Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  When his job changed, decomposer had quite logically changed his name: to router/decomposer, or, among friends, 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110000 01011100 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110011 01100101 01110010.

  Functional nomenclature didn’t appeal to Cohen any more than the personality architecture that normally went with it. But router/ decomposer was fabulously good at his job, fully sentient, and eminently capable of spinning off into his own autonomous aggregation. No other Emergent AI came close to matching the seamless integration and dizzying processing speeds Cohen could achieve thanks to router/decomposer’s elegant spinstream routing solutions. And router/decomposer would have applied for his own Toffoli number and gone into business for himself long ago if it were not for what he cogently termed his “low tolerance for the social friction costs of dealing with assholes.”

  Needless to say, Cohen tried very hard to keep the social friction costs of dealing with Cohen to a minimum.

  ‹Do you have any idea how much processing space I’m blowing on your little spy games?› router/decomposer queried.

  ‹Where’s your sense of adventure,› Cohen joked, ‹and you just a young whippersnapper of a hundred and fifteen?›

  Router/decomposer demonstrated his sense of adventure by sending an extremely rude chaotic attractor flickering across the hidden layers of their shared Kohonen nets.

  “Tell him to get a real name, will you?” Li said, having caught the tail end of router/decomposer’s dirty joke.

  “Tell him yourself,” Cohen answered.

  “I would, but he seems to not be speaking to me at the moment.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  ‹What’s that about?› Cohen asked router/decomposer on the root-only stream.

  ‹She keeps asking to access data you’ve made me firewall. It’s embarrassing. Actually,› router/decomposer suggested slyly, still on the root-only stream, ‹it would save a lot of RAM if you’d stop making me lie to her.›

  ‹It’s not lying!›

  ‹Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. The point is, our current associative configuration is highly inefficient. And detrimental to your relationship with her.›

  ‹Oh really? If you know so much about humans, why don’t you stop backseat driving and get your own?›

  ‹Nah,› router/decomposer said placidly. ‹I’m more the heckling-from-the-sidelines type than the do-it-yourself type. Besides, I tried shunting once. It was…squishy. A little bit of human goes a hell of a long way. That’s why I like Li. A little human, but not too human. Now if you’d just take my advice and—›

  ‹Don’t you have anything useful to do right now?›

  ‹Not until you fuck up again.› An affective fuzzy set drifted downstream and dispersed across Cohen’s neural networks like the icy plume of a mountain river mingling with the sea. It “felt” like all router/decomposer’s algorithms: as cold and complicated and inhuman as his beloved quantum spin glass. But the emotion that the set expressed was all too human: smug self-righteousness. ‹Seriously, though. I still think you need to back off and give Li a little more space.›

  ‹That’s not the way the Game works. As you damn well know.›

  ‹Bet I could figure out how to tweak the Game so you could do it.›

  ‹Tweak my soul, you mean.›

  That earned Cohen another rude attractor. ‹Souls are just obsolete social engineering for monkeys. And even if you get some perverse kick out of pretending to believe in such fairy tales, the Game is not your soul. It was a damn sloppy piece of code when Hy wrote it three hundred years ago, and it hasn’t improved with age. Code is written to be rewritten, and this piece is long due for an overhaul. Seriously, Cohen, do you see me chasing after humans like a codependent golden retriever?›

  “So how did you get him to stop talking to you?” Cohen asked Li out loud. “And can I do it?”

  But Li was laughing too hard to answer. And when he probed her thoughts across the intraface the only coherent words he could get out of her were ‹Down, Fido, down!›

  It was too bad, but there it was.

  If you wanted to get from Ben Gurion International Airport to modern Jerusalem, you had to go down the Jaffa Road. And if you went down the Jaffa Road, you had to go past the Line.

