“Why do you hate me?” she asked suddenly—or as suddenly as she could do anything in AI time.
He smiled coldly. “I don’t hate you.”
“Well you don’t like me much.”
“I don’t like any human much.”
“I’m not human.”
“Close enough, my dear.”
She looked into his eyes and saw Cohen in him. That was what made this so painful, she realized. The feeling that she was seeing Cohen as he would be if he didn’t love her, if he looked at her coldly and logically. Seeing the differences between them unmediated by affection. Seeing what he would be like if he wasn’t always making allowances for her. Worse, seeing that he was always making allowances for her, every millisecond that they spent together.
And wondering why on earth he bothered.
“It’s not personal,” he told her, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s purely structural. You simply don’t have the processing capacity to interest me more than casually.”
There it was again: the unstated assumption that lurked behind every interaction Li had ever had with any AI besides Cohen. It was more than mere racism or speciesism. It was a sort of bedrock presumption that humans were a lower, primitive, limited life-form. Not inferior exactly. But worse than inferior: obsolete.
“So what made Cohen different?” she asked.
“He was more conflicted. More … primitive.”
“The affective loop architecture.”
“Yes. He was the first of us, you know. They needed to resort to … well, I suppose you’d be insulted if I called them kluges. But in essence … And modern AIs aren’t built from the ground up like that. We’re bootstrapped into sentience on the backs of older AIs.”
“You make it sound like AIs are having babies,” Li said sarcastically.
“You could call it that,” he answered in perfect seriousness. “After all, ALEF has been arguing for a long time that there’s no fundamental difference between organic and artificial species. And that’s certainly one point of similarity. Life is any self-ordering system that reproduces itself.”
“But when you put it that way, it makes it sound like Cohen’s not fully … well, I almost said human. Not fully AI, I guess.”
“In many ways he’s not. And don’t look at me like that. I’m only telling you what the others think. You’ll need to be able to talk to them if you plan to learn anything useful. And self-righteous outrage will get you nowhere.”
Fine words. And they almost convinced her. But then he froze momentarily, his face smoothing out into a blank mask.
This was the other reason she’d come in person. The stream flattened life, giving it a surreal sheen and glamor at the expense of smoothing away the little details and imperfections of realspace. Most people preferred the improved and smoothed-out version of life—indeed, many Ringsiders spent so much time in streamspace that the differences between the spinstream and reality had become invisible to them. But for Li, raised offstream, the difference was always visible. She always felt the lack of something in all that smooth prettiness. And it was more than a matter of aesthetics, because there was information in life’s imperfections—information that could be critical when you were faced with split-second decisions: speak or not speak; lie or tell the truth; trust or not trust. Especially when the people on the other side of the table from you were operating at clocking speeds that allowed them to edit their outgoing spinstream before you ever saw it.
Aleph-Null blinked and cleared his throat as he slipped back on-shunt. And suddenly Li knew exactly where she’d heard that voice before.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I know you.”
“As if you ever could.”
“Well, I know part of you, anyway. You’re Cohen’s old Router/Decomposer.”
That hit home. “Irrelevant,” he snapped.
“Oh, you think? Does ALEF know who they’re having talk to me?”
“Of course. Don’t be so human about it.”
“It’s not being human. It’s being honest. I cost you a job. And …”
And God knows what else. Li couldn’t even imagine what a sentient agent felt at being evicted from a larger Emergent against its will. And though she remembered Cohen’s old Router/Decomposer leaving because he couldn’t abide intimate contact with a human, it was clear from his behavior now that he felt he had been the one whom Cohen betrayed—and that he blamed Li for that betrayal.
So why would ALEF send him of all possible choices?
She asked—and to her amazement she got an answer.
“Because,” Aleph-Null answered in a tone of bitter satisfaction, “I hate you less than the rest of them do.”
“So show me,” she snapped, frustrated beyond endurance.
“I’m trying, but what passes for your mind is useless. I can’t do a thing with it. If that’s what you want, you’ll have to let me in deeper than you have so far.”
She took a deep breath and steeled herself for the assault.
“Show me,” she told him.
And then he flowed across the intraface and into her mind.
He took the files, splayed them open for her like bodies on the autopsy table, and coldly showed her their inner workings. Having him in her mind was both appalling and exhilarating. Because with the coldness came clarity, reason, analysis, elegance.
And a story so compelling that she couldn’t look away from it.
It was the story of a dying empire. And she, Catherine Li, was the person who had killed it.
He showed it to her spread out in a map of stars that winked like diamonds on jeweler’s black velvet. It was a star map like none she’d ever seen before. It showed stars, worlds, human settlements that weren’t on the UN maps. Their existence had been established by the vast sentient AIs that scanned the skies as part of every major astronomy project, military or civilian. They hadn’t told their human masters about these discoveries—or their masters hadn’t understood their attempts to tell them. But the data had remained, and eventually it had made its way into ALEF’s files.
