Free Luminous by Greg Egan

Greg Egan
     
    Perhaps the hottest and fastest-rising new writer to debut in SF in the nineties, Australian Greg Egan is poised on the verge of being recognized as one of the genre's Big Names. In the last few years, Egan has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere. Several of his stories have appeared in various best-of-the-year series, including this one; in fact, he placed two stories in both our Eighth and Ninth Annual Collections—the first author ever to do that back-to-back in consecutive volumes. He has also had stories in our Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections as well. He was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story "Cocoon," which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov's Readers Award. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992, to wide critical acclaim, and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent book is a collection of his short fiction Axiomatic. Upcoming are two new novels, Distress and Diaspora.
    Here he launches an intrepid attack on the most abstract realms of Higher Mathematics with a computer made entirely of light—with potentially disastrous results for the entire universe when those abstract realms start to strike back . . .
     
    I woke, disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was lying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was d e pressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was lying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they'd slept.
    And I could smell blood.
    I opened my eyes. A woman I'd never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left tr i ceps with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.
    Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I couldn't start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response—catatonia in the face of danger—took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I'd been expecting something like this for weeks.
    I spoke softly, in English. "What you're in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried."
    My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese, Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I'd woken prematurely, she didn't show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I'd acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.
    Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, "Look on the table next to the bed."
    I twisted my head around. She'd set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood— mine, presumably—circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the inte r section controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.
    I cleared my throat and swallowed. "Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won't fool it."
    "You're bluffing." But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she'd used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering—and nothing at all about the software.
    "I'm telling you the truth." I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn't easy given our awkward geometry. "It's new, it's Swedish. You anchor it in a