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The Quantum Thief
The Quantum Thief
The Quantum Thief
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The Quantum Thief

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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The Quantum Thief is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Science Fiction & Fantasy title. One of Library Journal's Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy- from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he's confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turnedsingularity lights the night. What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self-in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur....

Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 10, 2011
ISBN9781429957144
Author

Hannu Rajaniemi

Born and raised in Finland, HANNU RAJANIEMI lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a founding director of a financial consultancy, ThinkTank Maths. He is the holder of several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English. He is the author of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel.

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Reviews for The Quantum Thief

Rating: 3.9875 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Overall, an excellent book. The action is fast-paced, the characters are enjoyable, and the future societies are delightful. It's so refreshing to see a book that posits very different technology, and that technology is actually the foundation of an equally different society, with different ways for individuals to interact. And this isn't wooly science -- I felt like I was in the right mind-frame for this book after having picked up Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos and reading a couple of chapters on the basics of quantum mechanics.

    My only quibbles are relatively minor. Firstly, the pacing was a little too fast; I felt I was still towards the middle of the book at the last page. Another thing is that the characters always felt just a little removed -- there were several emotional arcs that seemed to fade in and out a little, and a couple of emotional payoffs/gut-punches that didn't have the right impact, as they didn't feel earned.

    That being said, I enjoyed the book and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, that was some ride. Far-future weirdness, a great detective story, explosions, and heart. Great characters. I hated to put it down, and can't wait for the next one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wowza. Throughout the first half I kept wondering if I was going to finish the book -- so many weird concepts, so little explanation. And then suddenly the second half became gripping and I raced through to the end. Hannu's unwillingness to explain things is definitely a challenge, right through the epilogue, but in the end worthwhile because I can't get the book out of my head.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    To be consistent with other rankings this should be a 5/5.

    I have just re-read this book, having mostly forgotten what it is about, and really really enjoyed it.

    At the science level, humanity is still confined to the solar system (if one calls the Oort cloud part of the solar system). Some humans are wildly augmented, but most are still DNA based biological forms as nearly as I can tell. Most of the story takes place on Mars. The book is heavy on mathematics and physics: prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, and cryptography all add to the plot.

    At the political level, there are multiple factions, one of which may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of Jupiter. Mars is a reasonably closed world, unwelcoming to foreigners, although there is a colony of zoku, political refugees from inter-planetary war, descended from a colony of gamers.

    At the personal level, Mieli is a native of Oort, extorted into rescuing Jean le Flambeur from prison. Jean himself is a legendary thief and once resident of Mars. To earn his freedom, he has to help Mieli find something that he has hidden from himself, for reasons that he has forgotten. Meanwhile on Mars, Isadore helps the Gentleman solve a murder involving the taste of chocolate. Little do any of them expect to become entangled with each other, and with conspiracies that extend throughout Martian society and possibly even beyond.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was very hard to start but after reading a few reviews I decided to let the stream of unexplained worldbuilding just do its thing and I stopped trying to visualize the story and it came out all right in the end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oh, wow. I normally don't read SF -- I got bored with it about ten years ago and haven't given it a chance since -- but a friend really liked this so I decided to try it. I'm glad I did. It was really interesting, had some plot twists I wasn't expecting, created a very cool universe, and I liked the way the characters were written. I will definitely be reading the rest of the trilogy!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Many science fiction stories are human interest topics set to a relatively familiar background which take little introduction. Hannu Rajaniemi pushes the boundaries out by using terms and concepts which aren't immediately understandable. This to me is a more interesting (and could I say valid?) view of the way our future may develop. This of course made the story difficult to follow at times so it would have been helpful if he had included a glossary to help readers understand the unknown terms he uses. I really enjoyed Quantum Thief and I'm looking forward to reading the next title in the series. The idea of a thief storing his secrets so even he can't find them, the adventures he has on the way, along with an interesting range of different categories of beings and superb concepts makes for great science fiction reading.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is bona-fide weird, although that is not necessarily a bad thing. Existence has lost its physical touch, and a thief is more or less copied and pasted out of prison to sort out the issues of a space colony, but for that, he has first to collect the bits and bobs of his self, which he has squirreled away for his own safety. Interesting, fun, but not for the reality-grounded.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good stuff. You will not understand half of what is happening in the first half and you will think you know more than you actually do towards the end. Still it is a fun ride.
    I will go through the wikipedia and fan articles and then read it again before I start "The fractal prince"

