More Than Utopia Read online

  “All right.” She does not think she’s inspired fondness in her staff; loyalty yes, of the sort that aligns with the grimness of a soldier’s march. But Noor is an odd exception. There is a certain level of care there that makes her think Noor will attend her funeral.

  Noor, and Yvette.

  She puts on her jacket as she exits her car. Krungthep is chilly these days, averaging fifteen to seventeen degrees at night, a far cry from the thirty-plus-near-forty of previous decades. Climate change has done its work, bringing odd reversals to parts of the world that least expect it. But the city is habitable, the waters did not rise here as much as anyone anticipated, and she enjoys the weather. The city—her city—is fortunate.

  Jirayu traverses a dark street into a darker soi. No particular fear. Her heart is playing its own slow orchestra. Anyone who wishes her harm here, some common street thug, is less armed than she is. She is both a better shot and better at violence: she does not suffer from the hesitation imposed by the social contract. Any threat will be met with immediate, lethal force.

  The rendezvous point is a little house, ancient in style, all imposing teak. Shaded by tall trees, with an ungroomed garden where the grass rises nearly to her waist. But the house itself is illuminated, windows spilling out alabaster, and someone is waiting for her at the gate. A nondescript woman, who speaks to her in an accent that suggests her first language is Cantonese or Hokkien. “You’re expected, Khun Jirayu Vihokratana.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  The woman’s expression is porcelain, just as empty. “You’ll find out shortly. It’s not one of your competitors. My employers are in a . . . different industry. Please follow me.”

  Up the creaking steps, into a parlor of polished wood floor and austere furniture, chairs that seem carved from granite and which have been grudgingly upholstered in silk. The woman leaves her there and does not offer to bring refreshments, not even water. The house’s electronics have a murmur to them, as though they haven’t been used for a long time. Insects outside, loud.

  Jirayu stands firm on her feet, the weight of her holstered gun cool beneath the jacket. In a real crisis a single pistol will not save her—there will be more of them than there is of Jirayu. But she has come this far, following the most frayed thread, the thinnest haze of hope.

  She’s in the middle of considering whether to draw the gun when the door opens and someone comes through.

  Something. Her perception struggles, at first, despite her decades of threat assessment, of reflexive action. What walks toward her is sheathed neck to toe in black, a robe or a dress. Slender and tall, narrow at hips and shoulders, a strange silhouette altogether whose wrongness she wouldn’t be able to identify until much later. For now she’s drawn to the face. The face. A flat white mask, indented with the suggestion but not the actuality of eyes, and a perfect pout painted temptress red.

  It is not a mask. The entire head is made of a glossy material, white in the front and charcoal in the back. Hairless. She is transfixed even as the figure draws closer and closer, nightmare logic. It should be moving on all fours. Instead it is bipedal, elegant nearly, and it curtsies then says, “Call me Tatiana.”

  The creature’s voice is melodious. Despite the Russian name, its Thai is faultless. That jolts her out of her trance.

  “Where is my wife?” Jirayu says, her voice even and calm. She has been in situations where guns are pointed at her from all sides: she is above falling apart, whatever the odds.

  “Caught in the tides of liminal probability.” The creature sits opposite her, making every effort to appear civil. “When we came, it caused a mass-shift event. Don’t worry, Khun Jirayu, you weren’t the only person to lose a loved one that day. We’ve contacted each individual. That is the hinge on which the cognate program turns.”

  “Where is my wife,” she repeats. Louder. Sharper.

  “Let me try again. She is trapped between possibilities; she continues to exist but not in any waveform you can perceive. As far as your timeline is concerned, she’s never existed—that is why, to you, it appears that no one else remembers her. But you do, and that marks you out as unusual, part of a statistical outlier. Help us and we’ll help you find her. We will show you proof that we have the capability.”

  In a single motion she draws her gun. The matte-black muzzle points at the creature. “What are you?”