Among the scatter of stars was a web of brighter lights: the stars with UN-constructed Bose-Einstein relays—the precious FTL grid that the entire UN economy, government, and culture relied on. The UN’s galaxy-spanning network of Bose-Einstein relays was the quantum jewel in the empire’s crown. Moment by moment, millisecond by millisecond, unimaginable quantities of information streamed out through the quantum spinfoam, encrypted, routed, and decrypted by the vast grid of BE field arrays that orbited every settled planet. With the field arrays, the rush and roar of the spinstream was Information: the information that empires and corporations and people were made of. Without them the spinstream—at least on an interstellar scale—was merely noise.
And the field arrays were dying. They were dying far faster than UNSec was telling the public, falling off the grid as their now-irreplaceable condensates decohered and the UN’s precious storehouse of entanglement decayed and dwindled.
As past morphed into projection, Li saw where the collapse was taking them.
One by one, the Bose-Einstein relays winked out and star systems fell off the human map. Their economies shut down, their populations stagnated, and eventually—depending on the size and genetic diversity of the colonial population—they succumbed to the slow death that is the inevitable fate of every island population.
Li watched technologically advanced colonies run through their resources, exhaust their biospheres, and suffocate in their own industrial waste. She watched luckier colonies—if they could be considered lucky—drop back down the ladder of cultural evolution until they were living in a second stone age. And she saw many, many more colonies that simply vanished, victims of genetic bottlenecks and runaway mutation.
Eventually three strands of post-humanity emerged from the wreckage. The surviving fragments of the UN worlds occupied one quadrant of this newer, emptier galaxy. The Syndicates occupied a second. And facing them acro
ss the gulf, spread out over half the sky, lay the worlds of the Drift.
As the various simulated histories ticked down to their concluding points, the reality of post-humanity’s future became inescapable.
Whoever controlled the Drift would survive. Whoever controlled the Drift would determine the genetic destiny of the human species.
“Why do you care?” she asked.
“Because,” came the disgusted reply, “we need you.”
She shook her head in disbelief and incomprehension.
“I’m not paying you a compliment, believe me,” Aleph-Null explained. “It’s simple enough when you stop to think about it. You’re our biosphere. Just like humans need Earth—or a functional simulacrum thereof—to survive, AIs need humans. Our memes flow from your genes. Cut us off from you and we become an ultimately unsustainable island population—just like those dying colonies I showed you.”
“But the separatists—”
“They know it, too. Or at least they know it right now. They can’t argue with the math. Not that they won’t try, of course. And ALEF’s consensus-governing structures being what they are, I strongly suggest that you accept this job and get off-planet before they change our minds.”
Li was still deep in the grip of thrashing nightmares when the phone beside her hotel bed rang the next morning. She picked it up, marveling as always at the odd AI impulse toward the retro.
ALEF again. Aleph-Null’s cold voice, informing her that her presence was once more required and she would be expected within the hour.
He hung up before she could open her mouth to protest. Not that it mattered. She would show up no matter how rude he was or how little explanation he offered. ALEF had hooked her fair and square and they knew it.
The Rolls was gone today, replaced by an Aston Martin. Same chauffeur. Same halfhearted polishing. He glanced up at Li as she came down the drive, but without much interest, as if she were just another piece of the stage set.
The house was still dark this morning, but not entirely empty. A uniformed domestic servant was on her knees at the other end of the vast entrance hall, scrubbing the terra-cotta tile with a brush and bucket. Li smelled wet tile as she followed Aleph-Null into the shadows beneath the staircase.
It was the same room this morning but a different bunch of flowers. She wondered if they were changed on the same rotation as the limousines.
Aleph-Null began to speak to her. Calmly, slowly, as if he were speaking to a slow child. The words collided with her ears: New Allegheny, UNSec, the Drift, and (repeatedly) geopolitical considerations. But none of it made sense. Not even the way he was talking to her made sense. She struggled to understand his roundabout explanations, wondering all the while what had happened overnight. Of course “overnight” was an eternity at AI clocking speeds. But still, most AIs managed to maintain enough stability in their personality architectures to deal with the humans around them on a reasonably coherent basis.
Then finally she put her finger on the real source of the difference. He was different. This was a different person. A new AI was operating the shunt today.
She tried not to feel betrayed or lied to. She reminded herself that AIs were viral, multitudinous, fractal in ways that people weren’t. They could disassemble into smaller yet still viable sentients. And they could combine into composite entities that, theoretically at least, might represent entirely new life-forms. Which, arguably, was exactly what ALEF was.
This AI was less hostile—but also less competent. After ten minutes of “geopolitical considerations,” she still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about and said so.
Then suddenly Cohen’s old Router/Decomposer was back. She couldn’t put her finger on the moment of change, but it was as unmistakable as if the other AI had walked out the door and he had walked in. He smiled at her. Really smiled, with what would have passed for genuine good feeling on a human face. And that was when she knew the news was bad.
“I’ve been instructed to inform you,” he told her, “that your services are no longer required.”
