The Quantum Thief

Interlude. GOODNESS

Like every Sol Solis, Xuexue comes to the garden to smile at the red robot.

It stands alone, away from the clusters of fighting machines arranged on the black-and-white marble grid. Its design is a little different, too: sleek crimson lines of a sports car beneath a layer of rust, and a glinting little horse on top of its helmet.

Xuexue sits on a small folding chair in front of it, looks directly at the dark slit in its helmet and smiles, keeping as still as she possibly can. Her record is two hours. The hard part is maintaining the feeling of the smile. Today, it is easy: she had a good day with the children in the kindergarten. The little emperors and empresses of the Oubliette – bought dearly with Time by their parents and spoiled accordingly – can be difficult, but they have their moments. Maybe she will break her record today.

‘Excuse me?’ says a voice.

With some effort, Xuexue fights down a frown and keeps smiling, not turning to look.

A hand touches her shoulder and she flinches. Damn it. She should have closed her gevulot, but it would have spoiled the smile.

‘I’m trying to concentrate,’ Xuexue says chidingly.

A young man looks at her, amused. He has jet-black hair and a hint of the sun in his skin, dark eyebrows arching above heavy eyelids. He is dressed as if going to a party, sleek jacket and pants, with a pair of blue-tinted glasses against the bright glare of Phobos above.

‘I do apologise,’ he says with a hint of mirth in his voice. ‘What did I interrupt?’

Xuexue sighs. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’ He removes his glasses and regards Xuexue with a curious expression. His complexion is just a little too perfect, a different style from standard Oubliette bodies. He is smiling, but there is a distracted look in his eyes, as if he were listening to more than one conversation.

‘I have been smiling at the red gladiator,’ she says. ‘For the last year or so. At least an hour every week.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, there is a theory that there are slow gogols running inside them,’ she says. ‘An old Kingdom game. For them, this is a fierce battle. They are fighting for their freedom. They move, you know, if you look long enough. So I figured that they must see us, too. If we stand very still. Like ghosts, perhaps.’

‘I see.’ He squints at the robots. ‘I don’t think I would have enough patience for that. And why that one in particular?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It looks lonely.’

The young man touches the robot’s breastplate. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible that you’ll end up distracting it? So that it loses the fight? Never gets to go free?’

‘The Kingdom is gone. They have been free almost a hundred years,’ she says. ‘I think someone should tell them.’

‘It’s a nice thought.’ He offers her his hand. ‘I am Paul. I got a little lost: all those moving streets. I was hoping you could tell me the way out.’

A trickle of emotion bleeds through his rough visitor’s gevulot: a sense of unease, a weight, a guilt. Xuexue can imagine the old man of the sea sitting on his back. It feels very familiar. And suddenly it is more important to talk to the stranger than to smile at the robot.

‘Sure I can,’ she says. ‘But why don’t you stay for a little while? What brings you to the Oubliette?’ As she speaks, she crafts a gevulot contract in her mind and offers it to Paul. He blinks. ‘What is that?’

‘No one else will remember or know what we are going to say here,’ she says. ‘Even I will forget, unless you let me remember.’ She smiles. ‘This is the way things work here. No one has to be a stranger.’

‘It’s like you have a portable confession booth.’

‘Something like that.’

Paul sits down on the ground next to Xuexue, looking up at the robot.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘it is rare to meet a genuinely altruistic person. That is quite admirable.’

Xuexue smiles. ‘You don’t consider yourself to be one?’

‘I took a different turn on the evolutionary highway, quite far back. Somewhere between the dinosaurs and the birds.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she says. ‘Especially here.’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘This is the Oubliette. The place of forgetting. Here, you can meet a Kingdom tyrant or a Revolution leader and never know. Or sit next to someone worse, like me.’ She sighs.

He looks up at her, eyes wide. She peels her gevulot open like an onion and offers him a memory.

Xuexue sold immortality. She went to towns and villages ravaged by earthquakes or mudslides, to fishing villages by dried-up lakes. She looked at children’s brains with the MRI scanner in her phone and talked to their desperate parents about life without flesh. She showed the children videos from Heaven, where gods and goddesses spoke about eternal life as gardeners of code. The children laughed and pointed. In every village, there were a few who wanted to go. She gathered them in automated trucks with the help of company drones and took them to the Iridescent Gateway of Heaven.

The Gateway consisted of hastily erected barracks in the Ordos desert, covered in camouflage cloth. The latrines smelled. The camp beds were dirty.

They did not have a shower for the first two weeks, but Xuexue and the other instructors – most of them faces on the display screens of the teleoperated drone guards – said that it did not matter, that soon they would transcend the needs of the flesh.

The first stage of the transformation took place in the classroom. The children wore itchy skullcaps that told the company machines what they were thinking. Xuexue watched over them through the harsh training: hours and hours of programming, forming code blocks and sequences of symbols in their minds, receiving orgasmic jolts of pleasure through the cap’s transcranial magnetic stimulator for every success and experiencing a little hell for being slow or failing. There was no talking in class, only chorused cries of agony and ecstasy.

Usually, they were ready within six weeks, permanent burns on their shaved, hollow-templed heads, half-closed eyes twitching like in REM sleep. Then she took them to the Celestial Doctor one by one, telling them that they would now get their peach of immortality. No one ever returned from the Doctor’s tent. In the evening Xuexue would set up the superdense datalink to the company satellite, sending up the petabytes harvested from young brains, fresh gogols to spin code in the cloud software farms.

Afterwards, she allowed herself a brief oblivion, achieved with cheap rice wine and drugware, before setting out to the world again.

Ten years of work for the company, and she would have true immortality of her own. A high-fidelity Moravec upload, no break in her consciousness, a slow surgery in which her neurons would be replaced by artificial emulations, one by one: a true transformation into something digital. A Realm of her own design, in the cloud.

It was going to be worth it, she told herself.

She had just arrived with a new group of recruits when the Western micro UAVs came down from the sky in angry buzzing clouds, burning everything. For a moment, it felt right, and she just stood there, watching the Gateway die. Then the black terror of death came, and she did the only thing she could: ran into the Doctor’s tent.

Her second birth inside is lost to her even now, except for a sea of bright red pinpoints, a clamp around her skull, a grinding sound.

Xuexue opens her eyes. The memory pours off her like cold water. Paul stares at her, eyes wide.

‘What happened then?’ he whispers.

‘Nothing, for a long time,’ she says. ‘I was brought here with the King’s billion gogols. I woke up as a Quiet. The Revolution was good for me. We really did something new. We made a place without little immortals.’ She looks at the robot. ‘I suppose I’m still trying to make up for them. It will never be enough, but it’s good to try. One thing at a time.’

‘Maybe it is,’ Paul says. He smiles at her, and there is genuine warmth in his eyes this time. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Xuexue says. ‘I’m here every week. Come by again if you decide to stay.’

‘Thanks,’ Paul says. ‘Maybe I will.’

They sit together and look at the robot. Slowly, her smile returns. She listens to the young man’s breathing. Maybe she will break her record today.