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There is a kind of book that I'm hungry for. And there is a kind of book that appears, in the first chapter, to be the first kind, and then somehow pivots into something completely different. Sherri Tepper's Beauty was one of the latter, and so was Sarah Monette's Mélusine, and so is this.I mean it starts out talking about and re-enacting, cyberpunk-style, the Prisoner's Dilemma! And then the rest of the book is just cyberpunk, with no game theory I could see at all. (Possibly it was involved more subtly? But no: the author took pains to explain the Prisoner's Dilemma for those unfamiliar with it, so it doesn't seem likely he'd expect the reader to just recognise more obscure aspects of game theory without help.)It wasn't unenjoyable cyberpunk (although it was hard for me to follow, not being familiar with the sub-genre, and it's entirely possible it's not technically cyberpunk at all but something else I'm also not familiar with) but it wasn't what I expected or craved at all and that made it a disappointment to me when it may have been perfection for anyone who wanted what it was rather than what the first pages promised.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Don't you hate the “As You Know” trope? They are always so clunky, those paragraphs about ...insert SF tech name here..., they feel like quotes from some bad textbooks. I know I hate them, so I can't join the other reviewers in the whole “you don't understand what's going on for 50% of the book” rant. Then again, I liked “Dive into Python” much more than any other book on any other programming language ever, so...

    “The Quantum Thief” is clever, but not too clever, so there's no point in being afraid of it. As it happens with all references, you'll enjoy the book much more if you get them (and in this case, the references are from cryptography, for example), but you won't die if you don't get every single one.

    The book rushes you through countless action scenes, peppering them with interludes and pieces of ideas. It would be silly to expect deep characters here, and there indeed aren't any, but that's fine.

    I'd say this book is a good entertainment for a few hours and it leaves you with a little something to think about or discuss.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Charles Stross thinks this is better than the stuff he does, I am afraid I disagree.
    It's enjoyable and layered but even after a reread I was still confused about the story...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    he author is Finnish so of course I had to read it, he has also got a Phd in mathematical physics, which shows. I was truly confused by this book at times, but do not get me wrong, it is a well-written book and it shows that it is written by someone who masters the genre. It is wondrous.

    I truly do not know where to begin. It was made up from words, and I was lost at times. I felt like I was trapped in a surreal dream. And still it was one of the best sci-fi books I have read, because of the way he wrote. It is a masterful novel and if he continues to write like he does then he will be remembered.

    Later I found the thing I had been missing on wikipedia, a glossary of all those terms I had no idea about. Yes he sure made up a lot of things and I did not always understand what they were. So an advice would be, check wikipedia. It will help a bit. Rajaniemi knew his world, and better than I did for sure. But if you just go with the flow you will be alright.

    But do not ask me what the book is about, there are twists and turns, Mieli who has kidnapped our thief does not explain what she needs either. So we are thrown into a world and Jean needs to find his memories from before so he can figure things out. And just as he is confused what is going on, so are we. And at the end things starts coming together and secrets are brought out in the open, and I was surprised.

    I also liked that he used a few Finnish words as names, and more. Yes, I truly liked that. Not to mention that it gave me more insight since they had a meaning too.

