Free The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) by Hannu Rajaniemi Page A

through their issues: they get the narrative rights to shape their surroundings in the framework we give them. You did very well, by the way. I did not see that ending coming at all. Chilling.’ She cradles her own cup in her small hands, and sips it carefully. ‘But, I didn’t realise just how many enhancements your trueform there has. One of its subsystems started fighting back, so I thought it would be best if we started again here. What do you think?’
    Mieli looks at the girl sharply. Her Sobornost-made enhancements are functioning normally, and she tasks a few intel gogols to scan the environment. In an instant, they confirm what she already knew: she is on a strip of dense smartmatter, tens of thousands of kilometres long and a few hundred wide, somewhere near the equator of Saturn. However, they can’t access the local spimescape – either because she is inside a firewall, or because she lacks the right protocols.
    ‘What am I doing here?’ Mieli asks.
    ‘Whatever you want. Maybe start by drinking tea? You haven’t touched it. My name in this Circle is Zinda, by the way.’
    Mieli frowns. Her experience of the zoku is limited to fighting them. During the Protocol War, she went through a few virs set on Supra City, in case of capture, but they were nothing like this. As far as her sensors can tell, the apartment is what it looks like, down to the molecular level. Zinda, however, is a zoku alter – a mixture of foglets and zoku jewels – although she is running a passable emulation of a human body, down to sketches of internal organs and a digestive system.
    ‘I would like to find out what happened to my ship.’
    ‘Hmm. We’ll get to that in a moment,’ Zinda says. ‘But to answer your first question: you are here because the Rainbow Table Zoku – which you belong to, by the way – found you. They didn’t know what to do with your volition. They mostly deal with routers, Realmgates, that sort of thing: they are really more into picotech than people, if you see what I mean. So the volition got passed to our zoku, the Manaya High. We take care of … lost lambs, you could say. Those who want to return.’ Zinda smiles gently. ‘Like you.’
    ‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’ Gingerly, Mieli tries the tea. It, too, is exactly what it appears to be, slightly bitter and not completely warm anymore, but in spite of herself, she likes the taste. ‘I can’t stay. I need to get back to my ship.’
    ‘Oh dear.’ Zinda looks serious. ‘You are free to leave at any time, of course. But that’s not what your volition said to the jewel. You wanted to come home, and here you are.’
    Mieli gets up slowly.
    ‘My name is Mieli, the daughter of Karhu, of Hiljainen Koto, of Oort. I have nothing to do with you.’ But deep in her gut, there is a sudden chill. A tithe child. A child of the sun-smiths, given together with a Little Sun, for the koto to protect and cherish.
    ‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an example. Tell me something you really like. A food, or something.’
    Mieli hesitates. ‘This is pointless.’
    ‘Come on. Don’t take it so seriously!’
    Mieli sighs. ‘Liquorice. I like liquorice.’
    ‘Great! So, let’s say I have two boxes, A and B’ – she places two empty cups on the table, upside down – ‘and A has liquorice in it. I know that you really like liquorice and are looking for some. You ask me to open box B. Which box should I open?’
    Mieli blinks.
    ‘See?’ Zinda says.
    ‘But it’s not the same thing.’
    ‘Well, it’s harder to compute, for sure. The real extrapolated volition thing is absurdly difficult, PSPACE-hard or something, so usually we take shortcuts,