Read The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) for Free Online Page B

everyone. He is the King of Mars, and exomemory holds no secrets for him.
    Struggling against the memory flow, he takes out the Key again, and reluctantly summons its other function: accessing the back doors of memory that allows them to be edited, changed and manipulated. It burns red-hot against the ice of the memory trap and melts it away. Time leaps forward like a dog from a snapped leash.
    Jupiter explodes in Marcel’s hand and turns his fingers into red glowing pillars. There is a rain of stars in Owl Boy’s eyes. And then the quantum gods speak to Isidore.
    *
    The first voice belongs to a child. A tiny hand holds his own, by two fingers.
    You live on an island called causality , the voice says. A small place, where effect follows cause like a train on rails. Walking forward, step by step, in the footprints of a god on a beach. Why do that when you could run straight into the waves and splash water around?
    Laughter. He feels the joy of water droplets flying up, glittering in the sun, toes digging into the sandy bottom, and he knows that he could leap up and fall and all it would do is create a big splash.
    Causality. It’s a lens through which we see things. An ordering of events. In a quantum spacetime, it is not unique. It’s just one story among many.
    Listen. We’ll explain.
    You have to understand before you can be us.
    A different voice, an older male voice, a tone that sounds like Pixil’s tanglemother the Eldest, with the same hint of ancient weariness.
    It was an idea they already thought of in the twentieth century, that spacetime could compute. They tested it, in the last days of the Large Hadron Collider, when they learned how to make tiny black holes. Encode computations into their event horizons, then probe the information paradox by smashing them together, see if quantum gravity is more powerful than Turing Machines or their quantum cousins. Something to do for the humming LHC, still warm from finding the first Higgs.
    Fragments of lifestreams come, images of blackboards and huge humming machines in tunnels, distraught faces pointing at screens. The frustration he knows all too well when two shapes do not fit together, when there is no pattern.
    No one expected to find something wrong in the starbursts of the collisions. At first, what came out seemed like noise. It took many experiments, but the data was clear. The answers were there, but they were encrypted. Spacetime was not just a computer, it was a trusted quantum computer. To run anything on it, you needed a key, to open Planck-scale locks.
    It was thought it was another law of nature, another speed limit, another second law of thermodynamics. It was forgotten for a long time. Until we were born.
    Who are we and how did we come to be?
    A third voice joins in, a female voice, warm and rich like Marcel’s cognac. It makes Isidore feel safe.
    We are the Kaminari: the fireflies, the short-lived, those drawn to light.
    When the Collapse came and no one could afford to live on Earth anymore, we took care of our own. We piled our fleshbodies into the cargo holds of asteroid-mining ships hastily augmented with life support, moved our minds and early jewels – clumsy ion traps or diamonds that held slow light – strapped them to rockets that we launched to Jupiter and Saturn like little glittering Kal-Els as the world tore itself apart around us.
    And that’s when the adventure really began.
    We grew and we fragmented and became many. We forged jewels to house those things that defined us, our relationships to each other, those things that could not be copied, only given or stolen. We built Realms to play in. We covered the great planets in smartmatter. We fought wars with the Sobornost. We made little suns to warm the Oortians.
    And now we are old. The game of being Kaminari has lost its thrill. But the Planck locks remain, teasing us. We think we know what lies beyond.
    The voices become a chorus, speaking in unison.
    A dreamtime. The infinite,