    Conclusion:
    I have confused you all now haven't I? Just let me say that this is a sci-fi book to read, the world is pieced together masterfully and you get a detective/adventure story all in one. It would make one kicking movie.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I expected to like this more than I did. Maybe it's that I'm not familiar enough with quantum theory to really appreciate aspects of it. I felt somewhat the same way regarding Catherine Asaro's "The Quantum Rose" - the plot is supposed to illustrate the behavior of quantum particles, but to me it just seemed like a fantasy novel.
    Still, I don't think my issues with the book really had to do with the math. I found the continual present tense it's written in distancing.
    It's also an introduction to a very complex world, with tons of interesting and very alien tech, different cultures, even different levels of reality. It has a lot of characters. Introducing all of these smoothly; letting a reader slide into the world without didactic explanations, while still letting the reader know the essentials, is a difficult task - and one that I didn't feel was always successfully executed. I like the lack of overt explanation, but there were moments where I was confused, or just couldn't fully picture what was going on due to lack of information. This also applies to the main character, a man who can't remember significant portions of his memory and past. It can be hard to get to know a character who doesn't even know himself. More in-depth characterization in general would have been good, especially considering that so much of the plot has to do with questions of identity (who are "you" if who you are can be downloaded, edited, transferred...?)
    These things aside, this is still quite a good book, especially for a debut novel. Once I started to get to know the world and its functioning, it got pretty interesting. I assume a sequel is on the way...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After a rocky start (which any good editor would have helped fix) the story finally gained proper legs by 1/3 in when the technobabble gave way to a compelling story and a little more depth to the Thief.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This could have gotten 5 stars from me but it was just too confusing in the end. I'm a sucker for gadgetry and crazy ideas about future societies. This book was full of them. The first chapter completely blew me away but then as it got deeper and deeper I started to get more and more confused. The switching back and forth from first to third person threw me off sometimes and listening to it on audio may have increased that confusion. The other thing was that the narrator is the narrator from the Dune audio books so I kept feeling like I was in the Dune universe (which really isn't a bad thing, just confusing). I would definitely read more from this author but would probably avoid the audio so that I can back up easier if I get confused. Last little note. One of the main characters names (Isadore) sounds very feminine to me (an American) so I thought the character was a woman repeatedly until I finally got used to it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Felt like giving this a re-read. It's very very good! A little hard to follow, and my firm conclusion, on revisiting it, is that the Oubliette (a city on Mars) and its citizens are 100 times more interesting than the titular thief and the larger plot. The way the consensus-reality works is really intriguing from a social media standpoint, "the Quiet" are a great concept (the potentially-immortal citizens must periodically spend a life as mute robots who build, protect, and serve the city), and the little urban details and exotic intrigues are wonderful.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Finished, but felt the author was deliberately trying to make the book difficult to understand, and not for structural/literary reasons, but instead to prove out some kind of world-building ability.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Why in the Nine Hells didn't this book get a Hugo Award nomination? This is a fantastic SF novel! The characters are well written, the world is masterfully crafted, and the ideas inside the book are gloriously presented. I'm definitely going to read the next book in the series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Mind blowingly complicated SF!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a hard book. Not as in it's necessarily 'hard' scifi. It's just unforgiving on the reader.

    I really enjoyed this while I was reading it, but all the way through I felt like I just wasn't getting the hang of it, that more than half of the content and necessary plot was going over my head. I've let it sit for a few weeks and that's only increased. You know that old thing about how you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to someone else? I really didn't understand The Quantum Thief.

    Having said that, I really enjoyed it! And sort of loved the concepts he was playing with. Even if I found the plot incomprehensible at (lots of) times, the world was so vibrant and the story so fast paced that I kept going anyway. The characters were bright and contrasting, the prose was good and overall I've got a good impression of the book even though I couldn't summarise it to save myself. Especially the end, I was doing really well right up until the end!

    Rajaniemi has a good wiki on his website and my partner raced through all three in the course of a few weeks and was able to break down some larger level concepts to help me get the hang of the world and the major players. Things like understanding how the Zoku and the Sobernost work and how they contrast against one another.

    I wonder whether some of my difficulties were with the format I was encountering it through (audiobook) and I'm tempted to either re-read this one or do the rest of the series in paperback rather than audio to see if having it in my hands to flip back and forth through and chew where necessary might help. Note that at no point have I considered not finishing the series - this is not offputtingly hard, it's enticingly hard.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of my favourite thought experiments is to stand slightly back, look at our present-day world, and wonder "How would I explain this to a person from the 16th Century?" Because so much of our lives today would be incomprehensible to even a reasonably well-educated (by the standards of the day) person, I find this an intriguing exercise. And so I looked at the utter weirdness of so much of the setting of 'The Quantum Thief' and I felt like that 16th Century person.Still, that's what I started reading science fiction for, and so I wasn't disappointed. Most of what Rajaniemi puts into the book becomes clear with time; what doesn't come clear is most likely a setup for the next novel in the series. What we have here is a post-human heist caper, mainly set in a mobile city on the surface of Mars. A lot of the city's style and habits seem lifted from 19th Century Paris, but there are elements of Russian folklore and a few nods to the author's own Finnish heritage as well. The story switches between Jean le Flambeur, the thief of the title, and a detective, Isidore Beautrelet, whose stories become interlinked; it moves along at a fair pace, although about three quarters of the way in, a new character was introduced almost out of nowhere and I did stumble slightly. But the pace soon picked up again, and we were led to a spectacular, if slightly confusing, climax. (Well, confusing if you haven't been paying attention, or weren't aware of the meaning of words like 'panopticon' or 'oubliette'...)It's not a book that will be to everyone's taste, but I enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Oh, this book was frustrating.

