The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  “He is pretty fast,” Marie admitted.

  Stills’ signal stopped, just as he was cutting free one of the four packages of explosives and attaching it to the undersurface of the ice. Silence on the line. Now Stills would have to stab a small detonator into the hard putty and hopefully not be blown up in the process.

  His signal started moving again, at ninety degrees from his previous path. “Merde, patron,” Stills squawked over the comms. “I still ain’t putting two an’ two together.”

  “It’s four,” Marie offered.

  “Boss-man, you’re Homo quantus. You’re not doin’ this job for money, are you?”

  “Money sure buys a lot of mountaintop,” Belisarius said, “but I’m doing it for the same reasons as you, and the same reasons I left the Garret. Life is short and life isn’t fair. You’ve got to grab it and own it before it owns you. And I might as well kick somebody in the huevos if I have to, right?”

  “Or even if you don’t,” Stills replied. “All right. Fuck it. Buy yourself a mountaintop.”

  Belisarius switched off the comms. “You sound as drunk as when I met you,” Marie said. “Is drunk Bel back? I really liked him.”

  “You like laughing at drunk Bel, but trust me, you don’t want him running your con.”

  “Probably,” Marie said, pointing at the display. “Stills isn’t far off his target,” she said. “Pretty good for navigating with just Ptolemy’s magnetic field.”

  Stills made better time to the second point with only three bales of explosives to drag behind him. The pressure was crushing, at the limit of what the Homo eridanus should have been able to survive.

  “How’s your respiration, Vincent?” Belisarius asked.

  “Fuck you!” The electronic voice Stills had selected could not express sounds like being winded, any more than his face could convey emotion. “This shit I’m pullin’ around stinks.”

  Marie frowned. “None of explosives should be dissolving.”

  “Is he smelling something else?” Belisarius asked. “Or should he drop the packets and run?”

  Marie watched the icon representing Stills move away from the second anchor point. Six kilometers to the next one.

  She toggled the comms. “What does it smell like?”

  “Fats. Amides. Some weird organics,” Stills answered. “The smell is gone now that I’m movin’.”

  Belisarius and Marie looked at each other for a while.

  “If one of those goes off, is the rope long enough?” Belisarius asked.

  “Unless it goes off while he’s attaching it to the ice,” she said.

  “Scuttle the test?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Vincent, drop the packages,” Belisarius said. “We don’t want to risk it until we find out what the smell is. Marie says the packages shouldn’t have a smell. We need to run more tests.”

  “So you don’t know if it’s gonna blow, and you turned into pussies?” Stills answered.

  “It’s better to be sure,” Belisarius said.

  “Fuck that noise. Let’s get this done.”

  The display showed Stills’ speed rising slightly as his depth dropped.

  “Vincent, where are you going?” Belisarius asked. “You’re dropping.”

  “There’s a slush field, a few hundred meters thick. An’ this ain’t as deep as I gotta go at show time. Better check it now.”

  Marie moved her finger along a depth curve graphed against the stability of the explosive charges. “We couldn’t replicate this pressure in the lab,” she said. “I can’t say if it’ll go more stable or less.”

  “Vincent, you’re out of the design parameters of the equipment and of yourself,” Belisarius said. “Let’s try it with the two packages in place.”

  “No, patron.” The screen showed Stills plunging deeper to avoid the slush field. “Besides, the packages are sizzling behind me. I doubt it’s a good idea to see what it is.”

  “What kind of sizzling?” Marie demanded.

  “The sphincter-tightening kind that tells me to sashay my delicate little ass faster.”

  “Vincent, don’t go on!” Belisarius said. “You can’t put the detonators in if the packages aren’t even stable.”

  “Hold your pecker, patron. I put the detonators in at the first anchor point.”

  Marie pursed her lips. “It shouldn’t do anything, but these are experimental explosives under nine hundred atmospheres of pressure in a dilute ammonia solution. I’d rather do more tests.”

  “Vincent,” Belisarius said, “Marie just admitted that even she wouldn’t carry explosives around like that, and she’s mostly crazy. Can you let go of the rope and swim away?”

