The Causal Angel

15 MIELI AND PROMETHEUS

The thief looks at Mieli. He looks younger than she remembers: his hair is thicker and jet-black, his eyebrows charcoal-dark. But his eyes and his arrogant smile are the same.

‘Dear friend,’ he says. ‘I am Jean le Flambeur. I steal things. Maybe you don’t remember me. I have been away a long time.’

‘Jean?’ she asks, in spite of herself. Her heart pounds. If he made it, maybe Perhonen did, too. She bites her lip. It is too early to give in to false hopes. The sting of Zinda’s betrayal is too fresh in her mind for her to have any confidence in the Universe.

The thief raises his eyebrows. ‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage!’

Of course. It’s just a partial, not a full gogol, just a conversation tree with a few neural states for colour. Mieli wraps her freshly fabbed toga tighter around her, suddenly self-conscious. Barbicane is looking at her thoughtfully. They are in a featureless grey room in the Invisible Realm of the Great Game, and the Elder looks just as out of place as she does. It feels like only the thief belongs there, in his minimalistic white suit, leaning back in the metal chair.

‘Never mind,’ she tells it. ‘Go on.’

‘I freely admit I have a lot of catching up to do, especially when it comes to making the acquaintance of charming ladies. The fault is all mine.’ He leans forward towards Mieli. ‘To make it very clear to the entire System, I am going to demonstrate what I do. A comeback with a splash, if you will, as I already told your colleagues. Any signal boost would be much appreciated – I don’t want anyone to miss it!’

He looks at a large silver watch on his wrist and taps it with a deft forefinger. ‘In approximately fifty-six minutes, baseline time, I am going to steal all the quantum information stored in the F-ring of this planet.’

Mieli looks at Barbicane. ‘What does he mean?’

‘An excellent question!’ the thief-partial says. ‘You will have to ask your friends at the Gringotts-Zoku if you want a full answer to that one. But to put it briefly, no self-respecting zoku member wants to carry all their zoku jewels around all the time – a bit incovenient without Bags of Holding. And in case of wars, accidents and such, you want to keep at least a part of your q-self stashed away somewhere safe, so that if the Reaper visits, you don’t have to start again as the quantum equivalent of a level one kobold.’ He sighs.

Mieli frowns. He doesn’t seem like himself. There is some hidden purpose behind this. But the thief she knows is only the latest chapter in his long life, and flamboyant announcements of upcoming crimes are something that the Jean le Flambeur of times past was well known for.

‘Apparently, one hot jewel banking trend these days is that sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from nature. So if you want really long-term storage, you make your quantum memory look like natural objects. The rings are a good candidate. Introduce some rubidium impurities into the icy bodies there, couple them to the magnetosphere of Saturn, and you have a natural setting for quantum information storage. Hard vacuum, cold temperatures – a bit retro, but much more long-lived than the warm wet synthbio components the routers use. The F-ring has a few petaqubits of zoku data, mostly relating to Supra City infrastructure zokus, as I understand.’

The thief looks at Mieli from behind steepled fingers. ‘I am going to take it all.’ He glances at his watch again. ‘In fifty-six minutes! We’re in a fast-time Realm, I see. Very clever.’ He looks around. ‘Is that why the setting is so pedestrian? Or is it just traditional? Is one of you the bad cop?’ He leans towards Mieli again. ‘Is it you? You are far too beautiful to be the bad cop.’

Mieli narrows her eyes. ‘You have no idea,’ she says.

‘Ooh! Now I’m intrigued! At least it sounds like we have time to get to know each other. And by all means, think as hard as you can. It won’t help you.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Mieli asks.

‘Why does a scorpion sting? It’s in my nature!’ He purses his lips. ‘But yes, I know, property! How pedestrian, Jean!’ He winks at Mieli. ‘Well to be completely honest, this whole thing is a farewell gig. I have decided to retire after this one last job, and this little planet of yours caught my eye – Saturn is the god of old age, after all. And Jean le Flambeur, King of Saturn has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?’

Mieli turns to Barbicane.

‘What are you – we – doing about this?’ She glances at the partial. It is smiling impassively, and giving her a lewd look she does not care for at all. ‘I take it can’t eavesdrop?’

‘No, we are in a sandbox here – nothing gets out.’ Barbicane plays with the coarse red hairs of his sideburns, braiding them with the tiny golden fingers of his manipulator arm.

‘My dear, the problem is not so much the nature of his crime, but certain information we believe he has in his possession. That is the reason we are involved. Please go on, my villainous friend.’

‘Thank you,’ the thief says. ‘You are far more polite than most of the people I have been speaking to. And your sandbox is hardly secure, by the way. Well, if you are a three-year-old child, perhaps—’

‘Please,’ Barbicane says, exasperated.

