Quarantine

by Greg Egan

  I sit in the anteroom, watching the simulated dice rise and fall automatically, ten times a minute, hour after hour. I keep my real vision fixed on the dice, while

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  holding two windows in my mind's eye: the Hypernova menu, and an interface to an analysis program - a modified, miniature version of the ion experiment software, smuggled to me by Lui in a two-second RedNet handshake.

  Smearing ON.

  The dice are tossed.

  Smearing OFF.

  Enter results.

  Primed, I could do this indefinitely, without the slightest change in mood. Deprimed, I slide from bursts of enthusiasm into grey tedium, then screaming boredom, then stretches of merciful automatism - from which I emerge more frustrated than ever. All of which may be helpful: whatever my differences upon smearing, it's hard to believe that I'm not unanimous in wishing to cut short this mind-numbing procedure - and the only way to do that is by succeeding.

  Or is it? I can hold my virtual selves to ransom only if, after each collapse, / remain in control - and the truth is, I have no way of knowing what the eigenstate mod will be used for: to choose the state of the dice, or to choose my own state of mind. At the next collapse, I might find that a state has been selected in which I've simply given up on the experiment ... or given up on the true Ensemble. Every time I smear, all the rules of the game are being thrown into the air, alongside the dice. I can only hope that they're harder to sway.

  I pocket the dice generator seconds before Lee Hing-cheung arrives to relieve me. The program in my head -running much more slowly under von Neumann than it would on any decent hardware - scours the accumulated data with ever more sophisticated and obscure tests in the hope of detecting an effect, but spits out its final, unsurprising conclusion as I step off the homebound train:

  [null hypothesis unchallenged.] I turn up for duty expecting to find that Po-kwai has been

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  granted a rest day, but my orders are to report to Room 619. When I get there, Lee explains.

  'She says it doesn't tire her any more; there's no reason to hold up the work.'

  I stand guard with single-minded vigilance, as if to compensate for my nocturnal dereliction. I blank out the chatter of the scientists, and suppress any sense of anticipation. P3 distils me into a pure observer - wired to respond in an instant to any contingency, but until that moment, utterly passive.

  When Po-kwai emerges from the ion room, an hour later, they call it a day. In the elevator, heading for the restaurant, I ask, 'How's it going?'

  'Good. We've had useful data all afternoon.'

  'Already?'

  She nods happily. Ί think I've crossed some kind of threshold; everything's just getting easier and easier. Well. . . you know what I mean. / do nothing, as always. I take no credit - but it certainly looks like the smeared Po-kwai has finally mastered Ensemble.'

  For a moment, I'm tempted to ask her to repeat what she said, but there's no need; I heard her perfectly, and the meaning is unambiguous. And if she's never named the mod before, no doubt she was explicitly instructed not to - by Leung, perhaps - with sufficient emphasis for the message to sink in more fully than all the other 'security bullshit'.

  I see no reason to admonish her for the slip.

  I sit through dinner with infinite patience, nodding politely while Po-kwai complains about how boring the food has become.

  I sit in the anteroom, listening to her moving about the apartment, wondering what difference, if any, this information will make.

  At one a.m. I deprime, and my joy is no longer constrained. The true Ensemble is the mod named Ensemble - and this perfect equation, this electrifying symmetry, is the final confirmation of everything I believe. A revelation, yes - but in retrospect it seems

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  impossible that it could have been otherwise. And what greater inspiration could I hope for, to guide and encourage the virtual selves who remain loyal to my mission?

  I take out the dice generator, invoke the mods, begin.

  The dice fall at random, again and again, but I'm not discouraged. My smeared self can't be expected to perform instant miracles, however fervently he's pursuing the task . . . least of all when I annihilate him by collapsing, every six seconds, and he has to begin again, picking up the threads from whatever hologrammic traces of his experience are preserved in my brain.

