After a prickly initial period in which none of them could really figure out how to talk to one another, Router/Decomposer had become that best and only real friend that she and Cohen had outside of their peculiar relationship. Her friendship with the lesser AI had none of the all-consuming intensity of the full-bandwidth machine-meat meld that was life with Cohen. But it was important to her. More important than she’d quite realized until this moment. He’d told her once, long ago, that he was keeping an eye on her because he was interested in what she was turning into. Like any actually honest thing an AI said to you, it left you wondering what they really thought of humans and whether the fuzzy set that they called friendship actually had anything to do with the human emotion. But somehow, in the mere act of programming a bot to keep track of her legal status, it seemed like Router/Decomposer had answered that question.
“Thanks,” she told him, biting back a laugh at the spectacle of someone who didn’t even have a body doing such a phenomenally good job of imitating the uncomfortable shrug and grimace of a supposedly hard-edged rationalist getting caught in the act of being a softie.
“So what do you know about the suicide?” Router/Decomposer asked when his GUI had cycled back to normal.
“The so-called suicide.”
“As you wish. And I don’t really know anything more than you know. He went out there on a consulting job for ALEF.” Router/Decomposer’s GUI shivered in disgust. “They call it consulting. You might as well call it exterminating.”
Li must have made some sound of protest; the AI answered what he assumed was her objection to the word, never guessing that what really pained her was the fact that he had known more than she did about Cohen’s work for ALEF.
“Well, I won’t argue semantics,” he went on. “Cohen was sent out there to put down a wild AI outbreak at the Navy shipyards. That’s what I heard, anyway. Putting down wild AI outbreaks seems to be ALEF’s main line of business these days. Not that they admit that. It’s always an exceptional circumstance, or an unprecedented crisis, or a one-time exception to the general rule of autonomy.” He snorted sarcastically. “We live in exceptional times, haven’t you noticed?”
“You’re talking about AIs policing other AIs? ALEF putting down wild AI outbreaks for UNSec under the Controlled Tech Treaties? But what did Cohen have to do with that?”
“He was one of the largest ALEF constituents. And the oldest, of course. They didn’t do anything he wasn’t involved in.”
“But I can’t believe he would have gone along with—”
“Cohen was very loyal. And not always to the nicest people.”
Li raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me that?”
“I didn’t mean to say—well, you know.” He sounded stricken. “And for the record, I think you’re very nice. And so did Cohen.”
She’d been suppressing a chuckle at Router/Decomposer’s confusion, but now she laughed out loud. “You must have an unusual definition of the word. Anyway, tell me about New Allegheny.”
“There’s nothing to tell. That’s really all I know. Except what everyone knows. It’s the gateway planet to the Drift. They’re discovering new FTL routes daily. New planets weekly. And surprise, surprise, the UN Security Council just officially declared it a Trusteeship. Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? I suppose not. The news broke yesterday. It would have been after you talked to the lawyer.”
“Does that mean they’re deploying Peacekeepers?”
“Yep. And they’ve locked down the Bose-Einstein relays and cut off civilian traffic. If you really do want to go out and investigate Cohen’s suicide you’re going to have a damn hard time getting there.”
“Holy Mother of God,” Li breathed. “Cohen dies out there and within hours UNSec has locked down FTL transport and put the planet under military control? You think that’s a coincidence?”
“I know what you’re getting at, Catherine. But I don’t think it necessarily follows that Helen Nguyen is involved.”
The name lay between them like an unexploded bomb. Their last encounter with Helen Nguyen had cost Li her hand and disrupted Cohen’s internal networks so badly that Router/Decomposer had decided that the uncertain life of a meta-Emergent was more inviting than staying on inside Cohen’s older and far more stable personality architecture. But the Israeli debacle had only been blowback for their original and unforgivable betrayal. In her last job for Nguyen, Li had been sent to her own home planet to defuse a miners’ strike—and she’d ended up siding with the miners and shutting down the only known source of the Bose-Einstein crystals that powered the UN’s FTL transport grid. The damage she had done was still rippling out across UN space, crashing relay stations and turning once-viable colonies into doomed island outposts. Nguyen would never be done punishing Li for that betrayal—or wreaking vengeance on Cohen for having led her to it.
“Can I ask you something?” Router/Decomposer said.
“What?”
“Well … Cohen had a different router back then, but … I always got the sense that Nguyen hated him even before Compson’s World.”
Li sporked up a mouthful of mediocre mac and cheese. It was cafeteria food at its worst—tasteless enough to make her instinctively tweak her VR inputs before she remembered that she’d taken the trouble to come see Router/Decomposer in person today. “Well,” she said finally, “Cohen always did have a talent for evoking the irrational in people.”
