The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) by Hannu Rajaniemi Read Free Book Online

sunlit sea.
    We have done most of the work. We found a solution in the most unlikely place: in the Collapse, in our own genesis. A beginning hidden inside an ending.
    We just need your help to make it real.
    If you want to leave the island, give us your hand. Accept our entanglement. Join your volition to ours.
    So we can be you. So we can all swim out to the sea.
    Isidore sees three figures standing in the light, reaching out to him, stars shining in the palms of their open hands. He opens his arms to embrace them, to accept the bright thought they are offering him. His fingers entwine with theirs and then it is like he is not one but many, a node in a web of light stretching across the System, a part of something that he does not understand but which he can touch through the light of Jupiter in the sky, between Marcel’s fingers.
    The entangled web grows at the speed of light, stretches from Mars to Earth to Saturn and beyond, as billions of minds accept the Kaminari’s offer. He does not understand how, but on Jupiter, their shared brightness is used to make a key, and it is turning in the lock.
    No. Stop. The Kaminari chorus cries out. Isidore feels it, too, a wrongness in the weave, a hidden thread in the web that tightens, suddenly, like a noose. A trap. A betrayal.
    The web unravels and catches fire. Far away, the Kaminari struggle to contain it. For Isidore/Owl Boy it is too late. The light consumes him as Jupiter dies in the sky.
    *
    Isidore opens his eyes and blinks at the light, but it is only Phobos that shines on his face, in the zenith of its rapid journey across the sky, casting golden beams through the dust curtains of Hellas Planitia. He is back in Owl Boy’s room. The mystery of the Spike flows through his thoughts like an inverted avalanche, pieces assembling themselves into something larger than he could have ever imagined.
    He grabs his zoku qupter and sends a dense thought to the thief. Jean! You can’t believe what I found! He wraps the vision of the Kaminari in the qupt as a co-memory. It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to look at this!
    The link breaks. Something is wrong. The room is too silent. There is a faint smell of ozone in the air. Marcel stands still next to him, eyes wide, mouth half-open, frozen.
    And Isidore’s connection to the exomemory is gone.
    The silence is so overwhelming that it takes him a moment to notice the fourth person in the room – or more like a person-shaped disturbance, a black and faceless shadow that does not catch the light properly. There is a silver rocket-shaped q-gun floating in the air above its left shoulder. The weapon’s sharp end glimmers dangerously, tracking Isidore’s every movement.
    ‘I apologise for any inconvenience caused,’ the shadow says. Its voice is vaguely male, but metallic and distorted. ‘Did I say that right?’
    Isidore does a quick calculation in his head. He is not sure how much time has passed – only a few minutes, perhaps – and it should only take his bodyguard of the night, the Futurist, a few more to find him. He probes the exomemory to see if he could get a message out, but there is simply nothing there, the same empty feeling he has only experienced before while visiting the zoku colony in the Dust District.
    ‘You should have left things alone,’ the shadow says. ‘But it is not too late to make it right. Just give me the Cryptarch Key, and I’ll help you forget.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘What you found is dangerous. It’s much better for all of us if I erase it for good, both from the exomemory and your mind.’
    ‘You are too late. I already sent it out.’
    ‘Ah. Well. That situation is already being dealt with, I’m told. Above my paygrade, in any case. It does not concern you. Please, I am asking nicely. Give me the exomemory key. I know you don’t want it anyway.’
    ‘It is not mine to give,’ Isidore says. I need to buy time. ‘Not many people know about the Key. You are