The Quantum Garden Read online

  THE QUANTUM

  GARDEN

  Derek Künsken

  First published 2019 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-231-9

  Copyright © 2019 Derek Künsken

  Cover art by Justin Adams

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CAPITAINE ARSENAULT’S FACE was cool in the infrared, unperturbed. On the younger side of forty, with braided blond hair, she stood inscrutable on magnetic soles in the zero-g. She fingered the ridges of artfully symmetric acid scars on her cheeks as she considered the tactical display. As much as the Scarecrow could like anyone, he liked Arsenault. She had the controlled passions and equanimity to command a Congregate warship.

  Les Rapides de Lachine was her command and the Scarecrow waited on her now. He’d given Arsenault the intelligence he was willing to share. While his recommendation was founded, it in no way obligated the naval arm of the Venusian Congregate.

  Majeur Demers, Les Rapides de Lachine’s political officer, eschewed magnetic soles and floated with still grace in the middle of the bridge. The Scarecrow hated political officers, political commissars, envoys, advisers and ambassadors. Too slippery by half, they slithered among the factions of the Congregate Presidium, cluttering clean military and intelligence choices with spongy thinking.

  “A clear signal must be sent,” Demers said. A fashionable Venusian lilt colored the precision of her français 8.1. “The Congregate protested the Plutocracy’s bioengineering of the Homo eridanus. The Congregate demarched the Plutocracy when the Homo pupa were bioengineered. Now the Banks have engineered the Homo quantus and one of our own client nations is in rebellion, aided by the Homo quantus, probably aided by elements of the Homo eridanus.”

  The Scarecrow’s neck swiveled with the flexing of artificial, piezoelectric muscles and he creaked forward, imposing his weight on the conversation again. If he didn’t, the political officer would drown them all in words.

  “We hold prisoners and many records,” the Scarecrow said, “but the intelligence teams need weeks, perhaps months to scour the Homo quantus nest deeply enough to be sure we leave nothing of value in the Garret.”

  Majeur Demers crossed her arms. “We can’t leave warships over the Garret to protect you from Bank ships, Scarecrow. And waiting tells our rivals we thieve from a position of weakness rather than punish from a position of strength.”

  Capitaine Arsenault studiously ignored them, long enough that he and Demers quieted.

  “I understand the political and intelligence concerns,” Arsenault said, “but the Congregate does not stand or fall on politics and intelligence. Politically, a client nation is in open rebellion. Militarily, the dreadnought Parizeau was destroyed and we’re certain the Homo quantus had a role. Military setbacks never go unavenged.”

  Demers smiled. Arsenault’s choice was not timid. Although the situation had not swung his way, the Scarecrow sympathized with the capitaine’s view. The Congregate thrived because its enemies feared its strength. The choice here today, Arsenault’s choice, might precipitate a war with the Banks of the Plutocracy, and although they had not yet finished mopping up the rebellion of the Sub-Saharan Union, they acted from a position of strength.

  “Feu,” Arsenault said to her bridge officers.

  Les Rapides de Lachine was too massive for humans to feel the launch vibrations of even a missile as large as a casse à face, but not so the Scarecrow. The fibrous webs of variably conductive carbon making up the Scarecrow’s muscles and nerves sensed the vibrations through tiny deviations in resistance and potential.

  The holographic display showed the casse à face gaining speed, lancing at a massive asteroid looming on one side of the display. The image expanded quickly. The surface detail sharpened. Small features of the rock and ice regolith resolved, and then even patterns of decorative lights near a small port.

  The explosion bleached the display. Chunks of asteroid hundreds of meters wide tumbled into space. Webs of fracture lines shot through the surface, erupting with super-heated plasma and dust. A fast-expanding cloud of debris bloomed into nothing, along with any chance of gathering more information from the Homo quantus habitat.

  The home of the Homo quantus had been a spherical asteroid six hundred kilometers in diameter. Now a crater fifty kilometers deep was burned in its side, the center of the kilometer-deep fracture lines grasping all the way to the other face of the asteroid.

  “Bon,” the Scarecrow said. “I will get my information through interrogation.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BELISARIUS AND CASSIE had finally decided to call the inflaton racer The Calculated Risk. They’d had a lot of choices, but felt this best described the last three months of their lives. The act of Saint Matthew’s automata painting the name onto the bow gave them a tiny sense of belonging.The ship had been partial payment for moving a small fleet of Sub-Saharan Union warships across the Puppet wormhole, and the last three weeks hadn’t been long enough to feel like it really belonged to them.

  The Calculated Risk wasn’t spacious. A hollow tube fifty-three meters long and three meters in diameter constituted the drive section. Other systems and spaces wrapped around the outside of the cylinder: the habitable areas, control and power networks, life support and information processing. The ‘living’ area shrank to a meter tall in many places, but expanded to as much as two in the cockpit and galley. A larger cargo area lay astern.

