"The Quantum Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rajaniemi Hannu)2. THE THIEF AND THE ARCHONSMieli’s heart pounds as the pilot’s crèche embraces her. Objects: Scattered Trojan asteroids, clustered around 2006RJ103, a two-hundred k nugget of rock, inhabited by slow-brained synthlife. The Prison, a diamond doughnut thirty lightseconds behind them, the origin of The Archon bladeships, coming in fast at a.5g, much more delta-v than the gentle tug of The Highway, twenty lightseconds away, their next way-point. A constant torrent of ships, one of the few rare ideal invariant surfaces in the N-body Newton’s nightmare of the Solar System, a gravitational artery that lets you travel fast and easy with the gentlest of pushes. A safe haven, too far away. The hidden Sobornost tech beneath the Oortian sapphire coral wakes up. The spidership reconfigures itself. The scattered modules pull themselves together along their tethers and fuse together into a tight, hard cone. The q-dot winglets transform from a perfectly reflective material into a diamond-hard firewall. Just in time, before the Archons’ nanomissiles hit. The first volley is just a series of thistledown impacts that fail to penetrate. But the next batch will adapt and optimise, and so will the ones after that, over and over and over until either the software or the hardware of the firewall collapses. And after that- The engines in her mind prune the game-theoretic branches like diamond-bladed chainsaws. There are many paths through this, like meanings in an Oortian song, and she only needs to find one- Another barrage, innumerable needles of light in the spimescape. And this time, something gets through. One of the storage modules blossoms into a misshapen sapphire growth. Calmly, she ejects it, watches it drift away, still mutating and shifting in slow motion like a malignant tumour, forming strange organs that fire molecule-sized spores at ‘That hurt,’ ‘I’m afraid that this will hurt a lot more.’ She burns all the delta-v in their emergency antimatter in one burst, swinging the ship into the shallow gravity well of 2006RJ103. There is a brief flash in the spimescape, gamma rays and exotic baryons. Then the rocky lump becomes a fountain of light, a lightning flash that does not end. The scape struggles to keep up, turns into white noise and goes down. Flying blind, Mieli spreads It takes a moment for the scape to come back up and to filter out the particle noise and the madness. Mieli holds her breath: but no black fang-like ships emerge from the slowly expanding incandescence behind them. Either they were consumed, or lost track of their target in the subatomic madness. She lifts the autism to let herself feel a moment of triumph. ‘We made it,’ she says. ‘Mieli? I don’t feel so good.’ There is a black stain spreading in the ship’s hull. And in the centre of it, is a tiny black shard, cold and dark. An Archon nanomissile. ‘Get it out.’ The fear and disgust taste like bile after the combat autism, raw and foul. ‘I can’t. I can’t touch it anymore. It tastes like the Prison.’ Mieli shouts a prayer in her head, at the part of her mind that the Sobornost goddess has touched. But the pellegrini does not answer. Around me, the ship is dying. I don’t know what Mieli did, but, judging by the miniature nova that lit in space minutes ago, she is putting up a good fight. But now there is a spiderweb of blackness spreading into the sapphire in the walls. That’s what the Archons do: they inject themselves into you and turn Then I hear a mocking voice in my head. Hell no. There is always a way out. You are never in a prison unless you And suddenly, I know exactly what I need to do. ‘Ship.’ There is no answer. ‘Ship! I need to talk to Mieli!’ Still nothing. The cabin is getting hot. I need to move. Outside, 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. 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. ‘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 ‘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 I am I move through the dying ship, looking for the nanomissile, no longer a clumsy monkey but gliding smoothly in the air under my own power, like a miniature spaceship. With one thought, I reach out and make a local copy of I put it into my mouth, bite down hard and swallow. The Archon is happy. For a moment, there was an imperfection, when it tasted the thief, a sense of dissonance, like there were two Thieves, in one. But things are strange outside the Mother Prison: out here, the games are not pure. The old ugly physics is not perfect like the game of the Archons, perfect in its simplicity, yet capturing all of mathematics in its