  Must I collapse so often - after every throw? It's true that Po-kwai succeeded with this approach - and collapsing after each ion would have given her the simplest possible goal: amplifying one of just two possibilities. Her task and mine aren't identical, though; Ensemble is in her skull, not mine. Maybe I need to smear for a longer time, to generate versions of myself capable of influencing the mod. How long was I smeared when Karen appeared, unbidden? I have no way of knowing; the process was out of my control.

  Now, that's no longer true.

  I tick the ON switch.

  On the table beside me, the dice generator sends the images of the cubes spinning into the air. They look almost solid - even glinting convincingly as they pretend to catch the ambient light -and they fall to the surface with a faint simulated click.

  Snake's eyes, two ones - my target.

  I twitchily suppress the by now instinctive third step of the routine, and, leaving the Hypernova menu untouched, enter this first result into the analysis program -thinking: each time I do this, von Neumann will smear into multiple versions, with copies of the program which have been fed every possible combination of results so far. I don't have to think about individual throws; all I have to do is choose an eigenstate in which the analysis program eventually declares success. Surely I can manage a task as simple as that - with the help of the true Ensemble.

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  Snake's eyes for a second time. And a third.

  What if I collapsed right now, before the program gives a verdict? What will this have been - a fluke? A coincidence? A rare - but insignificant - run of good luck? Or am I already witnessing the proof that I will remain smeared beyond that point?

  Snake's eyes, for a fourth time. At one chance in thirty-six each toss, the probability of a run of four or more - just once in all the thirty thousand tosses, the ten nights' worth of data that I have so far - is already down to 1.7 per cent.

  A fifth time ... at 0.048 per cent. Having crossed its arbitrary one per cent threshold, the program starts flashing messages of triumph.

  Six . . . at 0.0013 per cent.

  Seven ... at 0.000037 per cent.

  Eight... at 0.0000010 per cent.

  I stop feeding data into the program, and just stare at the dice landing the same way again and again, like some cheap, looping advertising hologram. Maybe the generator has malfunctioned, that's all. Malfunctioned how, though? And why? Do I think I've 'willed' a change of circuitry that biases the thing? Am I going to crawl back to some cosy idea of telekinesis, by method unknown? I'm not even trying to influence the device; I'm just watching everything happen. Po-kwai was right: the smeared self does all the work.

  I'm going to have to swallow the whole truth: I'm living through a pattern of events that will be (or has been) plucked from a few quadrillion possibilities, by the collective effort of a few quadrillion versions of me . . . most of whom I am about to slaughter (unless I already have).

  I tick the OFF switch.

  The dice keep falling: A three and a four. A two and a one. A pair of sixes.

  I wipe the sweat off my face; shaken, elated, giddy with success and fear.

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  I reach down and grip the seat of the chair; the cool, smooth metal is as solid as ever. It doesn't take long to calm myself. I've come through unharmed, unchanged, haven't I? And I have less to fear than ever; there'll be no more mod failures, no more hallucinations. I'm in control now.

  And whatever bizarre metaphysical convolutions I'm going to have to come to terms with, one simple truth remains: in the end, when I pull the plug, hit the OFF switch, collapse the wave
... it still all adds up to normality.

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  In the spirit of the Canon, Lui sets the agenda for my conquest of the mod without ever suggesting that my own instincts on the matter could be anything but flawless. With his prompting, I move on to more elaborate dice tricks: cycles of two, three or four different outcomes; totals that are always prime numbers; dice that always agree. The objective odds against these conditions being met by pure chance are no more spectacular than those of my first success - and in some cases are far less stringent -but nevertheless, identifying and amplifying the eigenstates for these complex patterns seems like it ought to be more of a challenge.

