The Quantum Thief

8. THE THIEF AND THE PIRATES

The Museum of Contemporary Art is hidden below the street level, a series of transparent tubes, balconies and galleries snaking around the city’s hips like an elaborate glass girdle. The arrangement offers abundant light to the exhibits and amazing views of the legs of the city below, drawing slow arcs in the Hellas Basin.

We wander from one gallery to the next, carrying coffee in tempmatter cups. I’m enjoying it; I’ve always found art calming, even though much of the latest work on display here has a violent, aggressive undercurrent, explosions of colour and sharp edges. But Mieli looks bored. Studying a series of watercolours, she makes a strange, humming sound.

‘Not much of an art enthusiast, are you?’

She laughs softly. ‘Art should not be flat, or dead, like this,’ she says. ‘It should be sung.’

‘I believe they call that music around here.’

She gives me a withering look, and I stay quiet after that, content to look at the older, abstract works and the art student girls.

After a while, we start noticing the gogol pirates.

Mieli got the public keys of the Soborost agents from her employer and sent them co-memories. The museum as a meeting place was my idea. The gevulot here is well-structured, enough agora spaces around the exhibits to discourage violence, but allowing perfect privacy for quiet conversations. But I did not expect them to come in such numbers.

A little girl looking at a painting of a herd of gracile elephants grazing in the Nanedi Valley touches the tip of her nose exactly the same way as a passing couple, holding hands. And their gait is identical to that of a tall female art student in a revealing top, who I can’t help staring at for a moment. An entire family of them goes past, a father with thinning red hair laughing in odd synchrony with his son. And many more, everywhere in the crowd, all around us. I realise they are opening small parts of their gevulot to us to highlight where they are. Strangely, the mannerisms are familiar to me, from a long time ago, from my human days on Earth.

‘They are herding us,’ Mieli whispers to me. ‘This way.’

We end up on a large balcony separated from the main part of the museum by glass doors. There are three fountain sculptures, standing in a large shallow pool of water. They look like totems, made from jagged metallic and organic shapes that – I learn from the little co-memory attached to them – are discarded Quiet body parts. Water trickles from between the seams: the sound would be soothing if it didn’t make me think of blood.

The balcony fills with the pod people, perhaps twenty of them. A group of them position themselves in front of the glass doors firmly, preventing all possibility of escape.

To my surprise, Mieli seems to like the sculptures, standing there for a while, until I touch her arm. ‘I think it’s time.’

‘All right,’ she says. ‘And remember, I’ll do the talking.’

‘Be my guest.’

A little black girl, perhaps six years old, walks up to us. She is wearing a startlingly blue dress, and has pigtails that stick out to both sides of her head. She touches her nub of a nose in a way that is now all too familiar. ‘Are you offworlders?’ she asks. ‘Where are you from? My name is Anne.’

‘Hello, Anne,’ Mieli says. ‘No need to stay in character. We are all friends here.’

‘You can’t be too careful,’ says the leggy art student standing behind us, not looking up from her sketchbook.

‘You have,’ says a woman in a kaleidoscopic dress, holding hands with a young man by the railing of the balcony, ‘one minute to explain how you found us.’

‘After that we find out ourselves,’ finishes Anne.

‘I’m sure you would not want to start anything here,’ Mieli says. ‘This place is full of agoras.’

Anne smiles. ‘We deal with agoras all the time,’ she says. ‘Fifty seconds.’

‘I serve one who serves your copyfather,’ Mieli says. ‘We require assistance.’

‘Show us a seal,’ says the young, red-haired father, trying to calm down his crying baby. ‘We are delighted to serve,’ says the art student. ‘But show us a seal.’ There is a sudden hush in the balcony. Some of them are still carrying on normal conversations, pointing at the statues, laughing. But all their eyes are on us.

‘The Great Common Task requires secrecy, as you know better than I,’ Mieli says. ‘We found you. Is that not proof enough?’

