The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  “Maudit,” Belisarius swore.

  The icon and read-outs showed Stills turning. He was far downstream, but he raced upward, making for the creaking, icy roof of the ocean. He was trying to get out of the current’s pull. At seven kilometers downstream, his signal winked out.

  “Maldita sea,” Belisarius swore. He sat back slowly.

  “This was supposed to give me confidence in what you are doing, Arjona?” Del Casal asked. “Thanks for the drink though, and the view.” He waved his hand at the panorama.

  Belisarius needed one of the Tribe. He unrolled a pad and scrolled through the stats and biographies of the other racers. The second and third place finishers might not do. They’d stopped dozens of meters above the open ocean.

  Bets on the tuna were already being settled. Belisarius’s account was sixty francs lighter. No one was settling on Stills’ survival yet, and the pall that had layered the mess passed. The racers gathered in the glow of the spotlights in the lee of the mess. Some of the tourists spoke with them through devices that translated their words into electrical pulses.

  Then, another cheer and groans.

  Stills’ icon shone briefly, eight kilometers downcurrent. The mongrel pilot had made it up to the layer of icebergs and slush scouring the undersurface of Claudius’s icy crust. The prominences of ice broke the current, but Stills’ problem was to make it back. There was too much debris to swim for long above the current; any gaps between the icebergs might crush closed without warning. Stills’ only non-suicidal option was to swim lower, back into the stronger current.

  Then Stills’ signal vanished again.

  People groaned. Del Casal held out his hand. “You want to pay now, or wait until he’s nine kilometers downstream?”

  Belisarius signalled the server robot.

  “Does the mess have windows facing the current?” Belisarius asked in French.

  “Oui, monsieur. Par içi.”

  Belisarius and Del Casal followed the server around pool tables, through darkened rooms and banquet salons, to a cool meeting room. The lights outside and inside the room came on, showing fast-moving, oncoming silt beyond the window.

  Belisarius took a small bottle before the server rolled away and touched it to Del Casal’s. The geneticist was poker-faced, waiting him out. Belisarius presumed that the antenna tracking the chips in the racers was on the lee side of the mess. Based on what he’d seen, it had a line-of-sight range of some ten kilometers. Stills’ icon was gone. Out of range. Or out of sight. Belisarius called up the topography of the undersurface, verified his guess about the location of the antenna and did a few more calculations. They watched the current flinging silt at the window for an hour, looking onto depths of an ocean that could crush them instantly.

  A hostile nursery like this had birthed the Homo eridanus, had turned them into something monstrous. In the late 2200s, a colony ship arrived at Epsilon Eridani and found the solar system in chaos from a recent planetary collision. Orbital habitats were defenseless against asteroidal debris, and even the surface of the only habitable planet was showered with fiery destruction. The colonists had faced a choice: die out, or engineer their children to live beneath the waves. But even under the surface they weren’t safe, not until they’d engineered the next generations to live at the very bottom of the oceans. The Mongrels alive today, like the Puppets and the Homo quantus, had not asked to be made into what they were, but none of them would exist at all if not for genetic engineers. And now they were trapped into this inhospitable ecosystem. Anything less than about five hundred atmosphere of pressure not only crippled the mongrels with gasses bubbling out in their blood, but denatured many metabolic proteins, killing them. They lived, but would never see the sun, or even a baseline human being except though thick glass. His augmented eyes and pattern-sensitive brain saw movement in the gloom, something approaching stealthily.

  “Like I thought,” Belisarius said.

  “Stills?”

  “I think so.”

  Belisarius went to the frame of the window and laid his hand against it.

  Carbon nanotubules came in many configurations. The ones reinforcing the window were undoubtedly designed for structural strength, a conformation that made them indifferent conductors. Belisarius sent a burst of electrical static through his hand anyway. The wary Homo eridanus approached, close enough for the spotlights to show expressionless gray skin, smooth and puffy around enormous black eyes. Wholly inhuman, yet there was a man in there, only a few centuries away from a common ancestor with Belisarius.