  The inside of The Calculated Risk was not inviting, nor even comfortable, and he and Cassie had done nothing to make it any better. They had data and they wanted to begin modeling hypotheses. But the original mainframe of The Calculated Risk was entirely inadequate to the processing needs of a pair of Homo quantus. So they rebuilt it.

  The new computer operated orders of magnitude faster than anything the Union had ever possessed, with multi-dimensional, geometry-heavy holographic interfaces suited to the way Homo quantus thought. Over the last two months, they’d both made an enormous amount of measurements and experiments on the Puppet Axis and the joined wormholes they’d stolen from the Union. The data they held now obliged them to reassess most of the known wormhole theories. Whole families of theories would have to be discarded or promoted, and vast series of mathematical symmetries needed new proofs. They couldn’t wait.

  They’d been jacked into their joint virtual workspace for a few hours through implants and wires. From within induced savant states that gave them prodigious mathematical abilities, they delighted in writing and rewriting the arrays of geometric structures containing each others’ ideas. Their thoughts and ideas dove through the holographic space like dolphins leaping through waves. But a persistent voice interrupted their geometric thoughts.

  “The telescopes are detecting a ship in high orbit of the Garret,” Saint Matthew repeated.

  The delusional artificial intelligence, stored in a service wristband, was plugged into the cockpit controls. A holographic head floated above the band, showing a stolid, white-bearded face patterned after the brush strokes of oil paints in
Caravaggio’s Inspiration of Saint Matthew. That the AI believed himself the literal reincarnation of the Apostle Saint Matthew didn’t bother Belisarius much, although his religiosity did make it harder for him to get his help in confidence schemes. It didn’t matter anymore. No more confidence schemes. He had wealth for a dozen lifetimes and a way to study the cosmos.

  Belisarius reluctantly came out of savant, leaving behind the soaring geometries. He expanded the display to show the Garret, as much as it could be expanded at a distance of three light minutes. Rendered in grainy detail, a ship hung over the place they’d been born. Cassie leaned on his shoulder.

  “Does the Garret get visitors now?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s big,” he said. His brain had already taken the reflectivity of the display, the strength of EM emissions, assumed its diameter at less than a hundred meters and corrected for a distance of three light minutes. “About eight hundred meters long.”

  “The right size for a Congregate warship,” Saint Matthew said.

  “Blockade?” Belisarius said.

  No one dared guess. They stared at the display whose resolution inched better minute by minute. The Calculated Risk’s drive emitted nothing in the electromagnetic, making the racer difficult to detect. They could get closer.

  The Garret was Cassie’s home. It had been Belisarius’ home once. It was also home to four thousand Homo quantus, the sub-species of humanity genetically-engineered to possess quantum perceptions. The Homo quantus project had been launched with great fanfare by the Banks of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy, with investors and an Initial Coin Offering. Bank CEOs, market analysts, and Bank Generals had held high hopes for the invention of novel predictive powers within the planned new sub-species of humanity: military strategies, investment tactics, monetary policy calculations. Wealth and power.

  But even eleven generations into the project, the Homo quantus were now a disappointing footnote in annual stock reports, one of the many blind alleys in corporate R&D. The Homo quantus couldn’t predict the future any better than classical or quantum computers. Worse yet, their natures were contemplative and retiring, unsuitable for military and conflictive economic environments. They became a cautionary tale, the butt of R&D jokes. The Banks had not withdrawn their funding yet, but they’d let the Homo quantus retreat to a quiet asteroid far from the bustle of the Epsilon Indi system. Except for Belisarius and Cassie, none of the Homo quantus left the Garret. They shied away from loud interactions and reported their ongoing experiments to the Banks in writing.

  “Maybe it’s just passing by?” Cassie offered. Her voice had risen half an octave.

  “It could even be a big freighter,” Belisarius offered without conviction.

  The ship orbited closer to the Garret than was efficient for off-loading supplies, well beneath the altitude suitable for low-energy transfer orbits. No one voiced the possibility that civilization had become interested in the Homo quantus.

  “We need better telescopes,” Belisarius said in frustration.

  “Time will improve resolution,” Saint Matthew said.

  “We’re forty hours away,” Belisarius said. “We shouldn’t accelerate until we know who that is.”

  “I might see it better from within the fugue,” Cassie said. “Three light minutes isn’t much.”

  It couldn’t hurt, and she was good at the fugue. Better than him right now, and maybe forever; he didn’t yet know how much his own experience of the fugue had changed.

  An immense flash bloomed into a searing crescent around the Garret. Sensor graphs spiked in a range of wavelengths: visible light, hot infrared, gamma rays. Then small peaks of beta particles searing in at close to the speed of light collected as statistics on the readouts.

  Someone had nuked the Garret three minutes ago.

  Cassie’s fingers tightened on his shoulder.

  Their sub-surface home was radioactive ash. The green rolling hills. The quiet birds. The faint, colored lights. The still, shallow ponds. And the thousands of infuriating, impractical, naïve, obsessive scientists, doctors and genetic engineers. His throat tightened, and not just from loss.

  He’d caused this. Guilt rotted in his stomach.