‘Darling, we are going to need a little more than that. We are vasilevs. Few carry out the Great Common Task with more passion than we do.’ Anne grabs the hem of Mieli’s toga with a tiny hand. ‘And we are not going to jump just because a singleton servant of some puny non-Founder clan tells us to.’ She smiles, displaying an uneven row of sugar cube teeth. ‘Time is running out. Perhaps we should have a look inside that pretty head of yours.’

‘We do not need much,’ Mieli says. ‘Merely tools. For gevulot emulation, a Martian identity-’

‘Are you a competitor?’ asks the red-haired father. ‘Why would we do that?’

Mieli tenses. This is about to turn ugly. The Sobornost are not great negotiators: having all your behaviours dictated by your copyclan template does not leave a lot of room for creativity. That’s why I love them, of course. I think about where I last saw the smile, the gestures, the tone of voice. On Earth, centuries ago, in a bar, getting drunk with hackers arguing about politics. Who else was there? Ah, yes. Matjek, short and angry. Matjek, who became a Sobornost god.

I shift my posture, like I was a short man wanting to be taller. I pull my shoulders back. I twist my face into a scowl of righteous anger.

‘Do you know who I am?’

A ripple of fear runs across the vasilevs’ faces. The art student drops her sketchbook into the pool with a splash. Gotcha.

‘My servant does not need to explain herself. I trust I do not have to explain myself. The Great Common Task requires faith. You have been found wanting.’ Mieli stares at me, wide-eyed. Just play along, I whisper in my feed. I’ll explain later.

‘Do you need seals and symbols to know that a Founder walks among you? I need tools. I have a mission here. The Task takes us to unexpected places, so I did not come prepared. You will give me what I need, immediately.’

‘But-’ Anne pipes.

‘I have a fragment of a Dragon with me,’ I hiss. ‘Perhaps you would like to be a part of it?’

The vasilevs are silent for a moment. Then a burst of data hits me. I can feel the Sobornost body recognising it, cataloguing it. Personality templates, gevulot sense emulators, the works: everything you need to maintain a false identity in the Oubliette. Goodness me, it actually worked-

Suddenly, Anne shudders and her eyes go blank. The data stream stops, as abruptly as it began. Maintaining my posture, I let my gaze wander around the room, trying to project regal displeasure. ‘What is the meaning of this? Did I not make myself clear?’

‘Perfectly, M. le Flambeur,’ the vasilevs say in unison. ‘Now please stay still. Our friends would like to talk to you.’

Crap.

I turn to look at Mieli to tell her that I’ve got what we need and that she needs to get us out of here, but before I can complete the thought, the fireworks begin.

Mieli watches the thief’s gambit with a mixture of shock and astonishment. She has met Matjek Chen, and the thief imitates his voice and body language perfectly. To the Sobornost minds inside the stolen Martian bodies, it is quite literally like standing in the presence of a divine being. And when they attack, it is with the ferocity of true believers faced with a blasphemer. To hell with subtlety. I’m taking them down.

Her metacortex online, she slows time to give herself time to think, pulling down the veil of combat autism.

Perhonen. Sweep.

Far above, the ship sends down a burst of exotic weakly interacting particles through the room. The skeletons of the vasilevs ghost in her vision. Her metacortex matches patterns, classifies hidden weapons. Ghostguns. Sobornost weapons, with bullets that take over your mind. Damn it. With a thought, she brings her own systems online.

Her right hand contains a q-dot gun, a linear accelerator firing semi-autonomous coherent payloads. Her left has a ghostgun with an array of nanomissiles: each has a war gogol ready to invade enemy systems, to flood them with copies of itself. The programmable matter layer under her epidermis becomes armour, her fingernails harder than diamond. The fusion reactor in her right thighbone spins up. The metacortex Nash engine chooses a set of optimal targets and a cover position for the thief.

Fire support. On my mark, she tells Perhonen.

I’m going to have to change orbits, the ship says. There will be trouble with the orbital Quiet.

Do it.

