The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  Belisarius wiggled his fingers in the shine of his faceplate, astonished. No hint of magnetism. He was like a regular person, almost; even his non-fugue brain was hard-wired to ferret out mathematical patterns and new understandings. Without magnetosomes, he was epistemologically adrift, with no baseline with which to calibrate visual information.

  He couldn’t believe it. He knew what had been done, genetically and epigenetically, to make him. It was an enormously complex and planned process. He was an advanced iteration of a multi-generational product. But nothing in his training or his bioengineering had foreshadowed this possibility. This was an unplanned evolutionary leap, new functions building themselves onto existing biological tools.

  “Why partition my brain?” Belisarius asked.

  A primary-level logical impasse occurred.

  Primary-level? There were only two priorities at level one: self-preservation and the pursuit of knowledge, the second of which was the whole raison d’être of the Homo quantus.

  A threat had forced this on his quantum brain.

  “What’s the danger?” Belisarius asked.

  The Belisarius physicality has completed approximately forty-six percent of the transit through the conjoined wormholes. Memory banks are running out of processing space.

  “How can my brain be full?”

  The navigational calculations are quantum in nature and must account for twenty-two dimensions of space-time. The sensory data from the inside of the wormholes is occupying the rest of the available memory.

  “The scientific information may have to be temporarily overwritten and re-observed at a later time,” Belisarius said.

  What later time? All the information available indicates that the Belisarius subjectivity must escape, leaving the time gates. This remains a primary-level impasse.

  “We’re stealing the time gate,” Belisarius said.

  That is not possible. The Belisarius subjectivity is unarmed, three hundred and twenty light years from safety, trapped in the temporal interstices of the time gates, in a warship filled with armed subjectivities who intend, under all circumstances, to maintain possession of the conjoined wormholes.

  “Everything is going according to plan,” Belisarius said. “Overwrite the non-navigational data. We’ll re-observe at a later time.”

  Belisarius let the quantum brain digest the order. He was mystified. Stunned.

  Belisarius’s consciousness had no value to the intellect. It would only have brought him into this decision because it legitimately needed a tie-breaking vote. As much as a poker-playing computer or an AI, the quantum intellect had its limits, and Belisarius had found them.

  He closed his eyes. Even with genetically enhanced mathematical abilities, the soft, braiding light hurt his eyes. He needed quiet. Sensory slowdown. Like the quiet, softly rolling hills of the Garret.

  This partition the quantum intellect had set up could be a gift, or it might be a deep brain injury. He’d never had control of his objective quantum intellect, but he’d at least been able to leave it quiescent, by denying his instincts and heritage. Now, it coexisted in his mind. How would he turn it off?

  Or would it turn him off, when this crisis was done?

  He couldn’t feel his electroplaques. The quantum intellect had control over the on-off switch of Belisarius’s consciousness.

  “I’m going to run out of air,” Belisarius said. “Which way is out, based on the space-time coordinates I originally set?”

  For a few seconds longer, the inside of his mind was silent.

  Deleting non-navigational observations and quantum interference information, his dead voice said. An unnerving relief flooded his arms and legs. He felt weak, like someone had just decided not to execute him.

  The quantum intellect droned out a series of angular rotations, across five perpendicular axes, and then a thrust profile. Five perpendicular axes, Belisarius thought in wonder. The time gates were a cathedral for the Homo quantus. The Expeditionary Force had found an ancient device of incalculable epistemological value, and they’d used it for military science. It seemed a shame to him, but he’d never lived as a citizen of a client nation. They’d forsaken knowledge for freedom. Perhaps it was the opposite with him.

  He travelled through weirdly deep space, for seconds squared and minutes squared, changing thrust angles and speeds whenever the readout on his retina changed. But he had no real idea what was around him.

  “I won’t survive without information,” Belisarius finally said. “What is the quantum objectivity’s proposal to provide me with information without collapsing superimposed states?”

  The Belisarius subjectivity may query the quantum intellect, it answered. Information may be provided in classical or quantum form. Any information provided in classical form will collapse probability waves.

  A query system. Nothing more.

  For five centuries, scientists had queried the quantum world, one measurement at a time. The Homo quantus project had been designed to bridge those two worlds. But the partitioning of his brain had turned Belisarius into one more scientist detached from his equipment. It made him almost human again, except that he did not own his body.

  The detached voice in his head issued navigational instructions. Outside his faceplate, the rotations about new axes reddened the blues and purples. He moved along new time-like dimensions, traveling backwards along them. The great vastness of the inside of the wormholes darkened. Then, Belisarius received new instructions. Full stop.

  The quantum intellect directed a new set of rotations along seven perpendicular axes, then thrust. The world lightened with red-blue cloudy softness and then, finally, the hallucinatory world melted away and Belisarius emerged into the zero-g darkness of the bay on the Limpopo.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  CASSANDRA TOUCHED THE world with her eyes like a newborn. She trembled. Beads of sweat on the ends of her lashes caught fragments of light in the gloom. Holograms showing a closing wormhole underlit her hands in yellow light. A cheer from the officers and crew exploded. Even Iekanjika beamed. They were happy. So happy.

