‘This will help you find me if that happens. If you ever want to, that is.’
She holds it up. Clever little thief. It is information encoded in matter, translated by her gogols into vir form. At a molecular level the petals are spiky cathedrals, rows upon rows of them, containing data. It defines a set of modal logic constraints, provable properties for a neural network, like a gogol. The flower is an empty shape of a person, a shadow, waiting to be filled.
‘That’s very romantic, Jean,’ she says. ‘Asking me to be your get out of jail for free card. Are you sure you’d not rather receive a file in a cake?’
‘You were never much of a cook, even less so a baker. And I didn’t imagine for a moment getting out of jail would be free.’
She freezes him in the vir’s slowtime for a moment and summons a warmind gogol family to scour the flower for traps. They find nothing. It is only then that she lets time resume and inhales the flower’s scent. It is delicate and sweet, the memory of a summer, with a hint of honey.
‘Jean,’ she says, a sudden tenderness in her chest. ‘This is Matjek. You are going to fail, and it sounds like you know it. Why are you doing this? You were happy on Mars, with the little people.’
‘I didn’t realise you cared.’
‘I don’t. I just thought I’d do the System a favour by keeping an eye on you.’
He looks down.
‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is perfect freedom in the black and white, except that the rules make invisible walls. Two squares forward, one left. One left, whole row forward and backward, one right. That’s all you see.
‘There is a reason for it, she said. Algorithmic complexity. The Universe is a quantum computer, and over time, it is simply more likely that structure comes out of it than noise. That means rules, patterns. That means a game. But spend long enough poking at it, and you start to see the game engine, the labyrinth of the quantum circuit, wires looping around each other, forwards and backwards.’
‘It sounds like the kind of thing the zoku like to say,’ Joséphine says disdainfully.
The thief sighs. ‘Perhaps. After that, she started talking about this ancient legend they have, about a creature called the Sleeper with a billion hit points, and after it was finally killed by a coalition of a thousand guilds, it dropped a small rusty dagger.
‘But there is something to it. I’m tired of games. Mars was not enough. And you were right, I made a mess of it. I need something new, something different.’
‘And you think the jewel will give you that?’
‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’
‘I know you, Jean, better than anyone. You will never stop. There will always be something else for you to steal.’
He gives her that fake-weary look. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think one more thing would be enough. Maybe it always was.’ He stands up. ‘Goodbye, Joséphine. If we meet again, it will be your choice.’
‘Did I give you my permission to leave?’ she says, hardening her voice.
‘Oh, I’m not leaving. I would never have come here if I expected to leave. This is a new branch of me that I created just for you. That self-destruct loop of yours? I stole it a long time ago.’
‘Jean—’ She reaches for the firmanent, for his mindshell, but it is already too late.
‘You know, it’s good practice for what is to come. Even if you are branching before jumping into the nothing, you have to have the resolve to do it yourself. Take this as a compliment, Joséphine: if I had come here first, it would have been hard to find the courage. Take care of yourself. It’s been fun.’
He closes his eyes. He twitches once. The mindshell stands still, chest rising and falling, but Joséphine knows that the gogol inside is gone.
She sits on the stairs for a long time, watching the still form of the thief, standing there with a peaceful expression on his face. She turns the flower in her hands. Finally she stands up and touches her Jean’s face gently with her ring hand.
Then she starts thinking about how to best betray him to Matjek Chen.
7
MIELI AND THE LIQUORICE-ZOKU
Mieli is singing to her new garden when the quantum spam rain starts.
She sits in the shade of a young pumptree and hums a wordless hum, softly varying in pitch and frequency. It tells the smartcoral in the garden’s soil to grow thin tendrils to hold the soft soil in place, packing it firmer than the gentle gravity of the Farreach Plate can. The humid air is warm and full of the wet rhubarb smell of pumptree breath. The shrill screams of young anansi spiders mingle with Mieli’s song. They dart amongst the tree branches, weaving diamond threads between them. The horizon curves up like the fingers of a cupped hand. Far above is the sky of ice, faintly transparent, and beyond it, the sisterspheres.
Only some of it is real, for certain values of real. Like almost all inhabitants of Supra City, she is a member of the Huizinga-zoku now, the zoku of Circles. Inside her own Circle, she is free to define her own realities and their laws as she wishes. She cringes at the memory of fumbling with Circle-crafting, turning her hex first into a cartoon world without a third dimension, then into a grey fog where only sounds had physical form.
Reluctantly, at Zinda’s suggestion, she turned her longing for Oort into a wish and wove it into the volition of the zoku through her Huizinga jewel. In an instant, several thousand Huizinga members qupted her complete Oortian Circle and Realm spimes, ranging from megaproject construction game Realms to a very detailed Narrativist Circle exploring gender dynamics in an Oortian koto. Mieli found the last one promising, until she realised it only allowed communication through song and wing movements, and completely excluded all sexual activity. But there was enough to help her create a patchwork reality that matched her memories.
Now, she could believe she is in Oort. Almost.
The song comes out of her easily, and she can feel the movement in the earth beneath her. She has already planted some cloudberries. Vecbushes and maybe even a small phoenixwood grove will follow. She breathes in the scent of the garden. It almost fills the hollow space in her chest.
A part of her dreads finishing the song. After singing to living things, it will be time to sing to the dead. She has been working on a song for Perhonen for weeks. But she can only do it in bits and pieces, when the grief is hiding beneath a blanket of sunlight and comfort. In her dealings with her zokus, she uses her metacortex heavily, to filter her thoughts and emotions. It always leaves her feeling like a butterfly pressed between two glass plates, thin and lifeless. But she refuses to touch her sorrow, and so it remains a wild thorny plant in the ordered garden of her mind.
She mistakes the first falling jewel for a waterdrop from the anansi webs. But more follow: slowly at first, little more than flashes of sunlight that vanish into the grass, then as a relentless glass hail downpour that beats down on the pumptree leaves with a sound like a whispering machine gun. A tiny jewel stings her cheek. An offer to join a zoku dedicated to constructing a perfect life-sized replica of an ancient imaginary starship from notchcubes on the surface of Rhea flashes through her brain, full of shrill enthusiasm. She brushes it aside and presses herself against the pulsating trunk of the pumptree.
Bigger jewels follow, bouncing off the anansi webs and tearing the creatures down from their perches. They make small craters in her soil and completely decimate the cloudberry patch. Mieli fumbles for her link to the Plate zoku that takes care of all the infrastructure needs, and qupts a frantic request for a q-dot umbrella over her garden. Conflict with your Circle’s Schroeder locks, comes back the reply. Mieli groans. Clearly, some subtle setting in her Circle excludes non-Oortian technology.