Then the thing he had been afraid of from the moment he set foot in UN space finally happened.
“Arkady!” a woman called out in a voice sharp enough to stop him in his tracks.
The woman was short, muscular, probably Korean. She was a soldier out of uniform; he read it in the cut of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the decisive moments of someone who actually knew how to hit people. She was also, quite unmistakably, a genetic construct. But no Syndicate design team would produce a face so functional and so unaesthetic. And no crèche-raised construct would speak so sharply or stare out at the world through such hard, uncompromising, self-sufficient eyes. This woman was a pre-Breakaway construct, spliced and tanked and raised to serve humans. And if she really was the soldier she appeared to be, then she’d chosen to kill for humans too.
The man with her, on the other hand, was anything but a soldier. He slouched elegantly behind his companion, as if he could barely be bothered to pay attention to Arkady. Yet there was a taut, poised, abstracted quality to the beautiful body that set Arkady’s teeth on edge. This wasn’t a person, whispered some atavistic instinct. It was a living doll operated by an unseen and supremely skilled puppetmaster.
Then Arkady remembered that the proper word for it was shunt. He’d just met his first Emergent AI. And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm.
“Arkady,” the woman repeated. “We thought you were dead.”
“Don’t let her frighten you,” the AI drawled with a smile that would have looked perfectly at home on Korchow’s face. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean dead dead.”
Arkady stared at the machine-man, torn between horror and fascination. The AI watched him through wide hazel eyes, a faint shadow of that mocking smile still hovering at the corner of its lips. Somehow Arkady was quite sure that the smile belonged to the machine, and not to the human into whose shunt-suppressed body it had poured some incomprehensible distillation of its component selves. It was a clever, changeable, humorous smile. A smile that would be easy to love but impossible to trust…even if there were anything but a teeming chaos of semiautonomous agents behind it.
“I—I don’t think I know you,” he said, speaking both to the woman and the machine.
“But Korchow—”
The woman fell silent as abruptly as if someone had interrupted her. The AI cocked his head like a dog listening for its master’s voice, and Arkady had the sense that some shared thought had just passed between them in streamspace.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Of course.”
She turned on her heel. Her coat flew open, and the blaring orange of an El Al security seal winked at Arkady from the trigger guard of a holstered pistol. Then they were gone, swallowed by the swirling human tide as quickly as they’d emerged from it.
Osnat frowned nervously at him. “You okay, Arkady?”
“I think so.”
“Was that who I think it was?”
“I don’t know. Who do you think it was?”
“Well, it looked like—no, never mind. That’s crazy. He wouldn’t have the nerve to show his face here.
Any of his faces. You sure you’re okay? You look like shit.”
“I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. They’d known him. They’d known his series name, even if they’d mistaken him, as humans so often did, for another Arkady. And they’d thought he was dead.
Dead how? Dead where? What had happened to that other Arkady before he died?
And what did Andrej Korchow have to do with it?
Cohen looked out the window of the Ben Gurion-Jerusalem bus and told himself he needed a new body.
It was impossible to go anywhere quietly in this one. That Hoffman girl had been on the edge of recognizing him. Even the nice boy at El Al Security had waved him to the front of the line far too obviously for discretion. It had been one thing when he’d still been able to travel under his French passport, but the Tel Aviv fiasco had put an end to that and left him with no claim to citizenship or humanity except the one his long-dead inventor’s religion gave him.
And then, of course, there was the irksome detail of being a ghost.
“Why do they keep calling you that?” Li had asked the first time someone did it in front of her. “It’s creepy. Like they actually think you’re him instead of you.”
“It’s just a formality. No one takes it seriously except the religious nuts.”
But Li had been less interested in theological niceties than in the soldierly virtue of loyalty. “Has it ever occurred to you that if they really were your friends, they’d have gotten the hell over it sometime in the last four centuries?”
“Well, they have a point. Technically, I’m only a Jew because Hy Cohen’s mother was one. And it isn’t like he was observant, trust me—”
“I’ll remind you of that self-righteous tone next time I catch you eating oysters.”
“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”
Never mind the absurdity of trying to argue that the vast virtual universe of coevolving neural networks, affective loops, and expert systems called “Hyacinthe” was even remotely the same person as the Hy Cohen who had uploaded the memories of his failing body into the long-junked original hardware.
And never mind that even Hyacinthe was only one of the thirty-four separate sentient and quasi-sentient synthetic entities (this week’s head count) currently enjoying the somewhat debatable benefits of Israeli citizenship under Cohen’s Toffoli number.
And never mind the problematic thirty-fifth wheel: one very sentient and only partially synthetic Catherine Li, formerly of the UN Peacekeepers.
She was sleeping now, caught in the intense, lying web of dreams that still had the power to shock Cohen after half a dozen lifetimes among humans. She slept with her arms crossed over her chest and her boot soles braced on the seat in front of her. Looking at her clenched fists and frowning face, at the faint tracery of ceramsteel snaking under the brown skin, Cohen thought: Even in sleep she defends herself.
