Huw rubs her chin.
“Huw—,” Bonnie says, a warning tone in her voice.
“This isn’t a universe where causality only runs forwards, right? Things that happen can unhappen. Something you do in the future can affect the past, here.”
“Huw—,” the djinni says, sounding more alarmed.
“And 639,219 only got derezzed by her rootkit after we created an agreement. And since I’m still in this sim, all I need to do is violate the agreement and I’ll unwind everything back to that point. We’ll get one of those little tokens—” Huw flipped the poker chip so it did a high end-over-end arc, clattering away into the infinite regression-depths of the club’s storeroom. “We’ll get one of those, and poof, 639,219 will be back and hale and hearty and we can all start over again, right?”
The djinni and Bonnie are shaking their heads together in sync, like two metronomes. “Huw,” the djinni says, “if you revert this sim to the moment before you and 639,219 agreed to arb, you’re going to roll back the lives of thousands of people.”
Huw makes a rude noise. “I may have only just ascended, but I didn’t just fall off the tree. There wasn’t anyone around when we arbed.”
“You’re forgetting the djinni chasing me down. If you and 639,219 never arbed, I wouldn’t have run, and the djinni wouldn’t have chased me.”
“All right, a few people probably saw that, but how many of them had their outcomes influenced by seeing an infinite herd of djinni chasing a bartender?”
“Dozens,” the djinni says. “Hundreds. And then there’s everyone they talked to or influenced as a result. Huw, you’re talking about deliberately unwinding the lives of a small city, and the population is growing by the second.”
Huw feels belligerent. “I do the same every time I do anything and everything. Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?”
Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.
“Right,” she says, pointing at Bonnie. “You, talk.”
“Look,” Bonnie says, “you’ve got this all wrong.”
The djinni frowns. “You need to audit her,” he says. “You’ll never get anything useful out of her volitionally. Just arb her.”
“No,” Bonnie and Huw say at the same moment. Huw is struck with a whole-not-body revulsion at the thought of being exposed and exposing with this Bonnie, this weird shade of the man and woman she’s loved and lost and loved and hated.
“Why is it always me?” Huw says. “Why don’t you do the transhuman mind-meld for a change?”
The djinni shakes his topknot. “Wrong cognitive model. I’m an expression of a hivemind, wholly synthetic. You two are uploaded—built incrementally by modeling a physical structure. Means that we’re impedence mismatched. Can’t ever have a meeting of the minds, alas.” He doesn’t sound very sorry. “So, look, Huw, let me tell you, whatever leverage you’ve got with Bonnie is going to evaporate pretty quick. Soon as someone leaves the club, the contract is fixed, because now there’s causal links that are external to this sim—Club Capabilities can’t reverse effects that take place outside of here. That’s why there’s no comms links in or out—we’re causally isolated. So if you’re going to blackmail her into arbing, better do it quick before someone decides to go outside and check his email.”
Huw opens his mouth: “Well, fuck. Bonnie—”
“You’re not going to make me—” Bonnie makes her move, begins to derez, trying to untrust Huw. But the djinni is faster. Bonnie and everyone in the bar—except the djinni —freeze in place and fade to red again.
“Bullet time,” the djinni tells Huw. “You have about ten subjective seconds—two milliseconds as far as everyone else is concerned. Use them wisely.”
Feeling pressured and desperate and sick to her stomach, Huw tweaks her emo control into bland-faced robotitude. A comforting blanket of gray descends, and of course it’s obvious what she ought to do. It’s for Bonnie’s own good, and 639,219’s insofar as 639,219 was a fragment of Huw’s own mind. Huw doesn’t owe her flawed instance-sister anything except the honest truth before the planning tribunal, and proof of Bonnie’s malfeasance will provide that. Besides, I’ve spent most of the past however long hating her guts. Isn’t this fit of sentimental sympathy a bit perverse?
“Arb. Now,” Huw hears herself say. She watches her finger extend to touch Bonnie’s forehead, growing longer and stretching like a bizarre insectile appendage, multijointed and not part of her self-image. Bonnie is frozen, mouth half-open, hair caught in motion around her face. “You’ve got her? Connect us.” The djinni nods.
“Well, fuck,” says Huw, staring at the same rootkit she saw in 639,219’s cognitive map. She glances at the djinni . “If we put this in front of the planning committee, along with the record from 639,219 ...”
“Yes, that will provide an evidential chain suggesting that testimony provided by 639,219 must be discounted.” The djinni strokes his goatee. “There is an appeal stage where procedural errors can be raised. And proof of external tampering with evidence presented at the hearing will bring everything to a halt, if not result in a mistrial.” His expression is reserved, if not shifty.
“Good.” Huw pauses. “But if I do that, I’ll be unable to unwind to before Bonnie killed 639,219. Won’t I?”
The djinni points. “The answer is in your hands.”
“Yes. I see.” Dully, Huw tweaks a helical slider past a detent labeled EMPATHY BLOCK, into a red zone flagged DANGER: SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Instantly, she feels better. In fact, she feels great. “Cool! Let’s go!”
The djinni smiles. “I knew you’d see sense eventually.”
When they revert to realtime, Bonnie puts up a fight: crying, shaking, pleading with Huw for understanding, offering to kiss and make up.
Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought to act, how she would have acted, back when she was in the throes of lust or love or something. It’s trivially easy to calm Bonnie’s fears, to apologize for not trusting her—to pretend not to have seen the rootkit lurking gray and bloated in the wreckage of her moral maze—to agree it’s all a misunderstanding and anyway Huw hated 639,219. And so she holds Bonnie’s wrists as the floor carries them toward the exit and the djinni spins them around and down through bubbling blue layers of reality, back to the polished floor of the lobby of the Tripoli Marriott.
“It’s all going to be okay.” Huw soothes Bonnie, who is whimpering and writhing but evidently in the grip of some kind of BDSM compulsion field, courtesy of the lurking djinni : “We’re going to go in there and explain that it was all a mistake and I’ll give evidence. All right?” She can see that Bonnie—or the rootkit—doesn’t agree that it’s all right, but she sees no reason to let it faze her.