Greg Egan - Quarantine

I need somewhere to stay, but hotels are far too computerized to be safe. It takes me most of the afternoon, but I manage to rent a small flat in a mildly run-down district in the south-west — and with a suitable bribe, no ID is required. When the agent hands me the key and leaves, I collapse onto the bed. The concussion is starting to catch up with me; I'm having trouble staying awake.

Karen says, 'So, where do we start? What's the most immediate risk to containment?' I sigh. 'You know this is hopeless. Lui must have made a dozen copies of the data, by now.'

'Maybe. But would he have trusted anyone else with them — or just hidden them?' The room itself keeps going slightly out of focus, but her image remains perfectly sharp. I squeeze my eyes shut, and try to concentrate.

'I don't know. He certainly wouldn't have given them to the other members of the Canon; I expect he'll have told them that I failed to complete the break-in — if he's had a chance to tell them anything at all.'

'So he may still be the only person with access to the data?'

'Perhaps. Except for the company he's hired to manufacture his copy of the nanoware, of course. If he plans to keep on selling code-breaking services without me, he's going to have to install Ensemble in his own skull, and learn how to use it himself.'

'Which company?'

'I don't know.' I force myself back on my feet; the floor sways for a second, then stabilizes. 'But I think I know how to find out.'

I'm in luck: Lui hasn't chosen a new front for his dealings with backstreet manufacturers — and after some token resistance, the owner of the stall where I picked up Hypernova proves remarkably cooperative. At this rate, I'll be flat broke in a matter of days, but I might as well make good use of my windfall while it lasts.

He says, 'I sent both packages to NeoMod by courier this morning. About seven o'clock. The client paid for a rush job — it would have been ready by two. But the product didn't come back to me; he phoned about noon and said he'd collect it himself, straight from the factory.'

'Both packages? How many mods did he order?'

'Just one — but he supplied his own customized vector for the nanomachines. That's pretty unusual, but — ' He shrugs.

Unusual is an understatement. The standard Endamoeba are designed to be unable to survive for more than a few minutes outside the culture medium in which they're shipped. They rely on enzymes which they can't manufacture for themselves — which the culture medium provides, but which don't occur in nature at all. Along with several other kinds of engineered flaws, this guarantees that they have no prospect of surviving for longer than it takes them to cross the user's nasal mucous membrane; anyone else in the vicinity has about as much chance of being infected with nanomachines and 'catching the mod' by mistake as they have of becoming pregnant from a couple making love in the room next door.

And there's only one reason for using a nonstandard vector: to undermine these safeguards. To improve the ease with which a mod can be imposed on someone who doesn't want it.

Which makes no sense at all. If Lui plans to use Ensemble for code-breaking, what possible reason would he have to force it on to some unwilling accomplice?

'This customized vector — what do you know about it?'

He shakes his head. 'Nothing. I didn't supply it; I just sent it off along with the chip.'

'Was the vial marked in any way? With a brand name? A logo? Anything?'

'I didn't see the vial. It was packed inside a little black box — and that had no markings on it at all.'

'A little black box?'

'Yeah. No markings… just a tiny blue light on it.' He shrugs at this eccentric detail; puzzling, but none of his business. 'It was brought in separately, before the mod data. Yesterday afternoon.'

I fish out my ASR employee's badge. The stallholder squints at the photo and says, 'Yeah. A southerner. I think that's him.' He looks back up at the pale version of the very same face, without a hint of recognition.

I fight my way through the rush-hour crowd, without any idea where I'm going. The Endamoeba would have smeared into every possible mutant strain — however exotic, however improbable, however difficult to engineer by other means. There must have been enough bioelectronics in the box to test the strain for the unlikely properties Lui wanted, and signal with the LED only if the cells could jump through all the right biochemical hoops. And I swallowed his lie about code-breaking supercomputers, and blithely chose the eigenstate which made the light come on. What properties, though? And why? What profit is there to be made?

But then, why do I think that Lui's idea of the true Ensemble has anything to do with money? Because he paid me half a million dollars? Because he sheepishly 'confessed' that the black box contained a code-breaking computer? Well, maybe it did — along with everything else; his funds must be coming from somewhere. But if the money's just a means to an end … then what's the end? If he hasn't twisted the mod's constraints into pure human greed, after all … then what quasi-religious vision has he constructed around the flaw in his brain?

// he's known, all along, who Laura was, why The Bubble was made, and exactly what the risks of smearing are …

I stop dead in the middle of the street and let the crowd push past me. It's all too easy to imagine how I would have reacted, if I'd learnt the facts in a different order — if I'd come to define the true Ensemble, knowing the whole truth about Laura.

Laura's progenitor died — collapsed — in the act of creating her, like some self-sacrificing God-become-woman. And now, able to smear into woman-become-God, she's shown us precisely how we can cease collapsing, regain our Godliness, and rejoin the rest of super-space.

I don't know Lui's background; if he grew up in NHK, it could be Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or as atheist as my own. But perhaps it makes no difference what he believed beforehand; perhaps a story as powerful as Laura's — combined with the loyalty mod's axiomatic decree that the work of the Ensemble is the most important thing in the world — would have set up the same dangerous resonances in anybody's skull.

And it would have been blindingly obvious to anyone what the work of the Ensemble was.

I look around helplessly, as dusk overtakes the city. People squeeze by me, tense and weary, lost in their own concerns; I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them out of their complacency.

If I'm right about all this, then there's no limit to what Lui might have done to the vector; he could have made it robust, airborne, highly infectious, quick to reproduce … everything that the original was painstakingly designed not to be. He could have made it the perfect vehicle for what he sees as Laura's gift to humanity.

Who do I warn?

Who would believe me? Nobody in their right mind; a neural-mod plague is the stuff of paranoid fantasy. The nanomachines themselves are fragile and non-virulent — and their operation is intimately linked, at the lowest level, to hundreds of specific details of the vector's crippled biochemistry. Within those constraints, the most elaborately enhanced illegal vectors can survive at large for about an hour — useful for infecting individual victims, but hardly the stuff of epidemics. The expert consensus has always been that anything more than tinkering at the edges would require, not just nonstandard vectors, but nonstandard nano-machines — entailing a research effort almost as expensive as that which created the whole technology in the first place. No terrorists, no religious cult, could afford that — and probably not even a government would be able to pull it off in absolute secrecy.