Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief

In the zoku colony, everything is in motion. The diamond buildings are folding , becoming smaller, changing shape, as if they were papercraft castles being disassembled and put away. There are zoku creatures everywhere, in a variety of shapes from faces in foglet clouds to green monsters, manipulating matter with gestures.

A man-sized q-dot sphere appears in front of him, like the inverse of a soap bubble popping. Pixil steps out, still wearing her armour and sword. Her face is grim.

‘What is happening out there?’ she asks. ‘Our raid got cancelled. And the whole zoku is getting ready to leave . I would have told you, but-’ She touches her zoku jewel helplessly.

‘I know, I know. Resource optimisation. I think we are about to have a revolution,’ Isidore says. ‘I need to talk to the Eldest.’

‘Oh, good,’ Pixil says. ‘Perhaps this time you can really make her mad.’

The q-dot bubble takes Isidore and Pixil into the treasure cave. It, too, is full of activity: the black cubes rise off the ground and vanish into the portals of silver. The Eldest is in the middle of it, a giant, shimmering female form, serene face surrounded by a circle of floating jewels.

‘Young man,’ she says. ‘You are always welcome to visit us, but I must say you have chosen a particularly bad time.’ Her voice is the same as that of the blonde woman Isidore met, deep and warm.

Isidore looks up at the Eldest, summoning all the anger and defiance he can before the posthuman. ‘Why did you do it? Why did you help the cryptarchs?’

Pixil stares at him incredulously. ‘Isidore, what are you talking about?’

‘You know the cryptarchs that the tzaddikim out there have been talking about today? Do you remember that Realm that you said Drathdor whipped up? Well, that is the Kingdom. That’s where all the memories anyone in the Oubliette has about the Revolution and before come from. Your zoku made that possible.’

‘That’s not true!’ She stares at Isidore, eyes blazing. ‘That does not even make sense!’ She turns to the Eldest. ‘Tell him!’

But the Eldest says nothing.

‘You have got to be kidding,’ Pixil says.

‘We had no choice,’ the Eldest says. ‘After the Protocol War, we were broken. We needed a place where we could hide from the Sobornost while we healed. We made a deal. It seemed like a small thing: we rewrite our pasts and memories all the time. So we gave them what they wanted.’

Pixil takes Isidore’s hand. ‘Isidore, I swear I didn’t know about this.’

‘We made you to be like them, to go among them,’ the Eldest says. ‘So we couldn’t let you know any more than they did.’

‘And you just let them do what they wanted ?’ Isidore asks.

‘No,’ the Eldest says. ‘We had some… regrets after we saw what happened. So we created the tzaddikim – gave technology and assistance to young Oubliette idealists. We hoped that they would act as a counterweight. Clearly, we were wrong, and this thief of yours has disrupted things.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ Isidore says. ‘What was this place before?’

The Eldest pauses. An expression of sadness flickers across her serene face.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ she says. ‘The Oubliette was a prison.’

I stand in the robot garden with my old self, weighing the gun in my hand. He is holding it too, or a dream reflection of it. It’s strange how it always comes down to two men with guns, real or imaginary. Around us, the slow war of the ancient machines goes on.

‘I’m glad you made it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where you have been. I don’t know where you are going. But I know you are here to make a choice. Pull the trigger, and you get to be who we were. Do nothing and – well, you will go on with your life, doing smaller things, dreaming smaller dreams. Or you can go back to listening to the music of the spheres, and the musical sound of breaking their laws. I know what I would do if I were you.’

I open the gun and look at the nine bullets. Each has a name on it, holding a quantum state, entangled with the Time in a person’s Watch. Isaac’s. Marcel’s. Gilbertine’s. The others. If I pull the trigger nine times, their Time will run out. The engine will start. Nine people will become Quiet, Atlas Quiet, beneath the city. They will make my memory palace. And I will never see them again.

I close it and spin the chamber, like in Russian roulette. The young me grins. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘What are you waiting for?’

I throw the gun away. It lands in a rosebush. I look at the empty space where my young self stood. ‘Bastard,’ I say. ‘You knew I’d never do it.’

‘That’s all right,’ says a voice. ‘I will.’

The gardener discards his gevulot, holding the gun in his hand. His hair is white, his features carefully aged, but there is something awfully familiar about them. I take a step forward, but a sleek, egg-shaped device – a zoku q-gun – is hovering above his right shoulder, looking at me with a bright quantum eye.

‘I wouldn’t move,’ he says. ‘This thing will make a mess of even that fancy Sobornost body of yours.’

I raise my hands slowly.

‘Le Roi, I presume?’ I say. He smiles, the same smile I saw on the cryptarch in the hotel. ‘So, you are the King here?’ I calculate my chances of survival if I were to rush him. They are not very high. My body is still locked in its human state, and the five metres between us might as well be a lightyear.

‘I prefer to think of myself as just a gardener,’ he says. ‘Remember Sante Prison, on Earth? What you told your cellmate? That the thing you’d really like to steal was a Kingdom of your own. But ruling it would be too much trouble, much better have someone else be the figurehead, watch its people prosper and be happy, while you weed the garden and give flowers to young girls and give things a little nudge every now and then.’ He moves his free hand in a wide arc, encompassing the garden and the city around us. ‘Well, I’m living the dream.’ He sighs. ‘And like all dreams do, it’s getting a little old.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I say. ‘The tzaddikim are about to end it and wake the people up.’ I frown. ‘We were cellmates?’

He laughs. ‘After a fashion. If you want, you can call me le Roi. Jean le Roi, that’s what they called me here, although I don’t much care for the name anymore.’

I stare at him. Now that his gevulot is open, the resemblance is there.

‘What happened?’

‘We were careless before the Collapse,’ he says. ‘And why not? We worked with the Founders. We cracked our cognitive rights management software as soon as Chitragupta came up with it. There were lots of us. And some of us got caught. Like me.’

‘How did you end up here?’ I ask. Then it hits me. ‘This was never a Kingdom, was it?’ I say. ‘It was a prison.’

‘This was supposed to be a new Australia,’ he says. ‘A typical pre-Collapse idea: put criminals inside terraforming machines, get them to pay their debts to society. And we worked hard, believe me, processed regolith and lit up Phobos and melted the ice cap with nukes, all just to be human for a little while again.

‘Of course, they made sure we were safely locked up here. Even now, if I even think about leaving Mars, it hurts like hell. But then the Collapse happened, and the lunatics took over the asylum. We hacked the panopticon system. Turned it into the exomemory. Used it to give the power to us .’

He shakes his head.

‘And we decided to tell the others a nicer story. The Spike was a blessing, wiped out all the traces we left – not that there were many. It was only after the zoku came that we were really able to flesh it out, of course. In retrospect, we should never have let them in here. At the time, we needed something to keep the Sobornost off our backs. Much good that turned out to do. But at least they gave us tools to make pretty dreams.’