The Quantum Thief

The ship is in high orbit, and their neutrino link – strictly hidden from the Oubliette’s paranoid technology sniffers – allows barely more than a normal conversation.

Another little frustration of this place, but not nearly as bad as the constant heaviness, and the stubborn refusal of objects to stay in mid-air when she lets go. As ashamed as she is of her Sobornost enhancements, she has come to rely on them.

But secrecy is one of the mission parameters. So she wears the temporary gevulot shell the black-carapaced customs official Quiet in the beanstalk station gave them (no imported nanotech, q-tech, sobortech; no data storage devices capable of storing a baseline mind; no—), keeps her metacortex and q-stone bones and the ghostguns and everything else in camouflage mode, and suffers.

Anything on the public exomemory data yet? she asks. Or our mysterious contact who never showed up?

No, says Perhonen. The gogols are going through it, but there is a lot: no Thibermesnil, no Flambeur lookalikes yet. So I would make our boy work harder for his freedom, if I were you.

Mieli sighs. That’s not what I wanted to hear, she says.

The only good thing so far is the artificial sunlight, from the bright pinpoint in the sky that used to be Phobos. At least I’ll have my Venusian tan back in no time.

‘To hide that Gulliver look of yours,’ the thief says again.

Suddenly, Mieli feels disoriented: an overwhelming sense of déjà vu pulses in her temples. Damn the biot feed, trust the pellegrini to know exactly what would drive me insane. In her koto, back in Oort, she lived in an ice cave with two dozen other people, a hollowed-out comet with living space not much bigger than Perhonen. But it was nothing like this, a constant awareness of another’s thoughts and actions through a quantum umbilical. She filters most of it out, but every now and then, thoughts and sensations tunnel through.

She shakes her head. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Perhonen tells me we are going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. We are going to keep walking until—’

She is talking to empty air. The thief is nowhere to be seen. She takes off the sunglasses and stares at them, looking for some trick, for some augmented reality function that allowed the thief to slip away. But they are just plastic. Perhonen! Where the hell is he?

I don’t know. You are the one with the biot link. She can almost hear the amusement in the ship’s voice.

‘Vittu. Perkele. Saatana. The Dark Man’s balls,’ Mieli swears aloud. ‘He’s going to pay for this.’ A passing couple in Revolutionary white, with a child in tow gives her a strange look. Clumsily, she tries to think at her visitor’s gevulot interface. Private. An odd, stifled sensation tells her that she is now a placeholder to those around her.

Gevulot. Of course. I am an idiot. There is a boundary in her memories, between those which are local and exo. The thief passed her a co-memory of them talking, from seconds before, and her primitive gevulot accepted it. I was talking to a memory.

Mieli’s self-loathing is sudden and sharp. It reminds her of the smartcoral infection she had as a child, sharp spikes growing from her teeth and pressing painfully into the gums. Karhu cured her with a song, but it was impossible not to poke the protrusions with her tongue. She swallows the feeling, and focuses on the biot feed.

It is difficult to work without resorting to the metacortex and revealing it to the sniffers. So she just tries to focus on the part of her mind that is connected to the thief’s. It feels like trying to reconnect with a phantom limb. She closes her eyes and focuses—

‘Lady, have pity,’ says a voice, coarse and ragged. There is a naked man standing in front of her, intimate areas tastefully censored by a grey gevulot blur. His skin is pale, and he has no hair. His eyes are red-rimmed, and he looks like he has been crying. The only object on his body is a Watch, a thick metallic band with a clear crystal disc, dangling from one scrawny arm.