  You lost me sixty francs, Belisarius pulsed in the electrical language of the mongrels. It made tiny static clicks against the glass.

  Pulses returned. Not my problem, fucker. You speak Mongrel?

  How’s my pronunciation? Belisarius asked.

  You talk like you have donkey balls in your mouth, Stills replied.

  The Tribe of the Mongrel were promiscuous users of the foulest words from every language, from français 8 back to français 1, to most forms of Anglo-Spanish, Mandarin and Trade Arabic.

  I studied the translation matrix, Belisarius replied electrically, but I didn’t know if the source who sold it was any good.

  What the fuck are you talking with? Stills asked. Computer augments?

  I’m Homo quantus.

  The hideous, alien face, imprisoning a human mind behind it, considered Belisarius.

  I heard of you ass-wipes. I thought you guys shat on mountaintops, thinking about the stars.

  I’m scared of heights, Belisarius said.

  What the fuck you doing on this side of the mess? Stills demanded.

  I figured you were showboating. You didn’t just want to beat the other mongrels. You wanted to show them that you could go deeper, and farther, and make it back without being seen, Belisarius said. Then Belisarius quoted, “Wipe their noses in it.”

  Where’d you come up with that, Angel Boy? Stills said.

  I’ve read the Way of the Mongrel, Belisarius said. I can quote some of the good bits. “Bite every hand. Piss on everyone’s leg. Lick your balls if you can find them.”

  You forgot, “Unless you’re doing the fucking, you’re getting fucked.” That’s an important one.

  I didn’t want to come across as a know-it-all, Belisarius said.

  So why you know all that, quantum man?

  I’m hiring for a job. I talked to some people who hired you in the past.

  Blow me. I already got a job.

  Don’t take any more jobs on the side? Belisarius asked.

  The current washed silt over the unblinking bulbous black eyes. The Mongrel was electrically silent as well, hopefully uncertain. I take some working vacations, Stills said finally.

  I need more than a work vacation. I need you to take some extended leave. I pay a lot better than the Congregate, and I need a free-diver with giant cojones.

  If I could find my cojones, I’d let you lick them. Shit, I’ve made every other diver here suck my flukes, Stills said, but I got a boss expecting me to pilot the fastest fighters this side of hell.

  Too bad for you peace broke out, Belisarius said. Are you liking convoy runs and picket duty?

  Eat shit, you ball-sucking rimjobber.

  Stills swam at the window suddenly, fishy mouth open, gills wide, arms unsheathed from pockets of blubber. Pudgy gray palms slapped hard against the window. Del Casal gasped behind him, but Belisarius didn’t move. The crackle of Stills’ electrical laughter throbbed against Belisarius’s electroplaques.

  I’ve got a dangerous dive, Belisarius said, with more pressure than you just did. The pay-off is big.

  Does this involve boning the Congregate?

  Not for long. I’m a love ’em and leave ’em kind of guy. Belisarius felt his own bravado in the electrical language of the mongrels, and it felt doubly false.

  When you piss in the Congregate’s coffee, they fuck you up pretty bad, Stills said. I know ’cause I’m one of the heavies they send in to
stretch your back chute.

  Belisarius already knew that. He’d do his best to make sure the Congregate didn’t find out.

  You don’t really care about that, Belisarius said. You’re not scared of the Congregate.

  Shit no.

  But I bet it’s hard to stay on top among the Tribe, Belisarius said. You’ve got to prove yourself over and over. You handed them their asses today, but how often can you outdo mongrels when you’re flying defensive patrols and you’ve only got Claudius to swim in?

  You sound like you’re trying to suck my cock, Stills said, but you’re still just tonguing. Swallow or fuck off.

  Give it a think, Stills, Belisarius said. You’re dead-ended here. You’ve got nothing new to do, ever, unless the Congregate decides to bully somebody, and how long will that take? I’m offering the most dangerous mission you’ve ever seen. Everyone is going to be taking a shot at us. When we pull this off, people won’t be talking about what we did for years. They’ll be talking about it forever.

