The Causal Angel

13 MIELI AND THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

In spite of herself, Mieli enjoys the egg hunt.

The search keeps getting harder as she goes. It is not a simple matter of finding peculiar hiding places, although, at first, she finds a few small eggs in streams, tree holes and under leaves, all easily spotted from air. But one particularly large egg, sitting in the crook of a tree branch, grows slender white legs when Mieli approaches it, and flees with amazing speed. She chases it on foot through a thicket, and a burning chasm suddenly appears in front of her. The egg leaps over it effortlessly, and Mieli almost falls in.

She stops and stares at the hot lava at the bottom of the deep fissure, hissing and spitting sparks. The fleeing egg is lost among the shadows of the trees.

‘How do you find flying now, Oortian?’ rings Zinda’s taunting voice from the other side. ‘You have to be smarter than that!’

Gritting her teeth, Mieli sits down on a rock and starts listing the craziest possible hiding places she can think of. Barbicane’s hat. Clouds. Inside flowers. Then she starts going through them, one by one.

Most of them turn out to be dead ends, although she does find swooping down from above to snatch the zoku Elder’s hat away quite satisfying. He shouts something at her she can’t hear. Fortunately, the Circle prevents his gun arm from working. The hat turns out to be empty, but she wears it for the rest of the night anyway. Eventually, she does notice a suspiciously low cloud over the party – far too white and fluffy to be natural – and inside it she discovers a large floating egg with the number 890 written on one side.

When the time is up, Mieli returns to the riverbank with her loot and gathers them in the stovepipe hat, five eggs in total. Surely, that must be a respectable result, especially the cloud egg. She leans back on the grass and watches the wavering golden and silver reflections of the lanterns on the dark water. She imagines herself drifting along the river with the small zoku boats, sailing somewhere far away.

After a while, a sound wakes Mieli up abruptly. She sits bolt upright and sees Zinda kneeling next to her, angular face lit from below by blue light.

‘I’m sorry,’ the zoku girl says. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up. You looked so calm. But I’m afraid I have to tell you that you lost.’ At Zinda’s feet, there is a glowing pyramid of at least a dozen eggs of different sizes. ‘I even found the one that I think is the main prize.’ She holds up a tiny egg with the number 999.

‘Where was it?’ Mieli wipes her eyes. She feels more awake now, but the night and the river still hold her in their grip. Or perhaps she is not ready to let go of them.

‘In my purse! The last place I could think of. But I don’t think it was actually there before I looked – Great Timbo! Is that Barbicane’s hat?’

‘It was the last place I could think of,’ Mieli says.

Zinda laughs a long, pearly laugh. ‘Well, I’m glad you have been having a good time, Mieli,’ she says.

‘Me, too. And thank you. It has been a good party.’

‘It’s not over yet! Do you want to go back to collect our winnings?’

‘No, not really.’ Mieli looks at the glowing contents of her hat. ‘Maybe I prefer to imagine what I would have won.’ She holds up an egg with the number 27. ‘An unsung song, perhaps. Or a new beginning.’

Zinda takes her hand. ‘That’s a nice thought,’ she says. ‘Maybe we need one, too.’

A warm wave of desire leaps up within Mieli. No, not like this. She is just wearing a mask. None of this is real. I am doing this for Sydän, maintaining my cover, getting close to her for information.

Mieli pulls her hand away.

‘Speaking of winnings,’ she says, ‘what is your wish going to be?’

Zinda looks down. ‘I’ll tell you later.’ She puts Barbicane’s hat on. It is far too big for her, and she has to tilt it back at a ridiculous angle to wear it.

‘I don’t know about you, but I feel like doing something forbidden,’ she says. ‘I think it would do us both a lot of good. What do you think?’

Mieli sits up. ‘Listening to people say that is the story of my life,’ she says.

‘So, what happens next?’

‘Usually, we find out why the forbidden things are forbidden.’

‘Come on! On nights like this, we need to climb over fences and break into graveyards. Suggest something forbidden.’

‘Well,’ Mieli says carefully, ‘your friend Barbicane said that talking about the Kaminari jewel was forbidden.’

Zinda looks at her, eyes wide. ‘I didn’t realise you even knew about that,’ she says in a hushed voice.

Mieli shrugs. ‘So you don’t know everything about me,’ she says.

Zinda smiles. ‘Are you trying to play me, Mieli? Are you flirting with me to try to get me to talk about things I’m not supposed to?’

Mieli takes Zinda’s hand. It is small and warm in her own. Kuutar help me, she thinks.

