The Quantum Thief

by Hannu Rajaniemi

  She turns away from me. Her face is hard. I try to take her hand, but she does not open her fingers. ‘Look at me. Let me do this. So you won’t have to.’

  ‘Damn you.’ She grabs my wrist. ‘But whatever I give you, you’ll give back, after it’s over. Swear it.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘And I swear too,’ she says. ‘If you hurt him, you’ll wish you were still in your Prison.’

  I look at the young man. He is leaning on a tree, eyes half-closed, almost as if asleep.

  ‘Raymonde, I’m not planning on hurting him. Well, perhaps his ego, a little bit. It’ll do him good.’

  ‘You were never much good at doing good,’ she says.

  I spread my hands, give her a small bow and go to meet the detective.

  *

  Isidore is alert, walking around, observing, deducing; it is not hard to see social patterns below the flow of gevulot. Here is the composer responsible for the music the Quiet will play later tonight, fishing for compliments; here, a Quiet resurrection activist trying to get a donation from Unruh for their cause. He tries to feel more than look, brushing a mental fingertip over his surroundings, reading a Braille of reality that has always been there for him, looking for things that do not belong.

  ‘Good evening.’

  Isidore looks up, his concentration interrupted. A dark-skinned man in a white tie stands in front of him. He is of indeterminate age, a little shorter than Isidore. The stranger’s waistcoat glitters with golden ornamental Watches – ostentatiously, in Isidore’s opinion – and in spite of the dim firefly lighting, he is wearing blue-tinted glasses. There is a strikingly red flower in his lapel. He brings with him the faintest whiff of a feminine perfume, a fine scent of pine.

  The man removes his glasses and gives Isidore a smile made world-weary by his heavy eyelids. His eyebrows are very dark, almost as if sketched with a sharp pen. His gevulot is carefully closed.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am sorry, I am looking for … how do you say, a private place?’

  Isidore frowns. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘For … bodily functions, you understand?’

  ‘Oh. Are you an offworlder?’

  ‘Yes. Jim Barnett. I’m afraid I find it difficult to navigate here.’ The man taps his temple. ‘My brain, it hasn’t yet adjusted, yes? Can you help?’

  ‘Of course.’ Isidore passes the man a little co-memory, indicating the restrooms in the castle. He feels a quick twinge of a beginning headache as he does so. Perhaps I have been working too hard.

  The man grins and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Ah! So convenient. Thank you very much. Have a nice time.’ Then he disappears into the crowd.

  Isidore wonders if he should direct a guard Quiet to keep an eye on him. But an anomaly catches his eye from a nearby agora. There is something familiar about a short man dressed as Sol Mercurii, all blazing silver and heat and wearing a winged helmet, having a conversation with a young woman in a Gemini costume – a foglet image of herself shadowing her every move. The man’s eyes are fixed on something far away.

  Isidore whispers to one of the Quiet, approaches the pair and touches the man on the shoulder.

  ‘Adrian Wu.’

  The journalist jumps.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ Isidore says.

  ‘But I have an invitation,’ Wu protests. ‘Unruh has been handing them out right and left. I need to cover this. I’m surprised to see you here, though. Is there something my readers should know?’

  ‘No.’ Isidore frowns. ‘Have you been taking analog photographs?’

  ‘Well—’

  One of the assault Quiet pads soundlessly next to Isidore. Its faceless head stares at the journalist. There is a silent, subsonic hum around it that echoes in Isidore’s lungs. Wu stares at it.

  ‘You know, I’m in charge of security around here,’ Isidore says.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Give them to me, and I’ll let you stay.’

  Wu takes off his helmet, unscrews a cylinder-like object from it and hands it to Isidore. It is an analog camera, apparently triggered by his chin strap, a primitive device with light-sensitive film, far too simple to be affected by gevulot.

  ‘Thank you,’ Isidore says. He nods to the Gemini woman. ‘I would be very careful what you say around this man. Let me know if he causes any problems.’ He smiles at Wu. ‘You can thank me later.’

  The first dance has started. Isidore decides he deserves a drink and finds a glass of white wine. Then he checks the time: Unruh still has an hour left until his Timely demise.

