It was a woman, pale-skinned, dark-haired, strong of jaw and straight of spine, dressed in expensive, uncomfortable-looking clothes that hadn’t been in fashion for at least six centuries. And she wasn’t Cohen at all. Li was quite sure about that, though she could never have said how she knew it. She just knew, without hesitation or question, that this was no one who had ever been a part of Cohen.
“Who are you?” the woman asked her.
“Catherine Li.”
“And I am the Lady Ada, Countess Lovelace.”
“Oh,” Li said stupidly.
“Li,” the Countess repeated. “That’s a strange name. And you … are you from China?”
“Um … Korea. Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“Everything here is complicated.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“At first I thought I had imagined it. I’m a mathematician, you see. And—well, this probably won’t make sense to you at all, but … this entire palace is a sort of mathematical puzzle.”
“Oh?” Li said weakly, feeling the conversation slide sideways at a speed too fast for any hope of recovery.
“I actually wrote a whole book about—” She broke off and looked away, as if distracted by an event taking place on some plane of the folded database Li had no access to. “Oh, never mind. That’s not the point. The point is—Where are we? And why have you brought me here?”
“I haven’t. I was brought here, too.”
“So we’re both prisoners.” The countess’s white shoulders slumped despairingly. “And you can’t help me after all.”
Li started to answer—and then lapsed into silent confusion. The memory palace was shifting around the ghost, its familiar contours suddenly gone feral. Another building was superimposed on the one they stood in, as if there were a second shadow universe hovering behind the other one like a face hidden behind a carnival mask. “What’s happening?” the ghost cried.
“I don’t kn—”
“You do know!” The woman stamped imperiously. “I won’t be lied to!”
“I’m not—”
“Do you think I don’t hear them? Do you think I don’t know what they whisper in the corridors after the doctor goes and they think the morphine has sucked me under? Do you think I don’t know they’re lying to me?”
“I don’t have anything to do with—”
The woman was plucking at her clothes now, in a distraught, self-mutilating gesture that reminded Li of the way she’d seen dying men pluck at themselves on the battlefield.
“Am I a child, to be treated this way? Am I a madwoman? This brain has built worlds of numbers! This body has made two whole human beings out of nothing! Don’t I deserve better than this?”
“I—yes,” Li said, not knowing what else to say and afraid of what the woman would do to herself.
The Dark Lady stepped toward her in a heavy rustle of silk. She smelled of perfume and medicine and something worse … something that turned Li’s stomach and sent her mind flashing back to the worst weeks of the slaughter on Gilead.
“Will you help me?” the woman whispered, grasping Li’s arm with the feverish, convulsive grip of an invalid.
“I’ll try.”
“Then tell me the truth!”
“I don’t know—”
“Don’t lie to me! You’re no better than they are! Smothering me, lying to me, imprisoning me. You think I haven’t seen blood before? You think my mind and my body are too feeble for this? I’ve borne two children! You think I can’t tell my womb is eating me from the inside out?”
Suddenly she fell silent, her rage spent, and shrank into herself.
“They think they’re being kind, of course. But I don’t want to be lied to. Do you see? I want the truth. I want to know. I want to prepare myself. I want …”
And gently, gently, she took hold of her dress and pulled aside the rich layers of silk and brocade to reveal the yawning, rotting, stinking chasm of the womb beneath them.
Li gagged and took an involuntary step backward.
“You’re going to see Llewellyn, aren’t you?”
“I—”
Li stopped and stared. The body in front of her was changing, flickering back and forth as Ada’s projected proprioceptive architecture—her own image of herself—cycled through confused, contradictory iterations. First the woman. Then the horrible sharklike thing that Li recognized as the deformed and half-mad embodiment of a malfunctioning military-grade semi-sentient. Then the sleek silver spire of the ship itself. And then—
“Tell him—tell him I forgive him. I just want him to come and see me. I won’t hurt him. I promise. I just want to know why he did it. Don’t I have a right to know why?”
And suddenly it wasn’t Ada talking. It was Cohen. And Li was face-to-face with the one person she would have known through any shunt or avatar or disguise.
She reached for him—but it was too late already. The rot was spreading, swelling, devouring everything around them. It devoured the ceiling and the beams that supported it, and the roof that crashed down around their ears, and the sky above them. It chewed up the floor beneath their feet. And then it began to devour Li herself …
The walls blackened and curled in on themselves like burning paper. Her vision tunneled and her lungs began to smart and sting with lack of air.
“Cohen! Cohen!”
Some rough force jerked her up and backward. She struggled, writhing and scratching, got free, scrambled away, and was caught again.
“No!”
And the memory palace was gone, annihilated, blotted out of existence as completely and instantaneously as it had sprung to life in the first place. Wherever she had been was gone. And whoever had been there with her was gone, too. She was lying on the deck of the twisting umbilical cord, halfway back to the pirate ship, her head and one arm in Sital’s lap as the other woman dragged her out of the target ship by sheer force.
