Greg Egan - Quarantine

Chan Kwok-hung says, 'And in the long term?'

Lui shrugs. 'Until we have our own copies of the whole mod, until we've carried out our own experiments to determine precisely what its advantages and shortcomings are, it's premature to discuss a detailed strategy for taking control of the sham Ensemble.'

Li Siu-wai says, softly but firmly, 'Which may not even be necessary. With our own, independent organization established, why bother trying to reform the sham? Why not simply ignore it?'

Yuen Lo-ching says, scandalized, 'The false Ensemble is a travesty! Ignore it? It has to be torn down! It has to be obliterated!'

Her brother says, 'You think they'll leave us in peace, to pursue our own work? You think they'll let us walk away with their secrets — '

Li Siu-wai says, 'No, but we'll be able to defend ourselves. If we maintain an edge in using the mod — '

'Better to have no need to defend ourselves.'

Chan Kwok-hung shakes his head. 'The sham Ensemble may be imperfect, but it's still the template for the true version we perceive. We have to keep it intact — and we have to keep struggling to improve it, bringing it closer to the ideal, year by year. The task is ultimately futile — but we have to undertake it, for our own peace of mind.'

Lui says smoothly, 'All of these alternatives can be considered, eventually — but if we don't get our own eigenstate mod, there's no hope of achieving anything at all. Which is where Nick comes in.'

He turns to me. So does everyone else.

I say, awkwardly, 'I take it that you all understand what Lui Kiu-chung is suggesting — and that you've all discussed his plan with other members of the Canon. I want to hear what you think. We all seem to agree that we have to get hold of the specifications — but is this the best way of doing it? Are there any problems, any dangers, we might not have anticipated? Is it even clear that it can work at all?'

Lui cuts in. 'There's no doubt about that. Consider what Laura Andrews achieved A a massively retarded woman. Consider what Chung Po-kwai has done, in her sleep. With Po-kwai's "help" — by "borrowing" her eigenstate mod while she sleeps — there's nothing to stop Nick finding a safe route, however improbable, that takes him from the ASR building, across the city, through BDI's security, into the vault, and back.'

Just hearing it all spelt out again brings protests of disbelief clamouring in my head. After thirty years of refining her talent, Laura Andrews did little more than escape the Hilgemann's mediocre security, travelling at most a couple of kilometres before being recollapsed. I'm expected to traverse a crowded city and steal the Ensemble's most precious asset — and I won't even have the eigenstate mod in my own skull.

Chan Kwok-hung says, 'He will remain smeared, reliably? You're sure of that?'

Lui says, 'The collapse-inhibiting mod should be ready within days.'

Yuen Lo-ching says, 'But these earlier episodes — how do you account for them?'

Lui shrugs. 'They may reflect a natural failure of the collapse. Or they may be related to P3, the behavioural-control mod he was using at the time; it's designed to greatly increase the probability of optimal mental states — which sounds like the very opposite of smearing — but ironically, it may have inadvertently inhibited the collapse, judging the process to be a "distraction" to be ruled out. Which, of course, would have had no observable consequences, until the eigenstate mod became involved.'

It's the first I've heard of that theory — and I don't see how P3could have played a crucial role in its own failure. Although … didn't I feel, when it was over, as if I'd remained in stake-out mode all along? Maybe I was primed and deprimed — maybe the collapse somehow left traces of both pasts intact. Memories may only endure from a single state, under normal conditions — but with Po-kwai's eigenstate mod shifting and recombining the 'mutually exclusive' possibilities, maybe that need not be the case. I remember Karen filling the anteroom, don't I? What was that? A single deranged hallucination, from a wildly dysfunctioning mod? Or memories surviving from a thousand simultaneous alternative incarnations — each of which, alone, would have seemed perfectly normal?

The prospect of spending several hours smeared is already unsettling enough — even if Lui is right and it happens to everyone, all of the time, and even if I could be sure of emerging from the collapse with all but one chosen eigenstate reduced to inconsequential fiction. But if there's a risk of multiple states leaving indelible memories, then not only will I be forced to treat smearing as more than an abstraction … but who knows what other tangible, physical consequences might end up being inconsistent? If I try to steal the ROM, and find myself remembering both success and failure, then what bizarre hybrid of the two might the rest of the world reflect?

Lui says, 'We need to move on this as quickly as possible. We don't know how long we have before Po-kwai begins to realize what's happening. The sooner Nick starts refining his control of the eigenstate mod, the better our chances of keeping her in the dark long enough to make use of the situation.' He adds — for my benefit — "This is to her advantage, as well; finding out that she's been deceived can only put her on dangerous ground. And if Nick takes full control, she need not even experience any more disturbing "somnambulism"; he can choose their joint eigenstate so that she turns out to have been safely asleep in bed, all along, while he's travelled across the city.'

Yeah, sure. Add one more miracle to the list. Who's counting?

Li Siu-wai says, 'If he fails, half-way…?'

'If he's collapsed in the street, then he's stranded — severed from Po-kwai and the eigenstate mod. He'll just have to bluff his way back into ASR — inventing some excuse for having left his post. He risks being disciplined-but then, he may be able to smooth things over with the other security staff; after all, if there's any investigation, how do they explain the fact that they never saw him leave the building in the first place?'

This scenario doesn't impress me; nobody running Sentinel is going to be blackmailed into a cover-up.

'If he's collapsed in BDI, then obviously that's much worse. I can only assume that we'll all come under suspicion. Everyone with a loyalty mod will be subject to the closest scrutiny; at the very least, the Canon will have to shut down, perhaps for several years. Perhaps indefinitely. At worst' — he shrugs — 'we risk everything. But the same can be said of whatever means we use to try to obtain the data. Now is the time to decide: do we continue living so cautiously that we might just as well be serving the sham Ensemble? Or do we take the first step towards our own true vision?'

This rhetoric is surreal: our own true vision means something utterly different to everyone assembled here — but nobody seems greatly troubled by the fact. The sham Ensemble may have its factions (ironically, that was the core of Lui's argument in persuading me to turn against it) but the Canon is — clearly, unashamedly — a thousand times worse. So, what are these people actually hoping for? Does each believe that their own point of view will somehow, miraculously, prevail in the end?

I don't know. How can I hope to understand what's going on here, when I don't even know what my own 'true vision' of the Ensemble is. I try to picture myself free of BDI and ASR — while still being loyal to … what?

Chan Kwok-hung is speaking, but I find it hard to concentrate on his words. I'm suddenly tired of shirking the question. What is the Ensemble, to me? I have to discover — or decide — the answer. How far can I stretch the definition? How radically can I deform the knot?