2033 AD / -1 QE
LENIN COSMODROME, LUNA

"Hello?" And instantly, that damnable echo from nowhere: "Hello?"

"Dobroye utro, Sergei. You are to return to the Stalin Dome. There is no time to explain."

That news was as ugly as the burst of squealing echoes through the experimental relay. Wincing, I ripped the quantum headset away, hearing tinny words amid the interference:

"... tangled... random decoherence ... cease widescale testing ... "

I fumbled the earbud into place, fingers numb with cold. Xenon arc lights sprayed out across lunar rock from our two-person Mobile Isotropic Rambler Orb. Fine work required the removal of our skin suits, but the MIRrOr's shared environment provided no warmth beyond the bare minimum excreted by its engines and lamps. Interruptions were not acceptable in this environment. Mistakes were not acceptable.

"You are not coming through clearly on this test relay, Gospodin Dov Davidovich." The breath of my words hung in the air. "But I have not yet impressed the last suite of q-dots. Proof of maximum —"

"Return now, Doctor. The lab has shifted payload. You will be on the transport that leaves in six earth-hours."

If the fat, second-rate scientist turned political apparatchik bothered to bid me dasvidanya, another burst of static ate his words.

Left holding the headset, I glared at it for its dead link.

"Doctor?" my Alliance technician asked. Beyond him, the spray of light against the dome, and beyond that, the grey surface of the moon.

I nodded and he keyed the orb's power conservation routine. The sudden cessation of crackling left the atmosphere hushed. Consoles darkened.

Xenon lights winked out. A raised hand stopped the technician from flicking on the outside array lights. Blackness settled around us.

A connection telltale on the headset glinted, the only light. So small, it swelled amid the blackness to an island of light, a spark in a bubble, a tiny star on the surface of the Moon. I raised my eyes to heaven, black, with its spill of a million stars. Nowhere on Earth did the stars drill down with such fixed clarity. My eyes followed the trajectories of a million beams that could have linked us, dot to dots, spark to sparks. Actual pain gripped my heart.

"The bastards are shutting us down. But I still have four hours before we must start back to Lenin," I said. "Power up the array."

86TH YEAR OF THE MAHATMA RAJ / 0 QE
KOLKATA, TECHNOPALITY OF THE INDUS

"You can't shut me down!" The twisted echo came back in my own voice, taunting: "You can shut me down."

Stung, I resisted an urge towards escalating defiance. My fingers tightened, combing a beard more salt now than pepper. I had been a young man once, full of passionate potential, an engineer and scientist, before reality and red ink set in.

The holo of Daud hesitated, jowls quivering with something unsaid.

"A refreshingly realistic response, Sahib Sergei."

At the sarcasm, I slammed a hand onto the toggle, an ungentle 'off' for a delicate piece of experimental quantum equipment. The projection went flat, then showed a holosaver of a spinning mandala. I shouted my fury toward Bengalûru, through eight virtual buddhas and an uneaten plate of lunch: "Son of a pig!"

One year since my recall from the Maharaja's lunar pleasure dome. One year of the mahatmas neither protecting nor acknowledging the work of their pet Muscovite refugee. Instead, one year of suspended funding from the communications behemoth that owned my life. A full month since the United Nordic Nobel Academy and the Delhi Committee again passed over one Sergei Morozov, refusing to acknowledge anyon advancements in the field of quantum telecloning.

"Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Madame Chairman ... you honour not just the man but the future of man ... "

I'd written the acceptance speech half a dozen times.

"Any quantum particle may exist in all states of spin, superposed ... Only when it decoheres through outside stimulus, such as measurement, is one state manifested, one answer 'chosen' ... "

Half a dozen times the profundity of my accomplishment would have eluded the empty crowned heads of the illustrious attendees nodding off in their chairs.

"An anyon is a specific type of quantum particle unique in its ability to be anything — fermion, boson or any state in between, matter or energy ... anything."

Of course that wasn't quite it, but the harping on anything might have made a dent in ignorance.

