Quarantine

by Greg Egan

  Why? He came prepared to take the data from me by force, so why pay me a cent? True, he'll be able to earn enough from Ensemble to make a mere half-million seem irrelevant - and the payment does make it more likely that I'll leave him to do that in peace. It's a bribe, to get me out of the way. He could easily have killed me instead; I should count myself lucky.

  And I should take his advice. Head for the docks. Bribe my way out of the country. There's nothing to keep me here.

  Nothing? I think back over the last few hours, trying to pin down the instant of my liberation from the loyalty mod - but I can recall no tortuous struggle to assert my 'true' identity, no triumphant feat of mental agility that finally unravelled the knot. But then, nor was there any

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  such battle for my loyalty, the day the mod was imposed. It was always a matter of brain physiology - not logic, not strength of will. Exactly what changed that physiology -whether the minority of versions of me who'd tunnelled through the mod's constraints somehow swayed my smeared self into choosing one of their number to survive the collapse (namely, me), or whether the crisis at ASR simply left him with so many factors to juggle that he ceased even to care about anything so trivial as his collapsed selfs religion - I'll never know. Maybe the smeared Po-kwai intervened. Whatever the reason, it's happened -

  Has it? Lui claimed that I'd been collapsed . . . and probably believed it. . . but the only collapse that works is the one that makes itself real. Maybe I'm still smeared, as is Lui, and every one of ASR's guards, and the whole incident - the bombs being found, Lui coming to warn me, everything up to and including this moment -is part of an eigenstate that will be discarded, part of the extravagant cost of the night's unlikely success.

  Fighting down panic, I invoke Hypernova and hit the OFF button . . . then realize that doing so proves nothing: billions of versions of me must have done the very same thing - ineffectually - throughout the night. For a moment, the whole question seems intractable: how can I ever know that I've become irreversibly real?

  The schedule, that's how. It's 04:07 - and if everything had gone according to plan, I'd be back on duty, and collapsed, by now. I laugh with nervous relief. My failure is an irrevocable part of the unique past - and so is my liberation. And however many versions of me would have remained in the grip of the loyalty mod . . . I'm alive, and they're dead.

  So I have no reason to stay. The Ensemble, 'true' or otherwise, means nothing to me.

  As for the dangers of using Ensemble, Lui may be greedy, but he's not stupid. If he really has known about the risks all along, then no doubt he'll take great care to keep them under control. I may not like entrusting the

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  fate of the planet to his dubious expertise - but I have no choice. I can't go to the authorities; ASR will have set me up as the prime suspect for planting the bombs - and they might even believe that themselves. What do I do? Send an anonymous message to the NHK police, claiming that technology which might undermine the nature of reality has fallen into unsafe hands?

  The trouble is . . . even if Lui himself could be trusted to use the mod cautiously, there's the question of proliferation. What happens when one of his code-breaking clients grows curious about his technique and decides to cut out a few of the intermediaries, or ensure that the competition won't have access to the same service? With Lui's quaint ideas of security, it'd take them about a week to find out everything. Ensemble in the hands of gangsters - or, worse, Ensemble in the hands of the intelligence agencies of the PRC, or the USA. And even if they, too, understood the risks and exercised enough restraint to keep the planet from runaway smearing .. . reality shaped by Beijing, or Washington? Life wouldn't be worth living.

  Karen appears beside me. I hesitate, afraid to speak in case she vanishes - or explodes - but then I find the courage to say, 'It's good to see you. I've missed you.'

  Have I? I hunt for some memory of doing so, but then abandon the search as irrelevant. What matters is, / would have.

  She says grimly, 'You've screwed up.'

  'Yeah.'

  'So what are you going to do about it?'

  'What can I do? I'm now a suspected terrorist. I have nowhere to stay, no resources -'

  'You have half a million dollars.'

  I shake my head. 'That's something, but -'

  'And you have ninety-five per cent of Ensemble.'

  I laugh bitterly. 'Ninety-five per cent might as well be nothing. You can't feed a swarm of nanomachines ninety-five per cent of a mod specification, and just hope that the rest doesn't matter.'

