Greg Egan - Quarantine

Po-Kwai is on a rest day, but that's no problem; I've used Ensemble successfully under these conditions three times before. The smeared Nick-and-(dreaming)-Po-Kwai clearly has it down to a fine art now, the requisite skills preserved between incarnations in some corner of my skull, or hers, or both.

I sit in the anteroom, primed, but nonetheless infected with a sense of anticipation — enough, at least, to keep me from sinking into a pure stake-out trance. I wonder idly, not for the first time, if in fact I could have 'stolen' Ensemble straight from Po-kwai's skull, by sheer brute choice of eigenstate: selecting the 'spontaneous' rearrangement of my own neurons into a perfect copy of the mod. But I don't see how my smeared self could have discriminated between a successful result and all the alternative, useless, neural rewirings possible; any test of efficacy would have required me to collapse first.

At dinner, Po-kwai seems morose. I ask her what's wrong.

She shrugs. 'Nothing new. I'm just sick of being bullied, and patronized, and gagged. That's all.'

'What's Leung done now?'

'Oh, nobody's done anything. Nothing's changed. It just… all seems even more stupid and oppressive than usual, today. I read an article in Physical Review this morning: a whole new treatment of the measurement problem. They add a few more dimensions to space-time; throw in a few nonlinearities, asymmetries and assorted fudge factors; and — miracle of miracles! — the collapse of the wave falls out the other end.'

I know I should have dutifully silenced her half-way through the word 'measurement' — if only for the sake of appearances — but the hypocrisy would have been too much.

She says, 'People are wasting valuable time, heading down paths that I know are blind alleys. That makes me a liar by default. I don't expect Leung to divulge any commercial secrets — like neural maps, or details of the mod — but I don't see why we can't at least publish the results of the experiments.' She makes a sound of pure frustration. 'I signed the secrecy provisions freely; I have no one to blame but myself. Of course, they wouldn't have hired me if I hadn't signed, so in a sense I had no choice — but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.'

I say blandly, 'I'm sure ASR will release everything, in good time. How long has it been since your first result? Three months? Newton didn't publish his work for years.'

'Newton's work,' she says bitterly, 'wasn't this important.'

I deprime, smear, wait — the familiar routine. I spend some time trying to calm myself — until I realize that what I'm feeling is more excitement than fear. It's an unfamiliar emotion; it's a long time since I confronted anything challenging — let alone dangerous — without using P3to neutralize the experience. I feel a surge of pure resentment: the zombie boy scout has cheated me out of half my life; stolen it, and then gone through the motions like a sleepwalker, not even truly living it for me… but I quash this maudlin bullshit. The zombie boy scout has saved my life a thousand times — and it was my choice to live that way. I never wanted excitement, I never wanted to be a mindless adrenalin junkie. I've been 'cheated out of nothing but an early death.

And what 'danger' am I confronting now? I know I can bypass any amount of security hardware. I've proved that I can choose eigenstates as improbable as everything that lies ahead. What is there left to fear?

Only change.

I stare 'out' the fake window at a cluster of dark towers shrouded in sparks of golden light, and think: the city I have to cross tonight is no place I've ever known. In the real New Hong Kong, locked doors do not fall open, guards do not avert their gaze. I'll be walking out into a dream city, where anything at all can happen.

I laugh softly. Anything at all, yes — but out of that infinite diversity, I'll choose nothing but the smoothest, simplest burglary in history. Nothing but success, without complications or harm. Or change.

Walking unseen through the thirtieth-floor checkpoint is an easy start; if everything collapses now, all I've done is left my post for thirty seconds, to ask a colleague to take my place while I deal with an urgent bowel movement that my mods seem unable to' delay. Not correct procedure, but nobody's going to shoot me for that.

I glance at the guards, a young man and a middle-aged woman; they coyly look away. I wonder: Do they feel manipulated? Or are they rationalizing their actions (convenient beyond belief, for me — but not intrinsically all that bizarre) as easily as ever? If my smeared self chooses a state in which they're visibly inattentive, but leaves the hidden details of their mental processes to chance, then I expect the odds are that the state also includes an elegant justification. If the brain can pull off that trick, so consistently, for eigenstates chosen purely at random, then surely the bias that I'm introducing — skewing their actions, but blind to their thoughts — shouldn't spoil the effect.

Between the twelfth and eleventh floors, I hear a door below me fly open. I freeze, think of backtracking — but before I can move, a technician bounds up the stairs right past me, whistling tunelessly.

I slump against the wall. A few seconds later, the door of the thirteenth floor slams shut. Did he see me? He was in a hurry; he would have ignored me, regardless — so could my smeared self tell the states apart? (Why didn't he keep the man out of the fucking stairwell altogether, until I'd passed?) Have I been collapsed, or not? I take out the dice generator, flick it on. Snake's eyes. And again. And again. And again.

I'm greatly relieved … but there's something perverse, something almost insane about this test. If I were collapsed then, yes, the odds against this pattern would be overwhelming … but if I'm smeared, all patterns occur — so I'm decreasing the intrinsic probability of the eigenstate that constitutes success, putting more demands on my smeared self, and creating ever more versions of myself who know that they won't be chosen.

And proving that I will survive the final collapse? Or at least, someone who arises from me: a 'descendant', a 'son'? No, I'm not even doing that. Every version who used the dice has smeared into versions who witnessed every possible outcome; if a billion versions consulted the dice, then a billion of the subsequent 'offspring' will have seen four snake's eyes.

I have no choice but to take it on faith that I'm the one who'll end up real. I continue.

I'm linked to the technician now — and keeping him from collapsing Nick-and-Po-kwai-and-(at-least)-two-guards. What about the other people on his shift? My mind baulks, but I keep moving. Even if he 'hadn't' come into the stairwell — whatever that means when we're not yet collapsed — would the mere fact that he might have done so been enough to correlate our wave functions? I'm linked to Po-kwai, aren't I — without this version of me having observed her since I smeared.

I leave the stairwell on the ground floor and cross the foyer, staring at the guards staring into thin air. I 'do all I can' to notice whether or not I've been seen, 'making it easier' for my smeared self to choose the correct state.

The front doors slide open, and I step out onto the forecourt — set back from the street, and largely concealed by a cluster of food stalls, all closed at this hour. I can hear people shouting and laughing nearby, and the whir of bicycles in the distance, but mercifully, there's nobody in sight as I move around the building to the laneway where the robot delivery van is parked. I glance back once, half expecting to find myself being pursued by a guard who snapped out of his trance a moment too soon. That must be happening to someone. But not to me.