Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “I don’t know that we can avoid that.”

  “I don’t know that we should. We’ll just have to handle things as they come up. And you’ll need to rely on your judgment.”

  “I always do, don’t I?”

  Nguyen smiled. “I’m counting on it.”

  “Speaking of relying on my own judgment, I could use a little more information.” Nguyen raised her eyebrows.

  “The code Korchow wants. The intraface. It’s Alba-designed.”

  “What, you saw a label?” Nguyen sounded politely incredulous.

  “I’m not stupid. I know Corps work when I see it. And this is Corps work. Some of the best.” “What’s your question?” Nguyen’s voice was as cold and hard as virusteel.

  Li hesitated.

  “The line’s secure.”

  “I guess I’m asking just how much of this is about deniability. Whether we gave the intraface to Sharifi. Whether Metz was an off-the-grid contractor—”

  “Who said anything about Metz?”

  Li froze. Her mind raced as she tried to retreat, retrench, keep Nguyen from finding out just how much she remembered about the raid, and why. “Well,” she stammered, “Cohen said …”

  Nguyen laughed bitterly. “Cohen.” She dipped a finger into her water and ran it around the rim of the glass, setting the crystal singing. “That brings us to our next topic of conversation,” she said at last. “I take it Korchow doesn’t think he can pull the job off without Cohen?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Or someone’s been very careful to make it look that way. If all goes as planned, Cohen will walk away with just what he’s wanted from the beginning: the intraface. We’ll have handed it to him in order to catch Korchow. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Cohen and his friends in ALEF come out winners no matter what happens. And we both know Cohen too well to think that’s a coincidence.”

  Li stiffened. “I can’t believe—”

  “You can’t?” Nguyen interrupted. “Or you don’t want to?”

  A shadow flickered across the windows of Nguyen’s office, sweeping over the planes and hollows of her unsmiling face.

  Li shivered. “ALEF doesn’t want the intraface anyway,” she argued. “It’s Cohen who wants it. For personal reasons.”

  “Cohen doesn’t have personal reasons. In order to have personal reasons, you have to be a person. Have you ever actually bothered to find out anything about ALEF? About what they advocate?”

  “I don’t get involved in politics.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous. Your relationship with Cohen is politics.”

  Li flushed. “You have the right to look at my private files, but not to tell me what to put in them.” “I do when your personal life clouds your judgment.”

  “That’s not the case here,” Li said. All the same, she felt a twinge of relief at the thought that Nguyen couldn’t download her last dinner with Cohen. Yet.

  “Isn’t it?” Nguyen said. “Then why aren’t you asking the questions you should be asking? The questions everyone else is already asking?”

  She plucked a fiche from her desk, tapped through the index to pull a file up, and handed it to Li. “Read it.”

  The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. This is not idle speculation. It’s reality—a reality that both Syndicates and UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with.

  Li looked up at Nguyen. “What is this?”

  “Cohen wrote it. It’s a speech he gave at an ALEF meeting last week. An ALEF meeting that was downloaded by known Consortium members.”

  “Oh,” Li said, and kept reading—the same words she had seen before back in Cohen’s sunny drawing room:

  The Syndicates embody one evolutionary vector: the hive mentality of the cr`eche system, the thirtyyear contract, the construction of a posthuman collective psychology, including cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from gene-norm.

  The UN, in contrast, has launched a series of what might best be described as rearguard actions. On the technological side, we have enslaved AIs (how very revealing programmers’ jargon can be); hardwired, task-dedicated artificial life of every possible description; wired humans and posthumans operating AIplatformed wetware. In essence, a plethora of attempts to subsume nonhuman intelligence into humancontrolled operating systems. And in the political sphere, the General Assembly kindly picks up any stray items the technicians fail to account for by slamming the door on consciously engineered posthuman evolution, by slapping AIs with source-code patents, mandatory-feedback-loop legislation, encryption protocols, and, of course, the much-beloved thirty-year death tax.

