‘There you go. At least three extra levels, for free. How do you like that?’ Zinda hands Mieli’s jewel back. ‘Don’t worry, everybody does it, sometimes.’ She lowers her voice. ‘So, what is it that you want to hear? I can’t tell you anything that really goes against the zoku volition, you know. Anything you need to know, you should just know.’
‘I’m just trying to understand,’ Mieli says. ‘The Kaminari jewel. Why doesn’t the zoku use it?’ She looks up at the stars and the curve of Saturn’s rings, dashed across the sky like a brushstroke of light.
‘It wasn’t that long ago, before I came here, that I wanted to die,’ Mieli says quietly. ‘A truedeath, not one of your games. I almost got my wish, too. But these last few days, I’ve been thinking – I want to live. I want to hunt eggs. I want to sing. I want to …’ She pauses.
‘I know the Sobornost. If they win, they will erase this place, take your minds, take away the thing you call the q-self, and make you work for their Great Common Task, forever. And I’m not sure you – we – can win without something bigger than we are.’
‘Wow. You really are not very good at flirting, are you?’
Mieli gives Zinda a dark look.
‘I’m only teasing!’ Zinda says. ‘But seriously. Using the jewel – can’t you feel how wrong that is? It would be against everything the zoku stands for. Protecting the Universe. Managing existential risk. Do you know what the jewel does?”
Mieli shakes her head. ‘Only that is something big. Something that the Founders want. Something that could be used against them.’
‘Duh huh! That’s putting it mildly!’ Zinda purses her lips. ‘There are two problems, really. The first is that we can’t solve any hard problems. Not really. Anything that’s NP-complete. The Travelling Salesman. Pac-Man. They are all the same. All too hard. Even if we had a computer the size of the Universe! It drives the Sobornost crazy. We don’t mind it so much: that’s what makes most games fun. And we have quantum shortcuts for some special cases, like coordination. And for throwing parties, of course!
‘But if you could do it, things would be very different. You could predict the future. Recreate history. Automate creativity. Make minds truly greater than us. Fulfil all those Strong AI nerd dreams from the pre-Collapse times. So you can see why the Sobornost has been trying for centuries now.’
‘Yes,’ Mieli says, remembering Amtor City, falling, the glowing whirlpool of the singularity, burning in the flesh of Venus.
‘The second problem is that no physical machine we know of can do it. It’s almost like travelling faster than the speed of light, or making a perpetual motion machine. Quantum computers can’t do it, synthbio machines can’t do it, doesn’t matter how big you make them! Pretty early on, everybody agreed that the only place where NP gods could hide was quantum gravity.
‘Use a big enough magnifying glass, and spacetime breaks into tiny pieces. At the Planck scale, causality becomes a variable. You can even have little time machines, closed timelike curves. Nothing like DeLoreans or Grandfather Paradoxes, those don’t fit into quantum mechanics. But maybe you could squeeze a computer in there. And if you could, you could turn time into memory. You could solve NP-complete problems, and more. Sounds too good to be true, right? Right.’
Zinda leans closer to Mieli. The night air is still mellow, but Mieli is glad of her warmth.
‘Just say if I start to bore you,’ the zoku girl whispers in Mieli’s ear. Her tickling breath sends a shiver through Mieli’s body. Then she pulls away again. ‘My usual technique does not involve theoretical computer science, I can assure you.’
Mieli shakes her head. ‘I’m not bored. Go on,’ she breathes.
‘Okay, then,’ Zinda says. ‘Where was I? Oh yes. So, of course, people tried. Pretty early on, too, before the Collapse, with tiny black holes. And they discovered the Planck locks. Try to build a quantum gravity computer, and you get nonsense out. Some say they are artificial, that the Universe is a construct, and the locks were put there to keep us in our place. The old Simulation Argument. But I’m not sure. It could be that they have to be there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Think about it. Imagine that there are many possible universes, with different rules. The Spooky-zoku claim that that’s how it works, that there are bubbles of possibility, that they collide and make Big Bangs. So imagine worlds where causal structures are broken, where spacetime can rewrite itself, where there are no stories, no games. Is that a world where we could exist? Is that a world where messy, silly humans arise and stumble through life and build cities and make mistakes? I don’t think so. That would be too tacky. We could not have evolved in a world where the Planck locks do not exist. They have to be there. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be us.’
Zinda takes Mieli’s hand again.
‘So, let’s say the Kaminari-zoku did it. Let’s say they broke the Planck locks. Let’s say they left behind a zoku jewel. You take it, make a wish, and maybe it accepts you. But your wish can rewrite spacetime, make a new world where everything else except what you wish for is different, create a bubble of false vacuum that wipes out the rest of the Universe. Would you destroy what you have now? Is there anything in the world that you want so badly?’
Mieli says nothing.
‘Don’t worry about the Sobornost, Mieli. They are just another level boss. We can beat anything when we have a clear goal. When they come, all of Supra City will join the war zoku. They won’t know what hit them. You’ll see.’
You haven’t met the All-Defector, Mieli thinks.
‘Have you ever seen it? The jewel, I mean,’ she asks aloud.
‘Me? No. It’s in a safe place. Only the Elders know where.’
Mieli remembers the flash in Barbicane’s qupt. A twisting sheet of light, close but impossibly far.
‘What would you wish for?’ Mieli asks. ‘If it didn’t destroy the Universe, that is?’
‘For the same thing you already owe me,’ Zinda says.
‘What is it?’
‘Something small.’
‘Tell me.’
‘A kiss,’ Zinda says. ‘For starters.’
Her fingers caress Mieli’s neck. Her lips are soft and warm and slick and taste of champagne and peaches. Mieli touches the curve of Zinda’s hip, feels the hot flesh under the flimsy fabric of her dress.
The guilt feels like the q-suit’s spike, between her ribs.
She pushes Zinda away.
‘I can’t,’ she whispers.
‘Why not?’ Zinda says. She looks hurt. ‘I know there was someone, Mieli, the girl the witch had on the mountain. But she is not here now. I think she is just a doll the witch has made, in your head.’
‘No. It’s not that!’ Mieli stands up. ‘You don’t know – you are not even flesh. This is not who you are, it’s an alter. Something you created to handle me. A mask.’
You idiot. This is not how it’s supposed to go. She hugs herself, unable to face the zoku girl.
‘Is that it?’ Zinda says. ‘Mieli, I don’t think you understand us at all. That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. We find ourselves here, together, because we are who we are.’