undecidability. That’s why its task is to turn this matter into another Prison, to increase the purity of the Universe. This is what their Father the Engineer-of-Souls thought them to love. This is the way the world is made right. And this is good matter to turn into a Prison. Its mouth waters in anticipation of the taste of the patterns that the iterated Dilemmas will make. Its copyfather discovered a defector pattern that tastes like pecan ice cream: a replicating strategy family like a flyer in a Game of Life. Perhaps it, too, will find something new here, on this little gameboard of its own. Far far far away, its copybrothers whisper to it through their quptlink, still complaining about the gut-wrenching It looks down upon the grid of cells where the little thieves and butterflies and Oort women live when it finds them in the sweet matter. And soon the Game will begin again, any moment now. It will taste like lemon sherbet, the Archon thinks. ‘Magic,’ I tell her. ‘You know how magic tricks work?’ I am back to my human self again. The memory of the extended senses and computational power is fading, but still feels like a phantom ache of a lost limb. And of course, I have an Archon running inside me now, locked inside my bones, in computational deep freeze. We are sitting in one of the cramped storage modules, spinning on a tether for gravity, while the ship repairs itself. But there is a sparkling river of spaceships all around us, scattered over thousands of cubic kilometres but magnified by ‘It’s quite simple, really – it’s all about neuroscience. Misdirected attention.’ Mieli ignores me. She is setting up a small table between us. There are Oortian dishes on it: odd purple transparent cubes and squirming synthlife and neatly cut sections of multicolored fruits – expertly fabbed – and two small glasses. Her movements in setting it up are formal and composed, ritual-like. Ignoring me, she produces a bottle from a wall compartment. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask her. She looks at me, expressionless. ‘We’re celebrating,’ she says. ‘Well, we should.’ I grin at her. ‘Anyway, it took me a long time to discover that: you can still induce inattentional blindness in Sobornost minds, would you believe? Nothing ever changes. So I swapped its sensory inputs, hooked it up to a sim based on ‘I see.’ She frowns at the bottle, apparently trying to figure out how to open it. The lack of interest she displays in my master plan irritates me. ‘See? It works like this. Look.’ I touch a spoon, grab it gently, make a motion like closing my hand around it, whereas in fact it’s already falling into my lap. Then I hold up both of my hands, opening them. ‘Gone.’ She blinks in astonishment. I close my left fist again. ‘Or, perhaps, transformed.’ I open it, and her ankle ringlet is there, squirming. I hold it out to her, an offering. Her eyes flash, but she reaches out, slowly, and takes it from my hand. ‘You will not touch that,’ she says. ‘Ever again.’ ‘I promise,’ I tell her, meaning it. ‘Professionals from now on. Deal?’ ‘Agreed,’ she says, with an edge to her voice. I take a deep breath. ‘The ship told me what you did. You went to hell to get me out,’ I say. ‘What is it that you want so badly to do that?’ She says nothing, opening the bottle’s seal with a sudden twist. ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘About that offer. I have reconsidered. Whatever it is that you need stolen, I will steal. No matter who you work for. I’ll even do it your way. I owe you that. Call it a debt of honour.’ She pours the wine. The golden liquid is sluggish, so it takes time. When she’s done, I raise my glass. ‘Shall we drink to that?’ Our glasses clink together: toasting in low-g is a skill. We drink. ‘It’s not I stare at her, breathing in Thaddeus’s breath. And with the smell comes a memory, years and years and years of being someone else, being poured into me He – I – hid it. Mind steganography. The Proust effect. Somewhere the Archons would not find it, an associative memory unlocked by smell that you would never come across in a prison where you never eat or drink. ‘I am a genius,’ I tell Mieli. She does not smile, but her eyes narrow, a little. ‘Mars, then,’ she says. ‘The Oubliette.’ I feel a chill. Clearly, I have little privacy in this body, or in my mind. Another panopticon, another prison. But as prisons go, it is a lot better than the last one: a beautiful woman, secrets and a good meal, and a sea of ships carrying us to adventure. I smile. ‘The place of forgetting,’ I say, and raise my glass. ‘To new beginnings.’ Quietly, she drinks with me. Around us, |
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