Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief

There, is that not better? One day you will understand that our way works. Not worrying about who is who, and realising that they are all you .

The dissonance being gone is like cold water on a burn. The sudden relief is so raw that she almost bursts into tears. But that would not do in front of her . So she merely opens her eyes and waits, ready to obey.

No thank you? says the pellegrini. Very well . She opens her purse and takes out a small white cylinder, putting it in her mouth: one end of it lights up, emitting a foul smell. So tell me: what do you make of my thief?

‘It is not my place to say,’ says Mieli quietly. ‘I live to serve.’

Good answer, if a little boring. Is he not handsome? Come now, be honest. Can you really pine after your little lost amour with somebody like him around?

‘Do we need him? I can do this. Let me serve you, like I’ve served you before-’

The pellegrini smiles, her rouge lips perfect like cherries. Not this time. You are, if not the most powerful of my servants, the most faithful. Do as I tell you, and faith will be rewarded .

Then she is gone, and Mieli is alone in the pilot’s crèche, butterflies dancing around her head.

My cabin that is not much bigger than a cleaning cupboard. I try to ingest a protein milkshake from the fabber in the wall, but my new body is not taking to food too well. I have to spend some time on the space-bog: a tiny autonomously moving sack that comes out of the wall and attaches itself onto your ass. Apparently Oortian ships are not big on comfort.

One of the curving walls has a mirrored surface, and I look at my face in it while going through the undignified if necessary bodily functions. It looks wrong . In theory, everything is exactly right: the lips, the Peter Lorre eyes (as a lover said, centuries ago), the dimpled temples, the short hair, slightly grey and thinning, the way I like to wear it: the skinny, unremarkable body, in reasonable shape, with its tuft of chest hair. But I can’t help looking at it and blinking, as if it was out of focus slightly.

What’s worse, I have a similar feeling inside my head. Trying to remember feels like poking at a loose tooth with my tongue.

It feels like something has been stolen . Ha.

I distract myself by looking at the view. My wall has enough magnification to show the Dilemma Prison in the distance. It’s a diamonoid torus almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, but from this angle it looks like a glistening slit-pupilled eye among the stars, staring straight at me. I swallow and blink it away.

‘Glad to be out?’ asks the voice of the ship. It’s a feminine voice, a little like Mieli’s, but younger, sounding like somebody I’d quite like to meet under happier circumstances.

‘You can’t possibly imagine. It’s not a happy place.’ I sigh. ‘Your captain has my gratitude, even if she appears to be somewhat on the edge at the moment.’

‘Listen,’ says Perhonen . ‘You don’t know what she went through to get you out. I’m keeping an eye on you.’

It’s an interesting point, which I file away for future investigation. How did she get me out? And who is she working for? But it’s too early for that, so I simply smile.

‘Well, whatever job she wants me to do has to be better than shooting myself in the head every hour or so. Are you sure your boss would be all right with you talking to me? I mean, I am a manipulative master criminal and all that.’

‘I think I can handle you. Besides, it’s not like she is my boss , exactly.’

‘Oh,’ I say. I’m old-fashioned, but the whole human-gogol sexuality thing always bothered me in my youth, and old habits die hard.

‘It’s not like that ,’ the ship says. ‘Just friends! Besides, she made me. Well, not me , but the ship. I’m older than I look, you know.’ I wonder if that accent in its voice is real. ‘I heard about you, you know. Back then. Before the Collapse.’

‘I would have said that you don’t look a day over three hundred. Were you a fan?’

‘I liked the sunlifter theft. That was classy.’

‘Class,’ I say, ‘is what I’ve always aimed for. By the way, you don’t look a day over three hundred.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Mm-hm. Based on the evidence so far.’

‘Would you like me to show you around? Mieli won’t mind, she’s busy.’

‘I’d love that.’ Definitely female – maybe some of my charm survived the Prison . I suddenly feel the need to get dressed: talking to a female entity of any kind without even a fig leaf makes me feel vulnerable. ‘Sounds like we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other better. Maybe after you get me some clothes?’

First, Perhonen fabs me a suit. The fabric is too smooth – I don’t like wearing smartmatter – but looking at myself in a white shirt, black trousers and a deep purple jacket helps with the sense of unself a little.

Then she shows me the spimescape. Suddenly, the world has a new direction. I step into it, out of my body, moving my viewpoint into space so that I can look at the ship.

I was right: Perhonen is an Oortian spidership. It consists of separate modules, tethered together by nanofibres, living quarters spinning around a central axis like an amusement park ride to create a semblance of gravity. The tethers form a network in which the modules can move, like spiders in a web. The q-dot sails – concentric soap-bubble-thin rings made from artificial atoms that spread out several kilometres around the ship and can catch sunlight, Highway mesoparticles and lightmill beams equally well – look spectacular.

I steal a glance at my own body as well, and that’s when I’m really impressed. The spimescape view is seething with detail. A network of q-dots under the skin, proteomic computers in every cell, dense computronium in the bones. Something like that could only have been made in the guberniya worlds close to the sun. It seems my rescuers are working for the Sobornost. Interesting.

‘I thought you wanted to get to know me ,’ Perhonen says, offended.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Just, you know, making sure I’m presentable. You don’t spend much time in the company of ladies in the Prison.’

‘Why were you there, anyway?’

Suddenly, it feels amazing that I haven’t thought about it for so long. I have been too preoccupied with guns, defection and cooperation.

Why was I in the Prison?

‘A nice girl like you should not worry about such things.’

Perhonen sighs. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should not be talking to you. Mieli would not like it if she knew. But it’s been so long since we had anyone interesting onboard.’

‘This certainly does not seem like a lively neighbourhood.’ I indicate the starry field around us. ‘Where are we?’

‘The Neptunian Trojan belt. Arse-end of nowhere. I waited here for a long time, when she went to get you.’

‘You have a lot to learn about being a criminal. It’s all about the waiting. Boredom punctuated by flashes of sheer terror. Sort of like war.’

‘Oh, war was much better,’ she says, excitedly. ‘We were in the Protocol War. I loved it. You get to think so fast . Some of the things we did – we stole a moon, you know. It was amazing. Metis, just before the Spike: Mieli put a strangelet bomb in to push it out of orbit, like fireworks, you would not believe-’

Suddenly, the ship is silent. I wonder if it realised it has said too much. But no: its attention is focused elsewhere.

In the distance, amidst the spiderweb of Perhonen ’s sails and the spimescape vectors and labels of habitats far away, there is a jewel of bright dots, a six-pointed star. I zoom in in the scape view. Dark ships, jagged and fang-like, a cluster of seven faces sculpted in their prows, the same faces that adorn every Sobornost structure, the Founders: god-kings with a trillion subjects. I used to go drinking with them.