Quarantine

by Greg Egan

  I take her by the shoulders, turn her to face me. She cringes, but meets my eyes.

  'Listen: none of this is your fault.'

  She makes a strangled, whimpering sound, then almost laughs. 'No? Who else do you know who could do this?'

  For a moment, I think: Why bother explaining anything? In an hour or two, it will make no difference. She may be suffering now - but how much consolation will the truth be?

  But then I steel myself, and set about answering her question.

  At first, she seems almost oblivious to my words - but slowly, the logic of what I'm saying penetrates her state of shock and the stupor of misplaced guilt. By the time I reach my encounter with Laura in the vault, the old Po-kwai is back.

  'She blew the tranquillizer back into the bottle?' She

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  nods, smiling faintly. 'Well, why not? No collapse, no time asymmetry.' ,

  'That's exactly what Lui said.'

  'Lui? When?'

  'I'll come to that.'

  So far as she knows, there were no bombs discovered in ASR the night of the break-in; when she spoke to Lee Hing-cheung in the morning, he told her that I'd gone missing, but claimed that nobody knew why. Perhaps she was kept in the dark - but it's just as likely that Lui himself arranged my collapse, and lied to me one more time.

  When I describe the release of the Endamoeba, and my unexpected survival, she says, 'You may be wrong to blame your own smeared self. What could he do to resist a creature twelve billion times stronger than he was?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'The entire planet, the smeared human race -'

  'But they weren't . . . they still aren't. Not the whole planet, even now -'

  'No - but if they will be, or might be, don't you think they could choose their past? You know what one smeared human can do - don't you think an amalgam of twelve billion would be able to tunnel its way into existence, by whatever means that would take? The versions of you who prevented the spill would have ended up collapsed, uncorrelated with anyone else - but the versions who failed would have been linked to all this . . .' - she gestures at the chaos around us - 'in the sway of at least a few thousand smeared people . . . and whatever's yet to come. It found a way to happen, and you were part of it, that's all.'

  Ί see.'

  So my 'liberation' from the loyalty mod, from Karen, is more of a joke than ever. / am who I am only because I served as a conduit for this apocalypse, a fault line through which the future smeared humanity could force itself into being.

  Something new is happening to the crowd; groups of people are coming together. Some merely join hands or

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  stand side-by-side - but others literally coalesce, their bodies melting into each other. I look away, fighting down panic. I can't face this. Not yet.

  I cling to a thread of normality. I try to apologize to Po-kwai for deceiving her for so long, but she brushes this aside. 'What does it matter now? I understand; you would have told me the truth, but the loyalty mod -'

  'But I didn't tell you the truth. It makes no difference what I would have done. I only have one past. I have to be . . . responsible for it. I have to reclaim it. I have to make it mine.'

  She laughs, disbelieving. 'Nick, it's all over. It doesn't matter any more.'

  'And I used Ensemble -1 invaded your skull

  She shakes her head wearily. 'You didn't invade my skull. I did what you asked, that's all.'

  'What?'

  She shrugs. Ί can't remember much. Just fragments. I thought I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming. We'd sit and watch the dice together; I'd make them fall the way you asked - and I knew that was impossible . . . but you don't remember any of it, do you?'

  'No.'

  'Well.' She looks away.

  I glance up at the sky; a single star has appeared. By the time I point it out to Po-kwai, there's another beside it. After a moment, she says, 'They're so pale. I always thought they'd be brighter.'

  The crowd falls silent, and watches as one. The stars double and redouble, just as they did in my vision in the anteroom. Could the smeared race reach back that far? Was it choosing my eigenstates, even then?

  Po-kwai starts shivering. I whisper some soothing inanity and take her hand. She says, 'I'm not afraid. I'm just not ready. Would you make it stop, please? I'm not ready.'

  The crowd begins to blur; the cells break up and reform, growing larger. In the gaps between, I catch sight of someone walking

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  alone. Karen turns to look at me, frowning slightly, as if she finds me vaguely reminiscent of someone she once knew. Then she turns and walks away.

  An arc of stars blazes across the sky. I stand, still holding on to Po-kwai, hauling her to her feet, dragging her forward with me.