Mieli feels the knife edge of nearby death. She is a singleton, truly finite: anything else would be betraying her ancestors. She won’t get a second chance if she fails. And sometimes, that edge makes all the difference, especially against the Sobornost.

The gogol pirates are speeding up too, but they are infiltrators. Their synthbio bodies do not have the same level of military enhancements. Still, they have ghostguns, implanted in eyes, hands and torsos. After ten milliseconds they fire the first volley, stars of infrared playing across their faces like glittering makeup as the nanomissiles are launched. The room explodes into a deadly spiderweb of vectors and trajectories in Mieli’s vision.

She grabs the thief and throws him against the base of the middle statue, into a gap in the web. At the same time, she fires a burst of q-dots. It feels like fingerpainting in the air, each stroke leaving a glowing trace. The dots – each a Bose-Einstein condensate, charged with energy and quantum logic – become extensions of her mind, like disembodied limbs. She uses three of them as a flail to swat missiles out of the air, tearing the deadly web to give herself room to manoeuvre. The other two flash towards the vasilev crowd, ready to explode into bursts of coherent light.

The vasilev missiles respond, targeting her. Others shift their trajectories to curve towards the thief. The vasilev crowd splits, trying to avoid the incoming q-dots, but too slowly. The dots blossom into white laser suns that light up the interior of the gallery, melting glass, synthbio bodies and priceless art.

She leaps forward. The air feels like greasy water. Even through combat autism, the freedom of movement is exhilarating. She weaves her way through the missiles, leaving frozen footprints in the water, punching through the art student’s abdomen as an afterthought.

Then they are upon her, Anne, the family, the woman in the garish dress, three others. Disassembler tendrils shoot out of their fingers, lines of vibrating destruction. One lashes across her back. Her armour reacts, burning away the infected layer, giving her wings of flame for an instant.

She programs a simple defence routine into her ghostgun and fires it at them, one, two, three: the thief will need more protection. She gets two. The ghost gogols take over the vasilevs’ brains and hurl their bodies at the paths of missiles aimed at the thief.

She tears off the caleidoscope’s disassembler arm, swinging it at Anne. The girl’s torso explodes into dust as the molecular fingers tear her cells apart. She fires her last q-dot into the red-haired man’s eye. Several vasilevs return fire. Ghostgun impacts make her armour scream. Gritting her teeth, she grabs one of the bullets in her fist. It will contain a copy of a vasilev mind – time to ask it questions later.

They rush her, all at once. There is a mass of bodies on top of her, a coordinated mountain of synthflesh, ignoring her punches and kicks that tear into it as if it were mist. Her skull presses against floor. She sends Perhonen a set of coordinates. Mark.

Fire from the sky cuts the balcony from the hip of the city like a surgeon’s knife. Metal groans. Somewhere above, Perhonen’s wings rain hard hot light.

The sudden freefall feels like home. She navigates through a bloody mist and tangled bodies, finds the thief and seizes him. Then she opens her wings. As always, the sensation – like flower buds opening in her shoulders – brings back her childhood, flying in her koto’s forests in the ice, racing paraspiders. But her wings are stronger now, remade, strong enough to carry both her and the thief, even in this heavy city.

Together they burst through the ceiling of the gallery. The twisted, burning remains of the balcony and the vasilevs plummet towards the city legs below.

Shame about the statues, she thinks.

The world is a chaos of bodies, explosions and the smell of burning flesh. I blink, and my body is hurled against stone. Staccato thunderclaps rock my skull. I am crashing through glass, Mieli is holding me and we are flying and there are flames below us and a whooshing sound of air as if in a wind tunnel that empties my lungs-

I scream. And then I fall. For about a metre. In Martian gravity. I land on my back, ears ringing, colours flashing in front of my eyes, mouth still open after the air in my lungs runs out.

‘Stop that,’ Mieli says. She is kneeling, a few metres away, and a pair of wings are slowly retracting into her back, two delicate trees of silver with gossamer-thin tracery, separated by a transparent, shimmering film, like Perhonen’s wing fabric. In a moment, they are gone.