  “Lick the devil. I’m at the third anchor point. The slush and icebergs are mostly clear. I’m fastenin’ one of the packages to an iceberg and carryin’ the sizzliest one up to the surface of the ice.”

  “Bel,” Marie whispered, “the sizzling might be the detonators shorting.”

  “What can we do?” Belisarius asked. “The detonators are already off.”

  “Stills doesn’t want to take his break, so the best I got is Matt better pray.”

  “This last one is hot, patron,” Stills said.

  Alarms sounded.

  “Two detonators went off,” Marie said. “I didn’t detonate them.”

  “Vincent!” Belisarius said. “Vincent! Are you alright?”

  No response. A small icon showed Stills unmoving.

  “Vincent! Are you hurt?”

  No answer. “Marie, get some of Saint Matthew’s drones moving that way. It’ll take them a while to get there, but—”

  Stills’ voice interrupted him. “What. Shitty. Explosives. What shitty, shitty explosives.”

  “Are you hurt, Vincent?” Belisarius asked.

  “I was expectin’ the world to come apart when those stallions blew their loads. We ain’t gonna get much done with donkeys, patron. You got a backup explosives guy you can call in?”

  Marie grabbed the microphone. “Listen, espèce de con! There’s nothing wrong with those explosives! Use them right next time! You’re the moron who—”

  Belisarius pulled the microphone away from Marie.

  “I’d say bring it on, cabrona,” Stills yelled back, “but you’d compact into greasy paste before you even got close.”

  Marie tried to get the microphone back, but Belisarius electrified his fingers so that they sparked before her. She turned away and kicked the wall. A slow stream of low-house Venusian swearing bubbled from her, creatively repurposed for an aquatic target. Belisarius shushed her.

  “Vincent, can you get back here?” Belisarius asked. “Once you’re in your chamber, we’ll detonate the other charges and see if they do any better.”

  “I worked up an appetite somethin’ fierce. Gonna be lookin’ for chow. Have it ready for me. Gonna taste like dog shit here. Ammonia makes everything bitter.”

  “We’ll have it ready,” Belisarius said, before toggling off the microphone. “Are you calm yet?” he asked Marie.

  “I’m always calm.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  CASSANDRA CAME TO the commissary at midnight to get some food to take back to her room. She hadn’t expected to see anyone here, and had timed it that way, but she found Major Iekanjika working at one of the tables. And Stills’ big steel chamber had been wheeled against a wall. Cassandra took a few heatable items from the freezer and put them on a tray.

  “You’ve been locked up in your quarters a lot,” Iekanjika said in French.

  She couldn’t place the Major’s accent. The tray in her hands was heavy. But the major was looking at her now. She had an unsettling intensity, as if she was invading personal space with her eyes and didn’t care.

  “My part of the job isn’t as exciting or as dangerous as Stills’ or William’s,” Cassandra replied in the formal, correct French she’d learned as a child. “My work will be from within the fugue.”

  “That isn’t dang
erous?” Iekanjika asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Interesting. I watched Arjona in the fugue. After he was done, my sickbay had a hard time keeping him alive through his fever.”

  Again, Iekanjika’s judging stare drilled into her, into her uncertainty. Had Bel lied about the fugue to Iekanjika too? Cassandra was starting to realize that exposing any of Bel’s lies to the others wouldn’t be healthy for him. Or was he telling the truth?

  “That doesn’t happen to you?” the major asked finally.

  “The longer we stay in the fugue, the higher the fever.” It would probably be wise to change the subject. Would Bel be proud of her for understanding that? Maybe she was adapting a little bit to the wide world. “Bel said that if we get your ships through, there will probably be war.”

  “The war’ll be shorter than a sneeze,” Stills said.

  “Is that true?” Cassandra asked.

  “The Venusian Congregate is powerful,” the major said, “and they’ve never released a client nation from one of their Patron-Client Accords.”

  “So why do this?” Cassandra said. “From a pure cost-benefit perspective, it doesn’t make sense. Hundreds or thousands of people will die, and nothing will change.”

