Quarantine

by Greg Egan

all; maybe the part of him who knew that 'the true Ensemble' was nothing but a neurological aberration couldn't bear the contradictions any longer. Maybe the loyalty mod has finally destroyed the old Lui Kiu-chung forever.

  I say gently, 'I've had about all the miracles I can stand.'

  'And there must be states where your wife -'

  I cut him off. 'Is that what all this "Heaven on Earth" crap was leading up to? Emotional blackmail?' I laugh wearily. 'You really are pathetic. Yes, my wife is dead. But I've got news for you: / don't give a shit.'

  He's visibly shaken - and I'm not surprised; if he really thought he might have swayed me, I've just crushed his last hope. But then a kind of resignation, almost tranquillity, seems to take hold of him.

  He looks me in the eye and says, 'No, you don't.'

  He lunges forward, right arm outstretched. I burn a hole in his skull and he topples sideways, crashing to the floor, scarcely bumping the table.

  The flask sits undisturbed, the magnet silently spinning.

  I walk around the table and squat down beside him. The wound is just above the eyes, a charcoal-rimmed well a centimetre wide, stinking of cooked flesh. My guts are squirming; I've never killed anyone before - and never even fired a gun, or been near a corpse, unprimed. And I shouldn't have had to kill him; I should have taken more care.

  Fuck it, none of this was his fault. The Ensemble's, yes. Laura's, yes. Laura the aloof visitor, the passive observer. She of all creatures should have known there was no such thing.

  / should have taken more care; moved him right away from the table, at once -And maybe I did.

  The thought sets my skin tingling with fear. Maybe I did. Almost certainly / did. So, who will my smeared self choose? Me - or the cousin who was smart enough to do things right?

  Who do I want him to choose?

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  I stare down at Lui's bloody face. I hardly knew him . . . but what would I have to give up, to raise him from the dead? Two minutes of my life, that's all. An eyeblink of amnesia. How many hours, added up over the years, have I lost from memory by now - have vanished as completely as if they'd never happened? And how many versions of me have died while I was primed, so that the one who made the optimal decisions could be real? This will be nothing new; I've been dying for the sake of getting things right, all my life.

  It's not my decision to make, but as I invoke Hypernova, I whisper aloud: 'Choose someone else. Let him live. I don't care.'

  I hit the OFF button -

  - and nothing changes.

  (Nothing would.)

  I walk over to the room's only chair, slump into it, close my eyes and wait. Karen stands beside me, silent but reassuring.

  After fifteen minutes - long enough, surely, for anyone who handled Lui more efficiently than I did to have tied him up and chosen to collapse -1 invoke CypherCIerk. I have no idea what to do with a flask of the world's most infectious protozoans, but Doctor Pangloss is sure to have a few suggestions.

  'Just think about it, that's all I ask. There must be states beyond The Bubble full of the most incredible things. Miracles. Dreams. There must be states where your wife is still alive.''

  For a moment, his words are electrifying, but -'You don't know that. You don't know that the Bubble

  Makers are human; it's all just speculation.' He ignores this, and just repeats, softly, 'Think about

  it.'

  Unwillingly, I do. Karen, alive. No more mod-generated hallucinations, no more solipsistic travesties. Everything we had, restored - with all its problems, all its failings . . . but at least it would be real.

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  I recoil from these emotions, dizzy and confused. How high a price have I paid, in escaping the loyalty mod? A new-found distaste for mods is one thing - but Karen should still be rendering these sentiments physically impossible.

  I should shut him up, ignore him. I say, 'Even if you're right. . . what could it possibly mean? It could never be real for me. Eigenstates diverge, they split - they don't recombine.'

  'No? Once the world stops collapsing, anything is possible.' He smiles beatifically. "The collapse is the source of time asymmetry; you might be able to tunnel back to a time before her death -'

  I shake my head. 'No. Versions of me might - while others wouldn't. That's . . . chaos, insanity. I couldn't live that way: creating billions of copies of myself, just so that some tiny fraction of them could get what I wanted.'

  Couldn't I? I've done just that, tonight.