  The mouth, she now realizes, doesn’t move. There is no hinge. The indentations in place of the eyes are likewise immobile. An entire mannequin ensemble, single-expression, stern. “I’m an avatar, so shooting me will accomplish little. This is of course not what I really look like, and my name is not really Tatiana. It’s something you can’t pronounce with the structure of your vocal apparatuses. But all that is irrelevant. We are the Vector. You want to see your wife again and we have an offer. Tell me, how much do you know about quantum theory?”

  Chapter One

  A jewelry boutique. Jirayu watches one of her managers meticulously slot a new collection into its home of revolving plinths, fractal branches for earrings and pendants, a piece of sanded metal grooved to hold complex collars and necklaces.

  The collection is avant-garde, created by a woman known for abstract eroticism. Jirayu has seen her paintings before, and the motifs follow into her jewelry, at once more and less risqué, constrained by metal but unleashed by dimension. There is a neckpiece designed to frame and accentuate the collarbones with a weight of rose gold and rubies. Here is a bracelet whose curves are deeply suggestive of the waist descending into wide hips. Even the ring, with its twin garnets and its band of serpentine loop, somehow strikes the impression of lushness, a ring that might ride on the finger of a voluptuous kinnaree.

  She owns this place, as she owns many others where the rich can purchase signifiers that impress the gullible, trappings that mean nothing next to the true power of wealth—the privacy, the immunity from consequences. But these days she is not much better than that class of fools. Her wealth was quickly extracted from the military-industrial complex and then reinvested elsewhere, laundered until it was no longer stained by blood. Now she is in possession of prosaic assets, stakes in pharmaceutical and food megacorps; she works from a tower of chrome and steel, an office situated so she can see a panoramic view of Krungthep’s glittering river, the undulating cityscape.

  “Madam,” the manager says, “will you be taking a piece for yourself? These really are unique.”

  Jirayu looks over the angles, the way the light falls on each piece. Good lighting is a magician’s trick, bringing spark and clarity to middling stones, illuminating beauty where objectively there may be only mediocrity. Not a lie, as such. Each article of jewelry here is certified, the grading and specifications in clear writing.

  There is a platinum collar that drips rubies, sanguinary, the symbolism obvious. She imagines it around Yvette’s throat; she imagines running her fingers along the cold metal and gemstones, and then down her wife’s warm clavicles.

  “Keep that one for me,” she says.

  She walks the boutique, looks out the window—it is hard not to, when there’s so much window. A view of Krungthep with its forest of skyscrapers, and above that, one of the alien ships. The belly resembles brushed metal; the rest of it resembles nothing made on Earth. A chaotic spread of what looks like tangled wires, jagged remains of mountains, denuded boughs that jut in every which direction. Not aerodynamic, but it doesn’t need to be. The sight disturbs, even now.

  A year has passed since the aliens landed, and life resumes. Not in complete normalcy, but something close. The status quo has a way of bouncing back. Everyone desires that: to go on as before, only now the collective consciousness must admit extraterrestrial life as well as their mastery over humanity. Not that it’s been violent. Fewer casualties than any human-on-human conflict. The aliens don’t want oil or fossil fuel or rare-earth oxides; they don’t want to reduce cultural landmarks to ruin or to replace any religion with their own. All they w
ant are cognates. Possibly the sole compelling quality that humans possess, as a species.

  Jirayu likes to stare at the ship, waiting for it to move, to glow or shift or do something more extraordinary than hover in place. It never obliges. She has fantasized about being inside it, where she’d be met with an interior too awful and geometry-warping for human perception. It would strike her dead. What would that be like, she sometimes wonders, a clean and instantaneous termination—cleaner than a bullet, than a lethal injection, than a specialized drug cocktail. Such a dream.

  Noor picks her up in a vehicle that remains armored; Jirayu may have shifted her business interests, but she has not dropped all of her habits—they are good ones, hard-earned, trained over a lifetime. Her operations chief remains with her, though what ey oversees now is mundane, exploitative in the average way of great capital and nothing more. Insider trading is the most sordid thing she gets up to these days. Jirayu has taken to donating some of her profits simply because she hardly needs so many zeros in her accounts: they become an annoyance, a burden that needs babysitting.