    It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.

    So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" _do_, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.

    But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    For a book that isn't thick the story is nice and dense. There are ideas in it that are not new but they were used to good effect in the story. The reader is plopped down right in the middle and you have to keep up there is no spoonfeeding any back story to the reader at all and it was a nice change of pace. Straight up SF novel and that was certainly a change of pace for me. Not sure if I will pick up the next one as soon as it comes out or wait until the third one and read them back to back.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Ok read, but much of the tech in the book is explained way to vaguely, and there's 0 to no background as to how things got to be the way they are.

    Bit disappointing
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    With enough new words and cultural references to fill a dictionary this could have been and incomprehensible mish-mash. That it wasn't is a testament to the author.Vividly imagined concepts that take our current obsession with an online presence and how we are perceived to a new level are brilliantly realised by Rajaniemi.Is it a prison if you do not realise you are imprisoned? How would a prison colony, like Australia was, evolve when those imprisoned run the place?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A worldbuilding. Not sure how won over I am by the rest of it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Most books of the distant future are surprisingly unfuturistic. If I'm not fairly disoriented with a story set thousands of years in the future, I'm disappointed. The Ancillary series is a good example of what I mean.The Quantum Thief is the opposite. It's not clear how far in the future it is, but disorientation is the name of the game. The boundary between reality and virtual reality is never clear, after the first chapter, which is clearly in a virtual environment. The various powers at play and their history is complex and never filled out. The downside is that it's hard to know what is and what is not possible. When dire things happen, or threaten to happen, all you can do is wait and see what rabbit is pulled out of what quantum crypto genetic hat. The result is a book worth reading for the experience. It's helpful afterwards to visit the Wiki to get some more bits of the background. But don't expect much in terms of dramatic tension or resolution.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A good book that would have been better if I were smarter. Seriously, I almost understood the ending, but not quite...

Book preview

The Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajaniemi

1

THE THIEF AND THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

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?’

I don’t even know if it can hear me. It has no visible auditory organs, just eyes, human eyes, hundreds of them, in the ends of stalks that radiate from its body like some exotic fruit. It hovers on the other side of the glowing line that separates our cells. The huge silver Colt would look ridiculous in the grip of its twiglike manipulator limbs if it hadn’t already shot me with it fourteen thousand times.

‘Prisons are like airports used to be on Earth. No one wants to be here. No one really lives here. We’re just passing through.’

Today, the Prison’s walls are glass. There is a sun far above, almost like the real one but not quite right, paler. Millions of glass-walled, glass-floored cells stretch to infinity around me. The light filters through the transparent surfaces and makes rainbow colours on the floor. Apart from them, my cell is bare, and so am I: birth-naked, except for the gun. Sometimes, when you win, they let you change the little things. The warmind has been successful. It has zero-g flowers floating in its cell, red and purple and green bulbs growing out of bubbles of water, like cartoon versions of itself. Narcissistic bastard.

‘If we had toilets, the doors would open inwards. Nothing ever changes.’

All right, so I am starting to run out of material.

The warmind raises its weapon slowly. A ripple passes through its eyestalks. I wish it had a face: the stare of its moist forest of orbs is unnerving. Never mind. It’s going to work this time. I tilt the gun upwards slightly, my body language and wrist movement suggesting the motion I would make if I was going to put up my gun. My every muscle screams cooperation. Come on. Fall for it. Honest. This time, we are going to be friends—

A fiery wink: the black pupil of its gun, flashing. My trigger finger jerks. There are two thunderclaps. And a bullet in my head.

You never get used to the feeling of hot metal, entering your skull and exiting through the back of your head. It’s simulated in glorious detail. A burning train through your forehead, a warm spray of blood and brain on your shoulders and back, the sudden chill – and finally, the black, when things stop. The Archons of the Dilemma Prison want you to feel it. It’s educational.

The Prison is all about education. And game theory: the mathematics of rational decision-making. When you are an immortal mind like the Archons, you have time to be obsessed with such things. And it is just like the Sobornost – the upload collective that rules the Inner Solar System – to put them in charge of their prisons.

We play the same game over and over again, in different forms. An archetypal game beloved by economists and mathematicians. Sometimes it’s chicken: we are racers on an endless highway, driving at each other at high speeds, deciding whether or not to turn away at the last minute. Sometimes we are soldiers trapped in trench warfare, facing each other across no-man’s-land. And sometimes they go back to basics and make us prisoners – old-fashioned prisoners, questioned by hard-eyed men – who have to choose between betrayal and the code of silence. Guns are the flavour of today. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.

