Her head spun. The world twisted and rippled around her. Numbers came at her too fast for her to feel them as anything but blinding, paralyzing, dizzying pain. This was a system never designed for human interface, a system never designed at all except in its earliest, most distant beginnings. It wasn’t as alive as a human—the constant chant of the AI–civil-rights proponents—it was more alive. More alive, more complex, more changeable and contradictory. Just more. Cohen must have been insane to think she could exist, let alone function, in this maelstrom.
She staggered and fell heavily against the railing. He put a hand under her elbow, steadying her. In the same instant, her brain clicked back into the VR interface as if someone had flipped a cutoff switch. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cohen said, and drew her back from the ledge.
She stared at him for a moment, feeling like a child who had put her hand into the fire only to have an all-seeing adult pull it out miraculously unscathed.
“You’re all right?” he asked.
She nodded and followed him back inside.
The hall’s internal wall was broken by what seemed to be an infinitely receding line of doors. Cohen was still behind her, one hand on her hip, his mouth inches from her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said. She closed them.
“What do you hear?”
“Water.”
“Good. That’s the fountain. See it?”
She turned and looked back over her shoulder into the glittering shadows of the portico. “Yes.”
“If you get lost, just follow the sound of the water and it will bring you back here. Now. How many doors do you see?”
“I can’t …” She looked down the hall and saw that the illusion of infinity had been just that. “Forty … forty-eight?”
“Good. Every door is a separate network with its own memory palace. Every room in each palace is a directory. Every object in the room is a datafile. Understand?”
She nodded.
“When you want to access a network, you find its proper door. When you want a directory, you find its proper room. When you want a datafile, you just open the drawer, the box, the cabinet, whatever it’s stored in. Just like the standard graphic user interface you’ve used in Corps archives … although I flatter myself that my aesthetic instincts put me a cut or two above the Corps designers. But bear in mind that you’ll still be dealing with a fully sentient AI every time you open one of those doors. And some of them are less … accessible … than the networks you’re familiar with. If you feel … nervous about anything, you can always leave. Always. Just come back here, shut the door behind you, and you’re alone again.”
“Except for you.”
He laughed. “You’re in the belly of the beast, my dear. I’m always here. I am here.” Li looked around. “Which door should I open?”
“Whichever one you want.” He looked at her, Hyacinthe’s little boy’s body so slight he actually had to look up to meet her eyes. A small, secret smile slipped across his face. “Try the last door.”
She walked down the hall, running her hand along the cool marble of the walls, the carved hardwood of the doorframes. Each door was labeled: network designations, Toffoli numbers, directory profiles. The last door, tucked into the farthest corner of the hall as if in an afterthought, had only a single word printed on it: Hyacinthe. She set her hand to the latch, and it opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her.
A large, bright room, shot butter yellow with morning sunlight. On every wall, row on row of wooden drawers, each drawer with its own polished brass knob, none of them much more than big enough to fit a datacube. There were no labels or schematics on the drawers, but as Li touched them brief images of their contents flashed before her. “What is this place?” she whispered.
“Me.” Cohen nudged an oriental rug straight with one toe. “Well, that’s the short answer anyway. The long answer would be that I thought this was a good place to start because Hyacinthe is the core network that you’re most familiar with.”
“Do you actually use this place yourself?”
“Of course. I shift back and forth between VR and the numbers like you do when you go instream. I won’t use VR much when I’m running under time pressure or handling heavy traffic. But when I have the time and processing space …”
Li knew how this sort of VR construct worked. The drawers would contain stored data platformed on a nonsentient access program. Behind the walls, where she couldn’t see them without dropping into code, would be the bones of the system: the semisentient operating programs and the sentient net that these memories and datafiles belonged to. She looked down the length of the room and saw that it was one of many, all opening onto a cloistered garden. And every wall, every arcade, every paving stone held a memory. “Christ,” she whispered, “it’s huge.”
“Infinite, actually,” Cohen called from the garden, where he was restaking a wind-tousled dahlia. “It’s a folded database.”
Li stared, breathless. How could anyone—any ten people—have that many memories? What a weight of the past to be buried under. She walked through the rooms, tentatively, running her hands along the wood but not quite daring to open anything. The memories were grouped in rough categories, and as Li worked her way through the place she began to see hidden links, make telling connections. In the arcade along the fringe of the garden, a whole long wall was given over to a mosaic of books, films, paintings, each compressed into a tiny, emotion-laden point of color. Another room seemed to contain only memory upon memory of Earth, most of them collected in the final few years before the Evacuation. Then came a white, silent room that was entirely empty. As she penetrated deeper into the complex, she saw that most of the memories in the outer rooms were other people’s. Cohen’s own memories were concentrated in the sunny, quiet arcade along the garden’s southern exposure. And in the garden itself were people—all the people Cohen had ever known during his long, long life.
“Come look at these,” Cohen said. She went.
“All these are Hyacinthe.” He gestured at a narrow row of drawers just inside the door. “The person, not the network. They should be quite easy for you to access. Go ahead, have a look.”