  He hesitates, then says, 'And you honestly don't want a chance for someone - someone you'll become - to go back to the night she died? To make things turn out differently?'

  I open my mouth to deny it. Instead, I hear myself make a strange animal sound, a wail of pain escaping from subterranean depths.

  He lunges forward. Startled, I take aim - too late. He has the flask by the neck, high above the table - if I shoot him, he'll drop it for sure.

  In one smooth motion, he flings it at the window. The pane is open; the insect screen tears.

  I stand frozen for a second, pointing the gun at him, half prepared to blast a hole in him out of sheer anger at my own stupidity, then I rush to the window and look down. I set the laser to spotlight strength, and see shards of glass, a hint of dampness. I vaporize the puddle, and scorch the concrete around it.

  Lui says, 'You're wasting your time.'

  'Shut the fuck upP Someone sticks their head out of window directly below me; I scream at them, and they

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  retreat. I play the beam in ever widening circles, thinking: There's hardly any breeze, and diffusion is a slow process. I can kill them all; it's not impossible. Compared to finding Lui in a city of twelve million people -

  Then I finally swallow the truth: whether I've destroyed the Endamoeba or not makes no difference. Maybe I am one of the unlikely versions - out of all those created since the flask hit the ground - who were lucky enough to completely sterilize the spill. It doesn't matter; none of us who screwed up this way are going to survive. When reality is chosen, Lui won't have laid a finger on the flask.

  I turn back into the room to face him. 'You and I are history.' I laugh. 'So now you know what you put me through with your fucking padlocks.'

  I close my eyes, try to contain my fear. A version of me will live - a version who succeeded where I failed. What more can I hope for? / wanted to be the one. But it's too late for that.

  I say, 'If I killed you, would it be murder? Seeing as you're already dead?'

  He doesn't reply. I open my eyes, holster the gun. I stare at him; he still says nothing. He doesn't look much like a man who's accepted defeat - or even martyrdom. Maybe he still believes that the true Ensemble can save him.

  I say, 'I'll tell you about the past: I walked into this room, tied you to that chair and destroyed all the Endamoeba. And I'll tell you about the future: I'll set you free from the loyalty mod. You'll be grateful. Between us, we'll do the same for the rest of the Canon. With their testimony, the law will take care of ASR and BDI - and maybe bring down the whole Ensemble. Then we'll both go our separate ways and live happily ever after.'

  I leave the building, and skirt around the harbour, heading for the city centre, moving just for the sake of it, trying to keep my mind blank. I could invoke P3 and its perfect stoicism. I could invoke Boss and put myself to sleep. I do neither. After I've walked about three kilometres, I finally check the time: one thirteen.

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  The successful version of me must have been in the flat for at least forty minutes by now. I turn back and scream obscenities. The street is crowded, but nobody gives me a second glance. Suddenly exhausted, I sit down at the side of the road.

  Habit overcomes disgust; I try to invoke Karen. Nothing happens. I run a MindTools inventory; the mod's still there on the bus. I run diagnostics - and my skull explodes with error messages. I shut down the test and bury my head in my arms. Okay, I die alone. I just wish he'd get it over and done with.

/>   After a while, I rise to my feet. I turn to a passing woman and ask, 'What is this? The virtual afterlife?'

  She says, 'Not as far as I know.'

  I take out the dice generator, put it away, take it out again. What can it prove? If I'm still smeared - and I must i>e — I'll split thirty-six-fold at every toss, with one branch of me gradually becoming convinced of the truth . . . but all the others learning nothing.

  I do it anyway.

  Seven. Three. Nine. Nine. Two. Five.

  What are you waiting for? Are you searching the city a second time, for hidden copies of the mod? Breaking into BDI again, to destroy the original?

  But why would I do either - without collapsing in between, to make the night's first miracle secure, and to reduce the risk of runaway smearing?

  I glance up at the empty grey sky, then head on into the city.

  By dawn, I can doubt it no longer: I'm collapsed, I'm the sole survivor. Any successful version of me would have tried to collapse by now; the mere fact that I still exist proves that my failure is real, and irreversible.

