Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

‘Nine buildings. Oh God.’ She grabs Isidore by the shoulders. ‘When did you work this out?’

‘Just before the gogol pirates attacked-’

‘That means,’ she says, ‘that the cryptarchs know about it too. Something terrible is about to happen. I have to go. We will continue this conversation later. You have to go somewhere safe. The zoku colony is the safest place. Stay there, with Pixil. Things are going to get very ugly here.’

‘But-’

‘We are not going to argue about this. Go, right now, or I will take you there myself.’

She becomes the Gentleman again and takes to the air before Isidore can answer.

Isidore stares after her for a moment. Then he sits down again. He is used to the ground moving beneath his feet – the constant, gentle sway of the city – but this is like teetering on the brink of a vast chasm that has suddenly opened. He tries to hold on to the shape in his mind, but his heart beats so fast that it is hard to focus-

The earth shakes. There is a terrible grinding sound. The cobblestones in the small square buckle. He falls to the ground, shielding his face with his arms. Vast machines in the underworld are rumbling, and for a moment it feels like the city is a thin layer of life on the rough skin of some huge creature, stirred by a bee sting, shaking itself. Then it is over, as quickly as it began. The thief’s machine .

Still shaking, Isidore gets up, blinking away the head rush. Then he starts running towards the Maze.

The aftershock echoes through the city. Most of the damage has been cosmetic – the buildings in the city have smart-matter skeletons – but the city has stopped moving. Persistent Avenue is filling with a noisy crowd: the air is full of the restless murmur of thousands of human voices. Something has happened in the Maze: a cloud of dust swirls to the sky above the rooftops. And behind it looms a new structure, a black needle, hundreds of metres high.

Isidore tries to make his way through the throng of the crowd. Gevulot shields are open in the confusion. Everywhere, there are wide-eyed faces, nervous laughter and quiet fear.

‘Another damn art project,’ says a rough-faced man in a cobweb mask, leaning on his grounded spidercab. ‘If you ask me, it’s another damn art project.’

‘Could you take me up there?’ Isidore asks him.

‘Not a chance,’ the man says. ‘The tzaddikim are blocking it off. Look.’

Isidore follows his gaze, and sees a cloud of tzaddikim hovering over the Maze, surrounded by heat haze, creating a shield of some kind.

‘They’ve all gone mad,’ the cab driver says. ‘Did you see what they did earlier? I got that co-memory of theirs. Tasted foul. And there’s another one.’

One of the tzaddikim – the Cockatrice – is hovering above a nearby agora. Her voice seems to come from everywhere, from the air itself.

‘Don’t trust the Voice!’ she says. ‘We have been lied to!’

She talks about the cryptarchs, and how the Voice has been manipulated, about the secret rulers. She offers a co-memory that will protect against them. She talks about gogol pirates, evidence of mind manipulation, about the data from Unruh’s mind. She says that the tzaddikim will make sure the exomemory remains intact, that the cryptarchs will be found and brought to justice. There are angry mutters in the crowd.

As she talks, Isidore ’blinks at the public exomemory feeds from the Avenue. She is not there in them, just a crowd, listening to empty space.

‘Shit,’ he says. They are trying to block it .

The sudden Voice memory comes with a crushing force and emotion and almost makes him fall to his knees. He remembers that the tzaddikim are spreading lies and that they are agents of the zoku , and that the zoku wants to destroy the Oubliette way of life . The Voice has always been just a suggestion, just a nagging little voice of remembering a to-do list, but this – it’s direct, violent, a memory branded into his mind, impossible to ignore. He remembers that he should go home and use full gevulot privacy until things are back to normal , and that any disruption in the city machinery has to do with a mild phoboi infection that is being dealt with .

He shakes his head. The memories are full of guilt: he wrenches himself away from them as if from quicksand.

‘This isn’t right,’ the cab driver says, massaging his temples. ‘This isn’t right. I heard what she just said.’

There are shouts. A fight has started on the edge of the agora, a young man in zoku-style clothing being pushed around by a group of men and women in Revolution uniforms. ‘Dust-kisser,’ they shout. ‘Quantum whore.’ Ripples of anger and violence are spreading through the crowd. And there is another movement, too, a slow flow of people moving in unison, in silence. A couple with middle-aged bodies passes Isidore. They have a strange, glassy look in their eyes. She was right , Isidore thinks. It is not just a game .

He shakes the cab driver. ‘A megasecond if you get us to the Dust District right now,’ he says.

The man blinks. ‘Are you crazy? These people are going to go there and tear it apart.’

‘Then you better get us there first,’ Isidore says.

Then he looks at Isidore, squinting. ‘Hey, you are that tzaddik’s sidekick boy, aren’t you? Do you know what the hell is going on?’

Isidore takes a deep breath. ‘An interplanetary thief is building a picotech machine out of the city itself while the cryptarchs take over people’s minds to try to destroy the zoku colony in order to stop the tzaddikim from breaking their power,’ he says. ‘I want to stop them both.’ He pauses. ‘Also, I think the thief is my real father.’

The driver stares at him blankly for a second.

‘Right on,’ he says. ‘Get in!’

The spidercab moves like a possessed insect, scampering away from the Avenue and cutting through a part of the Maze, crossing the streets with crazy leaps. The black needle looms over the Maze, and a few tzaddikim still hover around it. The Maze itself has been seized by vast hands and moved around like a child’s puzzle: there are collapsed buildings and broken streets. Yellow rescue and medic Quiet are everywhere, but their movements are uncoordinated and confused. There are strange ripples going through the whole exomemory, flashes of déjà vu .

The Dust District looks like a snowglobe. It is surrounded by a q-dot bubble that distorts everything inside, making the zoku buildings look elongated and surreal. And everything inside is moving, folding, changing shape.

The mob is marching towards it in the streets below, but it seems likely that their efforts are going to be frustrated. This can’t be what the cryptarchs are planning , Isidore thinks. They are not going to get rid of them with just a mob-

‘Well, that’s it,’ says the driver. ‘Do you want me to turn back? We are not going to go through that.’

‘Just get me somewhere close.’

The driver sets him down in a side alley, just outside the q-dot field. It looks like a soap bubble, thin but impossibly huge, curving towards the sky like a vertical, iridescent horizon.

‘Good luck,’ says the driver. ‘I hope you know what you are doing.’ The cab takes off again, legs striking sparks from the pavement as it leaps up.

Isidore touches the bubble. It feels insubstantial and slick, but the harder he pushes against it, the harder it pushes back. Every push he makes just ends up sliding along its surface. He thinks about Pixil. Let me in . But there is no response. ‘I want to talk to the Eldest,’ he says aloud. ‘I know about the Kingdom.’

For a moment, nothing happens. Then the bubble yields under his hand and he almost falls down. He walks through it: it passes over his skin exactly like a soap bubble, wet and tickling.