I snap back to life like a rubber band, blinking. There is a discontinuity in my mind, a rough edge. The Archons change your neural makeup a little bit every time you come back. They claim that eventually Darwin’s whetstone will hone any prisoner into a rehabilitated cooperator.

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.

My score after the last game is an ache in my bones. The warmind and I both defected. Two games to go, in this round. Not enough. Damn it.

You capture territory by playing against your neighbours. If, at the end of each round, your score is higher than that of your neighbours, you win, and are rewarded with duplicates of yourself that replace – and erase – the losers around you. I’m not doing very well today – two double defections so far, both with the warmind – and if I don’t turn this around, it’s oblivion for real.

I weigh my options. Two of the squares around mine – left and back – contain copies of the warmind. The one on the right has a woman in it: when I turn to face it, the wall between us vanishes, replaced by the blue line of death.

Her cell is as bare as mine. She is sitting in the middle, hugging her knees, wrapped in a black toga-like garment. I look at her curiously: I haven’t seen her before. She has a deeply tanned skin that makes me think of Oort, an almond Asian face and a compact, powerful body. I smile at her and wave. She ignores me. Apparently, the Prison thinks that counts as mutual cooperation: I feel my point score go up a little, warm like a shot of whisky. The glass wall is back between us. Well, that was easy. But still not enough against the warmind.

‘Hey, loser,’ someone says. ‘She’s not interested. Better options around.’

There is another me in the remaining cell. He is wearing a white tennis shirt, shorts and oversized mirrorshades, lounging in a deck chair by a swimming pool. He has a book in his lap: Le Bouchon de cristal. One of my favorites, too.

‘It got you again,’ he says, not bothering to look up. ‘Again. What is that, three times in a row now? You should know by now that it always goes for tit-for-tat.’

‘I almost got it this time.’

‘That whole false memory of cooperation thing is a good idea,’ he says. ‘Except, you know, it will never work. The warminds have non-standard occipital lobes, non-sequential dorsal stream. You can’t fool it with visual illusions. Too bad the Archons don’t give points for effort.’

I blink.

‘Wait a minute. How do you know that, but I don’t?’

‘Did you think you are the only le Flambeur in here? I’ve been around. Anyway, you need ten more points to beat it, so get over here and let me help you out.’

‘Rub it in, smartass.’ I walk to the blue line, taking my first relieved breath of this round. He gets up as well, pulling his sleek automatic from beneath the book.

I point a forefinger at him. ‘Boom boom,’ I say. ‘I cooperate.’

‘Very funny,’ he says and raises his gun, grinning.

My double reflection in his shades looks small and naked.

‘Hey. Hey. We’re in this together, right?’ And this is me thinking I had a sense of humor.

‘Gamblers and high rollers, isn’t that who we are?’

Something clicks. Compelling smile, elaborate cell, putting me at ease, reminding me of myself but somehow not quite right—

‘Oh fuck.’

Every prison has its rumours and monsters and this place is no different. I heard this one from a zoku renegade I cooperated with for a while: the legend of the anomaly. The All-Defector. The thing that never cooperates and gets away with it. It found a glitch in the system so that it always appears as you. And if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

‘Oh yes,’ says the All-Defector, and pulls the trigger.

At least it’s not the warmind, I think when the bright thunder comes.

And then things stop making sense.

In the dream, Mieli is eating a peach, on Venus. The flesh is sweet and juicy, slightly bitter. It mingles with Sydän’s taste in a delicious way.

‘You bastard’, she says, breathing heavily.

They are in a q-dot bubble fourteen klicks above the Cleopatra Crater, a little pocket of humanity, sweat and sex on a rough precipice of Maxwell Montes. Sulphuric acid winds roar outside. The amber light of the cloud cover filtering through the adamantine pseudomatter shell makes Sydän’s skin run copper. Her palm fits the contours of Mieli’s mons Veneris exactly, resting just above her still moist sex. Soft wings flutter lazily in her belly.

‘What did I do?’

‘Lots of things. Is that what they taught you in the guberniya?’

Sydän smiles her pixie smile, little crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s kind of been a while for me, actually,’ she says.

‘My ass.’

‘What about it? It’s very nice.’

The fingers of Sydän’s free hand trace the silvery lines of the butterfly tattoo on Mieli’s chest.