  Every year there was talk of moving the road or building a new highway that would swing out to the north and away from the dirty zone. But every year the planning board put it off until next year…mainly because building a new road would mean admitting that the war wasn’t just a passing inconvenience but a permanent fixture on the landscape. It was the same kind of mentality you saw in every low-level, multigenerational civil war: Lebanon, Ireland, Iraq, America. On the one hand, no one wants to be on the losing side of sectarian violence. On the other hand, no one was foolish enough to think that anyone could “win” such a war. And since no one quite understood how or why peace had disintegrated into bloodshed, most people still nursed a vague hope that a reverse process might occur (Cohen thought of it as a kind of sociopolitical phase transition) in which the chaos of war would spontaneously reorganize itself into peace.

  Years went by like this, with people schizophrenically dividing their time between waiting for peace to break out and trying to schedule the war around the weddings and brises and bar mitzvahs and funerals that will keep happening even when there’s a combat zone around the corner. And in the meantime, the streets weren’t getting fixed, and the real estate market was crashing, and the plumbing was getting iffy…and Jerusalem was starting to look more and more like a city whose back had been broken on the rack of civil war.

  Nowhere was the disintegration more visible than in the spreading no-man’s-land that leached out from the Line toward the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. Biohazard signs began to sprout on street corners like poisonous mushrooms. The divided highway deteriorated into a rough two-lane strip of pavement as it approached the last habitable houses. Then even the two-lane died of a slow bleed, giving way to mortar-pocked dirt, sporadically bulldozed to smooth out what was left of the roadbed.

  As the Line got closer the passengers got tenser. A screaming match broke out at the back of the bus between a paunchy middle-aged ultra-orthodox man and a scantily dressed young woman whose skimpy T-shirt had ridden up to expose what Cohen at first assumed was a charmingly old-fashioned bit of cosmetic scarring.

  “What’s she saying?” Li asked, her spinstream-assisted Hebrew completely unequal to the fast and furious pace of the argument.

  “She asked him to close the window. He refused.”

  The young woman was now actually pulling up her shirt and pointing to her stomach while the ultraorthodox averted his eyes in horror. And the scars weren’t cosmetic at all, it turned out; they were old shrapnel wounds.

  “Then,” Cohen translated on the fly, “he told her to cover up her arms if she was cold. So she told him to fuck off. So he told her get on the next Ring-bound shuttle if she didn’t want to be a real Jew. And now she’s shouting about how she spent two years on the Line and she doesn’t have to take this shit from some schmuck ultraorthodox draft dodger and how would he like to see her scars. All of them.” He grinned, caught between pride and embarrassment. “Welcome to Israel.”

  “The Line,” Li said when the screaming match in the back of the bus had finally subsided. “As in the Green Line?”

  Cohen nodded absently, craning out the window for his first view of what was left of the Old City.

  “That girl was an Enderbot ?”

  As if summoned into existence by the word, a squad of soldiers crossed the road in front of them, forcing the bus to a grinding halt. It wasn’t a checkpoint; these soldiers were coming off the Line, smeared with red dirt and dressed in bulky desert camouflage NBC gear.

  Without stopping to think whether it was a good idea, Cohen reached out across streamspace and sampled the squad leader’s spinstreams. Re
d flags must be going up all over EMET headquarters; but if he could hack their spins that easily, then whoever was handling security over there richly deserved to be hauled onto the carpet.

  Besides, he told himself, it was as good a way as any to let Didi know he was coming.

  As the squad dropped off the far side of the roadbed, one of the soldiers looked back. Her eyes were startlingly green, and the coin-shaped derm marks of long-term cortical shunt use were dead white against the sun-browned skin of her temples. She was Sephardic, of course; the well-heeled children of the Ashkenazim were back in the EMET programming bunkers running the AIs, not under shunt and facing live fire and land mines. A few leftist politicians had suggested rotating reservists through the Line on regular intervals, but it would have cost too much to install even the low-grade IDF shunts in such numbers. And what politician really wants to send his campaign contributors’ kids home in body bags? So the privileged children of the Ashkenazim sat under full-spectrum lights in the IDF programming bunkers and pampered and debugged and lied to the tactical AIs. And the children of Iraqis, North Africans, and Ethiopians collected the combat pay and the bullets and the genetic damage.