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  'No? What about ninety-five per cent of two mod specifications?' Two?'

  Then it hits me: Ensemble performs two completely independent functions: inhibiting the collapse, and manipulating the eigenstates. There's no reason for the rwo parts of the mod, responsible for these two separate functions, to have any overlap, any neurons in common. And if there's no overlap, either part should be able to stand alone. The only question is . . .

  I invoke CypherClerk and start wading through the data in the buffers. After a few dozen pages of preamble, I find:

  START SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL';

  I search for the next occurrence of 'eigenstate control'. Several hundred thousand pages later:

  END SECTION: 'EIGENSTATE CONTROL' (checksum: 4956841039);

  J* ****************************************** *j

  START SECTION: 'COLLAPSE INHIBITION';

  Karen says, 'You have half a million dollars. You have all you need of Ensemble. . . Hypernova makes up for the rest. And you have more experience of being smeared than anyone else on the planet, short of Laura herself. So much for having no resources.'

  I shake my head. Ί can't trust my smeared self. That was part of Laura's warning: he's played along with me so far, but I don't know what he'll do if he gains more strength.'

  'Yeah? And who would you rather trust: him - or Lui's clients, and their smeared selves?'

  I realize that I'm shivering. I laugh. 'I'm afraid. Don't you understand? I could turn into anyone. I just lost what used to be the most important thing in my life. Gone,

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  dissolved, in an instant. You know what that means. I might lose anything. / might lose you.'

  She says bluntly, 'My specification will still be on file; Axon will have archived it somewhere. If you lose me, you can always get me back.'

  Ί know.' Then I look away; I can't bear to say it to her face. 'But I'm afraid that if I lose you, I won't want you back.'

  Many of the small traders start opening for business around dawn, and I manage to buy a batch of cosmetic nanomachines and a change of clothes before the streets begin to grow crowded. I hide in the stall of a public toilet while the nanomachines take effect, breaking down a significant proportion of the melanin in my skin. The change is almost fast enough to perceive, and I stare, transfixed, at my hands and forearms as they fade from the deep black UV-belt norm to an olive complexion, reminiscent of photographs of my grandfather in his twentieth-century youth. An hour later, my kidneys have extracted the metabolites, and I urinate a surreal dark stream. It's absurd - but pissing away my skin colour is at least as disorienting as anything else that's happened in the last twelve hours. Whatever's changed inside my skull, up until now at least I looked the same.

  I check my appearance in a mirror, dragging my thoughts back to practicalities. Merely rendered pale, pattern-recognition soft-ware could still match me with ASR's records, but at least I'm no longer vulnerable to every bystander who might have seen my face splashed about the news systems.

  In fact, when I access The NHK Times, there's no mention of a foiled bombing attempt, by the Children or anyone else. The global news systems are the same. It looks like ASR have kept the whole thing to themselves; perhaps they don't want the NHK police pondering the mystery of exactly why the Children chose to target them.

  This cheers me up a little. I'm hardly out of danger- the Ensemble will hav
e put me on a dozen private hit lists -

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  but it's still nice to know that I'm not going to end up framed as a member of the Children of the Abyss. ,

  Sitting on a park bench in a patch of - reflected -morning sunlight, plugged into the world via Cypher-Clerk, RedNet, and my SatPhone, I hire an online nanoware expert system to deal with the ragged edges of my partial copy of Ensemble. Just as well; apart from simply discarding the incomplete second section, the preamble needs to be edited to reflect the change from two sections to one. Nanoware is never treated lightly; a neural mod specification with the slightest inconsistency would be rejected outright by the nanomachine synthesizer.

  I delete the copyright notices, copy the final specification from the CypherClerk buffers to a memory chip, ready to hand over the counter, and search the directory for the closest manufacturer. There's a place called Third Hemisphere, barely a kilometre away.