  The utterly alien face stared back, perhaps seeing nothing. Mongrel eyes were built for the low luminosity of the ocean floors. There was no way for baseline humans to interact with the mongrels without translation equipment. Belisarius didn’t know what it was to be a mongrel, but he was one of the only people in civilization who could speak with Stills in his own electrical language, the last bridge between subspecies of humanity. The pause extended, long enough for Belisarius to wonder if the bridge was there at all.

  Shit, little man, Stills said, don’t wet your pants. Front me a deposit and I’ll look at what you’re proposing.

  Belisarius turned to Del Casal. “We have our deep diver, our navigator, our electronics guy, and our two inside men. Do we have our geneticist?”

  Del Casal stepped closer to the window, staring at the Homo eridanus. “I wouldn’t want to miss humanity’s family reunion,” he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  FRANCAIS 8.1 WAS NOTHING if not a poetic language. Les Maisons d’éducation correctionnelle, the Houses of Correctional Education, was the Congregate’s name for the penitentiaries scattered throughout its provinces. The closest word in Anglo-Spanish was ‘reformatory,’ although this conveyed little of the graceful French irony.

  The Congregate built the penitentiaries on dwarf planets or asteroids, on off-ecliptic orbits that were fuel-expensive to reach. La Maison orbiting Epsilon Indi was buried in a Mars-sized, airless rock. Its orbit had been tilted twenty degrees off the ecliptic, so there was no practical low-energy transfer orbit to it. Except for supply ships running on high thrust, it had few visitors.

  Belisarius stepped off the supply ship into the landing bay beneath the surface of La Maison. The pilot was an AI, and Belisarius wore the uniform of a capitaine in the Inspector-General’s Office of the Congregate’s Correctional Service, which meant the crew left him alone. His blue uniform was crisp with pristine white fleur-de-lis shoulder flashes.

  On his wrist, he wore the hard band of smart carbon that officers carried, which normally contained a minor sub-AI assistant and the necessary codes and passwords. Belisarius’s service band housed Saint Matthew. The AI had fabricated Belisarius a complete identity for Capitaine Gervais, one that would last several months before AI auditors got to the files and found discrepancies with other databases.

  The deck sergeant saluted. “Shall I bring you to the warden or the watch officer, monsieur?”

  “I would like that, but I’m not feeling well. Please point me at the sick bay. I have a medical condition that sometimes needs minimal attention.”

  A private escorted him to the medical bay. Belisarius thanked her and asked for an appointment with the warden for the following day. The woman saluted and left Belisarius in the care of the medical AI.

  The small sick bay was cheap and functional, with hard plastic seats and cold, unwelcoming air. Being in a maison, it was also hardened against intrusion, with its tools of the medical trade sealed into the walls, ready for deployment by the AI.

  The sick bay began examining Belisarius with IR. A staccato set of IR signals shot outward from the wrist device and into the sick bay’s AI. The room darkened.

  “Saint Matthew?” Belisarius whispered.

  “I have forced the sick bay into a diagnostic mode that will last several hours,” Saint Matthew said in an implant in Belisarius’s ear. “The blinders, masks and Scarecrow viruses are uploading now. I’m downloading prisoner medical files.”

  Belisarius moved to the door.

  La Maison’s systemswere hardened against electromagnetic signals and passworded against other kinds of intrusion. The only system designed to receive any EM was the medical one. No humans were involved in the medical care of prisoners or crew, so the medical AI had to be connected to other systems in the Maison. Sophisticated electronic immune systems, none of which were as advanced as Saint Matthew, secured the administrative operations.

  “The mask virus has penetrated their network,” Saint Matthew said, “not far enough to reach their security systems, but enough to intercept some data transmissions. The blinder virus is creating data quarantines of the electronic immune system around the places you’re going to walk. The quarantine will only last a few minutes in each case, but by then you’ll be through.”