“Avery,” Sital gasped. “Avery’s ship was dark-side all along. She came in, almost got us. Got you.” Drag, huff, drag. “Okay?”
“I guess.”
“You see Ada in there?”
“I—guess.”
Li got her feet under herself and scrambled along the umbilical beside Sital. As they waited in the airlock, both still panting slightly, Sital turned to her.
“What did she say to you?”
“I don’t even know, really.”
“She hurt you?”
“Tried to.”
“You got off lucky, then. She’s a stone-cold killer.”
(Caitlyn)
THE PIT
Dolniak showed up the next morning to spring her from jail. He looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. And he looked very, very angry.
Much too angry, actually, given how predictable it should have been that she would manage to find some kind of trouble to get into.
“What’s wrong?” Li asked when they brought her into the interrogation room and pushed her into the chair that faced Dolniak across the usual battered table.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I mean, what else is wrong?”
He looked as if he was about to chew her out for a moment. But then he visibly reined himself in, he shrugged, stood up … and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him in an ostentatiously careful way that made it completely clear he was stopping himself from slamming it.
He came back ten long minutes later, with a station-side cop to handle the paperwork. She was fingerprinted, DNA-swiped, and released into his custody. He didn’t talk to her during the processing, or during the walk to the shuttle, or on the ride down.
“Where are we going?” Li asked when he gave the taxi driver a Shadyside address instead of directing him to her hotel.
“You’d know better than I would,” he said in a tone of smoldering fury.
After that she decided to just keep her mouth shut.
He took her to a flophou
se deep in the permanent twilight of Shadyside. This one made the boardinghouse Korchow had been holed up in look like a palace. And the carnage on the floor and walls in the upstairs back room made Li put a hand to her mouth and swallow hard. The body on the floor was covered with a chaste white sheet. But the stains oozing through the sheet—and the gore on the walls—made it clear that this hadn’t been a quick or painless death.
“We found your next yard sale buyer,” Dolniak said, indicating the body sprawled on the floor by the bed.
“How do you know?”
“Couple of reasons. One, look at the back of his head.”
“Can I, uh …” She gestured to the sheet covering the body.
“Go ahead. We’ve already got what we need.”
She lifted the sheet. The body had fallen facedown and the first thing she noticed was that the head was intact. “No forced download?”
“No. That’s the thing that doesn’t fit here. This victim wasn’t wired at all.”
Li felt a shiver of apprehension. “Can I get a look at the face?” she asked.
Dolniak turned the corpse over, lifting it as easily as if it were a rag doll.
Korchow’s face looked different in death. Smoother, less cynical. More like the Syndicate construct he was and less like the human he’d passed for in life.
“You know him,” Dolniak said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We weren’t exactly friends. He was a Syndicate spy.”
Dolniak started. “You mean he’s not human?”
“No.”
“He looks human enough.”
“He’s KnowlesSyndicate. They’re diplomats and spies. They need to be able to talk to humans to do their work. And sometimes they need to be able to pass as human.”
Dolniak appeared to consider this for a moment. “But if he’s a construct, then you might not know him after all. Isn’t that right? This could just be another construct from the same geneline.”
“I doubt it.”
“You can’t be sure, though.”
But she could be sure, Li realized, as the memory of a sunny spring morning during wartime welled up in her mind. The memory wasn’t pristine, unlike that long-ago morning. It had been washed and spun and redacted so many times that it was impossible to tell now what was real and what was just UNSec ass-covering. But she’d seen the scar twice in the years since—years during which UNSec hadn’t had access to her hard memory. And Korchow had told her things about that morning that no one who wasn’t there could possibly have known.
She bent down and pulled aside the collar of his shirt. And there it was. A long, jagged scar, healed badly, that snaked down the side of his neck and over his collarbone.
“It’s him,” she said.
“You know the scar? You’re sure about that?”
“Sure as death.” She laughed, sharp and bitter. “I gave it to him.”
Dolniak looked at her across the dead body, and his expression managed to convey more contradictory feelings than Li would have thought such a quiet face could contain.
“I’m going to need your NavComp logs for the relevant time frame,” he told her. “Not that they mean anything. I’m sure you know how to fake them in ways a simple country mouse like me wouldn’t even imagine.”
“Guess that still leaves you stuck with good old-fashioned country mouse detective work.”
“Yeah. I’m good at it, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’m glad. Plenty of guys would already have locked me up and thrown away the key.”
Before she could answer him, there was a bustle in the hallway and the coroner arrived. He greeted Dolniak with easy familiarity, spared a brief, incurious glance for Li, and began laying out his tools on the floor next to the body. He was wired—of course he would be—and as he bent over, Li got a glimpse of an angry rash around his input/output socket. It startled her. Other than listening to Router/Decomposer’s complaints about throttling and slow load times, she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to the progress of the wild AI outbreak on New Allegheny itself. Partly, she now realized, because the only organic on New Allegheny she’d had much contact with was Dolniak. And being wired was so normal in her world that it was always an effort to realize that he was unwired, and thus far more resistant to the outbreak than most people.