‘Just pointing out obvious facts! And speaking of obvious, I know what you must be thinking. You are zoku – distributed quantum minds with billions of members! What is to stop you from forming a dedicated detective zoku to apprehend Jean le Flambeur, that mischief-maker, and just throwing enough jewelled sleuths at the problem until you catch me?’

The thief inspects his fingernails. ‘How did it work out for you last time, Barbicane?’

Mieli takes a deep breath. In a way, the purpose radiating from the Great Game jewel and a touch of her old irritation at the thief make her feel clear-headed. Perhaps this is an opportunity, she thinks. If I provide useful information to the Great Game, I can get closer to the Kaminari jewel again.

But it means betraying the thief.

The thought makes her gut wrench. We had our differences, but we fought side by side. This place deserves every misery he can serve them. Is it really even him, or some other copy from the Dilemma Prison?

Or – is he still working for the pellegrini? He must be after the Kaminari jewel. He knows they have it. Then this is a distraction. I can reveal anything that does not compromise the true goal. It might even help him.

How do I get a message to him?

She looks at the partial. It is tapping at the surface of the table now with its fingers in an annoying irregular rhythm.

‘Young lady, you seem thoughtful,’ Barbicane says. ‘It goes without saying that anything you can share with the zoku about your experiences with young le Flambeur here would be much appreciated.’ The zoku Elder’s expression is grim. The jolly gentleman is gone, and only something much harder and older and colder remains.

He lowers his voice. ‘Let us be grown-ups here. We are aware of your background, Mieli. We offered you an opportunity to start again. Your quantum self is all that matters to us. If you feel any misplaced loyalty towards le Flambeur, I suggest you discard it quickly. You have formed your own zoku here already. There are people here who care for you. Do you want him to destroy all that?’

Barbicane hovers up from his chair and floats next to the thief-partial. It looks at him curiously, with uncharacteristic, infinite patience.

‘Let me tell you something about le Flambeur. You may think you know him, but you don’t. He will charm you. He will wear whatever face he needs to get what he wants. I knew him, when I was young and foolish, and he did that to me. But when the time comes, you are just another tool to him, to be used and discarded when you have served your purpose.

‘When he disappeared, I thought his sins had caught up with him, or that he had finally abandoned his profession. He reappeared a few days ago. He came to my old primary zoku, the Gun Club, in disguise, to steal an old ship of his. Making it was one of those youthful follies I regret. Making his escape, he killed one of the younger Gun Club members, a girl called Chekhova, not much older than you. A truedeath: all her jewels were destroyed with her mind. She got in his way.’ He leans closer to the partial. ‘I don’t think you can hear me, le Flambeur,’ he says, ‘but if you can, you are not going to get away with that.‘

He presses his gun arm against the partial’s head. There is a boom and a white flash, and the dull wet thump of falling simulated flesh.

Barbicane takes a deep breath. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I feel a little better now.’ He extends his manipulator arm to Mieli. ‘Shall we go and talk to the rest of the zoku now?’

In the Invisible Realm, fifty-six minutes is a long time. Mieli was expecting something like the battlespace virs of Sobornost, direct sensory awareness of vast and complex systems, a hub of coordination and control. Instead, it resembles nothing as much as a vast board game, played with thoughts; an endless black space, where colourful beads joined by silver string form a labyrinth of threads. She can zoom in to each of them with a thought, receive a qupt of the most recent thought in the chain, contribute her own insights, routed to where they matter the most by quantum coordination algorithms. It feels like being inside a vast song.

She picks a thread at random.

—Purpose. Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, devoted to the meme of crime in the posthuman context. What is his purpose, really? I do not believe this is the real le Flambeur but a work of conceptual art created by an as yet unidentified zoku—

—Conceptual art: our Martian agents have indicated that le Flambeur under the alias of Paul Sernine has a history of conceptual art—

Mieli feels lost in the torrent of thought, tells her gogols and metacortex to condense it as much as possible. The Realm allows her to glimpse the entire history of the zoku’s thought-web at will, and the current threads are thin and frayed compared to the vast, shining tapestries of the past.

She turns her attention back to the thread she was following. I do need to contribute. Barbicane is watching me. She looks for a connection and casts the first thought that comes into her mind into the mix. Other minds seize it immediately and devour it.

—Paul Sernine – in his case, the conceptual artwork was created to conceal stored quantum information—

She feels a pleasant tingle from her Great Game jewel: the contribution is successful, and she is rewarded with a modicum of entanglement.

—Stored quantum information: it would make perfect sense, he would find the Gringotts F-Ring project fascinating—

—F-Ring: Schroederian tech, with the goal of making a long-lived storage mechanism indistinguishable from nature. Possible connections to the Fermi Paradox spam zokus—

The thread branches into involved speculation about the nature of the Fermi Paradox, and if the absence of any visible alien life has anything to do with the thief is attempting to do. Mieli traverses back along the thought-beads, chooses one that actually provides more information about the ring itself.

