The Causal Angel

14 THE THIEF AND THE CLUTTERED SELF

The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, thinking about stealing.

The robot moves along the edge of the solar panel fields. It looks like a plastic toy, a camouflage-coloured crab. But there is a bioprocessor inside the cheap shell, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for it.

His mouth is dry. The sun is hot enough to peel even his parched neck, and bright lights are starting to flash in his eyes.

Tonight, his mother will come home again, bone-weary, and he won’t have anything to show her. Last week, he tried to bum cigarettes from the soldiers in the village, spoke French to them and did magic tricks to make them laugh. But when Tafalkayt found out, she beat him, called him a clown, a no-man who would never be amenokal. The memory makes his cheeks burn hotter than the sun.

The soldiers are laughing, smoking next to their low vehicle, just visible beyond the wavering glare of the panel field. He calculates: fifteen steps to the robot, a few moments to open it with the multi-tool he took from Ijja’s shop at the souk. It is as if there is a clock ticking in his head, counting down seconds to the moment when he needs to move. Before he even realises, he is sliding down the slope of the dune. His bare feet barely whisper on the hot soft surface.

He pauses to grab a handful of sand, throws it into the robot’s sensors, follows with a spray of paint from a can, watches as it scutters around in a circle. He fumbles with his phone, squints at the screen, presses the app with his thumb. The robot jerks and is still. He starts working on the plastic carapace. It takes all his strength to break off a palm-sized piece with the tool’s plier head. The sun glints off the plastic tubes inside, the prize, the thinking bugs that are the crab machine’s brain. He only has to stretch out his hand and take it and his mother will smile and all will be well.

‘What are you doing, boy?’

He grabs the prize. The sharp plastic edge tears at his hand as he pulls it out. Then he runs. But it is harder to go up the dune than to come down: his feet sink into it like in a nightmare. A hand grabs him by the neck, and he rolls down, right into a circle of towering figures, their faces and rifles black shadows against the stinging sun.

One of the soldiers pulls him up, roughly, a thick man whose face is shaded by blue stubble. He smells of black tobacco and sweat. He backhands the boy, hard, harder than Tafalkayt ever hit him. Something metallic on the man’s wrist bangs against his teeth. The boy’s brain shakes in his head like an egg yolk.

He begs for him to stop, in French, screaming as loud as he can.

The big man laughs. He kneels next to the boy, grabs his face between his big fingers.

‘Goddamn. You are Theo’s boy, aren’t you?’

Shaking in the man’s grip, he nods. He is not supposed to know his father’s name, but he’ll say anything to stop them from hitting him again.

‘Well, boy, your daddy isn’t here, so I guess it’s up to us to teach you a lesson about stealing.’

The rifle butts come down, on his ribs and arms and back, to the rhythm of laughter and curses, each impact a new crater of pain. After a while, they blend together into white agony.

He is not sure when they stop. He comes to when another repair robot scutters past him. The men are gone, bored of their game. He feels like a ragged doll: the sand beneath his face is black with his blood, and his face is numb and sticky, a puffed-up mask. Pain lances through a rib when he tries to move. It takes a while to sit up: his body wants to curl up and stay down.

He opens his right hand. He is holding the big one’s watch, a thick band of metal, silver and precious stones.

And that is the moment he remembers forever: not the prize, but becoming more than he is with a single act. It feels like being born.

He will look for it his whole life: on the other side of the sea, in cities and palaces and other worlds, and beyond. He won’t always find it. There will be times when he will die the death of getting caught. And one day, in a prison cell, he starts to read a book.

The boy becomes a young man with pencil eyebrows and dimpled temples, and weary Peter Lorre eyes. He is dressed in a dinner jacket and a red-lined cape, as if he was on his way to the opera. There is a white flower on his lapel that smells faintly of summer. He is me.

We are standing side by side in a crystal labyrinth, lit by some unseen sun far above. There is a bone-deep chill here, and our breaths steam in the air. There are glass cells on both sides of the narrow, twisting corridor. The light filters through their walls and makes dazzling rainbow patterns on the smooth mirrored floor. Inside each cell is a wax figure of me, as a young man, as an old man, with zoku jewels around my head. Each cell is framed in cast iron wrought in the shape of flowers and birds, and has a label written in old-fashioned cursive lettering: the design reminds me of the Paris metro entrances. The door to the cell behind me is open, and a rush of heat and desert wind blows out from it. The label above it reads THE BEGINNING.

