Qwern

Qwern is at home now, and has been at home for an hour. It has been an hour of preparation. She has ignored all avoidable packages (and, as it happens, has received no unavoidable ones). She has allowed time to elapse at its physical rate only. She has remained at the same radix the whole time, every detail of her perceptual and conceptual environment fixed. It is excruciating; the world seems drastically reduced, truncated to a parody of itself.

Her home at this radix presents as a palatial building of white marble. She, fixed for now in an ordinary, bilateral human corpus approximately 8 feet in height, reclines on a patio chair, looking out between widely spaced balusters on the simulated sun setting on the enclosure wall behind the New City’s central island. After thirty minutes this fixed sensory envelope began to seem deeply strange. After forty-five, the stability and reductiveness of it is enough to bring on a mental nausea that verges on the physical; Qwern begins to feel wary of getting up from her chair.

Qwern is about to do something perverse. Some would reflexively call it perverted, though Qwern isn’t doing it for prurient reasons. The hour of uncomfortable preparation is necessary as a sort of transition phase, and Qwern takes the discomfort in stride, knowing it is nothing compared to the mindfuck to come.

Qwern has been doing this more and more often, lately. It is beginning to become a second life for her, a shadowy flipside to her satisfied life as a New Citizen, her relationship with Estragon, her delightful job as mid-level metaerg. In one life Qwern is a model New Citizen. In the other she plunges deeper and deeper into everything forgotten, esoteric, unfashionable—Old.

Qwern notes high-level boredom. No, she does not note high-level boredom. She experiences it. She has been experiencing it for half an hour. Good. The hour of preparation has done its job. And now it is time to begin.

Qwern performs a benign controlled fork into 100 branches. A hundred Qwerns in a hundred identical palazzos look out upon the last sliver of sun slipping below a skyscraper. So far, nothing out of the ordinary—in fact if anything the novelty of the fork slightly quells Qwern’s boredom-fever. She feels good.

Qwern now calls upon her superliminal splitter, a piece of odd technology she picked up from her work friend Calvus, a fellow history freak with Salimist leanings—the weirdo who got her into this whole business to begin with, a little over a year ago. The superliminal splitter registers her pneuma trace, verifies that she is indeed herself, networks with its 99 other selves, arranges safeguards in case of unusually high fission energy release, and erects an information shield around Qwern’s house to avoid unwanted attention. Then it forks every Qwern into one million copies.

There are now, hidden in superposition inside the spherical shield surrounding Qwern’s house, one hundred million identical palazzos containing one hundred million Qwerns. The one hundred million Qwerns are not identical: at this resolution Qwern’s pneuma has begun to reveal its eigenstructure. These “Qwerns” are simpler creatures, more basic personalities which only make up a full Qwern in aggregate. There are still many orders of magnitude left before the eigensoul limit. Qwern has never gone there, and the idea frightens her, although Calvus claims to have done it, and keeps egging her on to try it one day. But Calvus is a freak. And anyway, tonight this is enough for her purposes.

Now Qwern calls upon a second piece of odd technology. Calvus did not give her this one, although he did tell her how to get it. This second device—colloquially known as a “freezer” by the freaks, perverts and psychonauts who comprise its only user base outside of scientific research—registers her pneuma trace and then asks her if she’s really sure she wants to proceed. She gives one hundred million nods of assent.

The freezer networks with its 99999999 other selves, verifies the presence of the information shield, and verifies that a failsafe infrastructure is in place to immediately reintegrate if anything even slightly unusual happens. Then it selects a Qwern at random and shuts off her 99999999 sisters.

The experience presents, physically, as the opposite of a seizure, a sort of sudden vast stillness. The branch-links that have kept Qwern’s identity stable have all been severed at once, and a single Qwern, in all her simple singularity, finds herself isolated on a desolate white balcony, completely still. She is used to being a tiny component of a vast system, moving mostly at the pushes and pulls of her counterparts. It takes minutes before she can recognize the tiny, jerking motions of her limbs—and the tiny, jerking motions of her mind—as non-negligible events in themselves.

All at once, self-possession comes to her, and she stands up from the chair. She is here, and she is looking at the nearly finished sunset—now frozen, thanks to the information shield—and she feels like a person. She is here. Her thoughts trip over themselves, trying to go faster than this small pre-augment self is capable of. She is the exact opposite of bored. She stares for a good full minute at the confluence of three lines made at a lower corner at the bottom of one of her balusters. The corner has collected dust and Qwern revels in the patterns it makes, the way it has collected near the point of confluence and the way it spreads out unevenly in quickly thinning bands—spreads timidly, she thinks.

Qwern remembers that it is always fun, at the beginning of this process, to try to remember what her daily life is like. The memories jostle, fight with one another for prominence in her tiny field of attention. She fixes upon the fact that she works as a metaerg, says the word “metaerg” out loud, several times, but is unable to make sense of the chaotic impressions called up when she tries to remember what this job consists of.

It occurs to Qwern, as it always does within minutes of freeze, that she is now a creature that the New City would think nothing of killing. An insect, extinguishable in good conscience. The feeling gives her a frisson of forbidden pleasure, a subversive feeling. “I am negligible,” Qwern thinks, drawing out each word, “and yet here I am.”

Qwern opens the door that leads from the balcony into a spacious living room. There is a grand piano here, and bookshelves. Qwern marvels at them for a bit. She sits at the piano and plays middle C. Qwern, reduced to a pre-augment creature, can no longer order her things around with her mind, and so physical signals are necessary. This is the signal for a third piece of odd technology, one which will rupture the information barrier while tricking the splitter and the freezer into thinking it remains unbroken, and then connect her to her friends.

She turns around. There is a profusion of cats on her couch that wasn’t there before. It speaks into her mind.

“Damn, Qwern! You’re going pre-augment tonight? Raw!”

She knows that this is merely an approximation of what Calvus is saying, tailored to her tiny mind, but it is enough. She rushes to the couch and pets one of her friend’s purring heads with each hand.

“So who are we expecting tonight? Anyone from the monastery?” she says out loud, the humble sound waves dispersing to the corners of this humble room, this sufficient room.

Several feline heads swivel to face her. “Yeah, SDJFRN and OWEILD are going to be here, at least.”

Qwern is delighted: these are both dear friends, patching in from an isolated place. They are not allowed to talk to outsiders except through permitted channels, which happen to include this one. Monastery is a pleasant word for the place these people live; compound is the term preferred by those more hostile to the Salimists.

A tabby pounces into her lap and a black cat nestles against her right leg. “I’ve heard they’re very excited. I’ve heard they’ve got some news to tell us.”

“Oh?” she asks. Qwern’s subversive side smiles: news from the Salimists is exciting. The complacency of the New City towers above her, incomprehensibly complicated and built upon innumerable steps of impeccable self-justification, and yet the animal part of her that celebrates motion—a part that emerges most plainly on these pre-augment evenings—wishes simply for change, for some change.

“They’ve seen things. Things that . . . make them think that Martin’s plan is working.”

Well, in over a year of these meetings this is certainly the most exciting news Qwern has been privy to. Martin the fanatic, Martin the romantic, Martin the radical, the man who fell out with Salim because he wanted praxis when Salim had been content with a millennium of monastic theory? Martin’s plan is working?

Things are in motion. Change beckons. Qwern is a happy animal.