‘Don’t do that,’ Mieli says. Suddenly, she feels cold.

Sydän pulls her hand away and touches Mieli’s cheek.

‘What’s wrong?’

All the flesh of the fruit is gone, and only the stone remains. She holds it in her mouth before spitting it out, a rough little thing, surface engraved with memory.

‘You are not really here. You’re not real. Just here to keep me sane, in the Prison.’

‘Is it working?’

Mieli pulls her close, kissing her neck, tasting sweat. ‘Not really. I don’t want to leave.’

‘You were always the strong one,’ Sydän says. She caresses Mieli’s hair. ‘It is almost time.’

Mieli clings onto her, the familiar feel of her body. The jewelled serpent on Sydän’s leg presses hard against her.

Mieli. The pellegrini’s voice in her head is like a cold wind.

‘Just a little while longer—’

Mieli!

The transition is hard and painful, like biting down on the peach-stone, the hard kernel of reality almost cracking her teeth. A prison cell, fake, pale sunlight. A glass wall, and beyond it, two thieves, talking.

The mission. Long months of preparation and execution. Suddenly, she is wide awake, the plan running through her head.

It was a mistake to give you that memory, says the pellegrini in her head. It is almost too late. Now let me out: it is getting cramped in here.

Mieli spits the peach-stone at the glass wall. It shatters like ice.

First, time slows down.

The bullet is an ice-cream headache, burrowing into my skull. I am falling, yet not falling, suspended. The All-Defector is a frozen statue beyond the blue line, still holding his gun.

The glass wall to my right shatters. The shards float around me, glinting in the sun, a galaxy of glass.

The woman from the cell walks up to me briskly. There is a deliberation in her step that makes it look like something she has rehearsed for a long time, like an actor who has received a cue.

She looks at me, up and down. She has short-cropped dark hair, and a scar on her left cheekbone: just a line of black against her deep tan, precise and geometrical. Her eyes are pale green. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ she says. ‘There is something for you to steal.’ She offers me her hand.

The bullet headache intensifies. There are patterns in the glass galaxy around us, almost like a familiar face—

I smile. Of course. It is a dying dream. Some glitch in the system: it’s just taking a while. Broken prison. Toilet doors. Nothing ever changes.

‘No,’ I say.

The dream-woman blinks.

‘I am Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘I steal what I choose, when I choose. And I will leave this place when I choose, not a second before. As a matter of fact, I quite like it here—’ The pain makes the world go white, and I can no longer see. I start laughing.

Somewhere in my dream, someone laughs with me. My Jean, says another voice, so familiar. Oh yes. We’ll take this one.

A hand made from glass brushes my cheek, just as my simulated brain finally decides it is time to die.

Mieli holds the dead thief in her arms: he weighs nothing. The pellegrini is flowing into the Prison from the peach-stone, like a heat ripple. She coalesces into a tall woman in a white dress, diamonds around her neck, hair carefully arranged in auburn waves, young and old at the same time.

That feels better, she says. There is not enough room inside your head. She stretches her arms luxuriously. Now, let’s get you out of here, before my brother’s children notice. I have things to do here.

Mieli feels borrowed strength growing within her, and leaps into the air. They rise up higher and higher, air rushing past, and for a moment she feels like she lived in Grandmother Brihane’s house and had wings again. Soon, the Prison is a grid of tiny squares beneath them. The squares change colour, like pixels, forming infinitely complex patterns of cooperation and defection, like pictures—

Just before Mieli and the thief pass through the sky, the Prison becomes the pellegrini’s smiling face.

Dying is like walking across a

desert, thinking about stealing. The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, watching the robot on the edge of the solar panel fields. The robot looks like a camouflage-coloured crab, a plastic toy: but there are valuable things inside it, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for them. And perhaps, just perhaps Tafalkayt will call him son again if he is like a man of the family—

I never wanted to die in a

prison, a dirty place of concrete and metal and bitter stale smells and beatings. The young man’s split lip aches. He is reading a book about a man who is like a god. A man who can do anything he wants, who steals the secrets of kings and emperors, who laughs at rules, who can change his face, who only has to reach out his hand to take diamonds and women. A man with the name of a flower.