  “So that’s EMET.” Li’s voice was flat and expressionless.

  “Yep. EMET meet Catherine. Catherine meet EMET, the latest and allegedly greatest stage in the evolution of military-applications Emergent AI. You want a war, EMET can run it for you from the lowest private to the fattest general. And Israel’s just the field trial. If little EMET runs this war well enough, he’ll put soldiers out of business permanently…except for the shunt-controlled cannon fodder.”

  Li glanced after the soldiers. She looked sick. “Was that girl under shunt?”

  “I can’t tell,” Cohen lied.

  But of course he could. And even for him it was hard to imagine that there was anything even remotely human behind those blank killer’s eyes. Was that what Li saw when she looked at him? The thought sent a shudder through Roland’s body that router/ decomposer’s best buffering algorithms couldn’t suppress.

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to go under shunt in combat,” Li muttered.

  “The casualty rates are a lot lower when the AIs run things.”

  “Some things are worse than dying. To wire yourself into a semisentient…”

  “They’re not semisentients. EMET’s component AIs are fully sentient, right down to the individual squad member level.”

  Li snapped around to stare at him. “So every one of those soldiers is being run by a fully sentient Emergent?”

  “Of course. Human consciousness is an operating system for the human body. Any AI that can operate a human body well enough to take it into combat has to be at least as self-aware as the average human.” More so, in practice; AIs didn’t have the armature of instinct, autonomic reflexes and hormones that humans had to fall back on.

  “But how do they get past the termination problem?”

  It would be called a suicide problem, Cohen thought bitterly, if it were humans instead of AIs killing themselves. The termination problem had been the stumbling block of every attempt to automate land combat since the dawn of Emergent AI. It turned out that Emergent AIs who were sentient enough to handle real-time nonvirtual ground combat were also sentient enough to suffer from most of the psychiatric disorders that afflicted human soldiers. And since AI identity architecture was far more brittle than the human equivalent, the result was suicide. Hard on the public stomach. And even harder on the AI programmers, who had an unfortunate tendency to get attached to their lab rats.

  In the course of their long war, carried out in punctilious observance of the letter of Embargo law, the Israelis and the Palestinians (the Palestinians had their own version of EMET too, of course) had worked through every variation and iteration of the termination problem.

  At first EMET’s AIs had full real-time interface with the Line: helmet-mounted digital cameras, roving RPVs, real-time SyWO and SpySat feed. The result had been a rash of synthetic psychiatric disorders and self-terminations.

  Next they tried running the Line with semisentients. Total carnage. Skyrocketing human casualty rates. Peace marches. Demonstrations. Shoving matches in the Knesset. The IDF backed off the semisentients faster than you could say “preterm election.”

  Then they’d developed EMET.

  EMET was a recursive acronym for EMET Military-Applications Emergent Tactical Systems. But the real significance of the acronym was as much mythic as technological. EMET—truth in Hebrew—was the word Rabbi Loew of Prague carved on his golem’s forehead in order to bring dead clay to life. And when the golem’s work was done, the Rabbi had simply erased the first letter of truth from its forehead, making it MET: dead.

  And that was exactly what the IDF did to EMET. When one of EMET’s AIs realized that the game wasn’t a game and the blood was real, they hard booted it and wiped its memory banks. Just like the original golem, EMET contained both truth and death separated by a single breath. But while truth had given life to Rabbi Loew’s golem, for EMET’s AIs discovering the truth of who they were and what they did was a death sentence.

  “They kill them?” Li asked, grasping the essence of EMET in as little time as it took Cohen to think about it.

  “It’s nice to know you see it that way.”

  “Of course I do!” Li snapped, conveniently forgetting that no court in UN space would charge killing an AI as murder. “That’s the most hypocritical…how can you work for these people?”