  It is the safest she’s ever been in her life, and it has left ashes in her mouth. She used to feel contempt for the lifestyle she has now, and she feels it still. But the aliens have altered the fundamental laws of the world, the nature of society. No more conflict zones, or at least limited ones. No more defense contracts, no more gunrunning. Organized crime remains here and there, but taking life on a mass scale has been interdicted—the Vector requires their numbers in cognates. International peace imposed by extraterrestrial occupiers. She doubts any politician or theorist has ever imagined anything like it. Academics of post-colonialism could not account for the possibility of interference from beyond the stars.

  And as a cognate, she is a prized asset, under Vector jurisdiction: assimilated by force. Not that it is public knowledge; cognate identities are jealously guarded, and that means in theory she could still do business in the fringes of law. Could have a life other than this appalling civilian one. Only it would feel false, now, a charade—a child playing at danger that can run to its mother whenever things go astray. Tatiana informed her that she would enjoy absolute Vector protection no matter what she gets up to, as long as she doesn’t instigate a war or harm other cognates.

  Her present life disgusts her. Tatiana’s control disgusts her. All of this—the new world, the new order—disgusts her. There were always people more powerful than she, but she was never owned.

  “Noor,” she says aloud. “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere?”

  “You’re deep in your angst again.” Eir voice thrums with amusement. “This life isn’t so bad. It’s comfortable. Bit of a break. You should try to be happy.”

  Yvette’s name clogs her throat. “And how would I accomplish that?”

  “How does anyone?” Noor counters, eyes on the road. “Get a woman you really like. Eat good food. Enjoy. World’s a buffet out there for you, boss. You know it too.”

  Does she really. Jirayu considers a version of her that has not been wounded by Yvette’s absence, a version that believes—like everyone else—that Yvette Vihokratana never existed. But it’s a nonsensical thought. She takes out the pendant she wears around her neck, amber filigreed in silver that has been hammered into butterfly wings. A cheap piece, unfit for her. Yvette purchased it on a whim in Taiwan or Hong Kong, she no longer recalls, and gave it to Jirayu: seemingly just a whim too. I know it’s really your money, she said then, and I should do better than a trinket like this, but—

  The gift was the beginning of an idea, that an undercurrent ran beneath their relationship as employer and bodyguard, that there was more to it than the occasional sex. Like everything else, this pendant vanished; like many other keepsakes, Tatiana brought it back to Jirayu. Physical photographs. Storage devices full of grainy footage captured by security cameras—Yvette and her entering or exiting secure bunkers, vehicles with deeply tinted windows, hangars. Any number of knickknacks that couldn’t possibly have been reproduced or recovered except by magic or, as Tatiana claims, an intimate familiarity with quantum streams. Not time travel, the alien intermediary was quick to correct, because that is impossible. Rather it’s about plucking fruits from a different branch, and the branches do not grow at the same rate.

  A reductive explanation, but she understands the gist. It’s not as if she would have comprehended a more elevated one, full of mathematics from the other side of the galaxy and theories that wouldn’t make sense even to Earth’s brightest and most educated.

  And so she allows herself to be Vector property, for now. Having Yvette returned to her is a greater priority than her personal sense of dignity, her need for independence. As long as her wife can come back, nearly anything can be borne.

  Jirayu’s careful research led her to a layperson’s explanation. Schrodinger’s cat. Universal wavefunction. But what matches the Vector’s explanation best is the many-worlds interpretation, with the cognate serving as the proposed observer of thought experiments in quantum physics. What the Vector grants is access to divergent realities.

  “We’re compound,” Tatiana told her, which wasn’t informative. “We’re present across all of them, which is how we can reach out and fetch the fruits of the branches. But we ourselves may not move across, or rather we cannot move in all dimensions. We are unlimited in our gaze; we are limited in our action. Do you see?”