I hate it so much when they catch you.

pull him up from the sand, roughly. The soldier backhands him across his face, and then the others raise their rifles—

not at all as much fun as

stealing from a mind made of diamond. The god of thieves hides inside thinking dust threaded together by quantum entanglements. He tells the diamond mind lies until it believes he is one of its thoughts and lets him in. up—

The people who are many have made worlds that shine and glitter, as if just for him, and he just has to reach out his hand and pick them up

It’s like dying. And getting out is like

a key turning in a lock. The metal bars slide aside. A goddess walks in and tells him he is free.

being born.

The pages of the book turn.

Deep breath. Everything hurts. The scale of things is wrong. I cover my eyes with vast hands. Lightning flashes at the touch. Muscles are a network of steel cables. Mucus in my nose. A hole in my stomach, burning, churning.

Focus. I make the sensory noise into a rock, like those on Argyre Planitia, large and clumsy and smooth. In my mind, I lie down on a fine mesh, pouring through it, crumbling into fine red sand, falling through. The rock cannot follow.

Suddenly it is quiet again. I listen to my pulse. There is something impossibly regular about it: every beat like a tick of a perfect mechanism.

Faint scent of flowers. Air currents tickling the hairs of my forearms, and other places – I am still naked. Weightlessness. The inaudible but palpable presence of smartmatter, all around. And another human being, not far away.

Something tickles my nose. I brush it aside and open my eyes. A white butterfly flutters away, into bright light.

I blink. I’m aboard a ship, an Oortian spidership by the looks of it, in a cylindrical space perhaps ten metres long, five in diameter. The walls are transparent, the dirty hue of comet ice. There are strange tribal sculptures suspended inside them, like runic characters. Spherical bonsai trees and many-angled zero-g furniture float along the central axis of the cylinder. There is starry darkness beyond the walls. And small white butterflies, everywhere.

My rescuer floats nearby. I smile at her.

‘Young lady,’ I say. ‘I believe you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’ My voice sounds distant, but mine. I wonder if they got my face right.

Up close, she looks awfully young, genuinely so: her clear green eyes lack that rejuvenated, seen-it-all look. She wears the same simple garment as in the Prison. She floats in a deceptively comfortable angle, smooth bare legs outstretched, relaxed but ready, like a martial artist. A chain made from multicoloured jewels snakes around her left ankle and up her leg.

‘Congratulations, thief,’ she says. Her voice is low and controlled, but betrays a hint of contempt. ‘You have escaped.’

‘I hope so. For all I know this could be some new Dilemma variation. The Archons have been pretty consistent so far, but you are not paranoid if they really have you imprisoned in a virtual hell.’

Something stirs between my legs and banishes at least some of my doubts.

‘Sorry. It’s been a while,’ I say, studying my erection with detached interest.

‘Evidently,’ she says, frowning. There is an odd expression on her face, a mixture of disgust and arousal: I realise she must be listening to this body’s biot feed, a part of her feeling what I’m feeling. Another jailer, then.

‘Trust me, you are out. It required considerable expense. Of course, there are still several million of you in the Prison, so consider yourself lucky.’

I grab one of the handles of the central axis and move behind a bonsai tree, covering my nudity like Adam. A cloud of butterflies alights from the foliage. The exertion feels strange as well: the muscles of my new body are still waking up.

‘Young lady, I have a name.’ I offer her my hand across the bonsai tree. She takes it, dubiously, and squeezes. I return the grip as hard as I can. Her expression does not change. ‘Jean le Flambeur, at your service. Although you are absolutely right.’ I hold up her ankle chain. It squirms in my cupped hand as if alive, a jewelled serpent. ‘I am a thief.’

Her eyes widen. The scar on her cheek goes black. And suddenly, I’m in hell.

I am a bodiless viewpoint in blackness, unable to form a coherent thought. My mind is trapped in a vice. Something squeezes from all sides, not allowing me to think or remember or feel. It is a thousand times worse than the Prison. It lasts for an eternity.

Then I am back, gasping, stomach heaving, vomiting bile in floating gobbets, but infinitely grateful for every sensation.

‘You will not do that again,’ she says. ‘Your body and mind are on loan, do you understand? Steal what you are told to steal, and you may be allowed to keep them.’ The jewelled chain is back around her ankle. Her cheek muscles twitch.

My Prison-honed instincts tell me to shut up and stop throwing up, but the flower man in me has to speak, and I cannot stop him.

‘It’s too late,’ I gasp.

‘What?’ There is something beautiful about the wrinkle that appears on her smooth forehead, like a brushstroke.