  Humanity has engineered its own obsolescence. They acknowledge it by act if not by deed. It is time for us to acknowledge it. Time for us to rethink the shape of UN politics—perhaps the very shape of the UN itself—and step into a wider, brighter posthuman future.

  Li handed the fiche back to Nguyen, who snapped it off with a flourish of her fine-boned hand. “Why show me this?”

  “I want you to know what Cohen is capable of.”

  “It’s just talk,” Li said uncomfortably. “You know Cohen.”

  “That’s my point. He’s using you, Li. The same way he’s used the Security Council. The same way he used Kolodny.”

  Li’s stomach contracted into an icy knot. “What do you mean the way he used Kolodny?” she whispered.

  “You think what happened on Metz was an accident? He used Kolodny to get what he wanted, and then he left her to die. Left you all to die. Didn’t you understand why the review board tried so hard to find a way to go easy on you? Because we knew it was Cohen’s fault all along—and he was the one person we couldn’t afford to blame publicly.”

  “He told me it was a malfunction,” Li said, too stunned to understand what Nguyen was saying about her own court-martial, too stunned to hear anything beyond the bare fact of the accusation.

  “Well, he lied. He found the intraface. Then he started going after the wetware specs. Specs he had no business looking at. Specs we couldn’t afford to let him look at. And in doing so, he endangered the security of the mission. We had to pull him off the shunt to stop him.”

  Li put a hand to her forehead, felt the fever rising beneath her skin. “You’re sure?” she asked. “I’m sure,” Nguyen said. “I cut the link myself.”

  Zona Angel, Arc Section 12: 25.10.48.

  Hell,” Cohen said. “The beastly thing’s stuck.”

  He was opening a long matte-black canister, capped at both ends with silver disks of stamped metal. He was having a hard time of it, having to use Chiara’s starlet-straight front teeth to pry the lid off.

  “Don’t break her pretty teeth,” Li said, and Cohen laughed.

  “I’d grow her new ones,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to tidy up a little collateral damage.”

  They sat in his high-ceilinged drawing room, the chandeliers casting rippled reflections in the hand-laid panes of the garden doors. Chiara looked as beautiful as ever, perched like a bright bird on the sofa; but Li thought there was a pinched quality to the lovely face, a puffy hint of tiredness around the hazel eyes. She nearly asked Cohen if he was feeling all right—before she reminded herself that it wasn’t Cohen she was looking at. That whether some pretty girl felt tired or sad or sick had not a thing to do with the enigma sitting across the table from her.

  He got the canister open at last, with a little grunt of satisfaction, and slid out a long shiny tube of architect’s fiche, which he unfurled on the low table between them. When one corner of the sheet refused to lie flat he borrowed Li’s beer to weight it down.

  Li squinted doubtfully at the blank surface. “We’re supposed to read the plans off that? You’ve got something against VR now?”

  “Only that I’ve been running VR scenarios ever since you sent me Korchow’s files, without getting anywhere near figuring out how to crack this nut.”

  Li had been doing the same
thing herself and coming up just as dry. But telling Cohen that now seemed less than productive.

  He tapped the fiche. It whirred softly and lit up, casting a cool blue glow on the belly of Cohen’s wineglass, the curving flank of Li’s beer bottle. A spidery web of lines spread across the sheet and coalesced into a long, shallow curve like the arc of a twenty-kilometer-long suspension bridge. Cohen tapped in another command, and the ghostly parallelograms of solar arrays formed above and around the arc. “There. Alba. A place you ought to recognize faster than I do.”

  “I guess,” Li said doubtfully.

  Cohen snorted. “Spoken like a true member of the virtual generation. It took humans two hundred millennia to figure out how to read, and they’re forgetting it in a matter of centuries. Anyway.” He tapped the sheet emphatically. “These are the plans the contractor worked from. They’re much more detailed than what Korchow gave you. And, more important, I pulled them from the contractor’s files without having to go into the UNSC databases and get flagged for querying classified material.”

