The Quantum Thief

Isidore takes out his zoku-made magnifying glass – a gift from Pixil, a smooth disc of smartmatter atop a brass handle – and peers at the body through it. Veins and brain tissue and cellular scans flash into being around him, archeology of a dead metabolism floating past like exotic sea creatures. He ’blinks again, at the unfamiliar medical information this time, and winces at the mild headache as the facts entrench themselves in his short-term memory.

‘Some sort of … viral infection,’ he says, frowning. ‘A retro-virus. The glass says there is an anomalous genetic sequence in his brain cells, something from an archeon bacterium. How long before we can talk to him?’ Isidore never looks forward to interrogating resurrected crime victims: their memories are always fragmented, and some are unwilling to overcome the traditional Oubliette obsession with privacy, even to help solve their own murder or a gogol piracy case.

‘Perhaps never,’ the Gentleman says.

‘What?’

‘This was an optogenetic black box upload. Very crude: it must have been agony. It’s an old trick, pre-Collapse. They used to do it with rats. You infect the target with a virus that makes their neurons sensitive to yellow light. Then you stimulate the brain with lasers for hours, capture the firing patterns and train a black box function to emulate them. That’s where those little holes in his skull are from. Optic fibres. Upload tendrils.’ The tzaddik brushes the chocolatier’s thinning hair carefully with a gloved hand: there are tiny black dots in the scalp beneath, a few centimetres apart.

‘Produces enormous amounts of redundant data, but gets around gevulot. And of course completely scrambles his exomemory. Kills him, if you like. This body eventually died of tacyarrhythmia. The Resurrection Men are working on his next one, but there is not much hope. Unless we can find out where the data went.’

‘I see,’ Isidore says. ‘You are right, it is interesting, for a gogol pirate case.’ Isidore can’t suppress a note of distaste in his voice at the word gogol: a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, anathema to anyone from the Oubliette.

Usually, gogol piracy – upload without the victim’s knowledge, stealing their mind – is based on social engineering. The pirates worm their way into the victim’s confidence, chipping away at their gevulot until they have enough to do a brute-force attack on their mind. But this – ‘A Gordian knot approach. Simple and elegant.’

‘Elegant is not the word I would use, my boy.’ There is a trace of anger in the tzaddik’s voice. ‘Would you like to see what happened to him?’

‘See?’

‘I visited him earlier. The Resurrection Men are working on him. It’s not pretty.’

‘Oh.’ Isidore swallows. Death is much less gruesome than what happens after, and thinking about it makes his palms sweat. But if he ever wants to be a tzaddik, he can’t afford to be afraid of the underworld. ‘Of course, if you think it’s useful.’

‘Good.’ The Gentleman passes the co-memory to him, opening both hands. Isidore accepts it, momentarily tickled by the intimacy of the gesture. And suddenly he remembers being in a room with the dark-robed Resurrection Men, in the underground spaces where they restore minds from the exomemory into freshly printed bodies. The remade chocolatier lay in the synthbio vat as if taking a bath. Dr Ferreira touched the still form’s forehead with the ornate brass Decanter. The sudden flash of eye whites, the reverbrating scream, the flailing limbs, the pop of a dislocating jaw—

The leather smell makes Isidore nauseous. ‘That’s … monstrous.’

‘Unfortunately, it is very human,’ the Gentleman says. ‘But there is some hope. If we can find the data, Dr Ferreira thinks they can cut the noise from his exomemory and restore him properly.’

Isidore takes a deep breath. He lets the anger dissolve into the calm pool of mystery.

‘But can you guess why you are here?’

Isidore feels around with his gevulot sense – an Oubliette citizen’s acute awareness of privacy settings in the intelligent matter all around. The factory feels slippery. Trying to reach into exomemory for things that happened here is like trying to clutch air.

‘This was a very private place for him,’ Isidore says. ‘I don’t think he would have shared the gevulot even with his close family.’

Three little synthbio drones come in – large, dextrous spiders, bright green and purple – and adjust levers and dials of the conching machine. The heartbeat sound goes up a notch. One of them stops to examine the Gentleman, spindly limbs brushing its coat. The tzaddik gives it a sharp poke with his cane, and the creature scutters away.

‘Correct,’ the Gentleman says. He takes a step forward, standing so close to Isidore that he can see his own reflection in the tzaddik’s silver oval face, distorted. His curly hair is in disarray, and his cheeks are burning.