  “Freedom isn’t the result of a cost-benefit analysis,” Iekanjika said. “We want to own our world. We want to freely visit the rest of civilization through the only wormhole out of Bachwezi. Congregate political commissars shouldn’t be embedded in our government. We should bleed in our own wars, not theirs. And we should keep what we create and discover. Dying is worth all that.”

  “Congregate gonna fuck you up bad,” Stills warned.

  “We’ll make it cost them,” Iekanjika said.

  “Like you said, cost don’t matter, sweet cheeks. They got the best warships and all the wormholes that matter. And they got us mongrels.”

  “The Homo eridanus don’t mind being clients?” Cassandra asked.

  “We ain’t clients, princess. We already got a planet. We’re contractors. We fly their fast fighters and go home after our tours. Maybe they’ll fly us against the Union. I would.”

  “Anywhere, anytime,” Iekanjika said.

  Stills laughed. Cassandra couldn’t understand why. Looking at her tray of frozen food, she left the commissary. Had they just threatened each other? Happily? Who were these people? How much violence did they carry in them? She couldn’t live like that.

  The Garret wasn’t like that. The Homo quantus sought knowledge. They didn’t threaten anyone. But what would the Homo quantus do if someone threatened them? She honestly didn’t know. Human history was a concatenation of power struggles and people trying to get away with whatever they could, until someone strong enough came along to stop them. That was the world she’d stepped into.

  That was the world Bel had been living in for twelve years. Maybe she ought to be surprised Bel hadn’t become more hardened. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and she activated a tiny micro-current from her electroplaques to her brain, inducing savant. The confusing emotions of the world became less important, pressed against her insides less, while mathematical and geometric patterns became clear. Savant was a comforting state in which to escape from some emotions. Bel and Gates-15 rounded the corner. Bel smiled at her. Gates-15 blushed. What did that mean? Faces were too pattern-rich in savant.

  “Hi Cassie,” Bel said, the way he had when they were teenagers.

  “Hi, Bel.”

  “Miss Mejía,” Gates-15 said. She looked away. Gates-15 tried looking up at her, but she turned her face further. “Are you okay?”

  Cassandra didn’t answer. She didn’t understand what he was asking.

  Bel put his hand on Gates-15’s shoulder. “This is savant, professor,” Bel said. “It’s one of a few cognitive states in which the Homo quantus can function.”

  “I have work to do,” Cassandra said. “Goodnight.”

  She moved past them and around the corner. Then, she stopped as they began speaking and moving again.

  “I go into savant as well,” Bel said, “to improve geometric abilities, but it’s a kind of induciblebrain damage, part of a family of depersonalization disorders.”

  What was Bel talking about? Savant wasn’t a kind of brain damage, not exactly. And it wasn’t a depersonalization disorder. It was a lie, or in a stretch, a bad mischaracterization. Did Bel hate his heritage so much that he believed that?

  “It sounds dangerous,” Gates-15 said as they receded from her.

  “The people who made the Puppets worked with the same mechanism,” Bel said, “except backwards. The Puppet brain can’t have dissociative disorders. There’s no way for the Puppets to avoid the religious awe of the Numen.”

  “You worry that I won’t be able to hold up my part in the con if Del Casal succeeds?” Gates-15 said.

  “I wonder if you’re still ready to go through with this.”

  “I want to be whole. Not just for a few weeks, but for my whole life.”

  “We all want to be whole,” Bel said. Then, they were too far to hear.

  Cassandra puzzled in the hallway for forty-eight seconds longer. She didn’t have a depersonalization disorder. If Bel was telling the truth, and the Puppets had been built to be unable to escape the cruelty of the Numen, even by going insane, then the wide world was more frightening and confusing than she’d thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE PUPPETS HAD intercepted the Middle Kingdom messages in the district of the Free City called Jeffey’s Finger, but after a bit of digging, Majeur Bareilles found that the transmissions had been routed through Three Prophets, a Puppet micro-state about thirty kilometers away.