  “No,” Jirayu said, but she did not receive a better elaboration. What she did get was that the Vector trains cognates as bonded pairs: one partner to travel across the branches to serve Vector interests, the other to act as anchor so the first will always be able to return home. She is meant to anchor Yvette, evidenced by the fact that she alone in this world can remember her wife.

  She did not miss that the Vector’s arrival caused it to begin with, their contact with the wavefunction shoving the universe sufficiently off course that it obliterated Yvette’s existence. For that they will pay, even if Jirayu cannot yet conceptualize how she’ll carry out her revenge, even if she has access to no armaments that can possibly damage them. She is an expert at grudges, and more than that an expert at realizing them. It doesn’t matter that the event was supposedly accidental.

  For the moment, she is meant to wait until an instance of Yvette from some other timeline appears, drawn to the factor—the gravitational pull—of Jirayu. When? How long will it take? These are not factoids to which she’s been made privy. A year, two years. Tatiana is not specific, instructing her to be patient. She chafes. She wishes she could tear that mannequin mask open, crack it in two with a sharp stone, a sledgehammer.

  Yet it is necessary to adapt, to adjust. She considers this past year to be that: breathing room in which she can pivot, can reestablish herself in new industries. Grow the resources that may, one day, allow her to strike back.

  Noor follows her. They ride the elevator up to her office. Jirayu’s security detail is much smaller these days, though the bulletproof vests and the guns remain. She continues to maintain her own staff—no outsourcing; she does not trust. Occasionally it feels like a sham, because her life is so stupidly safe now, but she is also aware the Vector is not everywhere and complacency’s going to see sniper rounds put in her head one day. So she marches through a floor of gleaming marble and tinted glass, offices full of lawyers and accountants, while she is defended by the same people who defended her on trips to warzones. The same human shields.

  The casualty rate of her personnel has dwindled to near nothing: she used to authorize compensation packages to their families or otherwise designated beneficiaries every other month, and now the payouts are more of a twice-yearly event. She can hardly remember what it’s like anymore to hear a gunshot in person, to feel shrapnel hurtling past. This must be how artists feel who have forgotten how to paint.

  Her office, a place of dark stone and pale trims, of perfunctory routines. She leaves Noor at the outer lounge
because what she wishes to do is private. She goes to the small wardrobe, ostensibly for her change of clothes. There are two compartments. One is for her things, the other for her secret: Yvette’s clothes, returned by Tatiana. Dress shirts and suits, trousers tailored for those long, long legs, all scented by Yvette’s cologne—oud and saffron. She shuts the compartment quickly, to keep the fabric impregnated with fragrance, to prevent its dissipation. Sometimes it irritates her that she has this compulsive habit, checking whether these objects are still there, as though they signify or serve as a meaningful replacement for the real thing. The rest of the time she accepts that she suffers from a deep injury that refuses to heal into scar tissue, and she must take what she can to salve the hurt. Self-medicating, dabbing the blood away one drop at a time.

  A knock on the door lets her know the interviewee is here. “Come in,” she says.

  Noor shows the woman through. Ingvild Tang is about Jirayu’s height, in the region of a hundred seventy, dressed in a suit. Her makeup is professional: eyeshadow in taupe, lipstick an inoffensive dusty rose topped with a faint gloss. She looks like she could be interviewing for a secretarial position, if not for the muscles that are obvious under the clothes—or the fact that her suit has been cut to emphasize her physique rather than hide it.

  She gives a wai, hands folded for precise courtesy. “Khun Jirayu.”

  “Sit.” Norwegian, Jirayu considers, with one Chinese and one Tamil parent—a minority within a minority. “Your references are impeccable. Why here, though, and not mainland Europe?”

  “After the plague, there was not much left in the Nordic region.” She means the virus that thawed from melting arctic ice: swift, vicious, and lethal enough that it killed its hosts too fast for the event to become more than one isolated outbreak. “I’ve been employed elsewhere, as you can see from my files. Besides which, what’s left of Norway’s government doesn’t greatly value people like me.”