The Quantum Thief

‘The co-memory you left with your note was crap,’ she says. ‘It took me a while to figure out you wanted to meet here.’

‘I thought you were interested in detecting. But then, first impressions can be deceiving.’

‘If this is about my father again,’ Élodie says, ‘I’m just going to leave. I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend.’

‘I’m sure you are. But it’s not about your father, it’s about you.’ He wraps his words in gevulot so tight that only the two of them will hear them, or will ever remember them being spoken. ‘What I’m wondering about is if it really was that easy for you.’

‘What?’

‘Not thinking about consequences. Giving your father’s private gevulot keys to a stranger.’

She says nothing, but she is staring at him now, every muscle tense.

‘What did they promise you? Going to the stars? A paradise, all for you, like a Kingdom princess, only better? It doesn’t work that way, you know.’

Élodie takes a step towards him, spreading her hands slowly. Isidore rocks back and forth on his chair.

‘So the keys did not work. And Sebastian – vasilev boyfriend, one of them – was not happy. He does not really care about you, by the way: it is just someone else’s emotion they put in him, a mashup.

‘But it seemed real enough. He got angry. Maybe he threatened to leave you. You wanted to please him. And you knew that your father had a place with gevulot, where one could do things undisturbed. Maybe he came with you to do it.

‘I have to say you were very clever. The chocolate tasted subtly wrong. He is in the dress, isn’t he? His mind. You used the fabber to put it there. They had just finished the original: you melted it and made a copy. The drones delivered it to the shop.

‘All that data, encoded in chocolate crystals, ready to be bought and shipped away to the Sobornost, no questions asked, not like trying to set up a pirate radio to transmit it, a mind all wrapped up in a nice chocolate shell, like an Easter egg.’

Élodie stares at him, blank-faced.

‘What I don’t understand is how you could bring yourself to do it,’ he says.

‘It didn’t matter,’ she hisses. ‘He didn’t make a sound. There was no pain. He wasn’t even dead when I left. No one lost anything. They will bring him back. They bring us all back. And then they make us Quiet.

‘It’s unfair. We didn’t fuck up their fucking Kingdom. We didn’t make the phoboi. It’s not our fault. We should live forever properly, like they do. We should have the right.’

Élodie opens her fingers, slowly. Hair-thin rainbows of nanofilament shoot out from underneath her fingernails, stretching out like a fan of cobras.

‘Ah,’ says Isidore. ‘Upload tendrils. I was wondering where those were.’

Élodie walks towards him in odd, jerky steps. The tips of the tendrils glow. For the first time, it occurs to Isidore that he might indeed be very late for the party.

‘You should not have done this in a private place,’ she says. ‘You should have brought your tzaddik. Seb’s friends will pay for you as well. Maybe even more than for him.’

The upload filaments snap forward, whips of light, towards his face. There are ten pinpricks in his skull, and then an odd dullness. He loses control of his limbs, finds himself getting up from the chair, muscles responding involuntarily. Élodie stands in front of him, arms outspread, like a puppeteer.

‘Is that what he said? That it wouldn’t matter? That they would fix your father no matter what?’ His words come out in a stutter. ‘Have a look.’

Isidore opens his gevulot to her, giving her the co-memory from the underworld, the chocolatier screaming and fighting and dying again and again in the room below the ground.

She stares at him, open-eyed. The tendrils drop. Isidore’s knees give way. The concrete floor is hard.

‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘He never—’ She stares at her hands. ‘What did I—’ Her fingers clench into claws, and the tendrils follow, flashing towards her head, vanishing into her hair. She falls to the ground, limbs spasming. He does not want to watch, but he has no strength to move, not even to close his eyes.

‘That was one of the most spectacular displays of stupidity I have ever seen,’ says the Gentleman.

Isidore smiles weakly. The medfoam working on his head feels like wearing a helmet made of ice. He is lying on a stretcher, outside the factory. Dark-robed Resurrection Men and sleek underworld biodrones move past them. ‘I’ve never aimed for mediocrity,’ he says. ‘Did you get the vasilev?’

‘Of course. The boy, Sebastian. He came and tried to buy the dress, claimed it was going to be a surprise for Élodie, to cheer her up. Self-destructed upon capture, like they all do, spewing Fedorovist propaganda. Almost got me with a weaponised meme. His gevulot network will take some rooting out: I don’t think Élodie was the only one.’

‘How is she doing?’

‘The Resurrection Men are good. They will fix her, if they can. And then it will be early Quiet for her, I suspect, depending on what the Voice says. But giving her that memory – it was not a good thing to do. It hurt her.’