  Weight pressed Belisarius harder into his seat. Cassie fell back in hers. Saint Matthew accelerated to two gravities. The painted holographic head of a saint dead twenty-four centuries leaned forward, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.

  “What are you doing?” Belisarius demanded.

  His stomach still churned as his mind processed. Four thousand people. He’d grown up with them. His near perfect memory flashed hundreds of faces before his mind’s eye. All of them gone.

  “The warship is moving away,” Saint Matthew said, his face spinning back. “We can cut our travel time to twelve hours, or many times less if you both get into the acceleration tanks. We can rescue as many of your people as we can.”

  The explosion bloomed multispectrally in the readouts, like news of a horrible event replaying over and over as particles of different speeds reached them: neutrons, alpha particles, plasma.

  Belisarius’ engineered brain was capable of imagining six- and seven-dimensional space—graphs, patterns, hyper-solid solutions to physics problems—but now that intellectual hardware unwillingly visualized the geometries of cindered bodies tumbling in precessing orbits around a shattered home. His brain identified vaporization rings beyond which diamond-bright water-ice chips would refract the bright shine of Epsilon Indi into rainbows coloring the charred, frozen dead.

  Belisarius couldn’t take thinking of them. He could count anything, quantify anything, except his own people. He sent a micro-current from electroplaques under his ribs, through conducting carbon nanotubes, to the left temporal area of his brain. The current impaired his social nuance and linguistic abilities. Savant didn’t balm emotion, but smoothed the topography of some feelings, eroding their sharp peaks.

  At the same time, the patterns of the world came into sharper relief: the acceleration curve of The Calculated Risk, the minuscule relativistic blue-shifting of the incoming particles, the shape and depth of the gamma-ray curve. And more sophisticated logical channels became available to him, ones better able to manipulate quantum possibilities.

  “The radiation pattern matches the known patterns of a Congregate casse à face missile,” Saint Matthew said.

  The Congregate. They knew about Belisarius then. They knew his role in the Union break-out from the Puppet Axis. And they’d erased the footnote that was the Homo quantus project.

  Cassie had no home because of him. The Homo quantus were ashes because of him. He and Cassie might be the last Homo quantus, heirs to the smoke and dust and blood of a stupid investment project. Might be.

  The Homo quantus brain was necessarily multi-channeled, but sometimes pattern searches crossed the channels. While he absorbed the enormity of what he’d done, his brain was also graphing incoming data. In routine linkage analysis between the two, his brain showed him calculations of burn and asphyxiation rates, and of bone-breaking concussive force. Geometric conceptualizations and models overlapped in his thoughts, painful imagination and hard observation, real and unreal at once, evenly balanced. The imagined unreality was as terrible as what they’d already seen. Worse, but the imagined would move into reality as they neared, driving the aching spike of grief further into his heart.

  Yet the quantum logic hard-wired into the Homo quantus tickled at his thoughts.

  Imagining and observation.

  The cat dead or alive.

  “Cut acceleration!” Belisarius said. “Make a new course for our last hideout.”

  “There may be survivors!” Saint Matthew said.

  “Set a new course,” Belisarius said. “They’ll all survive.”

  They would all survive the casse à face missile.

  Maybe.

  A quantum maybe.

  “The deepest parts of the Garret might have a chance of sur
vival,” Saint Matthew said. “There may be hundreds of survivors if we hurry.”

  “We’re saving all of them,” Belisarius said emphatically.

  Cassie pulled him towards her. He flinched from her glare, but only a bit. She was in savant as well. Cassie was probably running the same calculations. She shut off the sensors and the readouts around them.

  No observer. No reality.

  She was letting the unobserved overlapping probabilities grow, become more complex.

  Saint Matthew’s painted holographic face had an expression. Belisarius interpreted expressions poorly in savant, except for Saint Matthew’s. A series of three hundred and fifteen brush strokes made up his face. The program the AI used to animate the face followed rules that were easy for a Homo quantus to deduce. Disappointment. Saint Matthew was disappointed, but he cut the acceleration and rotated the racer.

  “We’ve observed the explosion,” Belisarius said to him, “but that’s all we observed. We’re too far away to know its effects, including casualties or deaths. We have to get out of here now before we make an observation that narrows our options. We’re going back in time to save them.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  BELISARIUS FELT HE was suffocating. To human eyes, the stars lay frozen beyond the cockpit window, but as he struggled with his storm of thoughts, his engineered brain and eyes measured minutely changing angles as The Calculated Risk raced across the Epsilon Indi system. Panic dogged him as he traveled the length of the racer to the stern of the cramped living space, where an airlock led to the hold and the time travel device.

  The galaxy was vast, so vast that some ancient forerunner species had constructed a series of stable wormholes to link the stars. Humanity had found some, but had yet to understand or even map them properly. Humanity called the network of wormholes the Axis Mundi, after the connection between heaven and earth found in so many human legends. Some Axis Mundi wormholes crossed a few light-years, but many bridged dozens or hundreds of light-years. They opened the stars to humanity.