"Anyon particles exist in a two-dimensional physical space but also possess the dimension of time... The space-time representation of an anyon's location is known as its world line."

Inbred cretins comprehending not a word, and me the fool playing for their pleasure.

"Anyon world lines may cross, or braid, multiple times, with such braiding giving direction, form and stability against interference to the anyon that far surpasses the stability of an individual quantum particle. In this ability to hold the superposed quantum state, rather than to be 'knocked out' by perturbation, is found the anyon's perfection as a data processor ... "

Far from a Nobel Prize, I crawled for rupees, made from my work. Q-Munications and the Indian technological hegemony owned the patent on the M-PACT because a decade ago the Czar hadn't been convinced of my importance, and so expatriated pure science cap-inhand to sub-continental industry.

I heard a buzzer in my assistant's office, and a moment later an apologetic step. "Sahib Morozov, Sahib Daud is sending a man for your comquter uplink?"

"Don't be foolish. Stop listening at my door, and shut it."

For the next hours, fl at screens of data scrolled upward, with nothing to show but tired eyes and a half-eaten naan. Huge gaps in the timeline of records existed. Misfiled or erased? Somewhere in these results from tests allowed before funding had been so suddenly rescinded must be something to prove Daud and his accounting thuggees wrong to doubt me, but I couldn't find it.

Echoes. The accursed, meaning-twisting echoes. On every connection.

M-PACT had been in use in a dozen industries for over 10 years. Anyon chips worked.

Entanglement had been perfected in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Telecloning worked.

Put the two together ... they didn't work.

Using quantum technology to send and receive entangled light should improve performance, not degrade it. Any calculations that silicon could perform, M-PACT could complete an order of magnitude faster. Silicon relied on single bits flipping between 1's or 0's but since Morozov-Praveen Anyon Chip Technology™, 1's and 0's and all states in between existed at the same time, piled on top of each other. M-PACT had given rise to the first marketable comquters, finding success with anyon braids.

What anchored anyons in place was, simply put, where they had been and where they were going. And where a pair of those world lines crossed, they created the undecided quantum state logic gate ... until the most likely potentiality collapsed out of it at breakneck speed. Anyon stability translated to the right results, dazzlingly fast, in a dozen — a hundred —applications.

But not here, it didn't. Pairing it with quantum entanglement foiled the anyon qubit. Why?

I muttered and shoved my plate away. "Q-municate. Vijay Praveen — Lab."

Buddhas vanished. An icon blinked, the call going through. It kept blinking. I frowned. Between there and here should be only a moment of light. Spooky, but empirical.

A smear of yoghurt soured on its plate. Indigestion burned, high in my chest.

"Open connection. Vijay Praveen — Office,"

I said more tersely, resorting to standard fibre optics. The icon blinked and expanded, but into the turban and beard of a pimply assistant, not a wizened Bengali. Behind him, through an open doorway, porters carried boxes. The flesh on my neck rose. A roar from me made the assistant vanish and Vijay appear at the doorway after another delay.

"Vijay, testing data after last year's Monsoon is missing —"

He ignored me. "Is it true?" he demanded, leaning out of my screen.

"Is what true?"

"Sahib Daud sends this, with termination!" Reaching out of frame, he was replaced by a holo of me, red-faced in this very chair, naan reconstituted almost atop the real empty plate. I — both the real and virtual 'I'— listened again to sententious Daud.

"The committee feels that telecloning with the anyon array, like Sampati, the vulture burned flightless, may be flying too close to the sun at this time. We hope that the clear sight granted Sampati in recompense will also come to your eyes in seeking a way onward, Sahib Morozov."

The holo brightened.

Half of me grumbled at the change in the quality of light and half approved the abrupt return to iron control exhibited by my holo. Until that holo opened its mouth and spoke.

"You can shut me down," it said, "but you can't fire me, you vampyr, I quit!"

I came to my feet. The unseen Daud spoke again his mocking praise of my pragmatic realism. Instead of toggling off in anger, as I had done in reality, the dopplegänger before me spoke over him, eyes alight with conviction.