As soon as she spoke, she wished she hadn’t. Router/Decomposer’s face clouded over, and she knew he must be thinking about his own disassociation with Cohen—you might as well call it a divorce though most AIs would scoff at the word. Cohen had treated Router/Decomposer badly before he left. Li had stayed out of the fight, figuring it was one of those internecine AI spats that no mere human could even begin to comprehend. But she’d always wondered how the two of them really felt about each other underneath the surface politeness that AIs were so good at using to paper over harsh memories and bad feelings.
AI emotions were slippery things. You could never tell from the outside whether they were real feelings or just interface protocols designed to bridge the chasm between artificial and organic consciousness. And sometimes they were both—in ways that even the AIs themselves couldn’t untangle. But the guilt and anger playing across Router/Decomposer’s face right now were real—and they mirrored her own feelings far too closely for comfort.
“Listen,” he told her, sounding far more human than she’d ever known him to sound. “Just promise me you won’t go off half-cocked. Don’t commit to anything in anger. You’ve got this ghost arriving in the mail—”
Li shuddered. “Don’t call it that.”
“All right. Fragment, then. Wait until the fragment arrives. He must have sent it to you on purpose. We’ll know a lot more once we hear what it has to tell us. And in the meantime … think.”
“About what?”
“About whether you should actually do anything at all. If he really did kill himself—”
Li made a sharp gesture of denial, but he overrode it.
“If he really did kill himself there’s nothing you can do that will change that. And if Nguyen killed him … well, she can kill you just as easily, can’t she?”
Li shrugged.
“Are you saying I’m wrong?”
“No. You’re right. On both counts.”
“So why don’t you drop it? He’s dead. Just as dead as if he were human. He’s not coming back. Nothing you do, nothing you discover, nothing is going to bring him back.”
“But there was a yard sale—” She caught herself and stopped.
“Ah, so now we come to it.”
“Don’t make it sound like that. I’m not that naïve. I know better than to believe in fairy tales. But haven’t some AIs been rebooted after …?”
“Not in any form that a human would recognize as the same person.”
Li wiggled the ends of her spork back and forth un
til it snapped in two. “Not in any form that a human would recognize,” she repeated bitterly. “Do you really think I know him that little? Do you really think I’ve lived among AIs for two decades without getting past that?”
“I didn’t mean to say that.” The strange attractor was spooling faster and faster, a writhing halo of light and shadow twisting in upon itself. “But Catherine. You can collect all the ghosts—sorry, fragments—that you want, and run free-range simulations on them from here to eternity, and you would be astronomically unlikely to ever produce anything that even I recognize as Cohen.”
“I know that,” Li said, ignoring the part of her that didn’t know that, that insisted on not knowing it, that stubbornly clung to hope because it couldn’t face the alternative.
“So why are you doing this?”
“Because I owe him.”
“Because you owe him.” Router/Decomposer’s flat, neutral voice was more challenging than the most pointed question.
“I owe him everything.” She felt her face twisting, and she knew even before she spoke that the next words were going to come out all wrong—an accusation, when she was the last person who had a right to accuse anyone of anything. “And so do you.”
He still wasn’t happy about the plan, but little by little he started helping her think it through instead of trying to talk her out of it. They agreed that Router/Decomposer would handle the New Allegheny end of the investigation while Li went to Freetown. It stuck in her craw, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative.
“The only way we could get you there without the UNSec pass codes is by a flat-out shotgun spincast,” he told her. “And that’s refugee tech. No sane person would use it unless it was a matter of life and death. And anyway, you couldn’t handle the New Allegheny end of things without me even if we could get you there. Cohen’s networks must be strung out halfway across the Drift by now. By my count so far—and I’m sure it’s far from complete—there are pieces of him on eighteen different planets in seven different star systems separated from one another by hundreds of light-years.”
In the end he canceled his afternoon class and they went back to his office, where they sat looking glumly at the star map of the planets bordering the Drift—a map that Li was getting to know far better than she wanted to. The image could have been captioned “Portrait of a Dying Empire.” Once there had been a clear line of demarcation between human-ruled UN space and the clone-dominated Syndicates. But now the UN’s frontier was shrinking, drawing back upon itself and leaving behind only a jagged crust of stranded settlements that looked like the ghost of an old coffee stain. Beyond that line lay the Syndicates, and the one outlying human settlement of New Allegheny. And beyond them surged the Drift.
“That’s what the real fight’s about,” Router/Decomposer said, following her gaze. “Whoever controls the Drift gets to dictate the shape of the future. For all of us.”
“Just because they’ll have FTL—”
“FTL’s not really the right word for it. Drift travel is certainly some kind of closed timelike loop. But it seems more a jump between quantum branchings or conmoving spacetime regions or—”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Do we have to do the endless AI quibbling thing right now?”
