The Quantum Thief

Kissing Mieli’s body is like finally kissing that old friend you have always had sexual tension with. Except the kiss is nothing like I imagined: there is a ferocity and strength to it that takes my breath away. And, of course, she is much stronger than I am: I have to turn my head away to come up for air.

‘Who are you?’ I manage, out of breath.

She lets herself fall back onto the couch pillows, laughing like a little girl. Then she spreads her arms along the back and crosses her legs.

‘Your benefactor. Your liberator. Your goddess. Your mother.’ She sees my horrified expression and laughs even louder. ‘I am joking, darling. Although you could call me your spiritual mother. I taught you a lot of things a long time ago.’ She pats the pillow next to her. ‘Now sit down.’

Somewhat gingerly, I obey.

She runs her fingers down my cheek and to my open shirt collar, sending cold waves through me. ‘In fact, we should find out if you still remember them.’ She kisses my neck, hard, nibbling at my skin, and I find it difficult to focus on my rage. I tense.

‘Relax. You like this body, I know you do. And I made sure yours is … receptive.’ She whispers the last words, and her hot breath on my skin turns the anger into something else. ‘When you live a very long time, you become a connoisseur in all things. Especially those you get to sample seldom. Sometime, when this is over, I will show you how to live. These things are so heavy and clumsy: we can do better in the guberniyas. But it’s fun, don’t you think?’ She bites my earlobe, hard, and flinches.

‘Oh, this silly biot feed. Poor Mieli, so paranoid. I am going to turn it off. You are not going to go anywhere, are you?’

‘No,’ I breathe. ‘But we need to talk.’

‘Talk can come after. Don’t you think so too?’

And, God help me, I do.

Bear in mind I don’t understand all of this, Perhonen says. But the mathematics gogols do. This is one of the root nodes of his gevulot tree. To Mieli, the complex data structures look like the incomprehensible visions one has in the alinen. Her viewpoint hovers over an intersection of innumerable lines, connecting in a sphere full of symbols and three-dimensional sections of a brain. The changes took place here, here and here. The objects inside the sphere change colour. Mieli touches the sphere to absorb the information and considers it for a moment.

‘It’s his procedural memory,’ she says. ‘So in a certain situation, it would trigger him to act in a certain way. For example, voting for the Voice.’

Yes. There are other changes too, here and there, but nothing major. Now, the interesting thing is that we can actually trace where the edit came from.

The ship highlights one of the lines connecting to the node they are viewing. There is additional information attached to it as well: complex mathematical formulae. The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root.

‘Except that—’

Except that it looks like all the roots are also generated from another pair. A master key, if you like. Whoever holds those is able to access every exomemory in the Oubliette, and to rewrite them. For people who pass through Quiet, that means their entire mind. That’s where these new edits to Unruh’s mind came from. The cryptarchs must have some sort of automated system that modifies everybody who passes through the Quiet.

‘Mother Ilmatar,’ Mieli breathes. ‘So potentially—’