Seemingly unrelated to Permutation City, but this story presents a compelling sci-fi noire set between 2034 and 2080 in a future where the solar system has been enveloped in a cosmic bubble which drives some people cult-crazy at first but eventually fades into everyday background as people accept their fate in the universe and realize their models of physics are basically busted.

The protagonist detective, Nick, is charged by an anonymous patron to investigate the disappearance of a vegetative patient named Laura who was born (?) in 2034 coincidental with the appearance of the bubble. She is incapable of taking care of herself but seems to have a knack for breaching containment.

He starts asking questions in the wrong places in futuristic HK and gets kidnapped himself by the group responsible. He is Stockholmed/inducted into the group and has a neural mod installed in his brain which overrides all other cognitive abilities which are bent around loyalty to the kidnapping group: the Ensemble. The Ensemble was interested in Laura because of her ability to collapse quantum wave functions into specific states.

This is where Egan pops off, commanding a superior understanding of quantum physics (tracks with my limited understanding). Nick is charged with protecting an asset at another research group connected with the Ensemble who is helping research a neural mod (the Eigenmod) which allows its possessors to imitate Laura's ability to select quantum outcomes.

When using the mod, the user becomes 'Smeared', existing within a superposition of states constantly, therefore every possible set of actions they take being equally 'real'. When one version of the user succeeds in whatever they want to do, they deactivate the mod, collapsing the eigenstates into that one subjective reality. This allows the mod to seemingly control probability to do anything, though raises questions of morality and philosophy to the narrator, who considers deactivating the mod equivalent to murdering the other equally real versions of the user.

So cool.

Egan also foretells the existence and advent of NFTs as pseudo-random noise to fabricate a sense of uniqueness and exclusivity to material or commercial consumer goods.

Reality is not continuous, it comes in bursts and spasms. Experience happens in hindsight, moving it over.

As I was struggling to get my PC to connect to my home WiFi network to play BF6, Jack instructed me to stick my thumb in my ass. I pantomimed inserting my thumb into my mouth and hiding the other thumb offscreen then rapidly switching them. Jack just said "No that's encryption. Poop in the mouth – that's encryption."

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