It reminds me far too much of the Dilemma Prison.

The other me smiles, walks past me and closes the door behind me. Then he gestures at the glass labyrinth with a white-gloved hand.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘Here we are. All of us.’

I follow the other me down the corridors of the crystal gallery of my selves. He hums to himself as he walks.

‘Here,’ he says, finally, pointing to another cell. The label above it says THE END. He takes out a small golden key, inserts it into the iron lock of the glass door and opens it. ‘This is mine. We will be a bit more comfortable here. The Gallery is far too cluttered. But that is really the point of you being here, isn’t it? Time for spring cleaning.’

Inside is a small table and two heavy mahogany chairs, facing each other. He points at one of them.

‘Please. Sit.’

I sit down carefully, watching him. The environment does not feel like a vir or a Realm, and as far as I can tell, everything is solid and real. I can’t feel the interface of the Leblanc. There is an uncomfortable pricking in my neck.

‘Any traps I should be worried about?’ I ask. ‘And if you want to play games, I didn’t bring my gun.’

‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘No games. No guns. Not anymore. Not here. Just the truth.’ He leans back in his chair, smiling. ‘First of all, Jean – I take it I may call you Jean – congratulations! You are the first of us to make it here. It’s quite an achievement.’

I raise an eyebrow.

‘Second, please note that I am not a full gogol like you – just a partial, a sketch, with limited autonomy. I may not be able to answer all your questions. I certainly cannot help you with any pressing problems you might have – which I believe include a rather strong-willed young man whom I spoke to briefly when he first entered this ship. He was very intent on exploiting every single vulnerability he could find in our systems, so I thought it best to have some words with him.’

‘Yes, thank you very much for that. Very helpful.’

‘Oh, but I had to give you a hint of some kind, didn’t I? Is he part of a plan to steal the Kaminari jewel from Matjek Chen? If so, I might as well tell you that you are wasting your time. Chen does not have it.’

‘Hm,’ I say. ‘I was wondering about that.’ I review the memories I got from the sumanguru on how Chen got his hands on the Kaminari jewel. With the wisdom of hindsight, there is something decidedly fishy about the whole thing.

‘The zoku gave up the jewel far too easily. Almost like the chens were meant to find it. It has the Great Game Zoku written all over it.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But how do we know he doesn’t have it?’ I ask myself.

He smiles a familiar smile. ‘Well, I tried to steal it from him, of course. It turned out to be a booby trap. A nasty viral thing that would have taken out the whole chen copyclan. The Great Game do not kid around. I was almost surprised it wasn’t an exploding cigar, or a poisoned diving suit.’ He sighs. ‘Nothing ever changes. I kept the fake as a memento, as a reminder of that. It should be lying around here, somewhere. Just to keep things civilised, I left a replacement in its place – with a calling card, of course.’

‘Well, that would have been useful to know. You know, before I spent several months and lost friends trying to steal your calling card.’

He waves a hand at me. ‘Calm down, calm down. I could not tell you anything before you got rid of Joséphine. You are here now, that’s all that matters.’

‘So, what about the real jewel? I take it that the Great Game has it?’

‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ he says.

‘After trying my luck with Chen, I went after the real thing. And yes, the Great Game have it, unless they have done something spectacularly stupid recently. I’ll spare you the details. I found it. I just had to stretch out my hand and take it. Except—’ His eyes are far away.

‘Except what?’

‘It didn’t accept me.’ He removes his gloves, closes his eyes and squeezes the bridge of his nose. ‘It was frustrating. To hold a piece of thinking spacetime in your hands, and then it—’

He makes a small sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. Then he shakes his head.

‘Anyway. Doesn’t matter. But the Kaminari really did it. They figured out what caused the Collapse. A hidden nonlinearity in quantum mechanics itself that manifests when your entangled states get large enough. In the case of the Collapse, it was quite literally a global wavefunction collapse, a sudden decoherence of the whole system into a definite state.’

‘A decoherence that we caused,’ I point out. ‘How? And why?’

‘Oh yes, you were curious about that,’ the other me says eagerly. ‘One of my functions is to provide you with information. Here is some recent work by our esteemed collaborator, Professor Zhu Wei.’ He pulls a pile of papers from his pocket and places them on the table. The heading on the sheet on top says THE BREAKDOWN OF LINEARITY IN LARGE-SCALE ENTANGLEMENT DISTILLATION FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM COORDINATION. I pick them up carefully. ‘You may not want to look too carefully into how we obtained this,’ the partial says. ‘The same goes for the why.