“What the hell kind of—”
“You’ll be reimbursed for your travel expenses, of course. I think you’ll find that our compensation for your time has been generous as well … though it’s always hard to know what humans expect in such cases. And do I need to tell you that what has been discussed in this room had better not go any further? If you violate our confidentiality agreement you’ll find that ALEF has a long reach … and an even longer memory.”
“Are you firing me?”
But it was useless. He was gone. The body was still there, but there was no one on the shunt now. The butler jerked slightly, shook himself, rubbed a hand across his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I suppose I ought to show you out.”
“I need to talk to Aleph-Null again.”
“Who?”
“To ALEF. To Cohen’s old—to the people who brought me here.”
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t—”
“You damn well can. Or you’re going to have a serious problem on your hands.”
The butler—and, amazingly, Li realized she had already made the switch to thinking of him as a mere butler—raised his hands in a defensive gesture. “You don’t understand. They hire me by the day. I don’t even know who they are. Or even if it’s the same bunch from one day to the next.”
“But someone must know. The maid. The chauffeur, even.”
“The same. They’re the same as me. We’re not meant to know. For security reasons, don’t you see? It’s a dead drop.”
And suddenly she did see. All this—this whole elaborate, kitschy set was the AI equivalent of an anonymous post office box. ALEF had brought her here to offer information—but only the information they wanted her to have. They weren’t giving anything else away, including their own identities. Because she realized now that she didn’t even know who had dragged her halfway across human space in order to fire her before the job started. She could have been talking to ALEF. Or she could have been talking to UNSec’s enslaved AIs as part of some convoluted controlled-tech sting operation. She could have been talking to General Nguyen herself, for all she knew. She could have been talking to anyone.
Outside the sunlight was sharp and brutal. As she stepped out from under the shelter of the porte cochere, she saw the chauffeur leaning over the sultry curve of the Aston Martin’s hood. He was looking at her. Again.
On a half-conscious impulse she turned and walked down the smooth sweep of gravel toward him. The sound of her feet crunching on pebbles seemed unbearably loud to her. She wondered if anyone was watching from the windows of the house. She wondered if anyone inside cared enough to watch, or even knew whom to report to if they did.
“Nice car,” she told him.
“Sure.” His voice was as stupid and self-satisfied as his face. Li had never thought much of handsome men, and this one wasn’t changing her opinion.
“Why do I get the idea you want to talk to me?”
“Who, me?” He looked her over, not even being subtle about it. His verdict was written all over his face, and it would have been devastating—if she were the kind of woman who gave a shit. “Nah,” he told her. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
But just as she was about to turn away, he changed. His features sharpened and fell into focus. The complacent look on his young face vanished, to be replaced by something far older and cagier. The childish sneer shifted into a world-weary smile. Nothing had changed outwardly. An observer who spent less time around AIs than Li did might even have missed it entirely. But suddenly the face looking at her across the silver curve of the Aston Martin’s hood was a little less handsome, far more intelligent, and—or so Li had always found it—lethally attractive.
“Who are you?” Li asked. She had to swallow hard and clamp down on her racing pulse just to get the question out.
His lips curved in a smile that didn’t belong on a young man’s
face. “Just call us the Loyal Opposition.”
“No—”
“You’re going to have to leave it at that, my dear. We only meant to get your attention. Breaking your heart isn’t in our plans today.”
“So what is in your plans?”
“Not our plans. ALEF’s plans. As they stand at the moment. We are participating under protest. It would take so long to explain, longer than you have, I’m afraid.” The AI—or fragment, or ghost, or whatever it was—sighed regretfully. “Humans do everything so slowly. Except die, that is. They’re all too quick about that. And they seem to be doing it at the drop of a hat these days.”
“Who’s dying? What are you talking about?” Li’s voice dropped to a whisper. She took a step closer to him, drawn against her will, against her better judgment. “Cohen?”
“Catherine.”
Her heart stuttered and stopped. The brilliant day spun around her, as dizzying as a child’s kaleidoscope.
“I’m not Cohen.”
“Then who are you? What are you?”
“I’m not him. You can’t think that way. I have memories, yes. Fragments. But they’re … broken. I think some of them may even be insane.”
“You’re a ghost,” Li whispered.
“Think, Catherine! You know it’s not that simple. I’m an Emergent. I contain multitudes.”
“And one of them … you were one of the buyers at the yard sale. For ALEF? They were there? They have fragments?”
“You didn’t hear it from me. Just know that there are factions inside ALEF that don’t support the current position. We have arranged … well, let’s call it an oversight. The top-level decision to terminate your involvement in this case was nearly unanimous. Still, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. And what with one thing and another, the execution of the resolution has been … imperfect. If you go to New Allegheny, you’ll still find the credit line and the list of yard sale buyers. I can’t tell you how long that window of opportunity will stay open, though. At some point, someone’s bound to notice that a few loose ends still need tidying. But if you move fast enough you’ll already have the money. And the list. And what you do with them … well, that’s your affair.”
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