  Cassandra was past happy. She was in awe. Measurements stuffed her mind. Unique experimental data. She’d been a telescope into hyper-space itself. She’d looked upon the naked stuff of the cosmos, without human filters. She’d briefly transcended humanity. The ash of that subjectless, personless experience was a brain stuffed to capacity with revelation. It was magnificent... overwhelming.

  And she couldn’t have seen any of it without leaving the Garret. There, she would have been in a fugue tank, with antipyretic IVs and two doctors, fully supported and safe, with no new data. Here she was, like Bel, perhaps at the edge of being shot, but she’d seen so much that in the balance, the risk to her life and health seemed small.

  She pressed her forehead with palms and huddled low. Dizziness warned that she was close to fainting. Low blood pressure. So thirsty. Shaking feverish. Sweat sucked cloth to skin under the fugue suit.

  “I have fugue fever,” she croaked.

  Touch, sound, sight, smell still fed her too much information. Her mind crackled.

  The Brigadier-General stepped to her on magnetized boots.

  “Félicitations,” he said.

  Cassandra held her head. “I can’t handle stimulation after the fugue,” she said in Anglo-Spanish. “Bring me someplace dark and quiet.”

  “I’ll bring you to your countryman,” he said.

  She shook her head and then groaned. “Alone. No stimulation. Electrical patterns from other Homo quantus are worse than staying here.”

  Voices spoke around her dizziness, in French and in their own language. Then, a lieutenant manually turned off the magnets on her boots. He gently took her in his arms and floated her from the bridge. She huddled, covering her ears and keeping her eyes tightly shut as she waited for her natural neural inhibitors to get back up to normal concentrations. The creaking of her skin echoed painfully in her brain.

  And she
couldn’t drug herself through this. Any of the sedatives she might normally have taken post-fugue would get in the way of her alertness. She let the basal electrical current running from her electroplaques to her magnetosomes persist. Her brain mapped the ship moving around her, her mind forming the three-dimensional blueprint without effort and orienting herself in it. In the sick bay, the lieutenant zipped her into a sleep bag on the wall, shut off the lights and closed the door after he left.

  Kind man, she thought. He would have been a good caregiver in the Garret. Unfortunately, he was also a good officer. She felt the MP he left posted outside the door. The metal equipment, including shocker and carbon-steel night stick, pressed against her light magnetic field.

  She wanted to sleep off this fever for drug-induced days. But her brain buzzed at what she’d learned. It was so beautiful. Enough discoveries for a lifetime. For many lifetimes. It had all been worth it. And they had a still greater prize. The significance of the time gates dwarfed even what she’d just accomplished.

  She unzipped the bag. Exhausted as she was, as depleted as her electroplaques were, as feverish as she remained, she set the low current from her electroplaques into her left frontal lobe. She struggled into savant. The world bloomed with comforting mathematical and geometric patterns, angles, connections. Elegant logic wicked into the world, as if meaning moved by capillary action.

  She peeled off a sticker on her fugue suit and pasted it to the back of her hand. Saint Matthew had built it based on his observations of the one on Major Iekanjika’s hand and on Bel’s specifications. But, being Saint Matthew, he’d evolved the tech, improved it, and in response to the movement of her fingers, it began breaking the access codes to the lock at the same time as it redeployed the MP outside.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  THE BAY WAS dark. Belisarius wasn’t used to making his way in the world without the press of ambient magnetism. The lack of polarity and charge was disconcerting. But it wasn’t just the magnetic polarity that was gone. Some root of his personality felt adrift.

  He wasn’t dead. He’d survived the fugue, not by plan, but it didn’t matter. In some way, the engineered death sentence that had been hanging over him since he was a teenager had retreated. And something bigger had happened. He’d experienced new knowledge so profoundly, so enormously, that his life before and life after could not be compared. He’d touched raw hyper-space. He’d moved through the naked geometry of space-time. He’d been engineered, and issued near-fatal flaws and new senses that had never found their ecological niche. Except now they had. No baseline human ever could have experienced or even appreciated what he’d seen and the experience was as religious as anything felt by the Puppets or Saint Matthew. In the face of so great a gift, it was difficult to hold onto his anger.

  He had to tell Cassandra.

  But he had to survive first.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Belisarius whispered. “I can’t function without a magnetic sense, and I need to move in and out of savant at will. I can’t do that without full control. Undo the neural partitioning and return control to me.”

  The pause lengthened. The quantum intellect could process algorithms and facts and make projections into the future, all in parallel. Belisarius understood the intellect, though. This was new and dangerous to it, so it delayed its response.

  The quantum intellect was no doubt comparing its own chances of successfully completing the con against Belisarius’s chances of doing the same. It wanted the time gates as much as he did. It needed the time gates as much as Belisarius needed life.

  And it was likely also calculating the probability of Belisarius ever entering the fugue again. But the quantum intellect would not find the algorithms that ran Belisarius the subjective person, no models to predict him; if there were any, they shifted in the moment, making him a creature of inscrutable probabilities, like a quantum event. A non-conscious hyper-intellect could not model the behavior of a subjective consciousness. But as the pause lengthened, he realized the quantum intellect would not give up its control either.