—The F-Ring: what are the likely physical mechanisms for actually carrying out the theft? The ring has little distributed hardware. The primary retrieval mechanisms are on Pandora and Prometheus—

—Prometheus, Mieli qupts instinctively. Stealer of fire. Prometheus means something to him. Being Prometheus, that sort of thing.

—Prometheus. A thematic connection, a common feature of le Flambeur crimes. The sharp cool joy of more entanglement, like fruit juice on a hot day.

—Put an agent there. Someone who knows him. Me. She attempts to weave her volition to that of the zoku, push at it with all her new-found entanglement. I need to at least try to get a message to him. And find out about Perhonen. A flash of anger comes when she thinks about the last moments on the ship, staring down the thief and the pellegrini both. They are alike. Barbicane was right. They will do whatever is necessary to get what they want. But I need to know what happened.

A flash of insight comes directly from her zoku jewel. A compulsion to be on Prometheus, as soon as possible.

The jewel is pulling her away, filling her mind with the need to allocate her resources to best serve the zoku. She fights it with her metacortex, tries to reach out to the bead game, to find at least a hint of the Kaminari jewel. Sensing her will, the zoku sends her a thread fragment.

Should we reconsider it?

To expose it to an individual’s volition? Never. And the resources required to access it would be prohibitive, especially in the case of invasion.

Resources: a better way required to transfer information between branes. Spooky-zoku has been harvesting dark matter particles entangled with the Planck brane, required for superdense inter-brane communication. The original jewel storage operation exhausted all the resources so far, but a new collection has been assembled at—

A personal qupt comes directly from Barbicane, and she pulls hastily away. The severed thread scatters random thoughts in her mind, like a rubber band, snapping at her painfully. A flash of the sheet of light, far away and close.

Mieli? A word, if you please, the Great Game Elder says.

Barbicane smiles at Mieli, his mouth a waxy line.

‘I noticed what you were doing, my dear,’ he says. ‘I do need to remind you that a decision on the subject of the Kaminari jewel has already been made, and the zoku volition will not allow it to be used. You will see what I mean if you try to pursue that line of thought further.

‘But—’ Mieli starts to protest. Barbicane holds up his manipulator hand.

‘Bear with me, my dear. I was not finished. Perhaps you do not take me seriously. Perhaps you laugh at the body I wear, at the Circles I choose. I do it because I celebrate what I lost. You of all people should understand.

‘I was a soldier, in the Fedorovist War. I believed I was protecting my people, fighting for my comrades. And then the Collapse came. Everything breaking. Chaos. An enemy we could not fight. All because of a tiny quantum effect we could not anticipate. Because we made a thing that was bigger than us.

‘Mieli, I think you know what it feels like when the world you love suddenly lurches and turns into something utterly alien, into something you never knew at all. You of all people should want to prevent that from happening to anyone else.

‘That is where my love of guns comes from, you see. Guns are predictable. Guns make sense. In a gun, you channel the destruction. You aim it. You make it do work. Or you use it as a threat, to maintain balance. With things like the Kaminari jewel, you can’t. To think otherwise is folly.

‘Le Flambeur is the same. When I was younger, I thought he could be aimed and controlled. We used him to attack a Sobornost sunlifter mine. The operation succeeded – but he used the mine for his own purposes. And now his scheme has brought the Sobornost upon us.

‘The Great Game’s purpose is to remove elements of chaos. Today, le Flambeur is one of them, just like the jewel. Do you understand?’

Slowly, Mieli nods.

Barbicane smiles. ‘Capital! In that case, my dear, we both have work to do!’

Prometheus.

The rings are a tilted mirror sea, glinting razor blades with dark gaps between them. Saturn itself is a vast sunrise that fills the sky. A silvery spiral of aurora borealis gleams near its south pole. The interwoven threads of Supra City’s Strips and the larger hexagonal blue-and-white shapes of the Plates are like a harlequin mask on the giant planet’s face.

She clings to the surface of Prometheus. The moon’s twin, Pandora, is a clumpy shape in the distance, nearly motionless, synchronised to the orbit of its brother, its partner in shepherding Saturn’s outermost ring.

Prometheus itself is subtly alive beneath her. On the surface, it looks just like a lifeless moon, elongated in shape, with large craters, barely enough gravity to hold her down. But in the spimescape, Mieli can see the hidden interfaces to the picotech embedded in the moon’s atoms, designed to last for aeons. When Supra City itself is gone, Saturn will survive – and the zoku legacy will be hidden inside it, there for some unimaginable archaeologist to discover in the distant future.