  The Scarecrow took a small skip ship with Duggan-12. The priest had been resistant at first, but had then begun speaking with him as if their travelling together was some sign of rapprochement between the Theocracy and the Congregate. He didn’t disabuse her of the notion and they descended the lock hatches into Three Prophets.

  The village was a mean place, dirty, blighted by poverty. The ceilings of ice were poorly dug, the lighting failing, and the faint hiss of escaping atmosphere accounted for the low air pressure. Eighty years ago, the village had possessed three human divinities, but they had died of old age in captivity, and had been replaced by only two other Numen. Every intelligence service knew the divine humans were dying out, and that eventually, in perhaps another generation, the Puppet states would fall. It would be then that the Congregate and the Banks would fight over the Puppet Axis.

  They were met by a priest who administered the village along with a sunken-eyed and partly starving local committee. The priest genuflected to Duggan-12 and then to the Scarecrow, somewhat wide-eyed.

  Instead of waiting for speech, the Scarecrow strode forward with hushed flexing of artificial tendons by smooth motors and the muted creaking of piezoceramic muscles. He knew where he was going. Decades ago, Congregate intelligence operatives had mapped out every public meter of the Puppet Theocracy, and some of the private ones. Duggan-12 hopped along beside him.

  “You wanted to investigate, Scarecrow? You wanted to investigate?” she said, enunciating loudly in the antique pre-Anglo-Spanish favored in the theocracy. “Witnesses are here!” She waved her hand at the following priest and his committee.

  The Scarecrow moved off the central laneway of Three Prophets to a narrow alley that ended in a maintenance door. The door was nothing special, but the ice in the alleyway was well-trodden. Behind the door nested the mainframe and comms node that had intercepted the transmission. Duggan-12 ran to put herself between the Scarecrow and the door.

  “If you need information, we are happy to trade it with a partner!” she said.

  In the infrared her face had flushed hot, as had the faces of the other Puppets. Heartbeats had risen. Puppets could be pliant and accommodating, but beneath the mushy exteriors was steely, obsessive resolve about protecting and holding their divinities. Their communities reflected their person
alities architecturally: disorganized, meandering, cluttered, and freely passable for the most part, until one neared the Forbidden Cities, where they kept their gods captive. The mainframe was probably near the Forbidden City of Three Prophets. And while the Scarecrow could probably overpower any number of external Puppet defenses, previous reconnaissance had reported old anti-aircraft cannons inside their village, enough to seriously harm the Scarecrow and explosively decompress much of the village.

  But he didn’t need to pass the doorway. He was made of the cutting edge of Congregate AI technology distributed deep within a body that was mostly weaponry. He directed maser pulses into receivers on the walls, in the Puppet frequencies, using Puppet authorizations snipped from intel reports. In fractions of a second, he’d accessed the administrator areas in the mainframe. He found the logs and drilled down to the interception event. The tags on the Middle Kingdom transmission the Puppets had intercepted were all appropriate. This was another line of evidence that the message was genuine.

  But a deeper look at the metadata in the intercepted message showed something very interesting. Before their normal encryption processes, Middle Kingdom spies sprinkled chaotic code in their messages, to render decryption even more difficult and to serve as a hidden, internal log on the message routing. Messages could be mathematically transformed and encrypted, but the chaotic elements were magnified by transformations. Manipulations like routing aged a message measurably.

  And this message had been manipulated between transmission and interception.

  The Scarecrow solved the code to find that the signal had been sent through a number of nodes to mask its path, but the routing in this message was longer than normal. And something, somewhere had decoded the Middle Kingdom’s top level encryption and left the message to go on.

  Duggan-12 stamped her foot and tugged at the metal fiber of his false shirt, trying to turn him around.

  It would take many powerful AIs to break the Middle Kingdom ciphers, each of which was big and bulky. The Anglo-Spanish were rivals to the Congregate in the development of AIs. How had the Anglo-Spanish smuggled that kind of processing power to Oler without being noticed? And why? The real secrets in the Epsilon Indi system weren’t on Oler. Unless the Anglo-Spanish were making a power play, trying to get Congregate Intelligence to sweep Oler of Middle Kingdom assets.