  “Reverse the partitioning, then,” Belisarius said to it. “I will be the principal, and the objectivity will run within the partitioned area.”

  Continuously?

  “Yes.”

  Fourteen point eight seconds passed.

  Then, magnetic polarity and electrical texture pressed once again upon his world. Vertigo washed over him. Belisarius breathed. He’d been holding his breath.

  Unless the quantum intellect was capable of conning him, Belisarius owned his brain. His brain had never been entirely his. His designers had engineered him to timeshare the interior of his brain with something inhuman. He still needed to share it with the quantum intellect, but for the first time since he was a teenager, he was not a person who could be switched off by an accidental slip into the fugue. His victory was a frightening evolutionary step.

  The pastward mouth of the wormhole stared unblinking at him, a low, luminous red oval held in place by the shock-absorbent frame that the Union had built to hold it. Even without savant, his brain chased at the marbled patterns shooting through it, analyzing the geometry, looking for equations to abstract the forces driving the motion. Instincts were as dangerous as their absence.

  He activated the cold jets, bounced off the floor and to the airlock.

  The floor where he’d left Saint Matthew was bare. He’d come back in time, to before he’d even entered the bay. Beyond the thick glass, the airlock and hallway were empty. He cycled the lock, hands moving across the controls with mathematical precision.

  In the hallway, he closed the airlock behind him and looked into the narrow compartment from which he’d taken the vacuum suit he was wearing. The well-patched suit with the 337 painted on its chest was still there, the same one he wore now.

  With the agility of one long accustomed to micro-gravity, he leapt down the side hallway, following the curve of the tube spearing the warship. He tightened his magnetic field around him, making him sensitive to the least electrical and magnetic breathing of the Limpopo. When the curve of the corridor had hidden the airlock and intersection from sight, he caught a handhold and went quiet.

  He waited with false patience, sensing the throbbing electrical metabolism of the ship as five minutes passed, ten minutes, then fifteen. Then, a new, slight magnetic pressure pressed against him in the distance. That was his past self. The sound of the airlock cycling drifted faintly to him. His past self and Saint Matthew had entered the airlock. Then voices, alarmed. The two MPs. He waited. The MPs had watched him through the airlock and had had time to put on vacuum suits. He counted as precisely as an atomic clock. Three minutes.

  Belisarius’s brain remembered the placement of handholds, the distance between each, the angles required of his arms depending on velocity. These geometric calculations were pure, instinctive joy for his brain. He sped silently forward along the rungs, building speed.

  Two MPs floated outside the airlock, hastily sealing two vacuum suits. Neither was looking his way. Belisarius’s magnetic field sharpened, like a bat increasing the frequency of its cries at the height of the hunt. One MP turned, eyes widening, hand darting to her holster.

  Belisarius’s hands touched them simultaneously, releasing six hundred and fifty volts of electricity into each as he shot past.

  He cried out, shaking at the smoke and tiny flames on the fingers of the vacuum suit as he swung around a handhold and returned to the airlock. The shocked MPs drifted in the zero g. Charred circles showed black where he’d touched them, one at the shoulder, one at the chest. Inside the bay, the lights shone. There was no sign of his past self inside, but the service band was magnetized to the floor.

  Belisarius took off his ruined suit with stinging fingers. The carbon fiber at his fingertips had blackened and melted. He peeled away the adhesive comms patches from the hands of the MPs, along with their sidearms and tossed them into the cabinet. Then, he tied their wrists back to back and lo
oped the bonds around one of the handholds on the ceiling.

  He took one of the undamaged vacuum suits and put it on while cycling through the airlock. He sealed it closed just as it started depressurizing. Then, he emerged into the bay and picked up the service band containing Saint Matthew.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Mister Arjona?” Saint Matthew demanded. “Where did you come from?”

  “It’s a circular story,” Belisarius said. “Are you still running the comms systems near the bay?”

  “It’s only been two hundred seconds. Why would I stop?”

  “I took the comms patches off the two MPs,” Belisarius said. “Make sure the ship’s automatic systems keep thinking that it’s still in contact with them.”

  “Done.”

  “And external and internal sensors are still ready to loop in false readings when we open the bay doors and make a run for it?”

  “Yes,” Saint Matthew said, “but if they maneuver at all, their logistics programs will soon notice the loading imbalance.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t move,” Belisarius said. “All right, open the braces on the wormholes, open the bay doors and take control of some of the cargo drones.”

  Lights in the bay yellowed and the bay doors above him hinged open. At the same time, six cold-jet drones detached from the wall and swooped around the wormholes. Above the bay doors, the Puppet tug floated, its cargo hatch open and its running lights blinking calmly.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  THE STARS WINKED out and alarms went off in the racer as Stills plunged into the Axis. He’d shut off his inflaton drive when he’d seen the Nhialic and the Gbudue do the same. The swallowing quiet itched his ass like something bad was going to happen. The two warships soared ahead, their running lights blinking. They hadn’t cut their speed.

  No one went through an Axis this fuckin’ fast.