Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

‘Jean, Jean, Jean,’ she says, in a musical voice that is hauntingly familiar. ‘What are we going to do with you, my little flower prince?’

Then she gets up, wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me.

Mieli is a prisoner in her own body. She wants to close her eyes, but can’t; wants to pull away from the thief, but can’t. She can smell the foul liquor in his breath. She can see where this is going to go, and suddenly there is nothing funny about it.

‘Help me,’ she tells Perhonen soundlessly. ‘Get me out of here.’

Poor baby. Here . Suddenly, comforting, cool blackness surrounds her. Whatever subroutine her mind has been demoted to, at least the ship still has access to it.

‘What is she doing ?’

Mysterious ways and all that , the ship says. Are you all right?

‘No.’ Bodiless, voiceless, Mieli wants to cry. ‘He was right, I was wrong. But there was no choice, was there?’

No, there wasn’t. What the goddess there says, goes, and that’s the way it is, for now. I’m so sorry .

‘And I broke vows. I need to beg Ilmatar’s forgiveness.’

I’m sure she is understanding, as goddesses go. I’m sure you’ll do better with her than with the other one. Don’t worry. She and the thief deserve each other .

The voice of the ship is soothing and calm. ‘That’s right,’ Mieli says. ‘Besides, don’t we have work to do?’

Indeed .

Suddenly, the blackness around Mieli is no longer empty. She is in a datascape, vast and complex. It whispers to her, explaining itself: two vast trees of nodes and lines, superimposed, representing the two versions of Christian Unruh’s encrypted mind and memory.

Kissing Mieli’s body is like finally kissing that old friend you have always had sexual tension with. Except the kiss is nothing like I imagined: there is a ferocity and strength to it that takes my breath away. And, of course, she is much stronger than I am: I have to turn my head away to come up for air.

‘Who are you?’ I manage, out of breath.

She lets herself fall back onto the couch pillows, laughing like a little girl. Then she spreads her arms along the back and crosses her legs.

‘Your benefactor. Your liberator. Your goddess. Your mother.’ She sees my horrified expression and laughs even louder. ‘I am joking , darling. Although you could call me your spiritual mother. I taught you a lot of things a long time ago.’ She pats the pillow next to her. ‘Now sit down.’

Somewhat gingerly, I obey.

She runs her fingers down my cheek and to my open shirt collar, sending cold waves through me. ‘In fact, we should find out if you still remember them.’ She kisses my neck, hard, nibbling at my skin, and I find it difficult to focus on my rage. I tense.

‘Relax. You like this body, I know you do. And I made sure yours is… receptive.’ She whispers the last words, and her hot breath on my skin turns the anger into something else. ‘When you live a very long time, you become a connoisseur in all things. Especially those you get to sample seldom. Sometime, when this is over, I will show you how to live. These things are so heavy and clumsy: we can do better in the guberniyas . But it’s fun, don’t you think?’ She bites my earlobe, hard, and flinches.

‘Oh, this silly biot feed. Poor Mieli, so paranoid. I am going to turn it off. You are not going to go anywhere, are you?’

‘No,’ I breathe. ‘But we need to talk.’

‘Talk can come after. Don’t you think so too?’

And, God help me, I do.

Bear in mind I don’t understand all of this, Perhonen says. But the mathematics gogols do. This is one of the root nodes of his gevulot tree . To Mieli, the complex data structures look like the incomprehensible visions one has in the alinen . Her viewpoint hovers over an intersection of innumerable lines, connecting in a sphere full of symbols and three-dimensional sections of a brain. The changes took place here, here and here . The objects inside the sphere change colour. Mieli touches the sphere to absorb the information and considers it for a moment.

‘It’s his procedural memory,’ she says. ‘So in a certain situation, it would trigger him to act in a certain way. For example, voting for the Voice.’

Yes. There are other changes too, here and there, but nothing major. Now, the interesting thing is that we can actually trace where the edit came from .

The ship highlights one of the lines connecting to the node they are viewing. There is additional information attached to it as well: complex mathematical formulae. The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root .

‘Except that-’

Except that it looks like all the roots are also generated from another pair. A master key, if you like. Whoever holds those is able to access every exomemory in the Oubliette, and to rewrite them. For people who pass through Quiet, that means their entire mind. That’s where these new edits to Unruh’s mind came from. The cryptarchs must have some sort of automated system that modifies everybody who passes through the Quiet .

‘Mother Ilmatar,’ Mieli breathes. ‘So potentially-’

– if they want, they can view and change every memory and thought of anyone who has been a Quiet. Of course, that is too much information for any one person to keep track of, so I assume they have some mechanical ways of augmenting it. Given the minor edits they have made to Unruh’s mind, I would imagine that they only have limited resources to do this .

But the bottom line is, the Oubliette is not a place of forgetting. It’s not a privacy heaven. It’s a panopticon .

It has been a long time. So at first, everything is a hot fast blur of flesh and skin and mouths and touches and bites. She is much stronger than me, and not afraid to show it. She plays with Mieli’s enhancements too, teasing me with a hot q-dot at her fingertip, grinning like a cat.

By the third time, we discover that her wings are touch-sensitive, and that’s when things get really interesting.

‘So what can we do with this?’

Well, we can’t do anything about the root access. But – the gogols say – we can put another encryption layer on top of all that. With the pirate engines, we can make fake Oubliette identities. We made a few of those with keys that did not come from the Oubliette key generator interface .

‘And?’

Well, that allowed us to make co-memories that the cryptarchs will never have access to. Anyone we share those with will be inoculated against any manipulation by the cryptarchs, passing through Quiet or otherwise. It’s viral: you can pass it on to as many people as you want. And we made another that makes you forget the edits that have already been made. In fact, the thief suggested publishing them through a newspaper-

‘Wait. The thief suggested what?’

Yes, we had this conversation already. While you were singing. It really did not take that long for the maths gogols to come up with all this .

‘He knows about this already? Does he have the co-memories?’

Yes . The ship pauses. He played me, didn’t he? Bastard . Mieli lets it sink in. ‘Yes. Yes, he did. And I think someone else is about to be played too.’

It is early morning before we stop to rest. At some point, we made it to my bedroom. I lean back on the pillows, eyes half-closed, and look at her, reclining on the other side of the bed, naked apart from her temporary Watch, wings still half-open, catching the light of the dawn.