‘I am reformed. You got me out too late. I’m an evolved altruist now, mademoiselle, a being filled with goodwill and neighbourly love. I could not possibly dream of taking part in any sort of criminal activity, even at the behest of my lovely rescuer.’

She stares at me blankly.

‘Very well.’

‘Very well?’

‘If you’re no good for me, I’ll just have to go back for another one. Perhonen, please bubble this one up and throw it out.’

We stare at each other for a moment. I feel stupid. Too long on the train of defection and cooperation. Time to jump off. I’m the first one to look away.

‘Wait,’ I say slowly. ‘Now that you mention it, perhaps I do retain some selfish impulses after all. I can feel them coming back as we speak.’

‘I thought they might,’ she says. ‘You are supposed to be irredeemable, after all.’

‘So, what’s going to happen now?’

‘You’ll find out,’ she says. ‘My name is Mieli. This is Perhonen: she is my ship.’ She makes a sweeping gesture with one hand. ‘As long as you are here, we are your gods.’

‘Kuutar and Ilmatar?’ I ask, naming the Oortian deities.

‘Perhaps. Or the Dark Man, if you prefer.’ She smiles. The thought of the place she put me in before does make her look a little like the Oortian dark god of the void. ‘Perhonen will show you your quarters.’

When the thief is gone, Mieli lies down in the pilot’s crèche. She feels exhausted, even though the biot feed of her body – that has been waiting for her with Perhonen, for months – tells her she is perfectly rested. But the cognitive dissonance is worse.

Was it me who was in the Prison? Or another?

She remembers the long weeks of preparation, days of subjective slowtime in a q-suit, getting ready to commit a crime just so she could be caught by the Archons and enter the Prison: the eternity in her cell, mind wrapped in an old memory. The violent escape, hurled through the sky by the pellegrini, waking up in a new body, shaking and raw.

All because of the thief.

And now there is the quantum umbilical that connects her to the body the pellegrini made for him, a constant dull awareness of his thoughts. It feels like lying next to a stranger, feeling them moving, shifting in their sleep. Trust the Sobornost goddess to make her do something guaranteed to drive her crazy.

He touched Sydän’s jewel. The anger helps, a little. And no, it’s not just because of him, it’s for her as well.

‘I’ve put the thief away,’ says Perhonen. Its warm voice in her head is something that belongs to her at least, not something that was tainted by the Prison. She takes one of its tiny white avatars and cups it in her palm: it flutters, tickling, like a pulse.

‘Feeling amorous?’ asks the ship, jokingly.

‘No,’ says Mieli. ‘I just missed you.’

‘I missed you too,’ says the ship. The butterfly takes flight from her hand, fluttering around her head. ‘It was terrible, waiting for you, all alone.’

‘I know,’ says Mieli. ‘I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, there is a throbbing sensation inside her skull. There is an edge in her mind, like something has been cut and pasted in place. Did I come back the same? She could speak to her Sobornost metacortex, she knows: ask it to find the feeling and wrap it up and put it away. But that’s not what an Oortian warrior would do.

‘You are not well. I should not have let you go,’ Perhonen says. ‘It was not good for you to go there. She should not have made you to do that.’

‘Ssh,’ says Mieli. ‘She’s going to hear.’ But it is too late.

Little ship, says the pellegrini. You should know that I take care of my children, always.

The pellegrini is there, standing above Mieli.

Naughty girl, she says. Not using my gifts properly. Let me see. She sits down next to Mieli gracefully, as if in Earthlike gravity, crossing her legs. Then she touches Mieli’s cheek, her deep brown eyes seeking hers. Her fingers feel warm, apart from the cold line of one of her rings, exactly where Mieli’s scar is. She breathes in her perfume. Something rotates, clockwork gears turning, until they click into place. And suddenly her mind is smooth as silk.

There, is that not better? One day you will understand that our way works. Not worrying about who is who, and realising that they are all you.

The dissonance being gone is like cold water on a burn. The sudden relief is so raw that she almost bursts into tears. But that would not do in front of her. So she merely opens her eyes and waits, ready to obey.

No thank you? says the pellegrini. Very well. She opens her purse and takes out a small white cylinder, putting it in her mouth: one end of it lights up, emitting a foul smell. So tell me: what do you make of my thief?

‘It is not my place to say,’ says Mieli quietly. ‘I live to serve.’

Good answer, if a little boring. Is he not handsome? Come now, be honest. Can you really pine after your little lost amour with somebody like him around?

‘Do we need him? I can do this. Let me serve you, like I’ve served you

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