‘In any case, the Kaminari used the same nonlinearity in a different way: to crack the Planck locks. They formed a huge, System-wide temporary zoku to do it, like the old story of all the guilds fighting the Sleeper together. The Great Game tried to intervene, but they only managed to cause some pyrotechnics. The Kaminari went God knows where and left behind one entanglement jewel. It works like the rest of them do: you tell it what you want and it asks the zoku.’ He sighs.

‘Except it doesn’t give you what you want. I think the damn thing actually computes the Universe’s coherent extrapolated volition. Trust a zoku to take a bizarre concept like that, and make it reality. I’ll give what you would want if you were wiser and stronger and smarter and better? Oh, and by the way, it has to be in the interests of the entire Universe. In other words, what you would want if you weren’t you anymore.’

I close my eyes. Domino pieces are falling into place in my head, tracing a shape in a cascade of clicks, and I don’t like the way it looks.

‘So you decided to become someone else.’

‘Yes. You.’

He gets up. ‘You know, I can’t do this without a drink. It’s like Isaac said: it’s not the chemicals, it’s the meme. Besides, I’m hoping we’ll have a few things to drink to, before we are done. Whisky?’ He produces two small glasses and a gentleman’s flask from his pocket, puts them on the table and pours. ‘There is a zoku called the Society: they get pretty obsessive about these things. They simulated an entire parallel biosphere to produce this.’ He smells one of the glasses. ‘Fortunately for us, they are better at distilling their whisky than at guarding it. It’s unique, of course. Quantum information, no-clone theorem, all that.’

I pick mine up and smell it: smoky, vanilla, and something deceptively candy-flavoured.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Well, I do think it’s rather interesting to drink a substance that combines flavours that never even existed on Earth, that don’t even have names, that you need a billion-year atomiclevel quantum simulation to even conceive.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Why change?’

He spreads his arms and smiles, sadly.

‘I was tired. I had been tired for a long time. Worn thin. Too many names, too many crimes. Some of them started to weigh down a bit.’

‘It was about Joséphine, wasn’t it? It was always about her.’

He ignores me, sips his drink and closes his eyes. ‘Vanilla. Tar. A hint of rosemary. Something a bit like a superposition of chocolate and charcoal. Something I don’t have a name for, but I imagine it’s a bit like liquid love. And, of course, a hint of guilt.’ He tosses the contents of the glass back, sighs and pours more. ‘You know, I didn’t think it would be such an emotional moment, but it is. To see you here, finally. I mean, it has only been an eyeblink for me, but still. To feel hope again. To know one’s death meant something.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What has dying always meant for us? Getting caught. I pretended to go after Chen again, just clumsily enough that he would catch me. And I made sure Joséphine would have reasons to get me out, gave her a template of myself to find from the billion variations in the Prison.’

I bow my head and squeeze my head between my fists.

‘You went to the Prison on purpose? Are you insane? Do you have any idea what it was like?’

He shakes his head. ‘Only in theory, I’m afraid. That was the point. But I’m hoping it will have been worth it for you.’ I throw my glass against the wall. It shatters, and the amber liquid pours down the crystal surface.

‘What do you mean, you bastard? Nothing is worth it!’

He looks at the shards and shakes his head. A second later, the tiny fragments rise to the air, a tiny galaxy of crystal, and reassemble themselves back into the glass in my hand. Only the whisky is gone. ‘The Gallery tries to keep things the way they are, so your temper tantrums will have little effect, I’m afraid. Except for the waste of a good drink. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.’

I roll my eyes. ‘So are you telling me that you went to the Dilemma Prison to become a better person?’

‘No, just different. But there are things we were never very good at. Altruism, compassion, cooperation. Or regret. I bet you’ve regretted past mistakes, tried to make up for them.’

‘But I haven’t—’

‘It doesn’t matter, as long as you tried. The template I gave Joséphine wasn’t me, precisely. Evolutionary algorithms are still one of the best ways to create new things. If you are here, if the book let you in, you are the best approximation of me – as far as I can tell – that the jewel might actually accept.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘There is one more job to do, Jean. A theft to end all thefts. Show them all. Steal the fire of the gods when it’s right under their noses. I will tell you how. And then – change things. The Sobornost clings to immortality that turns souls into cogs in a machine. The zoku get lost in silly games and Realms that lead nowhere. Chen always had a point. We don’t have to accept the way things are. We don’t have to do the same things, over and over and over.’ He smiles. ‘And don’t you just hate all those damn locks? Some bastard, a long time ago, made this Universe into a prison. I would imagine that you, of all people, would have a problem with that. What do you say?’