  That is when he realises his entanglement ring is gone from its chain. His heart pounds. He ’blinks at his encounter with the man with the blue-tinted glasses and sees the stranger steal it, with an almost imperceptible motion, separating his Watch from the chain and then putting it back, removing the ring, in a matter of seconds, talking to Isidore all the while, masking what can be masked with gevulot.

  Isidore takes a deep breath. Then his mind is racing through the agoras of the party, sending the co-memory of the man to Odette and the Quiet guards. But he is nowhere to be seen, either gone or masked by gevulot. He walks around frantically, trying to locate all the gevulot blurs that could be hiding the uninvited guest that he has no doubt was no other than Jean le Flambeur. But the man seems to have vanished. Why did he come to talk to me? Just to taunt me? Or – He feels the odd headache again and a bizarre sense of déjà vu, flashes of faces, as if he was in two places at once.

  He takes out his magnifying glass and Wu’s camera and looks at the film. Without effort, the zoku device translates the grains on the film into full-colour images. He flips through them, tapping the glass disc. Society women. Performers. And there – Unruh. A picture taken only minutes ago, according to the timestamp, showing the millenniaire laughing with a group of friends, among whom there is a familiar figure in black and silver, with tousled hair—

  Isidore drops the camera and starts running.

  Duplicating the detective’s physical appearance takes only a moment. I do it in one of the full privacy pavilions our host has considerately provided for his guests’ carnal and other clandestine activities: imprinting his three-dimensional image to my own flesh and reprogramming my clothes to resemble his. The match does not have to be absolute: a lot can be hidden with gevulot.

  Absently, I look at the ring I stole from him: zoku tech, clearly. Deciding to investigate it later, I put it in my pocket.

  The real problem is his identity signature, and that’s what I need the gevulot Raymonde provided for. And I need Perhonen’s quantum computation capability as well, to approximate the quantum state his Watch uses to identify itself.

  I thought being a thief was easy, the ship says, as we bounce information back and forth. This is hard work.

  ‘Waiting and sheer terror, as I said.’ I try to ignore the memories that scroll through my mind as the ship and the identity theft engine work on them, to keep my promise to Raymonde. There are flashes of blank faces sculpted on a wall, and a girl with a zoku jewel at her throat. There is a strange innocence about the memories, and briefly I wonder what this boy is doing chasing gogol pirates and criminals like me.

  I brush them aside: it is not the detective’s past I’m here to steal, but Time. The gogol engine chimes, announcing success, talking to my hacked Watch and making the world think I’m Isidore Beautrelet. Only a few moments before his Watch renews his identity signature with the ambient gevulot, so I have no time to waste. I check my remaining equipment – the q-spider and the trigger in my mind – and decide it is time for the main event of the night.

  I approach Unruh’s group – the borrowed gevulot now allows me to see them – and imitate the detective’s distracted, meandering walk. My mark is talking to a tall woman in icy white, and looks cheerfully drunk.

  ‘M. Beautrelet!’ he shouts when he sees me. ‘How goes the villain hunt?’

  ‘There are too many to choose from,’ I say. Unruh burst
s out laughing, but the woman in white looks at me curiously. Better make this quick.

  ‘You are in a festive mood, I see,’ Unruh says. ‘Good for you! Here’s to that.’ He drains his glass.

  I hand Unruh another glass from a passing Quiet waiter. As he takes it, I give the q-spider a quick instruction. It runs up my arm, leaps to his palm and vanishes into his gas-giant-coloured sleeve. Then it goes looking for his Watch.

  The spider took three days to grow and another protracted argument with Mieli to play with the Sobornost body. Perhonen and I came up with the design, and it grew in the crook of my arm, a little many-legged lump, storing inside it some of the EPR states that both Mieli and I use for our superdense communication link with the ship. I smile at Unruh and guide it with my mind.

  ‘It’s hard not to be,’ I say, ‘when the fireworks are about to start.’

  There. The spider nestles on his Watch and crawls inside it, connecting little q-dot threads to the ion traps that store Unruh’s personalised, unforgeable units of Time, quantum states that his Watch sends to the resurrection system one by one, counting down his lifetime as a human. Then it shoots a little signal up at Perhonen. One, two, three, ten, sixty seconds of Time, quantum teleported away, transformed into quantum states up in the sky, stored in Perhonen’s wings. Yes.