  The premises, at the end of a drab blind alley, look like shit, but once inside, I catch sight of the synthesizer - a genuine Axon model, complete with prominent authorized franchise sign. Or a convincing imitation. The woman in charge plugs my specification chip into a costing system. 'Thirty thousand dollars,' she says. "The nanoware for your mod will be ready in a fortnight.'

  According to the expert system, the synthesis should take eight hours at the most. Any further delay is nothing but queuing.

  I say, 'Fifty thousand. And it'll be ready by ten o'clock tonight.'

  She thinks it over. 'Eighty thousand. By nine.' 'Done.'

  I buy a gun; virtually an exact replacement for the laser taken from me this morning. Weapons are one thing NHK is not relaxed about, and black-market prices reflect that; at fifty-seven thousand, someone is collecting a de facto tariff of about three hundred per cent. I still find the generosity of Lui's bribe unsettling, but I can see why he'd

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  want to ease my way out of the city, rather than risk having me betray him to the Ensemble . . . and no doubt he was lying about his code-breaking fee, perhaps by one or two orders of magnitude.

  I need somewhere to stay, but hotels are far too computerized to be safe. It takes me most of the afternoon, but I manage to rent a small flat in a mildly run-down district in the south-west - and with a suitable bribe, no ID is required. When the agent hands me the key and leaves, I collapse onto the bed. The concussion is starting to catch up with me; I'm having trouble staying awake.

  Karen says, 'So, where do we start? What's the most immediate risk to containment?'

  I sigh. 'You know this is hopeless. Lui must have made a dozen copies of the data, by now.'

  'Maybe. But would he have trusted anyone else with them - or just hidden them?' The room itself keeps going slightly out of focus, but her image remains perfectly sharp. I squeeze my eyes shut, and try to concentrate.

  Ί don't know. He certainly wouldn't have given them to the other members of the Canon; I expect he'll have told them that I failed to complete the break-in - if he's had a chance to tell them anything at all.'

  'So he may still be the only person with access to the data?'

  'Perhaps. Except for the company he's hired to manufacture his copy of the nanoware, of course. If he plans to keep on selling code-breaking services without me, he's going to have to install Ensemble in his own skull, and learn how to use it himself.'

  'Which company?'

  Ί don't know.' I force myself back on my feet; the floor sways for a second, then stabilizes. 'But I think I know how to find out.'

  I'm in luck: Lui hasn't chosen a new front for his dealings with backstreet manufacturers - and after some token resistance, the owner of the stall where I picked up

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  Hypernova proves remarkably cooperative. At this rate, I'll be flat broke in a matter of days, but I might as well make good use of my windfall while it lasts.

  He says, Ί sent both packages to NeoMod by courier this morning. About seven o'clock. The client paid for a rush job - it would have been ready by two. But the product didn't come back to me; he phoned about noon and said he'd collect it himself, straight from the factory.'

  'Both packages? How many mods did he order?'

  'Just one - but he supplied his own customized vector for the nanomachines. That's pretty unusual, but -' He shrugs.

  Unusual is an understatement. The standard Endamoeba are designed to be unable to survive for more than a few minutes outside the culture medium in which they're shipped. They rely on enzymes which they can't manufacture for themselves - which the culture medium provides, but which don't occur in nature at all. Along with several other kinds of engineered flaws, this guarantees that they have no prospect of surviving for longer than it takes them to cross the user's nasal mucous membrane; anyone else in the vicinity has about as much chance of being infected with nanomachines and 'catching the mod' by mistake as they have of becoming pregnant from a couple making love in the room next door.

  And there's only one reason for using a nonstandard vector: to undermine these safeguards. To improve the ease with which a mod can be imposed on someone who doesn't want it.

  Which makes no sense at all. If Lui plans to use Ensemble for code-breaking, what possible reason would he have to force it on to some unwilling accomplice?

  'This customized vector - what do you know about it?'

  He shakes his head. 'Nothing. I didn't supply it; I just sent it off along with the chip.'

  'Was the vial marked in any way? With a brand name? A logo? Anything?'

  Ί didn't see the vial. It was packed inside a little black box - and that had no markings on it at all.'

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  Ά little black box?'

