The Quantum Magician (The Quantum Evolution, #1)

by Derek Künsken

BELISARIUS HAD THREE days to back out. He didn’t have the first clue as to how to move a fleet of warships across the Puppet Axis. It actually sounded like a great way to get killed, but he needed something complicated. His restless brain gnawed on all sorts of problems he didn’t want it touching whenever he didn’t give it enough to do. So he crossed the Puppet wormhole on one of their commercial transports and stepped off at Port Stubbs, three hundred and twenty light years from the Puppet Free City. He hadn’t brought much equipment, just a dozen sets of entangled particles stored in the buttons on his suit.

The Homo quantus project was born when it was discovered that consciousness was the element that collapsed quantum systems into clear outcomes.

Consciousness turned probability into reality. The goal of the Homo quantus project had been to engineer humans capable of discarding their consciousness and subjectivity so as not to collapse quantum phenomena.

The Anglo-Spanish Banks had been experimenting with the genetic improvement of humanity for centuries. The Homo quantus were their crowning achievement, a magnum opus of biological engineering and neural manipulation, although Belisarius felt the achievement was built more of irony than of anything truly useful. In fact, Belisarius doubted the Banks had ever gotten a single economic or military benefit from the Homo quantus project. Instead of humans who could predict economic outcomes or see novel military strategies, the very nature of quantum perceptions created a species inclined to contemplating abstract interacting probabilities. The Homo quantus plumbed the nature of reality, but became mired in arcane ideas rather than concluding anything of immediate benefit to humanity.

“I’ve found out how to move past my instincts, as all rational beings must.”

She approached, stretching her arms. “You’ve assembled a bunch of outcasts to commit a crime. I don’t belong here.” “Maybe you don’t. This is just an interlude. A necessary price to pay for experimental results.” “I can’t fit in my head that we were in the Garret, and now we’re here,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m part of a confidence scheme.”

Civilization was swimming in information, drowning in it really. What separated intelligence from information was assessment. Information had to be interrogated for source, currency, reliability, and the possibility that it was in fact, counter-intelligence. If information survived the interrogation, it could then be situated in the context of other intelligence and meaningful conclusions drawn.

“No, I’m not a thrill addict,” he whispered, “but I’m the equivalent to a fugue addict. I’m driven to commit psychological suicide over and over until I don’t come back, all to analyze more and more data. I found out twelve years ago that confidence schemes are complex enough to tie up my brain, to keep it stimulated. And because there’s nothing mathematical or geometric in a con, the urge to drop into the fugue falls away. This is keeping me alive, and I very much want to stay alive.”