  Unruh frowns. ‘I was saving the fireworks for my big moment tonight,’ he says.

  I smile. ‘Shouldn’t every moment be a big moment?’

  Unruh laughs again. ‘M. Beautrelet, I don’t know where you found your wit – at the bottom of a glass or on a pretty girl’s lips – but I’m glad you did!’

  ‘M. le Flambeur, I presume?’

  The detective stands in front of me flanked by two of the Quiet guards, two sleek black creatures made of sheer power and ferocity. I raise my eyebrows. Faster than I expected, much faster. He deserves the bow I give him.

  ‘At your service.’ I let my features revert to my own. I grin at Unruh. ‘You have been a gracious host, but I’m afraid I must take my leave now.’

  ‘M. le Flambeur, I must ask you not to move.’

  I throw my flower into the air and form the mental image of pressing a large red button.

  The fireworks go off all at once. The sky is full of trails of fire, weaving double and triple spirals, stars bursting into flakes of silver and sudden thunderclaps. After a cascade of bright purple confetti, two blue rockets draw a sign of infinity. There is a smell of gunpowder.

  Around me, the party stops. The Quiet guards are statues. The music dies. Unruh drops his glass, but remains upright, eyes glazed. There are a few slow collapses, but overall, almost everyone at the party remains standing, gazes fixed on something far, far away, but unseeing, as the fireworks fizzle and die above us.

  Another trick from the gogol pirate handbook: an opto-genetic virus that makes brain cells hypersensitive to certain wavelengths of light. It was not hard to customise it not for the purposes of uploads, but for creating a period of inactivity. It looks like the infection from my flower spread even faster than I thought. And there are only so many fireworks manufacturers in the Moving City: bribing them with the pretence of a little innocent surprise for M. Unruh was the easy part.

  I wrap myself in gevulot and make my way past the stunned, silent, thoughtless crowd. Raymonde is waiting for me at the garden gate, also wrapped in full privacy.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay for one more dance?’ I ask her. I close my eyes and wait for the slap. It doesn’t come. When I open my eyes, she is looking at me, face unreadable.

  ‘Give it back. His gevulot. Now.’

  And I do, returning all the rights to the detective’s memories she gave me, purging all of him out of myself, becoming just Jean le Flambeur again.

  She sighs. ‘That’s better. Thank you.’

  ‘I take it that your crowd will cover our tracks here?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Just go and do your part.’

  ‘In case it makes you feel any better,’ I say, ‘the next part involves me dying.’

  We are in the public park. It is dark. Raymonde becomes the Gentleman and floats into the air. The dying fireworks reflect from her silver mask. ‘I never wanted you to die,’ she says. ‘It was always about something else.’

  ‘What? Revenge?’

  ‘Let me know when you figure it out,’ she says and is gone.

  Amazingly, the party continues after the period of stolen time expires. Ten minutes have passed. The band picks up the tune, and the conversations begin again. And of course, there is only one topic.

  Isidore’s temples throb. With the Quiet guards and Odette, he searches the grounds and the garden’s exomemory, over and over. But there is no sign of le Flambeur. The sense of failure and disappointment is a leaden weight in his belly. When the hour approaches midnight, he finally returns to the party.

  Unruh has opened his gevulot to the public. He is the centre of attention and loving it, complimented on his bravery facing the thief. But eventually he waves his hand. ‘My friends, it is time for me to leave you,’ he says. ‘Thank you for your patience with our unplanned entertainment number.’ Laughter. ‘But at least – and thanks to the bravery of our very own M. Beautrelet – he went away empty-handed.

  ‘It was my intention to do this in bed between my lovely ladies here,’ he says, clutching two Serpent Street courtesans, ‘and possibly while being crushed by an elephant.’ He raises his glass to the gracile pachyderm looming behind the crowd. ‘But perhaps it is better to do it here, with friends. Time is what we make of it; relative, absolute, finite, infinite. I choose to let this moment last forever so that when I toil to clean your sewers and protect you from phoboi and carry your city on my back – I can remember what it is like to have such friends.’