She opened the drawer he pointed to. It was empty. “What—?” He smiled. “What’s the closest sense to memory?”
Li blinked. “Smell.”
“So?”
She bent over the drawer and sniffed. It smelled of cedar, and of the old-fashioned furniture wax that infused every piece of wood in Cohen’s realspace house. She had a ridiculous momentary image of one of his impeccably dressed French maids getting down on her immaculate knees to scrub at the floors and baseboards of the ethereal memory palace. Then she caught the smell underneath the other smells: the smell of the memory itself.
The room around her disappeared. She stood on a steep scree slope, her face warmed by the golden sun of pre-Migration Earth. A glacier snaked away like a river below her. Behind her loomed a near-vertical wall of rock and ice whose very shadow was like a little death. She turned and craned her neck to look up the soaring granite column above her. This was the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, her oracle told her. The most spectacular route up the most beautiful rock face on the planet. Given the state of the glacier winding below her, this couldn’t be much after the turn of the twenty-first century. Italy lay south, on the other side of that colossus. To the west, the Mont Blanc glittered under a sky blue enough for the most cautious climber to gamble on.
“Planning on helping?” someone said behind her.
She turned and saw a woman crouched on the slope below her coiling a brightly colored climbing rope. She handled the rope expertly, without wasted motion, lean climber’s muscles bunching and flexing under her sunburned skin. Lucinda, Li thought. Her name is Lucinda.
Lucinda looked up, her eyes (which Li somehow knew were blue) hidden behind mirrored glasses. Li saw her own doubled reflection staring back out of the lenses: a dark, narrow-faced greyhound of a m
an that could only be Hyacinthe Cohen himself.
“I love you,” Li heard Hyacinthe saying in a voice that was kissing cousin to Cohen’s voice. And she shivered, because she knew that love. She felt the heat of it, remembered living it. Remembered not just this moment, but everything. The whole life of a man who had died two centuries ago. Lucinda just grinned up at her with the warmth of a shared joke, and said, “I know.”
“Interesting,” Cohen said as the memory palace took shape around her again. “I wouldn’t have expected you’d see Cinda.”
“You don’t see the same thing every time?”
“As time passes, I become more and more inclined to sacrifice retrievability for … other values. Surprising what surfaces. As if what I bring in with me sets the direction. Most AIs, including some of my own associates, find it ridiculously inefficient. But then”—he smiled complacently—“I’m not most AIs.”
She looked around. How far did this go on? And what, or who, was lurking in all those other memory palaces?
“What’s bothering you?”
She hesitated. “It seems so … human.” “Well, in many ways Hyacinthe is human.” “You talk about him as if he weren’t you.” “He’s not all of me. But he is the first.”
“So he controls … the others?”
Cohen made a hairsplitting face. “ Controlsis too strong a word. I’d say he … mediates. I know you think I’m an inveterate navel-gazer, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never really thought much about it. Do you think about how you walk down the street? Or how your stomach works?”
“It’s just that I can’t square it with …”
“With what made you almost fall off the front porch before?” She thought he was waiting for her to smile at the front-porch quip, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Do you have to reconcile it?”
She had no answer to that.
“If it’s any comfort to you, most of the sentients in my shared net have the same reaction. They can’t get any perspective on the system without my mediating. It doesn’t mean I control them. They have their own ideas and opinions. But they’re guests here. And as it’s my house, they follow my rules. Mostly.”
Li looked at him uncertainly, hesitating between the many questions jostling in her mind and not finding any she was willing to ask just yet. She wandered down the rows of drawers, opening a few of them, with Cohen always just behind her, watching, commenting. Slowly, without quite admitting to herself where she was going, she worked her way back toward the garden.
It was a curious garden, wild, heavy with the smell of earth and roses. The near end was well kept up, planted in neatly tended French beds of herbs and flowers, almost formal compared to Cohen’s realspace jungle. But at the far end the ground and even parts of the palace itself had been overrun by a fierce sprawling thicket of wild roses.
She eyed the thorny tangle over the heads of the neatly pruned dahlia beds. It looked as if some feral and not entirely friendly presence had established a beachhead in that corner of the garden and was only biding its time before it flung out its thorny suckers to swallow the whole cloister. “You ought to rip those out,” she said. “They’re taking over everything.”
“I know.” Cohen smiled wryly. “They’re weeds, really. And they have the most vicious thorns. The thing is, I like them.”
Li shrugged. “It’s your garden.”
“So it is,” Cohen said. He strolled down toward the wild end of the garden and settled himself on a low bench already half-engulfed by a particularly predatory moss rose.
Li circled the garden, poking into the boxes and cabinets that lined the cloister. She found memories of half a dozen people she knew: Nguyen; Kolodny; a few AIs she’d met on Corps missions. Even Sharifi. But not the one person she was looking for.
“Can’t find it?” Cohen asked. She looked over and saw he was laughing at her. “Who says I’m looking for anything?”
“Have a rose,” he said.