‘Don’t you want to be played?’ she says aloud.

‘Mieli, daughter of Karhu,’ Zinda says, ‘are you suggesting that we twink? That I help you to level up, tell you zoku secrets you are not supposed to know? That’s bad. That’s very bad. How do you think we are going to get away with that?’ She grins wickedly. ‘I like it. Give me your Great Game jewel!’

Mieli opens her purse and passes the trinket to Zinda. The zoku girl holds it up.

‘This really is forbidden, you know. We could get bumped back to level one! But you just leave it to Auntie Zinda.’ She touches Mieli’s jewel with her own, like clinking glasses. Mieli feels a surge of entanglement, like in meditation, a sudden, sharp awareness of everything around her: the Great Game Zoku members, everywhere in Supra City, minds close to her like her own heartbeat. Then the feeling settles down like the surface of a glass of water.

‘There you go. At least three extra levels, for free. How do you like that?’ Zinda hands Mieli’s jewel back. ‘Don’t worry, everybody does it, sometimes.’ She lowers her voice. ‘So, what is it that you want to hear? I can’t tell you anything that really goes against the zoku volition, you know. Anything you need to know, you should just know.’

‘I’m just trying to understand,’ Mieli says. ‘The Kaminari jewel. Why doesn’t the zoku use it?’ She looks up at the stars and the curve of Saturn’s rings, dashed across the sky like a brushstroke of light.

‘It wasn’t that long ago, before I came here, that I wanted to die,’ Mieli says quietly. ‘A truedeath, not one of your games. I almost got my wish, too. But these last few days, I’ve been thinking – I want to live. I want to hunt eggs. I want to sing. I want to …’ She pauses.

‘I know the Sobornost. If they win, they will erase this place, take your minds, take away the thing you call the q-self, and make you work for their Great Common Task, forever. And I’m not sure you – we – can win without something bigger than we are.’

‘Wow. You really are not very good at flirting, are you?’

Mieli gives Zinda a dark look.

‘I’m only teasing!’ Zinda says. ‘But seriously. Using the jewel – can’t you feel how wrong that is? It would be against everything the zoku stands for. Protecting the Universe. Managing existential risk. Do you know what the jewel does?”

Mieli shakes her head. ‘Only that is something big. Something that the Founders want. Something that could be used against them.’

‘Duh huh! That’s putting it mildly!’ Zinda purses her lips. ‘There are two problems, really. The first is that we can’t solve any hard problems. Not really. Anything that’s NP-complete. The Travelling Salesman. Pac-Man. They are all the same. All too hard. Even if we had a computer the size of the Universe! It drives the Sobornost crazy. We don’t mind it so much: that’s what makes most games fun. And we have quantum shortcuts for some special cases, like coordination. And for throwing parties, of course!

‘But if you could do it, things would be very different. You could predict the future. Recreate history. Automate creativity. Make minds truly greater than us. Fulfil all those Strong AI nerd dreams from the pre-Collapse times. So you can see why the Sobornost has been trying for centuries now.’

‘Yes,’ Mieli says, remembering Amtor City, falling, the glowing whirlpool of the singularity, burning in the flesh of Venus.

‘The second problem is that no physical machine we know of can do it. It’s almost like travelling faster than the speed of light, or making a perpetual motion machine. Quantum computers can’t do it, synthbio machines can’t do it, doesn’t matter how big you make them! Pretty early on, everybody agreed that the only place where NP gods could hide was quantum gravity.

‘Use a big enough magnifying glass, and spacetime breaks into tiny pieces. At the Planck scale, causality becomes a variable. You can even have little time machines, closed timelike curves. Nothing like DeLoreans or Grandfather Paradoxes, those don’t fit into quantum mechanics. But maybe you could squeeze a computer in there. And if you could, you could turn time into memory. You could solve NP-complete problems, and more. Sounds too good to be true, right? Right.’

Zinda leans closer to Mieli. The night air is still mellow, but Mieli is glad of her warmth.

‘Just say if I start to bore you,’ the zoku girl whispers in Mieli’s ear. Her tickling breath sends a shiver through Mieli’s body. Then she pulls away again. ‘My usual technique does not involve theoretical computer science, I can assure you.’

Mieli shakes her head. ‘I’m not bored. Go on,’ she breathes.

