The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

by Hannu Rajaniemi

If they shoot and I don’t, I’m screwed. If we both shoot, it hurts a little. If we cooperate, it’s Christmas for both of us. Except that there is always an incentive to pull the trigger. The theory is that as we meet again and again, cooperative behaviour will emerge. A few million rounds more and I’ll be a Boy Scout. Right.

Lol humanity

For a moment, there was an imperfection, when it tasted the thief, a sense of dissonance, like there were two Thieves, in one.

The old ugly physics is not perfect like the game of the Archons, perfect in its simplicity, yet capturing all of mathematics in its undecidability.

Actually true in that some cellular automata are turing complete

And this is good matter to turn into a Prison. Its mouth waters in anticipation of the taste of the patterns that the iterated Dilemmas will make. Its copyfather discovered a defector pattern that tastes like pecan ice cream: a replicating strategy family like a flyer in a Game of Life. Perhaps it, too, will find something new here, on this little gameboard of its own.

I feel a chill. Clearly, I have little privacy in this body, or in my mind. Another panopticon, another prison. But as prisons go, it is a lot better than the last one: a beautiful woman, secrets and a good meal, and a sea of ships carrying us to adventure.

Isidore can’t suppress a note of distaste in his voice at the word gogol: a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, anathema to anyone from the Oubliette.

‘If I could only beg you to share a few worthless seconds, insignificant slivers of your time, I would reveal all my secrets to you. I was a Count in the King’s Court, no less, a Noble, not as you see me now, but with a robotic castle of my own and a million gogols to do my bidding. And in the Revolution, I fought in the troops of the Duke of Tharsis. You should see the true Mars, the old Mars, I will give you all that for only a few seconds—’ Tears are streaming down the long, pale face now. ‘I have only dekaseconds, have pity—

Cool metaphor

with an army of beggars.

Like Jack from The Baroque Cycle

‘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.’

No one ever returned from the Doctor’s tent. In the evening Xuexue would set up the superdense datalink to the company satellite, sending up the petabytes harvested from young brains, fresh gogols to spin code in the cloud software farms.

Like Terra Ignota SetSets

‘It’s a Watch. A device that stores Time as quantum cash – unforgeable, uncopyable quantum states that have finite lifetimes, counterfeit-proof, measures the time an Oubliette citizen is allowed in a baseline human body.

Crypto

‘All right. But first, tell me: why religion?’ Paul asks. Isaac laughs. ‘Why alcohol? Once you try it, it’s hard to give it up.’ He opens his flask and takes a swig. The vodka burns on his tongue. ‘Besides, this is the faith of champions, my friend: a thousand arbitrary rules you just have to accept, all completely irrational. None of this baby stuff about being saved if you just believe. You should try it sometime.’

‘Be a man,’ he says. ‘You’re bigger than the toys. We are always bigger than the things we make. Put them away. Make something new with your life, with your own mind and hands.’

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.

‘Also, finiteness gives everything such an edge, don’t you think? I think that’s what our founding fathers and mothers had in mind. Experiencing that is all I wanted.

‘You know,’ Isidore says, ‘I think I’m going to call you Sherlock.’

‘I lost my faith in the past. Something is wrong with it. Something is wrong with what we know. That is why I didn’t want you to study the texts in the library. I would not wish this feeling on anyone. Perhaps the old philosophers were right, and we are living in a simulation, playthings of some transhuman gods; perhaps the Sobornost has already won, Fedorov’s dreams are true and we are merely memories. ‘And if you can’t trust history, what should you care of the present? I don’t want any of it anymore. Merely Quiet.’

‘I know the feeling.’ And, to my surprise, I do. It is tempting to stay here, to do something on a human scale, to build something. That must be what he felt when he came here. Or maybe that’s how she made him feel. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not curious, of course,’ she says. ‘Maybe you could show me what it’s like, where you come from.’

The odd thing is that all that feels less real than sitting in the sun with her, pretending to be human and small.

?

‘We believe in what the Revolution stood for. A human Mars. A place where everyone owns their own minds, a place where we belong to ourselves. And that is not possible when someone behind the curtain is pulling our strings.’

‘It’s not worth it,’ Marcel says. ‘There are giants out there. We do not matter. Someone can step on us without noticing. There is no point in making pretty pictures. It’s all been done, anyway. We are ants. The only thing that matters is looking after each other.’

Some Time was stolen, and returned, with two separate copies of Unruh’s mind – which, of course, are completely useless without his gevulot keys to decrypt them. And how was the Time stolen in the first place?

Gevulot was how they could get away with altering minds and history

But the bottom line is, the Oubliette is not a place of forgetting. It’s not a privacy heaven. It’s a panopticon.

He is not worth it, she thinks. He is a thief, a liar. But he made me sing again. Even if it was a trick.

‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘it only takes a few moments to make you a different person. Sometimes it takes centuries.’

combing the vast Gödel universe for unproven theorems.