Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

I thought being a thief was easy , the ship says, as we bounce information back and forth. This is hard work .

‘Waiting and sheer terror, as I said.’ I try to ignore the memories that scroll through my mind as the ship and the identity theft engine work on them, to keep my promise to Raymonde. There are flashes of blank faces sculpted on a wall, and a girl with a zoku jewel at her throat. There is a strange innocence about the memories, and briefly I wonder what this boy is doing chasing gogol pirates and criminals like me.

I brush them aside: it is not the detective’s past I’m here to steal, but Time. The gogol engine chimes, announcing success, talking to my hacked Watch and making the world think I’m Isidore Beautrelet. Only a few moments before his Watch renews his identity signature with the ambient gevulot, so I have no time to waste. I check my remaining equipment – the q-spider and the trigger in my mind – and decide it is time for the main event of the night.

I approach Unruh’s group – the borrowed gevulot now allows me to see them – and imitate the detective’s distracted, meandering walk. My mark is talking to a tall woman in icy white, and looks cheerfully drunk.

‘M. Beautrelet!’ he shouts when he sees me. ‘How goes the villain hunt?’

‘There are too many to choose from,’ I say. Unruh bursts out laughing, but the woman in white looks at me curiously. Better make this quick.

‘You are in a festive mood, I see,’ Unruh says. ‘Good for you! Here’s to that.’ He drains his glass.

I hand Unruh another glass from a passing Quiet waiter. As he takes it, I give the q-spider a quick instruction. It runs up my arm, leaps to his palm and vanishes into his gas-giant-coloured sleeve. Then it goes looking for his Watch.

The spider took three days to grow and another protracted argument with Mieli to play with the Sobornost body. Perhonen and I came up with the design, and it grew in the crook of my arm, a little many-legged lump, storing inside it some of the EPR states that both Mieli and I use for our superdense communication link with the ship. I smile at Unruh and guide it with my mind.

‘It’s hard not to be,’ I say, ‘when the fireworks are about to start.’

There . The spider nestles on his Watch and crawls inside it, connecting little q-dot threads to the ion traps that store Unruh’s personalised, unforgeable units of Time, quantum states that his Watch sends to the resurrection system one by one, counting down his lifetime as a human. Then it shoots a little signal up at Perhonen . One, two, three, ten, sixty seconds of Time, quantum teleported away, transformed into quantum states up in the sky, stored in Perhonen ’s wings. Yes .

Unruh frowns. ‘I was saving the fireworks for my big moment tonight,’ he says.

I smile. ‘Shouldn’t every moment be a big moment?’

Unruh laughs again. ‘M. Beautrelet, I don’t know where you found your wit – at the bottom of a glass or on a pretty girl’s lips – but I’m glad you did!’

‘M. le Flambeur, I presume?’

The detective stands in front of me flanked by two of the Quiet guards, two sleek black creatures made of sheer power and ferocity. I raise my eyebrows. Faster than I expected, much faster. He deserves the bow I give him.

‘At your service.’ I let my features revert to my own. I grin at Unruh. ‘You have been a gracious host, but I’m afraid I must take my leave now.’

‘M. le Flambeur, I must ask you not to move.’

I throw my flower into the air and form the mental image of pressing a large red button.

The fireworks go off all at once. The sky is full of trails of fire, weaving double and triple spirals, stars bursting into flakes of silver and sudden thunderclaps. After a cascade of bright purple confetti, two blue rockets draw a sign of infinity. There is a smell of gunpowder.

Around me, the party stops. The Quiet guards are statues. The music dies. Unruh drops his glass, but remains upright, eyes glazed. There are a few slow collapses, but overall, almost everyone at the party remains standing, gazes fixed on something far, far away, but unseeing, as the fireworks fizzle and die above us.

Another trick from the gogol pirate handbook: an opto-genetic virus that makes brain cells hypersensitive to certain wavelengths of light. It was not hard to customise it not for the purposes of uploads, but for creating a period of inactivity. It looks like the infection from my flower spread even faster than I thought. And there are only so many fireworks manufacturers in the Moving City: bribing them with the pretence of a little innocent surprise for M. Unruh was the easy part.

I wrap myself in gevulot and make my way past the stunned, silent, thoughtless crowd. Raymonde is waiting for me at the garden gate, also wrapped in full privacy.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay for one more dance?’ I ask her. I close my eyes and wait for the slap. It doesn’t come. When I open my eyes, she is looking at me, face unreadable.

‘Give it back. His gevulot. Now.’

And I do, returning all the rights to the detective’s memories she gave me, purging all of him out of myself, becoming just Jean le Flambeur again.

She sighs. ‘That’s better. Thank you.’

‘I take it that your crowd will cover our tracks here?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Just go and do your part.’

‘In case it makes you feel any better,’ I say, ‘the next part involves me dying.’

We are in the public park. It is dark. Raymonde becomes the Gentleman and floats into the air. The dying fireworks reflect from her silver mask. ‘I never wanted you to die,’ she says. ‘It was always about something else.’

‘What? Revenge?’

‘Let me know when you figure it out,’ she says and is gone.

Amazingly, the party continues after the period of stolen time expires. Ten minutes have passed. The band picks up the tune, and the conversations begin again. And of course, there is only one topic.

Isidore’s temples throb. With the Quiet guards and Odette, he searches the grounds and the garden’s exomemory, over and over. But there is no sign of le Flambeur. The sense of failure and disappointment is a leaden weight in his belly. When the hour approaches midnight, he finally returns to the party.

Unruh has opened his gevulot to the public. He is the centre of attention and loving it, complimented on his bravery facing the thief. But eventually he waves his hand. ‘My friends, it is time for me to leave you,’ he says. ‘Thank you for your patience with our unplanned entertainment number.’ Laughter. ‘But at least – and thanks to the bravery of our very own M. Beautrelet – he went away empty-handed.

‘It was my intention to do this in bed between my lovely ladies here,’ he says, clutching two Serpent Street courtesans, ‘and possibly while being crushed by an elephant.’ He raises his glass to the gracile pachyderm looming behind the crowd. ‘But perhaps it is better to do it here, with friends. Time is what we make of it; relative, absolute, finite, infinite. I choose to let this moment last forever so that when I toil to clean your sewers and protect you from phoboi and carry your city on my back – I can remember what it is like to have such friends.’

‘And so, with a drink, and a kiss,’ Unruh kisses both girls – ‘or two’ – laughter – ‘I die. See you in the-’

He falls to the ground, dropping his glass. Blinking, staring at the still form of the millenniaire, Isidore looks at his Watch. It shows one minute to midnight. But how? He planned it so carefully, to the last word . But his thoughts are drowned by cheers and popping champagne bottles, all around.