  “Map?” Belisarius asked, opening the door onto an unlit hallway.

  Saint Matthew projected the blueprint of la Maison onto Belisarius’s cornea, blue lines superimposing themselves over his view of the darkened corridor. He crept along the route marked in orange in his display. None of the lights brightened for him.

  Prisons were designed on the principle of concentric shells, with hardened choke-points bridging one shell to the next. He was in the first shell. Marie and the other prisoners would be within the second. He was hoping she hadn’t done something stupid enough to get thrown into the third.

  “Cross-point ahead,” Saint Matthew said.

  The guard hut was a fortified structure beside what looked a lot like an airlock, mostly made of steel. The hut would be run by sub-AIs implementing fixed rules, counter-signed by a human guard. Belisarius walked to the hut and knocked on the thick window of the hut’s door.

  The guard inside saluted and said on the intercom, “ID please, monsieur.”

  Belisarius held the wrist band containing Saint Matthew beneath a reader. It chirped. The guard frowned, likely at the level of the security clearance Belisarius carried. Belisarius signalled impatiently for her to open the door to the hut. The private entered a code and physically opened the heavy door. Then she saluted again. Her nameplate said Lavigne.

  “I’m Gervais, from the Inspector-General’s Office,” Belisarius said. “You saw the clearance?”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “Very good,” Belisarius said. “Cycle me through the lock.”

  Her eyes widened. “Monsieur, we don’t go in without armor and anti-prisoner kit.”

  “You saw my clearance, private. This is Inspector-General business.”

  Lavigne gaped for a moment, then authorized the airlock into the main area of the reformatory. Belisarius went through both doorways and moved down the hallway without looking back.

  “She sent a message to her control area?” Belisarius sub-vocalized.

  “I already intercepted it and replied,” Saint Matthew said.

  “What’s your latest guess of the life expectancy of your virus?”

  “Twenty minutes. It depends on the security posture of la Maison. At higher alarm levels, the areas where I managed to put the virus will be closed out of main processing.”

  “You’ve got Marie’s location?”

  “She’s in AI-supervised rehabilitation,” Saint Matthew said. “Her curriculum includes training on hydroponics, along with class work and community sensitization. Serves her right,” he added.

  “I hope she’s in shape to react quickly,” Belisarius said. “Sometimes les Maisons are not gentle.”

  “Be ready
to carry her,” Saint Matthew said. “She’s probably been mouthy. Left turn here and introduce the service band on the access panel.”

  Belisarius waved the service band. A door unlocked and opened. A humid room the size of a gymnasium was filled with trays of running water, pumps, and the bright growth of cabbage, millet and rye sprouts.

  “There’s no Marie here, Saint Matthew,” Belisarius sub-vocalized after a few seconds.

  “She’s here. The reformatory AI said she was here.”

  “Well, she’s not.” Belisarius passed a charge through his magnetosomes to feel at the ambient magnetic field. There were weird, dead spaces in the field. He extended his arms and walked to a punch code panel recessed into the back wall.

  Its magnetic field was anomalously dormant, but behind it, other currents moved. It came off easily, spilling cold air onto his fingers. The seals and screws were worn free. Inside, the security camera cables snaked in counter-intuitive directions, patched to different feeds.

  “She damaged the reformatory systems!” Saint Matthew said. “That’s against the rules.”

  “It’s dangerous,” Belisarius said. “She can get tossed into a much tougher prison. Why did she do it? Is she making a break right now? That would be too much coincidence.”

  “The electronic immune system is going to catch our virus in less than eighteen minutes. Find her!”

  “I don’t know where she is!” Belisarius sub-vocalized. “She can’t be far, not unless she’s cracked the security AIs.”

  How could the AIs lose her? On the side wall was a door sealed with bolts. The hydroponics equipment would need some tools that the reformatory would want to keep out of the hands of the prisoners. Had she equipped herself with tools?