  “Oh, right,” Li said as the flat image began to make sense to her. “There’s the commissary. And the main labs.” She grinned. “I’ve spent enough time in the tanks there to recognize them.”

  “Indeed,” Cohen said. “But we’re not cracking the main labs. Our target is down here: biotech R&D.” “I don’t think I’ve ever been in that level,” Li said.

  “You wouldn’t have. It’s very hush-hush. All controlled tech work. Even the researchers live in separate quarters. It’s a quarantine zone, really; look how the bulkheads cut all the way across the station on the lab levels.”

  He tapped a section of the fiche, and the zone enlarged, revealing a warren of windowless, dead-end corridors and security checkpoints highlighted in red. “You’ll have to get through two security checkpoints on your way in, here and here.”

  Li pointed to a cluster of bulging growths on the station’s outer skin. “What’s that?”

  “Algae farm. Part of the oxygen cycle. But look here.” He pointed her back into the station’s interior. “Now what’s the job in front of us? One, we get you onto the station and into the lab wing. Two, you access the lab’s central database and manually open a line to the ship. Three, I go through the lab AI’s files, fielding any interference he sees fit to throw at us, and figure out which comp the intraface files are on. Four, you go get them. Five—and this is the real kicker—we get out without being detected. Or, in a less optimistic but more realistic scenario, at least without being positively identified.”

  Li nodded, a little bemused at hearing all this from Chiara’s pretty mouth, especially since she’d always suspected the girl was rather stupid.

  She picked up her beer, and the corner of the fiche popped up. She hunted around for something to set on it, and came up with a moldering first edition of Doctor Faustus.

  “Can we do it?” she asked.

  “Not in any way you’re likely to be very enthusiastic about, I’m afraid.” Cohen tapped up the scale on the area of the plans that included the lab spoke. “Physically, I have no idea where the intraface is. All I do know is that it’s in this lab. Unfortunately, the lab files—personnel, inventory, everything—are deadwalled.”

  “Like Metz.”

  “Worse than Metz.” He looked up at her. “Alba has a weapons-grade semisentient.”

  A chill worked its way down Li’s spine and settled in her stomach. She hated logging on to semisentients. Her fear was unreasonable—or so she had tried many times to convince herself. Sometimes she wondered if it was just blind prejudice; the one time she’d mentioned it to Cohen, he’d gotten so offended it had taken weeks to smooth his ruffled feelings.

  But still.

  There was something sharklike about the big semisentients: brute computing power, unfettered by hard programming or by the all-too-human qualms and foibles of fully sentient Emergents. Logging on to a semisentient was like swimming in dark bottomless water. Impossible to believe that the wordless menace that lurked behind their numbers could become Cohen. Terrifying to think that Cohen was only a few operations, a few algorithms removed from them—and that no one could say for certain where to draw the line between the two.

  “So how do we get you in?” Li asked.

  Cohen raised an eyebrow. “You assume a lot. I haven’t agreed to help you yet.” “What do you want me to do, say pretty please?”

  “You’re magnificent. Why is it that the bigger the favor you’re asking for, the more unpleasant you become?”

  “You’ll get paid,” Li said. “Last time I checked, that makes it a job, not a favor.”

  Cohen lit a cigarette without offering Li one and set the case and lighter on the table, carefully aligning them with the gold-leafed corner scroll.

  “I think we’ll just let that one slide, shall we?” he said. “Unless you actually want to pick a fight with me?”

  Li kept silent.

  “Right then. The lab AI has disabled external communications. You can’t call in. You can’t get wireless access. All you can do is call out to approved numbers, and you can only do that by direct contact jack.” He smiled and tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette with a Byzantine flourish. “Which means, my dear, that you’re going under the knife.”

  Li fingered her temple, where she could just feel the flat disk of the remote commsystem transmitter under her skin. She’d never gotten a direct-contact wire-to-wire jack. She’d never had to. Those were reserved for techs, like Kolodny, the people who did the real grunt work of cracking target systems— and who ran risks from which the automatic cutouts of Li’s remote interface largely protected her.