It is not just the moon that is seething with hidden activity. The space around Prometheus is full of metacloaked Great Game and Ganimard-zoku ships. Even though Mieli does not want to admit it, there is something satisfying about how during an operation, the zoku fulfils even her unconscious wishes. She is heavily armed, with an array of q-guns and a rather satisfying replica of a Sobornost multipurpose cannon.

Five minutes left to the thief’s deadline. Even without her enhancements or spimescape, she can see the F-ring itself in greater detail now, a twisting, kinked string of ice and dust.

The wait has been long: she has spent much of it in quicktime, engaged in collaborative planning with Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, mapping out the space of possible trajectories that could intersect with the F-ring. The Great Game agrees that to actually retrieve any quantum information from the rubidium atoms scattered around the ring’s icy objects, the thief will require access to the hardware on Pandora and Prometheus. The Gringotts-zoku is spinning further layers of cryptography around the data retrieval systems. Watching the entire circumference of the ring is difficult, but not impossible. With the resources the zoku has deployed, any attempted theft seems like madness.

Waiting. Always waiting. She allows herself to wonder what Zinda is doing, and regrets it immediately: even a fleeting thought of the zoku girl makes the wound inside her chest bleed something bitter and black. She almost tells her metacortex to extinguish the feeling, but decides against it. She needs to stay sharp, now more than ever. It will be walking on a razor edge: appearing as if she is acting in the best interests of the zoku, making sure the thief is not captured, sending him a message if possible. Damn you, Jean. What are you doing?

Three minutes. Prometheus is swinging closer to the F-ring. Its gravitational field sends a wave through the white weave of ice, makes it twist and dance. After a moment, Pandora follows, right behind its twin, adding its own smooth ripple to the ring’s movement.

One minute.

Perhaps it is a trick. Perhaps the real crime is happening somewhere else.

There is a sudden shiver in the F-ring that is not due to Pandora or Prometheus. Mieli’s systems, linked to the Great Game, find solutions to the inverse problem, look for gravitational sources that could explain the anomaly. That can’t be right. Several huge masses, approaching fast. Seven of them.

Guberniyas. Not now, not yet. He is working with them. This was all just a distraction.

The spimescape goes white with zoku chatter. The ripple in the rings grows into a tear. Mieli’s systems register something impossibly blue-shifted for an instant.

Then a vast knife slices through Saturn’s rings.

There is a wedge-shaped disturbance that plows through the silver bands of F, D, C and B, leaving behind a deformed cut, fraying at the edges, pulling icy bodies behind it. Then, a single flash of light on Saturn’s surface.

The Sobornost just hit a Plate with a kinetic weapon, she thinks. No matter. It’s just another level boss, like Zinda said. All of Supra City will join the war zoku. Already, she can feel a new thread in her q-self, pulling at her will, and she gets ready to flow in the cool stream of the zoku volition, anticipates the heat of battle.

A discontinuity. A flash of a scintillating web, overlaid on the face of Saturn. Then, a sudden emptiness.

It takes her a moment to realise all her zoku jewels are dead, devoid of entanglement. The sudden utter freedom in her head is like falling, naked, from a great height, towards the abyss of Saturn. A great terror rises within her. Is this what Zinda felt like? And she still did it for me?

The spimescape fills with the white noise of non-qupt chatter. All quptlinks are broken. All entangled states in zoku jewels have decohered. All zoku – the Great Game and the Ganimard and the Notch and the Evangelion alike – are in utter disarray, their perfect quantum order dissolving into chaos, like melting ice.

And the Sobornost is coming.

What have they done?

The nova of her anger surprises her. She pushes herself off Prometheus on her suit’s thrusters. The raions and nanomissiles will be coming soon. She launches autonomous q-dots in a sphere around her to form a defensive perimeter. Something drops a metacloak near her and triggers them almost immediately.

A ship. In quicktime, she has a brief flash of its shape, a blue, elongated droplet of smartmatter, like the petal of a flower. She fires her cannon at it.

The newcomer’s EM field grabs her, hard. The 20G acceleration shakes her like a leaf in a hurricane. Prometheus becomes a pinpoint in an instant. What is it doing? Through the acceleration strain, she tries to scan the ship, target something she can hurt with the tiny antimatter payload in her cannon. It is pulling her in.

Wait. Wait. She tries to keep her weapon steady. The EM field pulls her closer. Her gogols are making sense of the ship’s structure now, a strange zoku-Sobornost hybrid, high-end picotech and a micro-singularity somewhere inside. Well, this should at least hurt. She gets ready to fire the antimatter pellet, targets it to burrow into the ship’s core. If the Hawking radiation containment breaks, it will take them both, but the fire in Mieli’s mind wants something to burn.

Just before she presses the mind-trigger, a qupt comes.

Hello, Mieli. There is something familiar about this. Except this time, you were the one in a prison.

She hesitates for an instant. The EM field pulls her in, and the midnight skin of the ship swallows her.