The Quantum Thief

Then I hear a mocking voice in my head.

Jean le Flambeur, giving up. The Prison broke you. You deserve to go back. No different from the broken warminds and mad Sobornost toys and the forgotten dead. You don’t even remember the exploits, the adventures. You are not him, just a memory that thinks it is—

Hell no. There is always a way out. You are never in a prison unless you think you are. A goddess told me that.

And suddenly, I know exactly what I need to do.

‘Ship.’

There is no answer. Damn it.

‘Ship! I need to talk to Mieli!’ Still nothing.

The cabin is getting hot. I need to move. Outside, Perhonen’s wings are ablaze, like trapped aurora borealis, burning in space around us. The ship has so much acceleration that it actually has gravity now, at least half a g. But the directions are all wrong: below is somewhere towards the rear end of the central chamber. I scramble out of my cabin, grasp the axis handles and start hauling myself towards the pilot’s crèche.

There is a blast of heat and a searing light: an entire segment of the cylinder spins out to the void below. The only thing separating me from the vacuum is a soap-bubble wall of q-dots that flashes into being. But it is too late to cut the infection out. Hot sapphire fragments swirl in the air around me: one leaves a painful bloody brushstroke on my forearm, razor-sharp.

It is hot now, and the sawdust stench is everywhere. The blackness in the walls is spreading: the ship is burning, burning into something else. Heart beating in my chest like there was a Notre Dame hunchback making it ring, I climb upwards.

I can see into the pilot’s crèche through the sapphire: madly swirling utility fog like heat haze in the air, with Mieli suspended inside, eyes closed. I pound the door with my fist. ‘Let me in!’

I don’t know if her brain has been compromised yet. For all I know, she could already be in the Prison. But if not, I need her to get out of this. I try to get leverage from the pole and kick at the door with my heel. But it’s no use – unless either her or the ship tells the smart sapphire to open.

Sapphire. I remember her expression when I woke up with a hard-on. She is reading this body’s biot feed, but must be filtering it out. Unless there is a threshold—

Oh crap. Not hesitating makes it easier. I grab a long, sharp sapphire shard from the air and push the point through my left palm, between the metacarpal bones, as hard as I can. I almost black out. The shard scrapes the bones as it goes in, tearing tendons and veins. The pain is like shaking hands with Satan, red and black and unrelenting. I smell blood: it is pumping out of the wound, all over me and falling down into the void below, slowly, in large misshapen droplets.

It is the first time I feel real pain since the Prison, and there is something glorious about it. I look at the blue shard sticking out of my hand and start laughing, until the pain gets to be too much and I have to scream.

Someone slaps me, hard.

‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’

Mieli is looking at me in the doorway of the pilot’s crèche, eyes wide. Well, at least she felt that. Inert utility foglets swirl around us, grey dust adding to the chaos: it makes me think of falling ash, in a burning city.

‘Trust me,’ I tell her, grinning madly, bleeding. ‘I have a plan.’

‘You have ten seconds.’

‘I can get it out. I can fool it. I know how. I know how it thinks. I was there for a long time.’

‘And why should I trust you?’

I hold up my bleeding hand and pull out the sapphire. There is more blinding pain, and a squelching sound.

‘Because,’ I hiss through gritted teeth, ‘I will rather put this through my eye than go back.’

She holds my eyes for a moment. And then she actually smiles.

‘What do you need?’

‘Root access to this body. I know what it can do. I need computing power, way more than baseline.’

Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘All right. Get that bastard off my ship.’

Then she closes her eyes, and something inside my head goes click.

I am root, and the body is a world-tree, an Yggdrasil. There are diamond machines in its bones, proteomic tech in its cells. And the brain, a true Sobornost raion-scale brain, able to run whole worlds. My own human psyche inside it is less than one page in a library of Babel. A part of me, the smiling part, thinks of escape immediately, using this wonderful machine to launch a part of it into space, to leave my liberators to my jailers. Another part surprises me by saying no.