He plucked a moss-petaled bloom off the bramble behind him and held it out to her. She took it from him —but as she wrapped her fingers around the stem it pricked her.
“Christ!” She looked at her finger and saw blood welling up from half a dozen punctures.
“It’s a real rose,” Cohen said. He bent and handed it to her again, holding it gingerly. “Real roses have thorns. That’s why they smell so sweet.”
She put it to her nose, smelling it. And realized that the rose itself was a memory. A memory of her.
There she was six years ago. Younger, thinner, but her. This was not Li as she knew herself, though; it was what Cohen remembered. The young CO he had locked horns with during their first tense mission together. A dark whirlwind of a woman, hard, driving, utterly unyielding. Not a person Li herself could imagine liking. Not a person, she realized with a jolt, that Cohen had liked much.
“Was I really so awful?” she asked. “Just a little thorny.”
“Very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. As I recall, you pricked my ego not a little.” He grinned. “A certain speech about not having the patience to work with dilettantes comes to mind.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“My dear, it was well worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching a twenty-five-year-old who never finished high school look down her nose at me.”
“It’s not like I was the first.”
“Oh. Well, that’s simple bigotry, often as not. You despised me personally. I respected that.”
Something in his smile made her drop her eyes and turn away. She brushed her finger over the white velvet skin of a petal, then bent her head and put the blossom to her nose again.
Another memory. Her again, leaning back against the door of an officers’ flop on Alba with a knowing smirk on her face. It was the evening of the first and only night they’d spent together. She remembered standing there. She remembered looking across the room into Roland’s golden eyes, trying to play it cool, wondering what the hell Cohen even saw in her, still half-convinced it was all an elaborate joke at her expense.
But now she was seeing it through Cohen’s eyes. She felt Roland’s knees tremble and his breath quicken. And she felt something else behind the organic interface, something cleaner, sharper, truer. As if an infinitely complex mechanism had come into alignment, bolts sliding, tumblers clicking and turning over, locking in on her looking back at him, wanting him, making him real. On the dizzying, exhilarating, precisely calculated certainty that nothing, once she touched him, would ever be the same again.
Christ,she thought. What did I do to him? Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?
But she had known how he felt, hadn’t she? Why else had she been so unbearably, unforgivably cruel to him?
She jerked back into the present and saw Cohen sitting on the bench looking up at her, holding his breath like a child who still believed you could make dreams come true just by wanting them hard enough. It was the same look she remembered from that night—and God help her if some awful part of her didn’t still want to slap it off his face.
He blinked, and her stomach clenched with shame as she realized he’d caught the edge of that thought. “You’re a very confused person,” he said.
“It took you six years and a fortune in wetware to figure that out?”
“No. It took me five minutes.” He smiled. “It just didn’t seem polite to mention it before now.”
Something tickled at the back of her mind like the soft trailing ends of fingers. She realized she’d been feeling those fingers for a while. All the time she’d been exploring the sun-drenched garden of Hyacinthe’s memory palace, there had been a little cat-footed thief prowling through the dark passages of her own subconscious, probing her memories, weighing her responses, taking the measure of her own feelings. A little sock-footed soccer-shorts-wearing thief is more like it, she thought.
“I won’t have you sneaking around inside my head,” she told him. “I won’t have your prying
.” “Prying? And what do you think you’re doing here?”
“That’s different. I have to be here. It’s not personal.”
“Isn’t it?” He bit his lip and looked up at her through Hyacinthe’s dark lashes. “This is as personal as it gets, Catherine. And it doesn’t go one way. The link won’t work until you accept that.”
“Then I guess it won’t work,” she said.
She turned away, meaning to leave—and found herself tangled in one of the long suckers that arched out from the rose thicket. “God dammit!” she muttered, trying to pull it off her and only managing to gouge the razor-sharp thorns into her arm through the thin fabric of her shirtsleeve.
That was when she smelled Gilead.
What had Cohen said about finding in the memory palace what you brought to it? This was one memory she’d certainly brought in with her. A copy of her own UNSC datafile.
It was Gilead, sharp and real as if it were happening all over again. There was the mud, the filth, the constant, stomach-wrenching, soul-killing fear. There were the faces of dead friends she no longer remembered grieving for. There were the bodies of soldiers—and not only soldiers, God help her—that she hadn’t until this very moment remembered killing.
Because this wasn’t the edited spinfeed stored in her datafiles. It was the Gilead of her fears and nightmares and jump-dreams. It was the real Gilead: the original realtime feed that she’d recorded all those years ago. Somehow Cohen had accessed a file Li herself wasn’t cleared to look at, a file that should have been lying dormant in the deadwalled UNSC headquarters archives. And this file was different from the official memory. Different in ways she didn’t want to think about.
When she saw Korchow’s young, bloodied face looking up at her, when she heard herself saying those words he’d reminded her of back in the cluttered shadows of his antique shop, she broke and ran.
Shantytown: 5.11.48.
Has it occurred to you that this might not work?” Cohen asked Korchow a moment later. Li slumped in a chair, drenched in nightmare sweat, unwilling even to look at him.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 41