  The sun rises quickly over the Gulf of Carpentaria, sending fierce bursts of light through cracks between the skyscrapers - and whichever way I turn, I find myself facing into dazzling reflections. My head throbs, my limbs ache. I don't wish I was dead; I just wish I was someone

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  else. How can I rejoice in my survival, when the cost is so high?

  I keep searching for a way out. Maybe I haven't failed -maybe I managed to kill all the spilt Endamoeba. But. . . how could my smeared self have known that I'd done so -and even if he could, why would he have chosen such an unlikely path to success, over the multitude of others in which the flask was simply never broken?

  The answer must be: he didn't. He deliberately chose a state in which the vector was released. He must have understood, Anally, what that would mean for him: no more intermittent resurrections from the hologram in my skull, like a genie let out of a bottle only to grant my impossible wishes. What did I expect? That he'd turn down the chance of 'freedom' - or whatever alien concept he has of the world beyond The Bubble - for the sake of pleasing one cell in his body, one atom in his little finger, one irrelevant, infinitesimal part of his vast complexity?

  I buy myself breakfast, leave a ten-thousand-dollar tip, then walk back to my flat to wait for the end of the world.

  I monitor the news systems for some sign that the plague has begun, but scarcely notice what I'm reading. I alternate between fatalism and ludicrous hopes, between a heady wish to finally embrace the naked strangeness of the world, and moments of pure, stubborn disbelief. I gaze out of the window at the unremarkable city, and think: Even if humanity maintains this, microsecond by microsecond . . . after so many thousands of years, surely by now it must possess some kind of stability, some kind of inertia, some kind of independent reality.

  But why should it? Do I think that by collapsing inanimate matter often enough, we've destroyed its ability to smear? Cowed it into submission, in an act of metaphysical imperialism? And do I hope that the solid macroscopic world we've created will, in turn, now anchor us to reality? The truth is, the instant we cease imposing uniqueness upon it, it will explode in a billion directions with a resilience unchanged since the birth of the universe.

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  Denial aside, I don't know how to anaesthetize myself, how to make these last hours bearable. The old ways are lost; the mere thought of finding solace in a mod repels me - although I can't ignore my memories: I can't forget that the loyalty mod gave me a sense of purpose, or that Karen made me every bit as happy as if I'd been in love. And although I don't wish for a moment to regain that synthetic happiness, that obscene travesty of love ... I have nothing to take its place. How could I? I came into existence hours ago. I'm no repressed fragment of my previous self, no sublimated personality that's 'finally' broken to the surface. I'm a stranger in my own life, an intruder in my own skull. Worse than an amnesiac, I remember the past - but I know that I have no claim to it.

  The news systems patiently recount tales of ordinary madness: civil war in Madagascar; famine in the US north-west; another unexplained bombing in Tokyo; another bloodless coup d'etat in Rome. The local news is all trivia - corporate takeovers and minor political scandals. By nightfall, I'm prepared to abandon all pretence at having comprehended the events of the last two days - and to sink, gratefully, into the understanding that everything that's befallen me has been a paranoid delusion.

  The terminal's image flickers and dies. I thump it, and it comes back to life - but then the text wavers and disintegrates into individual letters, which slowly drift apart like flotsam, or space debris, then leave the surface of the screen itself and float out into the room. I reach out and sweep up a handful; they melt on my palm like snowflakes.

  I look out across the city. Advertising holograms are fragmenting, dissolving, mutating. Some have degenerated into abstract streaks of vivid colour, slowly bleeding into the night air; others remain identifiable, if surreal: images of jets are growing scales and claws; beaming children are regressing into translucent pink embryos; a giant stream of Coca-Cola, endlessly flowing

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  into a pair of disembodied lips, is blazing like napalm, lighting the buildings around it, sending a plume of thick black smoke twisting up into the sky.

  There's an old man waiting for the elevator. I greet him; he just stares at me, wild-eyed. I hit the call button, but the status display shows nothing but a stream of random symbols, with occasional snatches of pai-hua too brief for me to translate. The man whispers something in Cantonese: It knows my thoughts. I turn to him, and he starts weeping. I try to think of a way to ease his distress, to explain what's happening, but I don't know where to begin - or what comfort it would bring him.

