The quantum thief

1) ”As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. ‘Prisons are always the same, don't you think?’”

2) “‘This certainly does not seem like a lively neighbourhood.’ I indicate the starry field around us. ‘Where are we?’ ‘The Neptunian Trojan belt. Arse-end of nowhere. I waited here for a long time, when she went to get you. "You have a lot to learn about being a criminal. It's all about the waiting. Boredom punctuated by flashes of sheer terror. Sort of like war.’ ‘Oh, war was much better,’ she says excitedly. ‘We were in the Protocol War. I loved it. You get to think so fast. Some of the things we did - we stole a moon, you know. It was amazing. Metis, just before the Spike: Mieli put a strangelet bomb in to push it out of orbit, like fireworks, you would not believe—‘ Suddenly, the ship is silent. I wonder if it realised it has said too much. But no: its attention is focused elsewhere. In the distance, amidst the spiderweb of Perhonen's sails and the spimescape vectors and labels of habitats far away, there is a jewel of bright dots, a six-pointed star. I zoom in in the scape view. Dark ships, jagged and fang-like, a cluster of seven faces sculpted in their prows, the same faces that adorn every Sobornost structure, the Founders: god-kings with a trillion subjects. I used to go drinking with them.”

3) “The King of Mars can see everything, but there are places where he chooses not to look Usually, the spaceport is one of them. But today, he is there in person, to kill an old friend.”

4) “‘It's how we honour our heritage,’ the Eldest says. She has a powerful voice, like a singer. ‘Our zoku is an old one: we can trace our origins back to the pre-Collapse gaming clans.’ She smiles. ‘Some of us remember those times very well. This was just before the uploads took off. you understand. The competition was fierce, and you would take any chance to get an edge over a rival guild. We were among the first who experimented with quantum economic mechanisms for collaboration. In the beginning, it was just two crazy otaku, working in a physics lab, stealing entangled ion trap qubits and plugging them into their gaming platforms, coordinating guild raids and making a killing in the auction houses. It turns out that you can do fun things with entanglement. Games become strange. Like Prisoner's Dilemma with telepathy. Perfect coordination. New game equilibria. We kicked ass and drowned in piles of gold.’”

5) “Mieli claims that her systems need to recharge and that she has some damage to regenerate, so she goes to bed early. Perhonen is quiet as well, dodging the orbital sentinels, no doubt; or hacking into their systems and manufacturing convincing excuses about why they lost her for a moment. So I am as alone as I have been since the escape from the Prison. It feels good: I spend some time simply watching the night view of the city, on my balcony and drinking, single malt this time. Whisky has always tasted like introspection to me, a quiet moment after taking a sip, the lingering aftertaste, inviting you to ponder upon the flavours on your tongue.”

6) “I stand in the robot garden with my old self, weighing the gun in my hand. He is holding it too, or a dream reflection of it. It's strange how it always comes down to two men with guns, real or imaginary. Around us, the slow war of the ancient machines goes on.”

7) “His guberniya virscape is a machine garden, vast and blooming. The seeds he planted during the long Dyson winter when the guberniya slowed itself down to shed its waste heat have blossomed, and now there is variety, variety everywhere His gogols swarm around him like a flock of white-coated birds as he plumbs its depths: plunging a billion pairs of hands into black soil where each particle is a cogwheel that fits together with its neighbours perfectly, to feel the seeds of new composite minds about to bloom. Engineer-Prime himself is everywhere, directing the culling of this memetic tree, watching that flock of genetic algorithms alight into a new parameter space from a branching process. With infinite gentleness he pulls up a freshly bloomed shoot of a newly made gogol, one with a rare disorder that makes it think its body would be made of glass, easily shattered: something he thought lost centuries ago. Combined with an exquisite schizophrenia, it will result in a mind that can divide and recombine itself at will, integrating memories: something Matjek's warminds will love. He splits off a gogol to carry on the mundane details of the work, and returns his attention to the big picture, letting Engineer-Prime shoot upwards to the sky, white lab coat flapping in the fresh breeze. Yes, that patch there will yield a good harvest of Dragon-speakers. In that vast labyrinth, single-minded Pursuers are already gestating: soon they will be ready to explore parameter spaces larger than worlds, mathematical ants, combing the vast Gödel universe for unproven theorems.”