Greg Egan by Quarantine (epub)

Author:Quarantine (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

9

LUI SAYS, “WE CAN USE THIS.”

“Use it? I don’t want to use it, I want to put a stop to it! I want the Canon’s blessing to tell Po-kwai exactly what’s happening. I want to get the whole thing under control.”

He frowns. “Under control, yes, but you mustn’t tell Po-kwai about Laura. Suppose Chen found out that you’d disobeyed her? Where would that leave us? Right now, I’m sure nobody even suspects the existence of the Canon; they have far too much confidence in the loyalty mod. Or far too little respect for it. They don’t seem to have realized just how powerful a combination intelligence and its antithesis could be. You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there’s nothing you can’t derive from it. I like to think of that as a metaphor for our distinctive kind of freedom. Forget Hegelian synthesis; we have pure Orwellian doublethink.”

I look past him irritably, across the crowded lawns of Kowloon Park, to a flower bed shimmering in the heat. I have no one else to turn to, and I don’t seem to be getting through to him.

I say, “Po-kwai deserves to know the truth.”

“Deserves? It’s not a matter of what she deserves, it’s a matter of what the consequences would be. I have the greatest respect and admiration for her, believe me. But do you really want to sacrifice the Canon, just to let her know that she’s been deceived? The sham Ensemble wouldn’t simply impose harsher mods on us, if that’s what you’re thinking; they’d write off their losses—they’d kill us. And what do you think they’d do to her, if she tried to back out now?”

“Then we have to protect her, and protect ourselves. We have to bring the sham Ensemble down.”

Even as I say it, I realize how ludicrous a suggestion it is, but Lui says, “Eventually, yes. But that’s not going to happen on a whim. We need to act from a position of strength. We need to exploit whatever opportunities present themselves.” He pauses—just long enough for my hesitant silence to sound like implicit consent—then adds, “Like this one.”

“Po-kwai is losing control of her mod. I’m going insane. How is that an opportunity?”

He shakes his head. “You’re not ‘going insane.’ Some of your mods are failing, that’s all. Why? P3 is designed to act as a barrier, confining you to certain, useful states of mind—and yet somehow you’re tunneling through that barrier, into states that are supposedly inaccessible: boredom, distraction, emotional agitation. That ought to be highly unlikely—and yet you’re doing it. All the diagnostics tell you that the mod is physically intact. Which means the system itself is undamaged…but the probabilities of the system are being changed. Remind you of anything?”

I shudder. “If you’re saying Po-kwai is manipulating me the way she manipulates the ions…how can she? Okay, she can alter the probabilities of a

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