  I take the stairs.

  Out on the street, the crowds are subdued - quieter than I've ever seen them. All along I've been expecting hysteria and violence, but people seem to be mesmerized, walking in a dream. The transformed billboards make a bizarre spectacle, but they don't explain this mood. The mutating holograms and pyrotechnics could be nothing but an elaborate prank; surely nobody can yet have guessed what they presage.

  No? Their smeared selves might have circled the globe, might already have linked, intermittently, into a mind more complex than the Earth has ever known. Who am I to know what insights might have been passed down to the collapsed mode?

  In Observatory Road, I see a flowering vine burst from the pavement and dance like a snake. Amidst the dazed, blank-faced spectators, two small children are laughing and clapping with delight; perhaps they're choosing this event. The petals of the white blossoms form into luminous butterflies, which flutter away above the heads of the crowd; but the flowers remain intact, endlessly renewed.

  Which is most likely: an eigenstate actually containing this feat - or one in which every witness is merely hallucinating it? I cling to the distinction, stubbornly -although I don't know how much longer it can last.

  I turn away - to see a young man levitating, curled up

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  and spinning head over heels in midair, eyes closed, smiling blissftilly. People watch him politely, as if he were a busker juggling or stilt-walking. One old woman takes root in the ground, the cloth of her trousers and the skin of her legs melting together into bark. Another woman is turning into a statue of glass, a faint flesh-coloured hue retreating from her limbs into her torso, then fading completely. What version of her could have chosen this suicidal outcome? But the 'statue' stretches its arms wide, then strides purposefully away. I try to follow it, but it vanishes into the crowd. I keep walking.

  In places, the streetlights are blazing like tiny suns; a hundred metres on, the city is in darkness. I turn into an alley and And myself wading waist-deep in gold coins. I lift a handful; they're as heavy, as cool, as solid, as the real thing ought to be. I shouldn't be able to take a step, but I walk as easily as if there were nothing blocking my wa
y.

  I emerge onto a brightly lit street where it's raining blood - coarse dark stinking drops. People stand shielding their faces, screaming, or huddle on the ground, shaking and whimpering. What is this - some smeared lunatic's vision of the end of the world? Will every insane eschatology ever dreamt of be unleashed in these last hours? Or is this nothing but an accident, an unintended glitch? Many of the smeared humans could still be inexperienced, and isolated - maybe we're collapsing them unawares, constructing a mosaic reality from a series of random snapshots of their first, infantile explorations of the space of eigenstates. I stand and watch, helplessly, until the blood in my eyes begins to blind me.

  A block away, it's raining clear, sweet water, and people are turning enraptured faces to the sky to drink.

  The streets seethe with transformation. Some people's features are shifting, flowing smoothly or jumping between alternatives; walking in a daze, they seem oblivious, and I touch my own face, wondering if the same thing is happening to me. Vegetation is sprouting everywhere - patches of wheat, sugar cane, bamboo; stretches

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  of wild-looking tropical undergrowth. Some stalls are simply crumbling into fine dust; others are mutating into exotic architectural pastiche - and the walls of one have turned to flesh, blood visibly pulsing through veins as thick as my arm. I stare up at the skyscrapers, most of them surreally intact - but even as I wonder at this, the fractal cladding on one tower starts drifting down like confetti.

  Within a block of ASR, I catch sight of Po-kwai sitting on the pavement in front of a food stall, staring with a fixed gaze into the crowd. When I touch her shoulder, she looks up at me, then jerks away.

  'Hey. It's me. Nick.'

  'Nick?' She reaches up and touches my pale hand gingerly; the sight of it seems to horrify her. She says, Ί did this to you. I'm sorry.'

  I laugh. 'What do you mean? I did it to myself. The quickest disguise I could think of, that's all.' I sit down beside her.

  She gestures at the crowd, and says numbly, 'I'm destroying the city, I'm turning everyone into freaks. And I can't stop it. I've tried, but I can't stop it.'