The Quantum Thief

You capture territory by playing against your neighbours. If, at the end of each round, your score is higher than that of your neighbours, you win, and are rewarded with duplicates of yourself that replace – and erase – the losers around you. I’m not doing very well today – two double defections so far, both with the warmind – and if I don’t turn this around, it’s oblivion for real.

I weigh my options. Two of the squares around mine – left and back – contain copies of the warmind. The one on the right has a woman in it: when I turn to face it, the wall between us vanishes, replaced by the blue line of death.

Her cell is as bare as mine. She is sitting in the middle, hugging her knees, wrapped in a black toga-like garment. I look at her curiously: I haven’t seen her before. She has a deeply tanned skin that makes me think of Oort, an almond Asian face and a compact, powerful body. I smile at her and wave. She ignores me. Apparently, the Prison thinks that counts as mutual cooperation: I feel my point score go up a little, warm like a shot of whisky. The glass wall is back between us. Well, that was easy. But still not enough against the warmind.

‘Hey, loser,’ someone says. ‘She’s not interested. Better options around.’

There is another me in the remaining cell. He is wearing a white tennis shirt, shorts and oversized mirrorshades, lounging in a deck chair by a swimming pool. He has a book in his lap: Le Bouchon de cristal. One of my favorites, too.

‘It got you again,’ he says, not bothering to look up. ‘Again. What is that, three times in a row now? You should know by now that it always goes for tit-for-tat.’

‘I almost got it this time.’

‘That whole false memory of cooperation thing is a good idea,’ he says. ‘Except, you know, it will never work. The warminds have non-standard occipital lobes, non-sequential dorsal stream. You can’t fool it with visual illusions. Too bad the Archons don’t give points for effort.’

I blink.

‘Wait a minute. How do you know that, but I don’t?’

‘Did you think you are the only le Flambeur in here? I’ve been around. Anyway, you need ten more points to beat it, so get over here and let me help you out.’

‘Rub it in, smartass.’ I walk to the blue line, taking my first relieved breath of this round. He gets up as well, pulling his sleek automatic from beneath the book.

I point a forefinger at him. ‘Boom boom,’ I say. ‘I cooperate.’

‘Very funny,’ he says and raises his gun, grinning.

My double reflection in his shades looks small and naked.

‘Hey. Hey. We’re in this together, right?’ And this is me thinking I had a sense of humor.

‘Gamblers and high rollers, isn’t that who we are?’

Something clicks. Compelling smile, elaborate cell, putting me at ease, reminding me of myself but somehow not quite right—

‘Oh fuck.’

Every prison has its rumours and monsters and this place is no different. I heard this one from a zoku renegade I cooperated with for a while: the legend of the anomaly. The All-Defector. The thing that never cooperates and gets away with it. It found a glitch in the system so that it always appears as you. And if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

‘Oh yes,’ says the All-Defector, and pulls the trigger.

At least it’s not the warmind, I think when the bright thunder comes.

And then things stop making sense.

In the dream, Mieli is eating a peach, on Venus. The flesh is sweet and juicy, slightly bitter. It mingles with Sydän’s taste in a delicious way.

‘You bastard’, she says, breathing heavily.

They are in a q-dot bubble fourteen klicks above the Cleopatra Crater, a little pocket of humanity, sweat and sex on a rough precipice of Maxwell Montes. Sulphuric acid winds roar outside. The amber light of the cloud cover filtering through the adamantine pseudomatter shell makes Sydän’s skin run copper. Her palm fits the contours of Mieli’s mons Veneris exactly, resting just above her still moist sex. Soft wings flutter lazily in her belly.

‘What did I do?’

‘Lots of things. Is that what they taught you in the guberniya?’

Sydän smiles her pixie smile, little crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s kind of been a while for me, actually,’ she says.

‘My ass.’

‘What about it? It’s very nice.’

The fingers of Sydän’s free hand trace the silvery lines of the butterfly tattoo on Mieli’s chest.

‘Don’t do that,’ Mieli says. Suddenly, she feels cold.

Sydän pulls her hand away and touches Mieli’s cheek.

‘What’s wrong?’

All the flesh of the fruit is gone, and only the stone remains. She holds it in her mouth before spitting it out, a rough little thing, surface engraved with memory.

‘You are not really here. You’re not real. Just here to keep me sane, in the Prison.’

‘Is it working?’

Mieli pulls her close, kissing her neck, tasting sweat. ‘Not really. I don’t want to leave.’

‘You were always the strong one,’ Sydän says. She caresses Mieli’s hair. ‘It is almost time.’