  Then again, perhaps the criterion in all cases is simply my belief that the outcome is correct; the state is chosen only because it contains a version of me who thinks he's been successful. . . and if one of my virtual selves were to suffer a lapse of concentration and mistakenly believe that a five and a three had summed to a prime, he might end up being rewarded for his incompetence with the privilege of becoming real. (Maybe that's already happened. Several times. Maybe I'm slowly but steadily 'mutating' towards an increased capacity for inattentiveness and self-delusion. If this kind of 'evolution' could give Laura the brain pathways upon which Ensemble itself is based, I shouldn't underestimate the effects it might have on me.) I could buy a pocket HV camera and start recording everything -replaying it only after collapsing - but I'm reluctant to smuggle in too much incriminating hardware. If I'm caught simply throwing dice, that could be passed off as an innocent enough amusement; I could claim that P3 was malfunctioning again, requiring some diversion to keep me sane through the early hours of the morning. I doubt that this explanation would stretch to making home movies on duty.

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  As the experiment proceeds, my resolve often wavers, but it never quite fails. This is what the true Ensemble requires of me; I'm certain of that. And if smearing is the antithesis of everything I stand for, everything I've spent my life trying to achieve - control over who I am and who I can become - then surely the perfect control that Ensemble grants me more than compensates for the risks . . . so long as it's me who's in control, however indirectly. So long as my wishes continue to hold sway when I smear.

  At times, I still catch myself thinking: If / don't know how to invoke Ensemble, who does? Which of my shortlived virtual accomplices learns the trick . . . and, having done so, why does he let himself die in the collapse? Why does he strengthen an eigenstate other than his own, when he could use the mod to make himself real?

  But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Po-kwai's view must be correct: my entire smeared self operates Ensemble, and there is no single version of me who possesses the skill. Whoever the collapse made real would mimic my protestations of ignorance. The knowledge must be distributed, like the knowledge in a neural net. No single neuron in my brain embodies any of my skills - so why should I expect any version of me to hold the secrets of my smeared self? And whether the smeared Nick Stavrianos rediscovers the skill anew each time he comes into being, or whether the knowledge survives the collapse, encoded in some 'hologram' in my brain, there are no virtual martyrs, no self-sacrificing alter egos who use the mod to give me what I want, at the cost of their own existence.

  And my smeared self? He's no martyr; he has no choice. One way or another, he must always end up collapsed.

  Which is not to assume that he must always end up collapsed as me.

  Just when the whole business is beginning to seem almost mundane (I want totals of seven ... I get totals of seven

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  . . . what could be simpler than that?), Lui hands me a wad of sealed envelopes.

  'These are lists of one hundred random outcomes. You might try making the dice produce them.'

  'You mean, read through the list as the dice are thrown?'

  He shakes his head. 'What would be the point of that? Consult the list after collecting the data - but before you collapse, of course.'

  I baulk at this, instinctively - and fail, four nights running. And the truth is, I'm glad to fail: defiantly, blasphemously, self-righteously fucking joyful - as if my failure implied some kind of reprieve for all the discredited, 'reasonable' explanations that I thought I'd stopped clinging to long ago. How can I make the outcomes match, when I don't even know what they are? Of course I'm failing! It's just not possible.

  At the same time, I know full well that this task is nothing special, nothing new. It no more requires 'clairvoyance' than the other experiments required 'telekinesis'. It's just a matter of choosing the right eigenstate: of making the right present become the past.

  On the fifth night, as before, I note the results in a MindTools scratchpad, then pull an envelope from my pocket at random and tear it open. After the first three matches, I'm sure that the other ninety-seven will agree, but I diligently check them one by one.

  I don't feel the least bit disoriented - or resentful - until after I've ticked the OFF switch and collapsed.

  But then, given the choice, why would I?

  Lui gives me a combination padlock and suggests casually, 'Why not open this on the first try?'

  'By throwing dice?'

  'No. On your own.'

  'Using von Neumann?'

  'No. By guessing.'

  I sit in the anteroom, waiting for Po-kwai to fall asleep. I wonder what she dreams about when I borrow the mod;

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  nothing at all, if my smeared self chooses her state correctly . . . but without waking her and asking her (before collapsing), on what basis does he make that choice?

