‘Well, that would have been useful to know. You know, before I spent several months and lost friends trying to steal your calling card.’
He waves a hand at me. ‘Calm down, calm down. I could not tell you anything before you got rid of Joséphine. You are here now, that’s all that matters.’
‘So, what about the real jewel? I take it that the Great Game has it?’
‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ he says.
‘After trying my luck with Chen, I went after the real thing. And yes, the Great Game have it, unless they have done something spectacularly stupid recently. I’ll spare you the details. I found it. I just had to stretch out my hand and take it. Except—’ His eyes are far away.
‘Except what?’
‘It didn’t accept me.’ He removes his gloves, closes his eyes and squeezes the bridge of his nose. ‘It was frustrating. To hold a piece of thinking spacetime in your hands, and then it—’
He makes a small sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. Then he shakes his head.
‘Anyway. Doesn’t matter. But the Kaminari really did it. They figured out what caused the Collapse. A hidden nonlinearity in quantum mechanics itself that manifests when your entangled states get large enough. In the case of the Collapse, it was quite literally a global wavefunction collapse, a sudden decoherence of the whole system into a definite state.’
‘A decoherence that we caused,’ I point out. ‘How? And why?’
‘Oh yes, you were curious about that,’ the other me says eagerly. ‘One of my functions is to provide you with information. Here is some recent work by our esteemed collaborator, Professor Zhu Wei.’ He pulls a pile of papers from his pocket and places them on the table. The heading on the sheet on top says THE BREAKDOWN OF LINEARITY IN LARGE-SCALE ENTANGLEMENT DISTILLATION FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM COORDINATION. I pick them up carefully. ‘You may not want to look too carefully into how we obtained this,’ the partial says. ‘The same goes for the why.
‘In any case, the Kaminari used the same nonlinearity in a different way: to crack the Planck locks. They formed a huge, System-wide temporary zoku to do it, like the old story of all the guilds fighting the Sleeper together. The Great Game tried to intervene, but they only managed to cause some pyrotechnics. The Kaminari went God knows where and left behind one entanglement jewel. It works like the rest of them do: you tell it what you want and it asks the zoku.’ He sighs.
‘Except it doesn’t give you what you want. I think the damn thing actually computes the Universe’s coherent extrapolated volition. Trust a zoku to take a bizarre concept like that, and make it reality. I’ll give what you would want if you were wiser and stronger and smarter and better? Oh, and by the way, it has to be in the interests of the entire Universe. In other words, what you would want if you weren’t you anymore.’
I close my eyes. Domino pieces are falling into place in my head, tracing a shape in a cascade of clicks, and I don’t like the way it looks.
‘So you decided to become someone else.’
‘Yes. You.’
He gets up. ‘You know, I can’t do this without a drink. It’s like Isaac said: it’s not the chemicals, it’s the meme. Besides, I’m hoping we’ll have a few things to drink to, before we are done. Whisky?’ He produces two small glasses and a gentleman’s flask from his pocket, puts them on the table and pours. ‘There is a zoku called the Society: they get pretty obsessive about these things. They simulated an entire parallel biosphere to produce this.’ He smells one of the glasses. ‘Fortunately for us, they are better at distilling their whisky than at guarding it. It’s unique, of course. Quantum information, no-clone theorem, all that.’
I pick mine up and smell it: smoky, vanilla, and something deceptively candy-flavoured.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Well, I do think it’s rather interesting to drink a substance that combines flavours that never even existed on Earth, that don’t even have names, that you need a billion-year atomiclevel quantum simulation to even conceive.’
‘That’s not what I mean. Why change?’
He spreads his arms and smiles, sadly.
‘I was tired. I had been tired for a long time. Worn thin. Too many names, too many crimes. Some of them started to weigh down a bit.’
‘It was about Joséphine, wasn’t it? It was always about her.’
He ignores me, sips his drink and closes his eyes. ‘Vanilla. Tar. A hint of rosemary. Something a bit like a superposition of chocolate and charcoal. Something I don’t have a name for, but I imagine it’s a bit like liquid love. And, of course, a hint of guilt.’ He tosses the contents of the glass back, sighs and pours more. ‘You know, I didn’t think it would be such an emotional moment, but it is. To see you here, finally. I mean, it has only been an eyeblink for me, but still. To feel hope again. To know one’s death meant something.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What has dying always meant for us? Getting caught. I pretended to go after Chen again, just clumsily enough that he would catch me. And I made sure Joséphine would have reasons to get me out, gave her a template of myself to find from the billion variations in the Prison.’
I bow my head and squeeze my head between my fists.
‘You went to the Prison on purpose? Are you insane? Do you have any idea what it was like?’
He shakes his head. ‘Only in theory, I’m afraid. That was the point. But I’m hoping it will have been worth it for you.’ I throw my glass against the wall. It shatters, and the amber liquid pours down the crystal surface.
‘What do you mean, you bastard? Nothing is worth it!’
He looks at the shards and shakes his head. A second later, the tiny fragments rise to the air, a tiny galaxy of crystal, and reassemble themselves back into the glass in my hand. Only the whisky is gone. ‘The Gallery tries to keep things the way they are, so your temper tantrums will have little effect, I’m afraid. Except for the waste of a good drink. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.’
I roll my eyes. ‘So are you telling me that you went to the Dilemma Prison to become a better person?’
‘No, just different. But there are things we were never very good at. Altruism, compassion, cooperation. Or regret. I bet you’ve regretted past mistakes, tried to make up for them.’
‘But I haven’t—’
‘It doesn’t matter, as long as you tried. The template I gave Joséphine wasn’t me, precisely. Evolutionary algorithms are still one of the best ways to create new things. If you are here, if the book let you in, you are the best approximation of me – as far as I can tell – that the jewel might actually accept.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘There is one more job to do, Jean. A theft to end all thefts. Show them all. Steal the fire of the gods when it’s right under their noses. I will tell you how. And then – change things. The Sobornost clings to immortality that turns souls into cogs in a machine. The zoku get lost in silly games and Realms that lead nowhere. Chen always had a point. We don’t have to accept the way things are. We don’t have to do the same things, over and over and over.’ He smiles. ‘And don’t you just hate all those damn locks? Some bastard, a long time ago, made this Universe into a prison. I would imagine that you, of all people, would have a problem with that. What do you say?’
I sit down. I look at him, like looking into a mirror, only not. It burns in him, the sheer wanting, the fierce hunger of the boy in the desert. I can feel it on my face, too.