‘Okay, then,’ Zinda says. ‘Where was I? Oh yes. So, of course, people tried. Pretty early on, too, before the Collapse, with tiny black holes. And they discovered the Planck locks. Try to build a quantum gravity computer, and you get nonsense out. Some say they are artificial, that the Universe is a construct, and the locks were put there to keep us in our place. The old Simulation Argument. But I’m not sure. It could be that they have to be there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it. Imagine that there are many possible universes, with different rules. The Spooky-zoku claim that that’s how it works, that there are bubbles of possibility, that they collide and make Big Bangs. So imagine worlds where causal structures are broken, where spacetime can rewrite itself, where there are no stories, no games. Is that a world where we could exist? Is that a world where messy, silly humans arise and stumble through life and build cities and make mistakes? I don’t think so. That would be too tacky. We could not have evolved in a world where the Planck locks do not exist. They have to be there. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be us.’

Zinda takes Mieli’s hand again.

‘So, let’s say the Kaminari-zoku did it. Let’s say they broke the Planck locks. Let’s say they left behind a zoku jewel. You take it, make a wish, and maybe it accepts you. But your wish can rewrite spacetime, make a new world where everything else except what you wish for is different, create a bubble of false vacuum that wipes out the rest of the Universe. Would you destroy what you have now? Is there anything in the world that you want so badly?’

Mieli says nothing.

‘Don’t worry about the Sobornost, Mieli. They are just another level boss. We can beat anything when we have a clear goal. When they come, all of Supra City will join the war zoku. They won’t know what hit them. You’ll see.’

You haven’t met the All-Defector, Mieli thinks.

‘Have you ever seen it? The jewel, I mean,’ she asks aloud.

‘Me? No. It’s in a safe place. Only the Elders know where.’

Mieli remembers the flash in Barbicane’s qupt. A twisting sheet of light, close but impossibly far.

‘What would you wish for?’ Mieli asks. ‘If it didn’t destroy the Universe, that is?’

‘For the same thing you already owe me,’ Zinda says.

‘What is it?’

‘Something small.’

‘Tell me.’

‘A kiss,’ Zinda says. ‘For starters.’

Her fingers caress Mieli’s neck. Her lips are soft and warm and slick and taste of champagne and peaches. Mieli touches the curve of Zinda’s hip, feels the hot flesh under the flimsy fabric of her dress.

The guilt feels like the q-suit’s spike, between her ribs.

She pushes Zinda away.

‘I can’t,’ she whispers.

‘Why not?’ Zinda says. She looks hurt. ‘I know there was someone, Mieli, the girl the witch had on the mountain. But she is not here now. I think she is just a doll the witch has made, in your head.’

‘No. It’s not that!’ Mieli stands up. ‘You don’t know – you are not even flesh. This is not who you are, it’s an alter. Something you created to handle me. A mask.’

You idiot. This is not how it’s supposed to go. She hugs herself, unable to face the zoku girl.

‘Is that it?’ Zinda says. ‘Mieli, I don’t think you understand us at all. That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. We find ourselves here, together, because we are who we are.’

‘I—’

Zinda touches her face, cups her chin, turns her head gently. ‘Ssh. I want you to watch.’

She presses her hands against her chest. Something glows between them with warm light, emerging from beneath her smooth skin. Zinda cups it between her hands: a zoku jewel, like a pearly tear in a delicate golden frame. She places it on the ground gently, next to the eggs. ‘Great Game,’ she says. Another jewel follows, a round red eye in a silver disc, and then another, and another. ‘Manaya High. Supra. Huizinga. Strip. Liquorice. That’s my whole q-self.’

She smiles. ‘Remember, we always have the freedom to leave. You can always stop playing the game.’ She points at the jewels on the ground. ‘They are just pretty rocks to me now. What you see is all you get.’

She pulls her dress down and steps out of it with a rustle. Her body is slim and small, her breasts tiny buds, her bare sex a pink comma in the brackets of her hips. She steps forward lightly and stretches her arms like a dancer, wraps them around Mieli’s neck.

‘So, who is a big bad Great Game Zoku member now, hmm? Who is out to exploit a poor, innocent girl?’

Mieli answers with her hands and lips and tongue, and pulls Zinda down to the bed of grass, treasure eggs, and scattered quantum jewels.

Mieli sings to her, afterwards, a soft, quiet song that lovers sing. In Oort, it makes tinkling väki flowers grow in a koto’s walls. But here, it fits with the rhythm of Zinda’s breathing in her arms, with the warm breeze that the forest makes to dry the cooling sweat on their skin.

She feels free and light, unmoored, for the first time on a world bigger than a koto. Zinda is a small and precious and true thing against her.