‘Fuck,’ I say, when I catch my breath. We are on a gently sloping rooftop, somewhere near the edge of the city. The conflagration and a column of smoke in the horizon clearly shows where we were mere seconds ago. A flock of tzaddikim descend towards the battlefield, like crows. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘I told you to stop that,’ Mieli says, standing up. Her toga is in tatters, showing expanses of smooth brown skin. She notices my gaze and turns her back as her garment starts knitting itself back together.

‘F-’ I take a deep wheezing breath, cutting myself short. ‘The bastards. Somebody told them. Who we were. Somebody knew.’

Darling doves, says Perhonen. I’m glad you are okay, but don’t expect to hear from me for a few hours. I had to flee my holding position in stealth mode: the orbital Quiet might as well be blind and deaf, but even they have noticed me firing lasers down at their planet. I’ll let you know when I get back. Be safe.

‘What happened back there?’ I ask Mieli.

‘They attacked. I had to ask Perhonen to take them out, with extreme prejudice. Protocol.’

‘So, they are – all dead?’

‘Destroyed. No possibility of an exomemory sync; if they get resurrected, they won’t remember us. They were stealth vasilevs, they would not have had neutrino comms equipment.’

‘Jesus. Any collateral damage?’

‘Just art,’ Mieli says, and for the life of me I can’t figure out if she is making a joke. ‘But you got what we came for, yes?’

I touch the data the little pirate girl dumped on me. Parts are missing, but the important bits are intact.

‘Yes. I’m going to have to study this.’ I massage my temples. ‘Look, something is going on. Clearly, somebody tipped them off. Is there some twisted Sobornost power game going on with your employer? Is there something I should know about?’

‘No.’ Her answer does not leave any room for argument.

‘All right, then we have to assume it’s local. We are going to have to look into it.’

‘I am going to look into it. You are going to get on with the mission.’

I get up, slowly. My body is undamaged – no broken bones – but it pretends that it is. Everything tingles as if covered by one massive bruise. ‘Yes, about that.’

‘What?’

‘You do realise that you are going to have to give me more than just hurt privileges for this body? If I’m going to create a new identity, I’m going to need some flexibility. Even hunting this Raymonde girl down is going to involve more than just eyes and ears. Not to mention emulating the gevulot sense or surviving if we ever happen to encounter our many-voiced friend there again.’

She studies me carefully, massaging her hands together. A thin layer of dried gore is peeling off them, falling down in flakes as her skin cleans itself.

‘Oh, and thank you for saving my ass, by the way,’ I tell her. I know the effort is wasted, but I summon some warmth – most of it genuine – into my eyes and give her my best smile. ‘You have to let me repay the favour.’

Mieli frowns. ‘All right. Once we get back, I’ll see what I can do. Now, let’s get out of here. I don’t think we left any public trails outside gevulot, but the same rules don’t seem to apply to the tzaddikim. I don’t want to fight them on top of that.’

‘Are we flying?’

She grabs my shoulder firmly and drags me to the edge. The street is almost a hundred metres down. ‘You can try if you want,’ she says. ‘But that body does not have wings.’

That night, at the hotel, I make myself a new face.

We sneaked back a roundabout route, under full gevulot cover, covering half the sights of the city – somewhat excessively paranoid as under full gevulot we should not be recognisable by anyone – but Mieli insists. She also sets up a defence grid of some kind; little dots of light come out from her hands and start patrolling the doors and windows.

‘Don’t touch them,’ she says, unnecessarily. And then she does something magical, something that almost makes me kiss her. And I would, too, if I didn’t have flashing images of her tearing a young girl’s arm off and beating three people to death with it. In any case, she closes her eyes for a moment and there is a click inside my head. Nothing excessive, nothing like the complete freedom I briefly felt when we fought the Archons, but it is something. An increased awareness of myself, a sense of control. I now know there is a network of q-dots – artificial atoms capable of assuming any range of physical properties – under the skin of this body, able to simulate an epidermis of any colour, shape or appearance.