  ‘And so, with a drink, and a kiss,’ Unruh kisses both girls – ‘or two’ – laughter – ‘I die. See you in the—’

  He falls to the ground, dropping his glass. Blinking, staring at the still form of the millenniaire, Isidore looks at his Watch. It shows one minute to midnight. But how? He planned it so carefully, to the last word. But his thoughts are drowned by cheers and popping champagne bottles, all around.

  As the Resurrection Men come to take the body away and the wake part of the celebrations begins, Isidore sits down with a glass of wine and begins to deduce.

  Interlude

  TRUTH

  On the night of the Spike, Marcel and Owl Boy go out over Noctis Labyrinthus in a glider.

  It is Owl Boy’s idea, of course. Everybody knows the Labyrinthus canyons are full of phoboi and deceptive thermals. Marcel cannot exactly afford the Time for the glider either, but there is no arguing with his lover.

  ‘You have become an old man,’ he says. ‘You will never be an artist if you don’t court death every now and then.’ The barb about the concept he had been working on so long only to see it realised by someone else stings: and he can’t live that down. And so he ends up in the sky, looking down at the dark chasms and up at the stars, and, in spite of everything, enjoying himself.

  Above Ius Chasma, Owl Boy suddenly steers the glider down until they almost scrape the dark pseudotrees that grow there, then pulls sharply up. They veer close to the canyon’s rim and the bottom of Marcel’s stomach goes down to his toes. Seeing his expression, Owl Boy whoops with laughter.

  ‘You are crazy,’ Marcel tells Owl Boy, and kisses him.

  ‘I thought you were never going to do that,’ Owl Boy says, smiling.

  ‘That was fun,’ Marcel says. ‘But could we go higher and just look at the sky, for a while?’

  ‘Anything for you, my love. Besides, we have all night for acrobatics.’

  Marcel ignores his wink, swings his seat back and looks at the sky. He ’blinks the constellations and planets into being.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about going away,’ Marcel says.

  ‘Leaving?’ Owl Boy says. ‘Where would you go?’

  Marce
l gestures. ‘You know. Up. Out there.’ He presses his palm against the smooth, transparent skin of the glider. A bright Jupiter winks at him between his fingers. ‘It’s a stupid cycle here, don’t you think? And it doesn’t feel real here anymore.’

  ‘Isn’t that supposed to be your job? Feeling unreal?’ There is a hint of anger in his voice. Owl Boy is an engineering student, and he would never have gone for him if not for the physical attraction; but every now and then he says things that make Marcel’s heart jump. Many times during the course of their two-year partnership, Marcel has thought about leaving him. But moments like this always pull him back in.

  ‘No,’ Marcel says. ‘It’s about making unreal things real, or real things more real. It would be easier, up there. The zokus have machines that turn thoughts into things. The Sobornost say that they are going to preserve every thought ever thought. But here—’

  Beneath his fingers, Jupiter explodes. For a moment, his hand is a red silhouette against bright whiteness. He blinks, feels the glider shudder around them, its wings curling into strange shapes like paper twisted by flame. He feels Owl Boy’s cold hand in his own. Then his lover is shouting, words that do not make sense, larynx-tearing glossolalia. All around, the sky is burning. And then they fall.

  It is not until much later that Marcel hears the word Spike, after the Quiet have brought their bodies from the desert and the Resurrection Men have put them back together.

  The cities have suffered. There is damage in the exomemory itself. Beyond the sky, things are worse: Jupiter is gone, eaten by a singularity, gravitational or technological or both, no one knows. The Sobornost claim to be containing a cosmic threat and offer an upload asylum to all citizens of the Oubliette. The remaining zokus out in Supra City are moving in response. There is talk of war.

  Marcel cares little about any of it.

  ‘Well, this is an unexpected pleasure,’ says Paul Sernine, sitting in Marcel’s studio. Perhaps Marcel only imagines it, but his rival’s gevulot betrays a hint of silent envy as he looks at the claytronic models and sketches and found objects. ‘I really did not expect to be the first point of a social call after such a long absence. How are things?’