Meanwhile the dusty blue-and-white Egged bus rattled up onto the plateau of the Jordan floodplain, and half of Cohen’s associated selves looked out the window or worked on unrelated projects, while the rest eavesdropped on Li’s intermittent dreams and scrambled to keep his Ring-to-Earth connection ticking along at the massive bandwidth required to knit borrowed body and far-flung souls together.
He stretched, appreciating, as he always did, the elastic grace of Roland’s young and exquisitely well tended body. Humans took the pleasures of health and youth for granted—something that was a little harder to do once you’d survived dying of multiple sclerosis. But then taking things for granted seemed to be wired into the human gene pool.
Cohen looked around, taking stock of his fellow passengers in real-space. A smattering of Ring-side tourists and business travelers, conspicuous for the cranial jacks that revealed Earth-illegal wetware and psychware. Young aggressively secular Israelis, whose tanned good looks hinted at weekends spent windsurfing off Tel Aviv’s fashionable beaches—and whose skin-hugging outfits looked like the kind of goods that only slipped through the Embargo because Ring-side customs was too busy fighting real violations to worry about youth fashion. A rickety old Ashkenaz reading the Ha’aretz sports section— Maccabi Tel Aviv Smites Haopel Jerusalem 77-49. Well, at least someone at the Ha’aretz sports desk still had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for the Op-ed page. A large-eyed and unnaturally silent family of Hasidim huddled along the back bench where the ride was always roughest. The usual disturbingly large number of caps and chadors in the dusty green of the Interfaithers. And of course the impossibly young Israeli Defense Force soldiers whose rumpled uniforms made Cohen imagine mothers lean
ing over balcony railings all over Israel shouting, You’re-going-out-in-public-like-that?
The only thing missing was the Palestinians. Before the war they would have been here on the student passes that were a mere formality during the long peaceful generations of the open border. Laughing with their Israeli friends. Kissing their Israeli girlfriends to the abiding and roundly ignored horror of the ultraorthodox. Locked at the hip, like their two countries—and too young and idealistic to realize that the peace they took for granted was just a pause for station identification.
Li was waking up.
Cohen could feel her all around him, stirring, shifting, running the day’s events through her half-waking mind in a rapid-fire succession of half-formed dreams that cut in and out like the nightly newspin on fast forward. He tried to catch on to the tail of a few dreams as they passed, but he couldn’t make sense of them. And she was aware of him as a vague, alien presence in her mind, though she hadn’t yet awakened enough to identify the intruder.
Spying on her, she called it. And there’d be hell to pay if she caught him at it. He untangled himself from her, erasing his retreating footsteps and feeling hurt, as he always did, that she made him sneak and steal to get what he would have given her for the mere asking.
She twisted, murmuring, and brushed ineffectually at a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He reached out cautiously and pushed it back.
She opened her eyes.
He took his hand away.
“You need a haircut,” he told her.
“I know.” She stretched, yawning and he felt a pang of desire so strong it made his jaw hurt. “Things were so crazy before we left, I forgot. How’s your connection?”
“Fine.”
Not a lie. Just a nonrandom sampling of the available data.
He was wardriving—stealing streamspace time from unsecured local access points instead of going through Kyoto-legal channels. He and Li had argued heatedly about this. But he didn’t want UNSec eavesdropping on some of the Earthside errands he was planning to take care of this trip. There was nothing they’d like better than to slap an expensive corporate felony charge on him, if only for the PR value. And, as he’d pointed out in answer to Li’s objections, if he was going to give someone the power to pull the plug on him, he’d rather hand it to the warchalkers than to either General Nguyen or the boys on King Saul Boulevard.
He’d also pointed out to her (though much good it did) that the worst problems of interfacing on Earth had nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with bandwidth. He had to resort to scattershot prefetching just to be able to carry on a normal conversation. And prefetching, though it always made you look like an idiot sooner or later, was hardly a safety issue in normal circumstances.
Still, she was worried. And he didn’t like to worry her. So he was doing his best to limit the technical complications to his side of the intraface.
‹So what’s Arkady doing here?› Li asked onstream. ‹And am I crazy, or did I get the impression that you knew the woman he was with?›
The question flashed across his networks with the up/down, either/or, black-and-white clarity of the spin states that encoded it. And even before she hung the flesh of letters and syllables on the thought, he could feel the twist of strung-up nerves and vague worst-case-scenario visions that drove the question.
‹I don’t think she recognized me,› Cohen answered.
‹I didn’t ask whether she recognized you. I asked whether you recognized her.›
“Old friend from the office,” Cohen said, going offstream because it was so much easier to be evasive in realspace. “There’s a file on her somewhere or other. Router/decomposer can’t access it at the moment.”
Li groaned internally. ‹Is this going to be another one of those trips where you decide to pack light and end up forgetting to bring the one database you actually needed?›
“Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “you’re assuming it really was Korchow’s Arkady we ran into. I’m not convinced that was an act back there.”