  Maybe versions of me do wake her and ask her.

  I deprime, smear, then wait five minutes. I want to be sure that I'll end up 'sufficiently smeared' to operate Ensemble - and it's far less off-putting to go through all the waiting now, before even attempting the task, than to leave it until I've succeeded - and find myself confronting the fact that I have no choice: I can't, I won't, collapse too soon.

  The whole question of the timing of the collapse still unsettles me. Po-kwai has it easy; she's given no choice. In my case, there must be eigenstates in which I choose to collapse earlier, or later, than I do in the state that's finally made real. These attempts are inconsequential, of course; the collapse is only real if it makes itself rea. That sounds uncomfortably circular, but at least it's consistent: the entire wave collapses precisely when the chosen state includes the action which brings that about. Or rather, it's consistent from the point of view of the version who becomes real - but what about the versions who attempt to collapse, and fail? Do they know that they've failed -and what that means? Or are they just mathematical abstractions who know nothing, feel nothing, experience nothing?

  I take the padlock from my pocket and stare at it with increasing unease. People are notoriously bad at inventing truly random numbers; I wish I'd decided - before smearing - to ignore Lui, and use the dice. What if the combination is 9999999999? Or 0123456789? I have no doubt that it's physically possible for me to hit the keys in any order whatsoever - but am I psychologically capable of 'guessing' such a 'non-random' sequence?

  Well, I'd better be. Because if I'm not, I'm sure my smeared self - with the help of Ensemble - can find someone else who is.

  I laugh that off. Change equals suicide? That's Po-

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  Kwai's line, not mine. Besides, surely it's too late for such qualms; if nothing's real until the collapse, then surely I've 'already' collapsed. This whole experience has already been selected - and I've already become whoever I have to become in order to open the lock. And it doesn't feel like much of a change to me.

  But as I move my index finger towards the keypad, I suffer a sudden shift of perspective:

  I'm one of at least ten billion people, sitting in at least ten billion rooms, confronting at least ten billion locks. If I guess the correct combination, I live. If not, I die. It's as simple as that.

  What makes me think th
at / have 'already' succeeded? The fact that the room looks normal? The fact that I'm experiencing anything at all? If the collapse doesn't manufacture experience - if it merely selects it - then why should the perceptions of any one version of me be radically different from the others? Why should the state that happens to become real be the only one that seems real?

  I start to put the lock down - nobody's forcing me to go through with this - but then I think: That's the very worst thing I can do. My smeared self is going to choose someone who opens the lock, not someone who abandons the whole experiment. If I give up, my chances of surviving are zero.

  I stare at the lock, and try to psych myself out of these absurd fears. I've smeared before, and come through. Yes, of course I have -or 1 wouldn't be here at all. That says nothing about my situation now. I shake my head. This is ludicrous. Everybody collapses. What do I think -everyday life is founded on a process of constant genocide? If I couldn't swallow that for hypothetical aliens, why should I swallow it for human beings?

  Hypothetical aliens? Who do I think made The Bubble?

  So. . . what am I going to do? Sit here and wait for Lee to turn up and take the decision out of my hands? Or do I plan to find a way to spend the rest of my life unobserved? But even that wouldn't save me: when the chosen version

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  of me chooses to collapse, I'll vanish - unless I am the chosen version . . . and the odds against that are worse than ten billion to one.

  I don't know what breaks the spell, but suddenly -mercifully -I'm sceptical again. Part of me muses: // quadrillions of virtual humans really are dying every second, then death is nothing to fear. It's a purely intellectual observation, though; I don't believe I'm going to die. I raise the lock and hit ten keys without thinking, almost without looking, then I stare at the tiny display above the keypad: 1450045409.

  Too orderly? Too random?

  Too late. I tug the ring.

  Lui stands by the central pond in Kowloon Park, throwing bread to the ducks. I think he's seen too many bad spy movies. He doesn't even glance my way when I'm standing right beside him.