Greg Egan - Quarantine

More importantly: how long has she been awake? Since before I walked through the checkpoint, surely; it can't have taken me more than twenty seconds to get from the stairway to this room. So how did I get past the guards? Has she collapsed herself, collapsed me, broken my link to Ensemble — or are we both still smeared? And if we are … what happens if I shut off the collapse-inhibiting mod now? Is the past I remember already irrevocable? Or if I collapse now, do I risk some other sequence of events — chosen at random, or chosen by Po-kwai's smeared self-taking its place?

I have to stay smeared until she's asleep again — or predominantly asleep. I have to be certain that the choice of eigenstate is mine.

I move into the anteroom. All I have to do is stay calm, make small talk, wait for her to grow tired. 'What woke you?' She shrugs. 'I don't know.' Then she changes her mind and says sheepishly, 'Another stupid dream.'

'What about? If you don't mind me — '

'Nothing very exciting. Wandering around on the sixth floor. Sneaking from lab to lab, like some kind of burglar — but I didn't steal anything. I just wanted to prove that I could go wherever I pleased.' She laughs. 'No doubt acting out my resentment over the way I've been shut out of the scientific side of the work here. I'm afraid my dreams are usually like that — pretty transparent.'

'So what happened to wake you?'

She frowns. 'I'm not sure. I was coming up the stairs, and… I don't know, I was afraid of something. Afraid of being caught out. I was headed back here, and for some reason I was terrified that someone would see me.' She pauses, then adds, deadpan, 'Maybe that's what you heard in the corridor. Me on my way back.'

I know she's joking, but my skin crawls. Who's choosing this conversation? My smeared self? Her smeared seip The joint wave function of the two of us?

'Yeah? So you've been quantum-tunnelling through walls again? And floors. Why bother taking the stairs? Why not just move from A to B?'

'Well, in dreams, who knows? I expect my subconscious lacks the imagination to face the whole truth about quantum physics. And the courage.'

'Courage?'

She shrugs. 'Maybe that's not the right word. Courage? Honesty? I don't know what's needed. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the … part of me … that's lost when I collapse. And it's stupid, I know — but when I try to accept the fact that there are … women almost exactly like me, who exist for a second or two, experience something that I don't, and then vanish …' She shakes her head dismissively, almost angrily. 'Pretty precious, isn't it? Worrying about the death of my virtual alternatives. How many lives do I want?'

'You tell me.'

'Just one, personally — but I expect those other selves wouldn't mind one each, as well.' She shakes her head again, decisively. 'But it's crazy thinking that way. It's like … shedding tears over dead skin. It's what we are, it's the way we function. Humans make choices; we "murder" the people we might have been. If the work I'm doing makes that uncomfortably explicit, it still doesn't change anything; we can't live any other way. And now that The Bubble protects the rest of the universe, we just have to come to terms with ourselves.'

I recall my own previous scepticism, and say belatedly, 'Assuming that all of this is true. There may be nothing to come to terms with.'

She rolls her eyes. 'Listen, don't worry: ASR aren't about to announce to the world at large that The Bubble's purpose is to defend the universe against human depletion of alternatives. People went crazy enough about The Bubble itself, sans explanations. The truth is so loaded that I'm not even sure which would be more dangerous: people misunderstanding it, or people getting it right. Human perceptions have decimated the universe. Life consists of constantly slaughtering versions of ourselves. Imagine what kind of sects would form around ideas like that:

'And imagine what kind of reaction you'd get from the existing sects. The ones who think they've had all the answers for the last thirty-four years.' Yeah. The ones I'm supposed to be guarding you against.

Po-kwai nods, then stretches and stifles a yawn. I resist the temptation to suggest that she must be tired. She says, 'I don't know how you put up with me. If I'm not boring you with my dreams, or bitching about the way ASR is treating me, I'm spouting all this angst about obliterating alien civilizations and murdering our own alternatives.'

'Don't apologize for that. I'm interested.'

'Are you?' She gives me a searching look, then shakes her head in mock frustration. 'I can't read you, you know. If you were humouring me, I wouldn't know the difference. I'll just have to take your word for it.' She glances at her wristwatch — an ostentatious (and now dishonest) emblem of a mod-free brain. 'It's after three. I suppose I'd better — ' She moves towards the doorway, then hesitates. 'I know you physically can't get sick of this job — but what does your family think about you working all night, every night?'

'I don't have a family.'

'Really? No kids? I imagined you with — '

'No wife, no kids.'

'Who, then?'

'What do you mean?'

'Girlfriends? Boyfriends?'

'Nobody. Not since my wife died.'

She cringes. 'Oh, Nick. I'm sorry. Shit. My usual brilliant tact. When did it happen? Not… since you've been working here? Nobody told me — '

'No, no. It was almost seven years ago.'

'And — what? You're still in mourning?'

I shake my head. 'I've never been in mourning.'

'I don't understand.'

'I have a mod that … defines my responses. I don't grieve for her. I don't miss her. All I can do is remember her. And I don't need anyone else. I can't need anyone else.'

She hesitates, curiosity no doubt battling some outmoded sense of propriety, before it strikes home that I have no grief to respect. 'But… how did you feel at the time? Before you had this mod installed?'

'I was a cop, then. I was on duty when she died — or near enough. So …' I shrug. 'I didn't feel a thing.'

For an instant, I'm starkly aware that this confession is as improbable as anything I've done all night — that the smeared Nick-and-Po-kwai is plucking it from the thinnest realms of possibility with as much fastidiousness as each feat of lock-picking and sentry-dodging. But then the moment passes, and the illusion of will, the smooth flow of rationalization, returns.

'I wasn't hurt by her death — but I knew that I would be. I knew that as soon as I deprimed — shut down my behavioural mod — I'd suffer. Badly. So I did the obvious, sensible thing: I took steps to protect myself. Or rather, my primed self took steps to protect my unprimed self. The zombie boy scout came to the rescue.'

She's doing a pretty good job of hiding her reaction, but it's not hard to imagine: equal parts pity and revulsion. 'And your superiors just let you go ahead?'

'Oh, shit, no. I had to resign. The department wanted to throw me to the jackals: grief therapists, loss counsellors, trauma-adjustment specialists.' I laugh. 'These things aren't left to chance, you know; there's a departmental protocol several megabytes long, and an army of people to implement it. And to be fair to them, they weren't inflexible — they offered me all kinds of choices. But staying primed until I could physically circumvent the whole problem wasn't one of them. Not because it would have made me a bad cop. But it would have been awfully bad PR: join the police force, lose your spouse — and rewire your brain so you don't give a fuck.

'I could have sued to keep my job, I suppose; legally, I had a right to use any mod I liked, so long as it didn't affect my work. But there didn't seem much point in making a fuss. I was happy enough the way things turned out.'