"You may send my final credit to Peary Outpost. If Q-Sat cannot foresee the same future I do, NASA Colony has many times offered to be more forward-looking."

The holo split, minimising my double to a lower quadrant, boxing and dimming it. Vijay's face took over, wounded now. "What is the meaning, Sergei?"

"A ... fake. They seek to cover their timidity ..."

"What is this place you call Peary Outpost? What is a NASA Colony? Q-Sat? You mean to abandon your duty? And what is this? A joke, Sergei?" Crosshairs appeared on the minimised holo, targeting a levitation box at the corner of my desk. Five centimetres above the glass leviped, a gold medal hovered on its edge, face on. The image expanded, crowding Vijay's face to another lower quad.

I sat back down. The corner of my desk stood palpably empty.
I mumbled the inscription on the hologramic medal: "Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes."

As I spoke, Vijay was quoting the feathery lettering on the glass leviped beneath the medal: "For his contribution to the quantum theory of discreet anyon coherence. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2019."

He stared at me in disbelief.

"I distinctly do not recall receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics ten years ago, not even from that imaginary body." Furious, Vijay paused. "Nor watching you take credit for our work to receive one yourself. Have you lost your mind, Sergei? That is what Daud claims."

"Have you ... have you still an uplink to the orbitals?"

"I do not. They took mine."

"Do not let them lock the lab. I am on my way. Clear a polarimeter for use."

CYCLE 553.083, INDUSTRIAL RENAISSANCE /0 QE
HAWKING ORBITAL STATION 12, LOW EARTH ORBIT

The results from the polarimeter hit my brain like a stim shot. I couldn't be reading what I thought I was reading. My mind made dizzying leaps across awesome recognitions.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, Serge!" Pounding on the outside of the barricaded science deck's door punctuated Veej's urgings.

"Son of a 'bot!" Something spanged off the metal door. "Time to g—"

An explosion rocked the ship. The whole lab shook. A low-gravity agricultural specimen fell off a bench, glass shattering, fungi and spores billowing. Coughing, Veej lurched into me.

"Now, Doc," he wheezed, holding on to the desk to keep his feet. "Whatever it is you're doing, the Loonie bastards seem eager to expose it to vacuum—" Another explosion shook the corridor outside. The door buckled, but held to its hinges. Veej grabbed my arm to pull, then froze, his gaze going over my shoulder to the multiple holo projections I'd been studying.

"What the hell?"

With a shaking finger,I pointed to one quad as it looped back to begin again. In that holo, my light-etched image muttered commands to record.

"That's me, the original," I forced out.

I brushed a thumb across the button that had converted the test transmission to a stream of light with each of its photons impressed in data-bearing polarity. Another button had launched the light on its instantaneous journey, straight from the flatpad to the nearest receiver in the q-sat network, without going through any physical medium in between. Basic entanglement. Telecloning for the masses.

My finger shifted to another quad, seemingly - should be - the same recording, the postprocessed signal leaving the q-sat after the picosecond required to run an error correction routine that restored any photons sent off-spin in teleportation. Any stray gamma ray might knock out any number of photons, creating gaps, distorting the message. The error processing routine patched it up with the most probable results. Alongside both original and q-sat versions, polarity readings for every photon plotted themselves across a 3-D grid.

The second transmission flickered at exactly the moment its polarity readings departed from a linear progression. The probability line jumped to a different coordinate and began tracking a new course. My image looked up in shock as the door to the science lab blasted inward under the impact of a red web of targeting lasers. Beside me, Veej swore again. Both transmissions reset, starting again.

"More ... entangled than we ... thought," I whispered.

The door in my reality blasted inward. Loonie targeting lasers crisscrossed the room. One of them found a spot on my chest. I'd always thought my bum ticker would get me. I couldn't breathe, staring at the red dot. The 'bots' lunar masters had won; science for the survival of Earth had failed. I couldn't move, but my mind bounded across realities, forward through potential from this point and back to a speech given six years ago to the last Joint Scientific Assembly, before the attacks.

