leaves, I collapse onto the bed. The concussion is starting to catch up with me; I’m having trouble staying awake.
Karen says, ‘So, where do we start? What’s the most immediate risk to containment?’ I sigh. ‘You know this is hopeless. Lui must have made a dozen copies of the data, by now.’
‘Maybe. But would he have trusted anyone else with them—or just hidden them?’ The room itself keeps going slightly out of focus, but her image remains perfectly sharp. I squeeze my eyes shut, and try to concentrate.