I sit down. I look at him, like looking into a mirror, only not. It burns in him, the sheer wanting, the fierce hunger of the boy in the desert. I can feel it on my face, too.

I remember Perhonen. What are you going to do when this is over? the ship asked me once. I think of Mieli, and Matjek.

Who have I been kidding? It’s never going to be over.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’m in.’

He clasps his hands together and grins. ‘Excellent! Let’s seal it with a drink.’

We clink glasses.

‘Here’s to being Prometheus,’ he says.

‘That sort of thing,’ I say, nodding.

We drink. He is right: there is a warm undercurrent in the whisky that tickles the throat and makes you want to laugh. And an afterglow that settles into a heavy feeling in the bottom of your stomach. But that’s not all: something else passes into me with the complex quantum information that encodes the taste, a liquid key. Then the Leblanc is back in my head, with Prime authorisation this time. I can see the firmament underlying the Gallery, software cages for past sins.

‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ he says.

I nod and place the glass back on the table, stretching.

‘Much better. Thank you.’

‘Now, do you want to hear what the plan is?’ He smiles conspiratorially.

‘No.’ I wink at him.

Then I punch him in the face as hard as I can.

It’s not much of a blow. It glances off the underside of his jaw, and the impact of bone on bone jars my hand painfully. But it is quite satisfying to watch him fall down, eyes rolling in his head. I take the bottle of whisky from the table and walk to the door.

He looks up at me, genuinely astonished, rubbing his jaw. ‘What the hell was that for?’

‘For a lot of things. We’re done here. I just played along to get the Leblanc back. I do have one last job to do, but it’s not yours. I’m going to save Mieli, pay my debts, and then it is over. No more Jean le Flambeur.’

‘You don’t know what you are saying. You are not that different from me. That’s just a story you have told yourself. The only way to escape the desert is to turn it into a garden. Trust me.’

‘Not trusting myself was a lesson I learned pretty well in the Dilemma Prison.’

He gets up, slowly, face dark with anger now. ‘Do you really think you can just walk away? I have protocols for scenarios like this. You are not the only le Flambeur out there. There are plenty more in the Prison.’ A shudder goes through the Leblanc’s systems: a sudden conflict with access rights. The partial me is attempting to regain its control of the ship. That’s not good. The Ganimard-zoku can’t be far behind.

‘There is always a way out,’ I quote myself.

‘Not always,’ he says with a sad smile.

I grin and hold up the small golden key I stole from him when I smashed my glass.

‘Touché,’ I say. ‘Goodbye.’

Wait!’

I slam the glass door in his face and turn the key. It makes a small, final click in the lock. The glass frosts, and the other me becomes a statue, hands pressed against the door, mouth open to say words I no longer want to hear.

I stand in the Gallery, looking at the endless rows of frozen statues. I think about the other me – not the partial, the Prime who died to become me. What could have been so bad that he decided to become somebody else?

Here we are. All of us.

I could find out. All that I ever was that I thought was worth saving, past selves and identities, they are here, put in boxes like old letters that you can’t bring yourself to throw away.

I close my eyes. He was right about one thing. It is time for a spring cleaning.

I reach out my hands and mind to the Leblanc, and close the Gallery around me. I hold it in my lap. There is sunlight on my face again. The world is rocking, gently. There are screams of birds, and the soft, endless sound of the sea.

‘What is it that you are reading, Monsieur d’Andrezy?’ asks a female voice.

I blink, remove my sunglasses and squint at Miss Nellie Underdown, who is looking at me from beneath a white parasol with her great dark eyes, smiling. ‘It’s just that you seem so terrifically engrossed in it, I should want to read it after you. One does get bored on this long voyage, you know!’

‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ I get up and give her a slight bow. ‘Just a collection of rather weak detective stories. I could not finish it, in fact, and cannot in all honesty recommend it to you. But if you wish to be entertained, I am, of course, at your service.’ I offer her my arm. ‘How about a walk to the upper decks?’

She smiles demurely and hooks her small arm into mine. Later, standing in the bow of the ship, I make her gasp by throwing the book far into the sea. Its pages flutter like wings as it goes, and then it is lost in the foam of the Provence’s wake.