  'Yeah. No markings. . . just a tiny blue light on it.' He shrugs at this eccentric detail; puzzling, but none of his business. 'It was brought in separately, before the mod data. Yesterday afternoon.'

  I fish out my ASR employee's badge. The stallholder squints at the photo and says, 'Yeah. A southerner. I think that's him.' He looks back up at the pale version of the very same face, without a hint of recognition.

  I fight my way through the rush-hour crowd, without any idea where I'm going. The Endamoeba would have smeared into every possible mutant strain - however exotic, however improbable, however difficult to engineer by other means. There must have been enough bioelectronics in the box to test the strain for the unlikely properties Lui wanted, and signal with the LED only if the cells could jump through all the right biochemical hoops. And I swallowed his lie about code-breaking supercomputers, and blithely chose the eigenstate which made the light come on. What properties, though? And why? What profit is there to be made?

  But then, why do I think that Lui's idea of the true Ensemble has anything to do with money? Because he paid me half a million dollars? Because he sheepishly 'confessed' that the black box contained a code-breaking computer? Well, maybe it did - along with everything else; his funds must be coming from somewhere. But if the money's just a means to an end . . . then what's the end? If he hasn't twisted the mod's constraints into pure human greed, after all . . . then what quasi-religious vision has he constructed around the flaw in his brain?

  // he's known, all along, who Laura was, why The Bubble was made, and exactly what the risks of smearing are . . .

  I stop dead in the middle of the street and let the crowd push past me. It's all too easy to imagine how I would have reacted, if I'd learnt the facts in a different order - if I'd come to define the true Ensemble, knowing the whole truth about Laura.

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  Laura's progenitor died - collapsed - in the act of creating her, like some self-sacrificing God-become-woman. And now, able to smear into woman-become-God, she's shown us precisely how we can cease collapsing, regain our Godliness, and rejoin the rest of super-space.

  I don't know Lui's background; if he grew up in NHK, it could be Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or as atheist as my own. But perhaps it makes no difference what he believed beforehand; perha
ps a story as powerful as Laura's -combined with the loyalty mod's axiomatic decree that the work of the Ensemble is the most important thing in the world -would have set up the same dangerous resonances in anybody's skull.

  And it would have been blindingly obvious to anyone what the work of the Ensemble was.

  I look around helplessly, as dusk overtakes the city. People squeeze by me, tense and weary, lost in their own concerns; I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them out of their complacency.

  If I'm right about all this, then there's no limit to what Lui might have done to the vector; he could have made it robust, airborne, highly infectious, quick to reproduce . . . everything that the original was painstakingly designed not to be. He could have made it the perfect vehicle for what he sees as Laura's gift to humanity.

  Who do I warn?

  Who would believe me? Nobody in their right mind; a neural-mod plague is the stuff of paranoid fantasy. The nanomachines themselves are fragile and non-virulent -and their operation is intimately linked, at the lowest level, to hundreds of specific details of the vector's crippled biochemistry. Within those constraints, the most elaborately enhanced illegal vectors can survive at large for about an hour - useful for infecting individual victims, but hardly the stuff of epidemics. The expert consensus has always been that anything more than tinkering at the edges would require, not just nonstandard vectors, but nonstandard nano-machines - entailing a research effort

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  almost as expensive as that which created the whole technology in the first place. No terrorists, no religious cult, could afford that - and probably not even a government would be able to pull it off in absolute secrecy.

  As for some backyard operator engineering a vector that's both compatible with existing nanomachines and infectious enough to constitute a threat. . . such a feat is no doubt every bit as implausible as factoring a megadigit code key by pure good luck.

  The crowd thins out around me; the sky darkens. The world goes on as always. It all adds up to normality. Lui's had the mod since two; for all I know he might have released it already. How long would it take to spread? He'll have made one minor change from the version Po-kwai received: inhibiting the collapse won't be an option, requiring conscious invocation; the unwitting users will have no choice. With ten thousand, or a hundred thousand people smeared, how long before their smeared selves learn to suppress the collapse of the rest of the city? And with twelve million people smeared -