  Cohen resisted the urge to squirm, even though he knew perfectly well that Li would interpret Roland’s unnatural stillness as exactly the overcompensation it was. “That’s complicated. Actually, it’s not complicated. It’s my country.”

  ‹That’s the most complicated thing of all,› she said instream.

  He probed her feelings about EMET. Not pushing, just throwing out the merest suggestion that he was there and listening. Half a dozen vague associations swirled through the phase space in which he “saw” her cortex’s neural burst patterns. They traced a series of chaotic attractor wings that encoded the continuous shaping and reshaping of memory both humans and AIs called consciousness. Relief that she had gotten to be a real soldier instead of a zombie…no matter how badly it had ended. Memories of all the times she had fought her way out of cold sleep after a combat jump wondering what she’d forgotten this time, and whether she’d lost it to randomly decohering spins or UNSec memory washing. Fear at the way that memories long lost to her conscious mind could still twist her emotions. One memory that retained all its raw emotional power despite the invasive UNSec memory washing: standing under the deep blue sky of Gilead watching Andrej Korchow bleed out in a steaming pool of blood and coffee. And permeating all the rest—grooving itself into the older memories so that it would always be associated with them—a cold panic at the thought of the Enderbots struggling toward sentience only to be pushed back under by the cold hand on the keyboard.

  “I hate it too,” he said, knowing she would understand all the chaotic and contradictory feelings behind the words. “But what can I do?”

  Li reached over and set her hand lightly on Cohen’s.

  He could “see” through the link between them that she was watching Roland’s hands, the skin around his eyes, the corners of his mouth—all the little telltales she used to divine Cohen’s feelings through the veil of another person’s flesh. Over the years her relationship to Roland’s body had settled into a placid affection that she half-consciously associated with her few fragmented memories of her own parents’ marriage. That was what he felt in her now as she put her arms around him.

  “I love you,” she said, and meant it.

  A human lover would have been happy.

  But Cohen wasn’t human. And inside he could feel her letting go even as she held him. Drifting away, not with anger or resentment but with a kind of dull resignation.

  She loved him more than she had ever imagined she could love anyone. But she
was going to leave him anyway. And if there was anything he could do to stop it, she couldn’t tell him what it was because she didn’t even remember why she was leaving.

  The left-behind bomb exploded at eight in the morning on Easter Sunday of 2049.

  “Democracy of the bomb, twenty-first-century style,” Osnat told Arkady as their chopper thundered over the Line just high enough to be out of range of any locals crazy enough to take potshots at them. “Some maniac from Hoboken decided the Rapture wasn’t getting here fast enough, and he had to do his little bit to help Armageddon along. The cleanup stalled out after Phase One: the Old City and the Temple Mount. Now the UN keeps whining about funding and asking for new environmental impact reports. And meanwhile they’re offering state-subsidized tank babies to anyone who’ll emigrate.”

  “But why would the UN want you to emigrate?” Arkady asked, bewildered by the welter of unfamiliar terminology.

  Osnat looked at him as if he’d said something almost comically stupid. “Water,” she said, as if that was all the answer his question demanded.

  Arkady nodded, less to indicate understanding—he understood almost nothing that came out of Osnat’s mouth—than in the hope that a nod might elicit some more information that would make sense of what came before.

  It didn’t, but he was learning to live with being terminally confused.

  The Left-Behind Bombing had been the last poisonous shot fired in the War on Terror. An angry young man had stolen a genetic weapon designed to lower Sunni birthrates in Iraq without affecting neighboring ethnic groups. The targeting hadn’t quite lived up to the defense contractor’s hype, and the explosion had single-handedly wiped the most holy sites of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism off the political map.

  “It really is green,” Arkady breathed, staring down at the burgeoning wilderness of the Line. “It’s alive.”

  “Chernobyl Effect,” Osnat explained. “Contamination’s bad, but humans are worse. The Line’s just about the healthiest real estate in the Middle East these days as long as you don’t happen to be human.”