She suppressed an instinctive urge to step back from the coroner—and instead forced herself to consider the outbreak from his perspective. To ALEF and the privileged AIs of the inner worlds, wild AI was a threat that undermined their attempts to prove that organic and artificial citizens could coexist without conflict—or at least without more conflict than usually accompanied the rise toward full civil rights of any ordinary minority. To Helen Nguyen and UNSec, wild AI meant a potentially fatal loss of control over a double-edged technology. In the war zone DNA-platformed AI was their only hope of triumphing over the Syndicates. But back home in the inner worlds it was a dark cancer eating away at the foundations of a status quo designed for and by humans. And for the people of New Allegheny? A once-free people who were now wards of a newly claimed UN Trusteeship, locked out of any hope of controlling their own lives precisely because they lacked access to the high-speed virtual worlds in which every decision in UN space that mattered was debated and decided? What did wild AI mean to them?
And what did it mean to this man? His parents had probably sold his birthright to buy him a wire job that was decades out of date before he went into the viral tanks for his implant surgery. His options in life were defined and circumscribed by the fact that he could only creep along in the back roads of streamspace, clocking at speeds so slow that the only job he’d ever qualify for was in a backwater police station. And now he had acquired—for free and by accident—a massive parallel processing infrastructure that was built into his very cells and that no one could take away by any act short of outright murder. UNSec might call it a disease … but what did he call it?
Nothing in the man’s face gave Li any hint of the answer to that question. In fact, he seemed to be going about his business as usual, neither disturbed nor ecstatic about the profound changes being wrought in the genetic information that he encoded and embodied. He was trying to tell Dolniak something about the body. And Li peered over his shoulder, too, curious to see what he’d find.
But Dolniak had other ideas. “Would it surprise you to hear that your Mr. Korchow—if that really is his name—seems to have left you a little courtesy message?”
“Seems to have?”
“We can’t open it. That’s why you’re here instead of back in the lockup waiting until I feel charitable enough to get around to bailing you out.”
He turned and walked into the bedroom, leaving her to follow. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then she saw that Dolniak was standing by the room’s cheap flat-screen monitor with a handheld remote in his outstretched palm.
Li took it doubtfully. She’d used them occasionally in her half-remembered childhood, but she wasn’t sure she could even remember how.
“Go ahead,” Dolniak said, misinterpreting her hesitation. “It’s coded to your DNA. I sure as hell can’t open it.”
Except it wasn’t coded to Catherine Li’s DNA. It was coded to Caitlyn Perkins’s DNA. Korchow had always known that Li’s Peacekeeper files were faked. The first time they’d met he’d used the knowledge to blackmail her. But how had he gotten the original geneset? Had Cohen given it to him? And if so, did that mean that Cohen had predicted she would arrive on New Allegheny as Caitlyn and not Catherine? Li wasn’t sure how she felt about that. In fact, she was getting increasingly fuzzy about the real distinction between the two women even as she felt their identities spiraling uncomfortably in opposite directions.
She fumbled with the remote. The message began to play.
It was Korchow, but not Korchow as she’d ever seen him. He was bruised, bloody, battered. The corpse in the next room
didn’t look much worse than this.
“They must have locked him in here at some point,” Dolniak guessed, “and not realized he could use this to record something.”
Li could understand the lapse. She wouldn’t have imagined it, either. The thing was a dinosaur.
“They know about you,” Korchow rasped through cracked lips.
His voice was hoarse, his breath short and wheezing. Li knew that sound; the knowledge welled up from the murky depths of interrogation memories that she was pathetically glad UNSec had spliced and doctored into press-release-ready official war stories. Korchow’s jailers had broken his ribs, and his lungs were starting to fill with fluid. If he’d lived, he would have been mere days away from fatal pneumonia and in desperate need of the most basic medical care. Not that it mattered now.
“I didn’t tell them,” Korchow continued, each word coming harder than the last. “They knew when they got here. They know things only Cohen could have known. They have a fragment. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And that means they might know everything.”
He broke off to wheeze and wipe his bloody mouth. Then he glanced toward the door. Had he heard a noise outside? Were they out there? Were they coming for him?
“Run!” he whispered. “Run and don’t look back. There’s nothing you can do now except save yourself!”
Korchow lifted a hand to the screen. The message cut out and lapsed into static.
Li stood in front of the screen for a moment, getting her breathing back under control. She turned to Dolniak, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to meet his eyes.
“Can I go?” she asked.
“You want me to let you walk out of here alone? After seeing that?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Better than Korchow?”
She bit her lip.
“I’ll walk you home. And I’ll post a guard outside your door.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s not a favor.” He smiled, but the smile died before it reached his eyes. And truth be told, it hadn’t started out too healthy, either. “You’re the only suspect I’ve got, darlin’—I have to make the most of you.”
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