I can’t do this. I can’t lie to her with my body. I have to tell her the truth.

The pellegrini may have sacrificed herself for her, but no doubt it was for selfish reasons. After years of service, Mieli owes her nothing.

And Sydän? She looked back. But she got what she wanted. An eternity. A life without end. Would she begrudge an end for Mieli, or a new beginning?

Promises and vows, chains made of words and false hope. I am done with them. Perhonen was right. She would want this. She would want me to be happy.

I always loved you more than she did, the ship said.

Perhaps this is the best song I can give her.

‘Why did you stop?’ Zinda asks.

‘There is something I have to tell you.’ Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not one of you. I’m not sure I ever will be. I only joined because I was looking for the Kaminari jewel. And you were right. There was someone. And there was a witch, too. My friend Perhonen once told me the same thing you did. I have been a fool.’

‘Mieli, you don’t have to say anything.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Haltingly, she tells Zinda about Sydän, about Venus and the pellegrini; her long journey with the thief and Perhonen. And the All-Defector. It gets easier as she speaks, and it takes a long time. When she finally runs out of words, there is faint rosy soletta-light glinting in the infinitely distant horizon of the Strip.

‘I understand if you have to share all that with the Great Game,’ Mieli says, after a while.

Zinda hugs her bare knees and looks at Mieli. ‘I won’t, if you don’t want me to. I’ll leave the zoku, if I have to.’

‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

‘Of course you can.’

Zinda stares at the river water, weighing her pearly Great Game jewel in her hand. Then she squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she whispers.

‘What is it?’ Mieli touches her shoulder. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m not sure you would understand.’

‘After you listened? Of course I will.’

Zinda smiles a sad smile. ‘I know you pretty well, Mieli. I knew you even before we met. And I know you won’t like it. But after everything you said, I can’t keep you in the dark. You don’t like lies, Mieli, you really don’t. And like you said, you will never be one of us.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I was made for you, Mieli.’

‘What?’

‘I told you about zoku children. We are never born without a purpose. You are mine.’ She bites her lip. ‘It’s not artificial. It’s not a mask. It’s not a jewel putting thoughts into my head. I want to make you happy and to love you. It’s who I am.’ Mieli looks at the jewels lying on the ground. They sparkle in the morning light, in many colours. It was a trap, all a trap. She stands up.

‘I’m sorry, Mieli. But you have to understand, it doesn’t make it any different.’

‘I thought the Sobornost were cruel,’ Mieli says in a cold voice. ‘But they have nothing to learn from you. They deserve to have this place, and everything in it.’

She turns her back to the zoku girl and starts walking into the woods.

Mieli walks for a long time. She is naked, except for Sydän’s chain, and her zoku jewels, which follow her like a flock of birds. She ignores them, ignores the qupts from Zinda, and keeps walking. Rage and guilt and confusion swirl inside her like the eyestorms of Saturn, until finally she can’t bear it and uses her metacortex to filter the emotions out. But that is even worse: there is no room for anything else in her mind, and she is left a blank sheet of paper, a mindless point in motion.

The landscape is changing around her. The party is over, the Circle erased. The building blocks of the world are showing through: the surfaces of rocks and trees are melting back into smooth notchcubes, and after a while, she is the only living thing in a roughly sketched, blocky forest of gunmetal.

What finally stops her is an insistent impulse from her Great Game jewel. Stay where you are. She regrets not throwing it into the river, but cannot summon the energy to do it.

Impassively, she stops and waits. A Realmgate pops into being, and Barbicane floats through it, a rotund splash of colour against the grey cubetrees.

‘I suppose you want your hat back,’ Mieli says, folding her arms.

Barbicane raises his eyebrows, and smiles a little awkwardly. ‘My dear, young ladies at parties do what young ladies at parties do! My headgear is hardly the issue here. I do apologise for intruding upon your privacy at a difficult time, but the zoku has an urgent need for your services, and your handler, the lovely Zinda, failed to contact you. I thought my presence would carry more … weight!’ He clangs on his brass belly with his heavy gun arm.

Mieli turns away. ‘Whatever it is, I’m not interested.’ She reaches for her Great Game jewel, ready to throw it away.

‘Oh, but I think you will be! I believe you are familiar with a rascal by the name of Jean le Flambeur?’

Mieli stops and looks at Barbicane, eyes wide.

‘He is here?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Barbicane licks his lips. ‘We received a communication from him. He claims that in precisely fifty-seven minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn.’