Mieli claims that her systems need to recharge and that she has some damage to regenerate, so she goes to bed early. Perhonen is quiet as well, dodging the orbital sentinels, no doubt; or hacking into their systems and manufacturing convincing excuses about why they lost her for a moment. So I am as alone as I have been since the escape from the Prison.

It feels good: I spend some time simply watching the night view of the city, on my balcony and drinking, single malt this time. Whisky has always tasted like introspection to me, a quiet moment after taking a sip, the lingering aftertaste, inviting you to ponder upon the flavours on your tongue.

I lay out the tools in my mind, one by one.

Gevulot is not perfect. There are loops in it, places where a node – representing a memory, an event, a person – has more than one parent. That means that sometimes, sharing gevulot about an innocuous memory, a taste or an intimate moment, can unlock whole swathes of a person’s exomemory. The gogol pirates have software that tries to map out a person’s gevulot tree, tries to scan for the key nodes in conversation.

There is a man-in-the-middle attack software that attempts to intercept the quantum communications between a Watch and the exomemory. That will require a lot more brute force, and quantum computation capability besides: I will have to talk to Perhonen about that. A perfect emulation of the privacy sense organ which I want to start running immediately. And finally, a set of public/private keys and blank exomemories to choose from. I don’t want to think about how those have been obtained, but at least the dirty work has been done for us. Some of them are fragmented from the interruption of the transfer, but what is there will do, for now.

Being about to become someone else is a thrilling feeling, a tickle of possibility in my gut. There must have been times when I flicked from one identity to another, posthuman, zoku, baseline, Sobornost. And that makes me want to be the god of thieves again, more than anything.

I flick the Watch open and look at the picture again. Who should I become for you, Raymonde? Who was I for you before? Her smile has no answers, so I close the lid, finish my drink and look at myself in the bathroom mirror.

The face – heavy-lidded eyes, a tinge of grey in the hair – makes me wonder about Mieli’s employer again. She must have known me, a long time ago. But whoever she is, she belongs to the things that the Prison took away from me. I relish the image for a moment. I’m not narcissistic, but I like mirrors, the way they let your define yourself through something external. And at last, I test how this body responds. Become a little younger, I tell it. A little taller, higher cheekbones, longer hair. The image in the mirror starts flowing like water, and my belly thrill becomes glee.

‘You are enjoying this, aren’t you?’ says a voice. I look away from the mirror and around the room, but there is no one there. And the voice feels awfully familiar.

‘Over here,’ says my mirror image. It is the young me from the picture, dashing and dark-haired, grinning. He tilts his head slightly, studying me across the glass. I stretch my hand and touch it, but the image does not move. The same sense of unreality as with the boy at the agora is there.

‘You are thinking about her,’ he says. ‘Which means you are about to go to talk to her again.’ He sighs a little wistfully. ‘There are a few things you should know.’

‘Yes!’ I shout at him. ‘Where are my memories? Why are we playing games? What are those symbols-’

He ignores me. ‘We really thought she was the one. The redemption. And for a while, she was.’ He touches the glass surface from the other side, a reflection of my earlier gesture. ‘I really envy you, you know. You get to try again. But remember that we treated her very badly last time. We don’t deserve a second chance. So don’t break her heart, or if you do, make sure there is someone to put it back together.’

Then the grin is back. ‘I’m sure you hate me now, a little. This is not meant to be easy. I made finding things difficult, not for you, but for myself. Like an alcoholic who locks the booze in the basement and throws away the key.’

‘But you are here, so it wasn’t enough. There we are. Give her my best.’

He takes out a Watch, the one I’m holding as well, and looks at it. ‘Well, got to go. Have fun. And remember, she likes balloon rides.’

Then he is gone, replaced my own new reflection.

I sit back and start making a new one, for a first date.