“Neither am I,” Li said aloud, “but I’ve never gotten burned by being too suspicious. And I don’t believe in coincidence. Not that kind. We’re here for—” She glanced around and stopped talking, but he heard the rest of the thought just as he heard all her thoughts. At least all the ones she let him hear. ‹We’re here to bid on a piece of Syndicate tech some alleged defector brought across the line, and suddenly we run into an A Series we last saw in the company of Andrej Korchow? If I let that kind of ‘coincidence’ slide, we’d both be dead by now.›
‹There’s more than one Arkady. It’s not like running into a human. You ought to know that.› He glanced at her symmetrical construct’s features and decided not to pursue that line of thought. ‹Anyway, you worry too much.›
And then, with an almost humanly malicious sense of timing, they passed onto a new grid of his access point map, router/decomposer lost the most recent open node and failed to locate a new one, and the bottom fell out of streamspace.
The bus and its passengers drained away around Cohen as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.
What the hell? Cohen queried his routing meta-agent. But if the other AI heard him, he wasn’t answering.
Cohen dialed through the virtually stacked grid coordinates of the local nets, passing over the endless sea of O’s and triple slashes that marked closed nodes and danger points. He toyed briefly with two high-bandwidth nodes chalked with the legends KIND WOMAN TELL SOB STORY and RELIGIOUS TALK WILL GET YOU FOOD. He dropped them both; access with a data trail, however faint, was as bad as no access at all.
The next block was a government system full of high-security data holes (NOTSAFE).
Then the Border Police (BIG DOG—MOVE ON QUICKLY).
He skittered across the spinstream, feeling all contact with Earth slipping away from him. The bandwidth requirements for running a full-body shunt were inconceivable by the standards of human data-pushers—and human tolerances were all that most Earth-to-Orbital hardware was built to handle.
‹Hold for contact,› he messaged to Li’s Ring-side postbox across the low-bandwidth, high-surveillance Orbital-Surface routers, but he might as well have been shouting down a well for all the good it did. If anything went wrong down there while he was offstream, there was nothing he could do for her.
And then he saw it, gleaming through the haze of low-bandwidth static like incoming tracer fire: Two inverted brackets bellied up to each other to form the inverted capital I that marked the unpatrolled entrance ramps to Earth’s wide-open post-Embargo information freeway:
][
OPEN NODE SKY’S THE LIMIT
He was back.
He slipped back into the sensory feed from Roland’s cortical shunt like a diver sliding into blood-warm water. The bus and the passengers and the city all took shape around him. Most important, he felt Li’s reassuring presence interpenetrating the edges of his own composite consciousnesses:
HELLO WORLD
He sent the letters blinking across their shared work space in archaic LED green.
‹What the hell was that?› she asked.
‹Nothing. Old programmer’s joke.›
‹Jeez, be serious for once, can’t you?›
“Okay. Sorry about the road bump.”
“I’m sorrier. I thought I was about to be stuck making small talk with Roland for the next two weeks.”
“I thought you liked Roland.”
“A little of Roland goes a long way.” She gave him a sly sideways glance, seemed about to say something, then obviously thought the better of it.
“It’s your fault, anyway.” Cohen stretched coquettishly. “I wanted to be a girl for this trip.”
“We’re in the land of the Interfaithers and the ultraorthodox, Cohen. One of us needs to be able to pass as a member of the master sex. Besides, if I’d let you shunt through a girl on this trip, any last hope of making you pack sensible shoes would hav
e gone straight out the window.”
“Sensible shoes are bad for the soul,” Cohen kvetched. He ducked his head into the curve of her neck, tasting her familiar skin and the rich musky dust of Earth.
She shrugged him away.
It was barely a shrug. No outsider would have noticed the gesture, even if they’d been looking for it. But to Cohen it was unmistakable.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked after a moment.
Li’s generous lips compressed into a tense line. “Why pay for what you can get for free?”
And there it was, the truth Li could neither change nor live with. The two of them formed a hybrid creature whose realspace body was just the tip of the streamspace iceberg, and Cohen wrote the rules in streamspace. They ran on his networks. They navigated his gamespace. They depended on his processing capacity, which exponentially exceeded anything a mere organic could field—even an organic as heavily wired as Li.
Cohen had the power to go anywhere, see everything, do anything, take anything. Li only had the power to walk away. Not much for a woman who had commanded battalions and led combat drops. Not enough, Cohen was beginning to think.
Cohen’s routing meta-agent interrupted with a message that he’d sorted out the routing bug and was working on a patch for it. It was of course completely unnecessary for router/decomposer to bring such a message to Cohen’s conscious attention. Nor was it necessary to deliver it on a general access spinstream. But router/decomposer had sided with Li on the wardriving issue, and he had a point to make.
Router/decomposer had originally called himself just plain decomposer. And a decomposer was exactly what he was: a fully sentient massively parallel decomposition program supported by a vast Josephson Array currently holding in a low lunar orbit carefully calculated to keep its spin glass lattice operating at a crisp refreshing twenty-seven degrees Kelvin. But when Cohen’s last communications routing meta-agent had decamped in protest over Li’s arrival, decomposer—albeit with endless grumbling over being dragged away from his beloved spin glass research—had also taken over management of Cohen’s ant-based routing algorithms.
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