The Quantum Thief

I sit down on a wrought-iron bench on the edge of the agora, just short of the boundary of the public sphere. The Oubliette is a society of perfect privacy, except in the agoras: here, you have to show yourself to the public. The people change their behaviour instinctively as they move from the avenue to the agora: backs straighten, and it is as if everyone walks with exaggerated care, greeting people with curt nods. What happens there is remembered by everybody, accessible to everyone. Places of public discussion and democracy, where you can try to influence the Voice, the Oubliette’s e-democracy system. Also good for the cryptoarchitects: publicly available data, to help shape the evolution of the city—

How do I know all that? I could have gotten all that from the little exomemory that came with the temporary citizenship and the Watch that Mieli bought for us. But I didn’t: I didn’t ’blink – consciously focus on retrieving information from the Oubliette’s collective data bank. That means I must have been an Oubliette citizen, before, at least for some time. That means I had a Watch: and here, having a Watch also means having an exomemory, a repository for your thoughts and dreams, where they keep you as you flip between being a Noble and a Quiet. Maybe that’s what I should be looking for: the Watch of whoever I was here.

I roll the thought around in my head. It seems too simple, somehow, too inelegant, too fragile. Would the old me have done that? Stored secrets in the exomemory of an Oubliette identity? It chills me to realise that I have no idea.

Feeling the need to do something that makes me feel like myself again, I get up and walk the edge of the agora until I find a beautiful girl. She is sitting on another bench next to a public fabber, putting on parkrouller skates with huge round smartwheels she has just printed. She is wearing a white top and shorts. Her bare legs are like sculpted gold, long and perfect.

‘Hi,’ I say, giving her my best smile. ‘I’m looking for the Revolution Library, but they tell me there aren’t any maps. Any chance you could point me in the right direction?’

She wrinkles her tanned nub of a nose at me and disappears, a grey gevulot placeholder popping into being in her place. And then she is gone, the blur in the air, moving down the Avenue.

‘I see you are sightseeing,’ Mieli says.

‘Twenty years ago, she would have smiled back.’

‘This close to an agora? I don’t think so. And you botched the gevulot exchange: you should have made that ridiculous line private. Are you sure you used to live here?’

‘Somebody has been doing their homework.’

‘Yes,’ she says. I’m sure she has: going through virs and sims, sending out little slave-minds to dig up whatever our temporary gevulot allows us to get from public exomemories. ‘It is surprisingly little. If you did live here during the past two decades, you either looked very different, or never visited agoras or public events.’ She holds my gaze. There is a sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘If you somehow forged that memory – if this is an escape attempt, you will find me ready. And you will not like the outcome.’

I sit down on the bench again, looking across the agora. Mieli sits next to me in an uncomfortable-looking position, her back arrow-straight. The gravity must be hurting her, but she’ll be damned before she shows it.

‘It’s not an escape attempt,’ I say. ‘I owe you a debt. And everything is so familiar – this is where we are supposed to be. But I don’t know what the next step is. There is nothing on this Thibermesnil thing, and that’s not surprising; it’s layers and layers of secrets here.’ I grin. ‘I’m sure, somewhere, the old me is enjoying this. Honestly, he might have been too clever for us by half.’

‘The old you,’ she says, ‘got caught.’

‘Touché.’ I squirt some Time from my temporary Watch (a little silver circle on a transparent strap around my wrist; the hair-thin dial moves a millimetre) into the fabber next to the bench. It spits out a pair of dark sunglasses. I hand them to Mieli. ‘Here. Try these.’

‘Why?’

‘To hide that Gulliver look of yours. You don’t do planets well.’

She frowns, but puts them on, slowly. They accentuate her scar.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘my original idea was to keep you in suspension on Perhonen, come here to gather sensory data and feed it into your brain until your memories came out. You are right. I don’t like this place. There is too much noise, too much space, too much everything.’ She leans back on the bench, spreading her arms, lifting her legs up into a lotus position.

‘But their sun is warm.’

That is when I see the barefoot boy, maybe five years old, waving at me from across the agora. And his face is familiar.

You know, when this is over, I’m going to kill him, Mieli tells Perhonen, smiling at the thief.

Without torturing him first? the ship says. You are getting soft.