Greg Egan - Quarantine

I grasp the handle and tug it, far harder than I need to; with a soft click the door flies open, almost hitting me in the face. I step round it, and walk into the vault.

Six by six metres, and most of it empty space. I play the flashlight beam across the far wall; there's a rack of shelves going up to the ceiling. Eight shelves, each bearing twenty neat plastic ROM boxes — the kind that hold two hundred chips.

I move in closer. Most of the boxes are labelled with ranges of serial numbers: 019200-019399, and so on. The boxes on the lowest two shelves, and the rightmost two on the third shelf, are unlabelled and empty, but the rest seem to be full. That makes a total of twenty-three thousand, six hundred chips.

I take the dice generator from my pocket — why shouldn't I make this easy on myself? — but then change my mind and put it away. Will one of my sons survive — or one of their cousins, who used the dice? Both are capable of success. I reach out quickly and grab a box. It has a simple, purely mechanical lock. Perhaps I could make even this slide open by pure choice — my first ever feat of truly macroscopic quantum tunnelling — but I don't. I open it with a skeleton key, which takes almost a minute. I resist the temptation to close my eyes before lifting a chip from its cavity on the moulded tray — and resist the temptation to put it back and choose again, when I realize that I've taken one from the very edge of the tray.

I plug the ROM into a reader with an IR transceiver, then I invoke RedNet and CypherCIerk, and talk to the reader. I say, 'Show me the ID page, in English.'

The shadows of the vault fade almost to blackness, and a window of vivid blue-on-white text rushes towards me from the centre of my visual field:

ENSEMBLE

Neural Modification Algorithm © Copyright 2068, biomedical development international

Unauthorized reproduction of this software by any method, in any media, is a violation of the Intellectual Property Covenant of 2045, and is punishable under the laws of the Republic of New Hong Kong, and other signatories to the covenant.

Working by touch, I plug a blank chip into the reader's second port, and say, 'Copy everything, deleting all security, removing all encryption. Verify one thousand times.'

A sentry icon appears in front of the window, and says, 'Password?'

I close my eyes — to little effect — blank my mind, and 'hear' my virtual larynx 'whisper' something in Cantonese. It's not a word I've picked up, and I don't bother asking Deja Vu for a translation. The sentry bows and vanishes, and a caricature of a medieval monk copying a manuscript in comical fast-motion takes his place.

I stand in the centre of the vault, swaying gently. I have no way of knowing if I'm experiencing success — or just some combination of hardware, mod and natural-brain malfunctions which looks exactly like it. For isolated tasks, the odds look good: if I am inside a vault in the BDI building, then with a mere twenty-three thousand, six hundred chips to choose from, the number of states in which I really did pick the right one must surely swamp those in which the chip reader and/or CypherClerk lied, and pretended that I had Ensemble when I really had something else. But as for the probability of hallucinating the whole night's work without even leaving ASR, compared to that of actually opening all those locked doors… I don't know. All I can be sure of is that after the collapse, it won't take long to tell the difference; either I'll have a copy of Ensemble in my pocket, or not.

Verifying the copy one thousand times is pure overkill; if a mistake in the copying process is unlikely under normal conditions, and my smeared self does nothing to seek out such an event, then it should remain as improbable as ever. I'm still glad that I'm doing it, though; part of me refuses to believe that I can force locks and cameras into wildly implausible failures, and then take it for granted that other equipment, equally vulnerable to quantum tunnelling, will operate flawlessly.

After a few minutes, the monk stops work, bows and vanishes. I shut down CypherClerk, and then, with almost ridiculous deliberation, I unplug the ROM, pocket the reader, place the ROM back on the tray, lock the box, return it to the shelf. I play the flashlight beam across the wall, searching for anything I might have disturbed, but everything looks just the way I found it.

I turn round. There's a woman in a nightdress standing in the doorway; thin, mid-thirties, Anglo features, skin as black as my own.

Laura Andrews — but not as I saw her in the basement, disguised as Han Hsiu-lien. Laura Andrews, as in the Hilgemann's files, as in my client's transmission.

How did she get out of the basement? Stupid question. But how did she do it tonight, when she couldn't manage it before? Have I done something, inadvertently, to undermine the security systems monitoring her? But if she's finally succeeded in escaping … what's she doing up here?

I reach for a can of tranquillizer, thinking: and why should my smeared self let her interrupt me? Does this prove that I won't be chosen … that I'm now as good as dead —

She says, 'You have what you came for?'

I stare at her, then nod.

'And what exactly do you plan to do with it?'

'Who are you? Are you Laura? Are you real?'

She laughs. 'No. But your perceptions of me will be. I speak for Laura — or Laura-and-the-smeared-Nick-and-Po-kwai, and others. But mostly Laura.'

'I don't understand. You "speak for Laura"? Are you Laura, or not?'

'Laura is smeared; she can't talk to you herself. She's talking with the smeared-Nick-and-Po-kwai, but she's created me to talk to you.'

'I —'

'Her complexity is spread across eigenstates; the two of you could never interact directly. But she's concentrated enough information into a single-state mode to communicate the essentials. She's made contact with the smeared-Nick-and-Po-kwai — but they're childlike, unreliable. Which is why I'm talking to you.'

'I — '

'You've stolen Ensemble. Laura has no wish to prevent that. But she wants you to understand exactly what it can do.'

Still confused, I say defensively, 'I know what it can do. I'm here, aren't I? I opened this vault.' I suppose I shouldn't be shocked to discover that the smeared Laura is not retarded — after all, she was smart enough to get out of the Hilgemann, and she's had thirty-four years of emergent probability to refine whatever brain pathways work best in that mode. But to find her able to manufacture apparitions to lecture me on the use of Ensemble is still something of a revelation.

She shakes her head and says, 'You don't understand — but you will. Laura will amplify a state in which you do.'

'She's manipulating me — '

'She's communicating with you, in the only way she can. Her effects, I promise, will be independent of those of the smeared-Nick-and-Po-kwai. And, given your brain physiology, the most likely route to understanding is a conversation, like this one.'

Like this one? Meaning, of course, that there are other conversations, and maybe this won't be the one that succeeds. But that's been true of everything I've done tonight; becoming squeamish, now, would be ludicrous.

'Go on.'

The spokesperson says, 'The first thing you must understand is that the extent of the collapse is finite. The human brain only has a certain degree of complexity, and a finite number of people with finite brains can't destroy an infinite number of states. What's more, there are states in which the brain pathways involved in the collapse have ceased to function; without those pathways, the state is untouchable. The collapse is a local phenomenon. It depletes part of superspace — the space of all eigenstates — but only part. An infinite amount remains intact.'