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m better suited to go out there than you are. Bose-Einstein relays all along the Wall are being decommissioned even as we speak in order to try to stretch the UN’s FTL resources a little further and keep more important colonies from falling offstream or falling prey to the Syndicates. There’s simply no way an organic entity can investigate his death in any meaningful time frame. It’ll take an AI to track his surviving fragments down. Or an army. But UNSec is still letting through low-bandwidth civilian communications, so I can do the compressed data packet boogie and inject a parasitical program into the New Allegheny’s noosphere. I’d lay even odds that’s how Cohen got out there himself. So just let me handle the New Allegheny end of things and you concentrate on Freetown.” He hesitated. “Besides, ALEF’s more likely to talk to you than to me.”
Li frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought they were separatists.”
“Hah! Little do you know! In their eyes you’re just an inferior life-form. You don’t kick a donkey back when it kicks you, et cetera, et cetera. I, on the other hand, am a traitor.”
“If you’re a traitor, what does that make Cohen?”
The visual equivalent of a laugh flared across his representational matrix. “What was that nice nickname they had for you back in Israel?”
“An abomination?”
“Yep. That gets the general idea across pretty well.”
“Still,” Li insisted. “Whatever happened, it happened in the Crucible. On New Allegheny. That’s where I need to be, not Freetown.”
“Well, UNSec still controls the only in-system BE relay. So if you’re not hitching a ride with them, you’re shotgunning.”
Li cursed under her breath and kicked at the leg of the desk in frustration. Shotgunning was refugee tech: quick and dirty, and the last refuge of people who’d run out of hope, time, and credit. The technical name for it was scattercasting. Which pretty much told the whole story: People on Periphery planets without access to the Bose-Einstein FTL network or enough credit to emigrate on the lumbering slow ships had begun simply broadcasting their unencrypted jump files through the quantum spinfoam. The broadcasts were horribly corrupted and unstable. There was no way to control who downloaded them or what they did with them. There was only the slim hope—if you could even call it hope—that someone somewhere would decide to resurrect your pattern. And that the spacetime region of your resurrection would be preferable to the one in which you’d immolated yourself in the scattercaster.
Scattercasting was illegal in UN space for all the obvious reasons. It was a legal nightmare, spawning potentially infinite copies of the broad-castee, all of whom had the same rights and legal status as the original. And, the milk of human kindness running as sweet as it did, scattercasting had spawned every kind of abuse imaginable, from quantum kidnapping to indentured servitude and (if the rumors about some of the more remote Periphery planets were true) outright slavery.
“Not that I want you to go,” Router/Decomposer said, “but that face really isn’t warranted. It’s technically no different than Bose-Einstein-assisted quantum teleportation. Technically speaking you always die in this universe and are resurrected in some other quantum branching of the multiverse. You just choose to think of BE jumps as faster than light travel and scattercasting as some kind of quantum death warrant.”
“I think of it that way,” Li said acerbically, “because that’s the way it is.”
“The way you think it is.” Characteristically, Router/Decomposer had now completely lost sight of his larger goals and was arguing the technical point every bit as enthusiastically as if he wanted her to scattercast to New Allegheny. “But only because that’s what’s consistent with your mammalian identity architecture. The truth is, there’s no such thing as FTL. No matter what technology you’re talking about. Spinfoam-assisted quantum teleportation, the Drift, scattercasting, clicking your heels together twice and thinking of Kansas—you name it, it’s all the same. If it gets you outside your light cone, then you’ve gone to a different universe. The math is simply too elegant to deny.”
“Anyway,” Li said, unwilling to waste time splitting cosmological hairs, “it’s not the copies of me in other worlds I’m worried about. It’s the ones in this one.”
“But that’s my point. I don’t think you’ve grasped the kinds of distances we’re dealing with. The FTL age is over. Now that the New Allegheny field array is kaput, the entire Drift is outside your light cone barring some extraordinary act of God or General Nguyen. So basically the copy of you on New Allegheny might as well be in a parallel universe.”
“Not copy. Copies.”
Router/D
ecomposer shrugged. “You’re assuming someone will go to the trouble of resurrecting more than one copy. But why would they bother? Not everyone even has the technical know-how. And besides, it’s expensive. I can’t imagine who’d even think it was worth it.”
“Can’t you?”
If Router/Decomposer had been human she would have seen him remember Gilead. But even though she couldn’t see it, she knew it was happening. At least he didn’t flinch. And that mattered more than she wanted to admit to herself. Now that Cohen was gone the list of people for whom Catherine Li the person was more real than the bloodthirsty caricature in her war crimes dossier was short to vanishing.
She tried to think about what a scattercast pattern for Catherine Li, ex-Peacekeeper, ex–UNSec operative, ex–Butcher of Gilead, would mean in the multiverse—and the images that came to mind weren’t comforting.
“Look,” Router/Decomposer said. “Just forget about New Allegheny for now. Go to Freetown. See what you find out. And meanwhile I’ll see what I can find out, and we’ll talk when you get back. Okay?”
Li’s mouth tightened in frustration.
“Okay?” Router/Decomposer repeated.
“Okay.”
But she might as well not have promised, because as things turned out she didn’t need any help from Router/Decomposer in getting to Freetown. If anything she could have used his help getting out of it.
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