  At the edge of the crowd, I hesitate. Fluid, human-shaped forms collide and coalesce. Po-kwai breaks free. I step back. I catch one last glimpse of Karen, retreating, but I can't seem to move.

  I raise my eyes to Heaven and the sky turns white.

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  Epilogue

  I spent a week travelling from camp to camp, looking for her. Everyone in the camps is - supposedly - registered on a central computer, but I thought she might have been wary; she might not have used her real name.

  On that first morning, surveying the debris and carnage, I didn't believe that help would ever come. No power, no water, no transport; food to last a day at the most - and a million or more corpses rotting in the street. I took it for granted that the whole planet was in the same condition, and we'd all be left to starvation and cholera. When the helicopters started landing in Kowloon Park, I almost slit my wrists: I thought it was some kind of miracle, I thought the whole process had begun again.

  It seems that the plague didn't spread beyond the city -or at least, those versions of events where it did haven't been made real. The world's population may have smeared - but the eigenstate that was finally chosen confined the damage to New Hong Kong. If there were miracles in London or Moscow, in Calcutta or Beijing, in Sydney or even Darwin, they've left no memories, they've left no trace. Perhaps the impact was the very least that it could have been, consistent with the last moment of the definite past - the last instant that anyone, anywhere collapsed.

  Po-kwai travelled with me at first, but met up with her family on the third day. I think we were both glad to part. I know that, alone, it's much easier to pretend to be one more innocent, shell-shocked, uncomprehending survivor.

  Uncomprehending is a relative term. I doubt I'll ever know why the smeared human race, after going to such lengths to come into existence, finally touched the infinite space beyond The Bubble - and recoiled. (Perhaps it

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  didn't; perhaps it was driven back. Perhaps the Bubble Makers intervened . . . although if Laura's messenger was any guide, that's hard to imagine.)

  But if smeared humanity couldn't face what lay beyond The Bubble, for whatever reason, then it had no choice but suicide - collapse into a state from which it would not re-emerge. Smearing is exponential growth, increase without bounds. A single, unique reality was the only stable alternative. There could be no middle ground.

  Communications channels are tightly controlled - the geosynchronous satellite serving NHK has been switched into a special mode which only the UN troops can access -so I don't know what the rest of the world believes went on here. An earthquake? A chemical spill? HV news teams fly overhead, but as yet haven't been permitted to land; still, with telephoto lenses, they must have made out some of the more exotic corpses before they were buried. No doubt there are new cults springing up even now, with their own perfect explanations for everything that took place.

  And no doubt stories have begun to leak out from other survivors who believe they saw the dead walk.

  I'm beginning to suspect, though, that however reliable these witnesses might be, on close investigation their claims will come to nothing. I don't believe that they're lying, or that they mistook
what they saw. Everything happened j ust as they described it - but it was simply never made real.

  I've settled down now, in this camp on the old city's western edge. I have a registration card, I queue for food twice a day, I do exactly what I'm told. Most of the relief workers here are freshly recruited volunteers; they insist that we'll all be resettled within a year. The experienced ones, though, admit - when pressed - that a decade is more likely. New Hong Kong won't be rebuilt on the original site until investigators know why the city crumbled, and the answer to that -1 hope - will be a long time coming.

  I don't have much to do here to pass the days. I try to get some exercise, but mostly I end up lying on my bunk, thinking it all over one more time.

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  And last night, this is what I thought:

  Maybe smeared humanity reached the edge of The Bubble - and didn't recoil, after all. Maybe the planet is still smeared. One consciousness per eigenstate, branching out endlessly; the many-worlds model come true. Blood still rains between the skyscrapers of New Hong Kong. Children still conjure up dancing flowers. Every dream, every vision, has been brought to life: Heaven and Hell on Earth.

  Every dream, every vision. This one included, mundane as it seems, half-way between infinite happiness and infinite suffering.

  So here I am, gazing up into the darkness, unable to decide if I'm staring at infinity, or the backs of my own eyelids.

  But I don't need to know the answer. I just recite to myself, over and over, until I can choose sleep: It all adds up to normality.

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