"Mr. President, Mr. Ambassador, honoured guests ... Qubits exist in all states of probability, potentiality a cloud around them. The most probable outcome can be mathematically predicted from a given starting point, photon by photon, say ... from the beginning of a beam of light being processed for error correction after telecloning across the solar system."

That speech had earnt me this lab.

I would've had a helluva followup now.

"Despite the ability of anyon qubits to repair gaps in a stream of photons, we have long known that significant message breaks do occur, and now it seems that an entirely unexpected sort of repair may take place. Error correction routines in the quantum chip seek to restore the most probable data lost to interference, but testing has shown that lower probabilities may be restored. Why? How? The quantum array exists not merely within a cloud of potentiality weighted for our reality but for all realities, perturbed by simultaneous reception of multiple approximates of the message from multiple realities."

"Please, take your seats ... In such a case, we now discover that the error correction routine in one world may well 'repair' signifi cant gaps in a message with stretches of data from a different analogous reality."

"Serge!" Veej's cry came from a distance. Something ... hurt. The floor hit me in the side of the head.

Awareness narrowed to a homologue, an alternative self, leaning out over the desk, puzzling his way through what was so dazzlingly selfevident to me.

The anyon chip, by its nature and design, existed in all states of probability ... across all probable 'might-have-been' worlds. Mine was outputting chopped-together versions of might-have-beens. Quantum echoes.

I had discovered alternate worlds.

Dread of what mankind might do with that knowledge slipped with me into the cold emptiness that awaited.

2782 AB URBE CONDITA ROMA /1 QE
CIVITATIS VATICANAE

"And he asked him, 'What is thy name?' And he answered, saying, 'My name is Legion: for we are many.' And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea. They were about two thousand; and were choked in the sea. Glory to the Lord!"

"Glory to God," I echoed, sketching covert equations on the back of a pew with a lightstick. The maths still fascinated.

"Absolute distance as a percentage of half the circumference of earth ... multiplied by time differential since divergence of analogue from locus ..."

At my muttering, Brother Vincent glanced aside. I shut my mouth, doodling the delta of the moment of Quantum Epiphany for a high potential reality relative to my own. Once QE was known, the rest could be charted on any probability distribution and projected at leisure. The maths was more beautiful than most of the visions I had seen through the archangel chip, which embodied it.

Vincent nudged me and I hastened a "Glory to the Almighty," as a bulky shadow fell over us.

"We shall not suffer Legion to sully the creation of our Lord, shall we, Brother Sergei?" Monsignor David asked menacingly.

I lifted my eyes. The night-blue dome arched far over the head of our porcine reverend father. Beneath my chin, I was aware of the scribbled equations fading. "No, Monsignor."

"God is well pleased with you, Brother." He breathed through his mouth. Bread and wine burnt in my belly. Since surviving my heart attack, by God's grace, I'd learnt to tell indigestion from apoplexy. He took my silence as obedience.

"By the glory shown you, no longer will any Earth suffer the tread of the damned. As we redeemed the Moon, so shall we save the souls of our very selves, damned in hells that mock His creation!"

My fingers tightened on the hidden lightstick, itching to lose themselves in abstracts. Not only messages could be carried on light.

Ten years since Holy Mother Earth had rained telecloned photonic retribution on the lunar apostates; one year since God had revealed to me the miracle of the archangel chip's existence in all realities. Mere months since the Lord of all Creation granted me the insight to reliably triangulate my homologues' inventions in their own firmaments. In a multiverse of souls, what number constituted acceptable losses? What defined suicide?

Science proposed; the Church disposed. How many archangels could dance through the head of a q-dot? Monsignor David raised his hands.

"Blessed be the master of creation, greater than we knew! You will be called the Light unto the Faithful!"

My name would be writ alongside blessed Galileo's and Cardinal Newton's. The faithful would pray for my intercession with the Lord.

"Deus vult! God wills it!"

"Deus Lumen Vult," I whispered, bowing my head to the motto of the Knights Q-saders

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