  “You come up with that idea yourself?” she asked Cohen. “Or did you get help from Korchow?”

  “I wouldn’t waste my time arguing about it if I were you,” Cohen said. He shot a dark stare at her over the top of his wineglass. “A jack is nothing compared to what they’re going to need to do to you to get the intraface working.”

  Li bit her lip and shifted uncomfortably as her thoughts roved from semisentients to contact jacks to the several hundred meters of prototype hardware Sharifi had been carrying around in her head when she died. How had they slid into actually planning this mission without any discussion of whether or not Li was going to let Korchow test-run the intraface on her?

  Had she actually made that decision herself? Or had Cohen coaxed her into it like a chess master nudging his player across the board toward the enemy? Was Nguyen right about him? And even if she wasn’t, even if his intentions were good, what did he really want from her?

  “Has anyone actually tested this intraface thing?” she asked, settling on an easy, emotionally neutral question.

  “I think there’s a monkey somewhere who has one.”

  “Oh.” Li laughed nervously. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “Cohen!”

  “But there’s some indication that he was crazy to begin with. And besides, he’s a monkey.”

  He pointed to the network of alleys and firewalls around the lab’s back entrance. “Right. Here’s my first brilliant idea. We do a cutout around this door that would get you past the security network.”

  “Which means you have to be on-station to fiddle the main AI. Which means a second person for you to shunt through. Which means twice as much chance of getting caught.”

  The more they worked through it, the shorter the list of realistic options got. Cracking Alba was like building a house of cards; each piece of the puzzle that fell into place exposed another piece, another problem, another collapse waiting to happen.

  They went at it again, teasing out the problems and pitfalls until they had something that looked like a plan in front of them. At least as far as getting through the security checks and actually retrieving the data went.

  But they were still left with the problem of how to get Li into Alba undetected.

  “Hang on,” Li said finally, g
rabbing at the fleeting tail of what looked like it might just be a viable option. “Go back to that first section we looked at. Hydroponics.”

  Cohen tapped back through half a dozen screens to reach it.

  “What about these turrets?” She pointed to a row of ten-meter-high towers jutting through the thick pelt of guy wires, sensor lenses, and communications equipment that bristled from the outer skin of the station. “They look like vents.”

  “Sure.” A look crossed Chiara’s smooth face that made Li think Cohen knew exactly where she was going with this. “Decontamination vents for the algae flats. So what?”

  “So the last time I was on Alba, it was overcrowded.” “It always is.”

  “Well, what’s the daily CO2load?”

  Cohen paused for a moment, searching. “Sixty thousand cubic meters. And, to anticipate your next question, they’re shipping in about 1.8 thousand of compressed oxygen every day.”

  “So where’s the excess CO2going?” “Out those turret vents, obviously.” “Where it can get out, I can get in.” “Not without someone inside to open the vents.”

  “Korchow says he’s got an inside man.”

  “Not possible,” Cohen said, scanning the plans again. “They’re using the outgoing CO2to turn the turbines that power this whole section of the solar array. And even if you get past the turbines, you’re still talking about crawling down a twenty-meter shaft in hard vacuum. And the vent diameter’s too small to take a suit and gear.” He tapped decisively on the tight print that gave the duct’s dimensions. “You can’t get in that way.”

  “I could if I stashed my gear outside and went down the duct with just a pressure suit.”

  “Too risky. You’re talking about crawling down an active ventilation duct in hard vacuum with no air, no heat, just a pressure suit. If anything goes wrong—even if you just run into a minor delay—you’re dead.”

  Li smiled. “And you won’t have anyone to eat oysters with.”

  The look Cohen gave her couldn’t have been more naked if he’d stripped his skin away. She saw fear, guilt, anger flash across his face. Then she looked away; whatever else was there, she couldn’t deal with it. Not now, anyway. She pushed her beer away from her. It left a ring on the table, but for once Cohen didn’t seem to care about the punishment her bad habits were inflicting on his furniture.