Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  Cohen’s better-than-human memory called up a detail-perfect image of the day, as accurate and unfaded as remastered spinfeed. Gavi slim and handsome in his uniform, and so achingly young that he looked like a boy just playing at being a soldier. Leila all business—and to everyone’s ill-concealed delight already visibly pregnant. Didi had been Gavi’s commanding officer. Cohen had been…well, what he’d always been. And Gavi Shehadeh and Walid Safik had been just two more bright young men who might or might not amount to anything. It had been Leila—the intense young doctor with the startling eyes and the even more startling opinions—who everyone thought would change the world.

  Well, the world had changed all right. And Leila had been among the first casualties. It was still hard to believe that such an extraordinary person had been killed by something as wastefully impersonal as a stray bomb.

  Cohen looked up to find Didi’s eyes searching his face. The memory of Gavi hung between them. Unasked questions rose and drifted and shredded themselves in the backwash of the ceiling fan.

  Didi turned off the monitor and sat down heavily. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the tail of his shirt, put them back on and peered fretfully around the room. He seemed disappointed with the result, as if he’d expected the world to look better through clean lenses. Then, with a mournful little shrug, he got down to business.

  He described Arkady’s appearance at Maris Station; his approach to Maris consulate junior intelligence staff; his disappearance and subsequent resurfacing in Moshe’s hands; GolaniTech’s agreement with Korchow, insofar as they understood it; the cautious back-channel contacts with the bidding parties.

  Cohen didn’t even try to calibrate Didi’s version of events against his own information and look for discrepancies. You might as well try to catch a bird in flight as catch Didi Halevy in a lie. You just trusted him to tell you what he thought you needed to know. Or you didn’t trust him at all. There was no middle ground.

  “The big questions are two,” Didi said when he’d come to the end of his tale. “One, what is Arkady selling? And two, why should we care?”

  “You read my report?” Cohen asked doubtfully.

  “Yes, yes. And I’m sure you thought it was perfectly comprehensible. But I’m not Gavi. And even if I were, I’d still need to get it into terms the prime minister can understand.”

  “Does the interest in this case go that high?”

  “This is a country of population one million and dropping. Everything goes that high.”

  “Well,” Cohen began. “First of all, let’s talk about so-called weapons’ infection vector. It’s a retrovirus, and as far as I can see a relatively straightforward one. So the real question isn’t what the virus is. The real question is: What’s the transgenic payload it’s inserting into the target organism’s cells?”

  Cohen stopped to collect his thoughts—a task that was both difficult and necessary because he and the half dozen or so of his aggregated Emergents who had worked on this problem had not reached anything even remotely approaching a consensus on what the payload of Arkady’s mystery virus actually was.

  “Let me guess,” Didi said wryly. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

  “On the contrary. It’s exactly like something I’ve seen before. Or rather something Hy Cohen saw, and actually messed around with a bit before he invented me. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”

  “I don’t cook.”

  “Oh my, aren’t we funny? Turing Soup was a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century idea, child of the era of networks…just like me. People had networks on the brain back then. The way Enlightenment thinkers had clockwork on the brain. Or the way people in Darwin’s day had steam engines on the brain. Or the way we’ve got spin on the brain. Actually some associates and I are working on a paper about…right, okay, never mind. Turing Soup was the brainchild of a guy named Walter Fontana. The same Walter Fontana who invented AlChemy, more prosaically known as Algorithmic Chemistry. One thing you have to say about the guy, he had a gift for names. He also happened to be at MIT toward the end of his career, and to take under his wing a bright young French postdoc in theoretical computer science called Hyacinthe Cohen. Which is why I might just be the only person still alive who remembers Turing Soup.

  “The idea behind Turing Soup was to look at the evolution of algorithms as a model for the evolution of organic life. A Turing machine is a universal computer—in fact, the paradigmatic universal computer. It has a reading head that can ‘read’ any tape run through it. It has an execution apparatus that carries out whatever instructions the reading head reads. Turing couldn’t know it back in 1950, but he was essentially describing RNA: a ‘reading’ mechanism that zips itself to the unraveled DNA strand in order to reproduce its folded protein sequences. Fontana’s idea was to throw a bunch of molecular Turing machines together and let them ‘read’ each other’s programs and see if they could construct new programs from the components of the existing ones. It didn’t work, mainly because Turing machines have a problem that RNA and DNA either don’t have or figured out how to solve a long time ago: they hang, like just about every other computer ever invented. So the machines in Turing Soup would just lock up with each other, start reading each other’s tape, slip onto a positive feedback loop, and hang.

  “So that was Turing Soup: wrong tool for the right job. Fontana moved on to lambda-calculus and AlChem. And everyone filed Turing Soup away as an idea whose time had come and gone. But if I had to describe this sample Moshe’s flogging around, that’s what I’d say it was: Turing Soup made out of DNA. Or more accurately, a virus that takes its host’s DNA and turns it into Turing Soup.” Cohen grinned. “Which—if you’ll forgive a joke that about eighteen of my associates have already made at some point in the last few weeks—gives a whole new meaning to parasitic computation.”

  “So you’re saying this is…what? AI in a virus?”

  “God, no! Start letting your metaphors gallop around like that and you’ll never be able to sort out what it actually is. What Moshe showed us was…conceptually provocative. But it wasn’t artificial intelligence. At least not in any form that’s recognizable to this particular artificial intelligence. If you need a layman’s label to hang on it, let’s call it…a search engine in a virus?”

  “And what’s the engine searching for?”

  “That, my friend, I can’t begin to tell you.”

  Didi pursed his lips, considering. “And you believe Arkady’s story that they found it out on—what was the place called?”

  “Novalis. I’ve never heard of it either. It’s off the maps. No record of any survey. No BE buoy within light-years, probably because the spectrometry wasn’t promising enough. It’s one of those ‘you can’t get there from here’ planets. Anyway, the host genotype is descended from an old Monsanto patent. That tells us nothing; half the known universe is littered with that crap. But it certainly would make sense if they really did find it out there. And it fits in again with what I said about it not being Syndicate splice work. They won’t touch corporate genesets as a general rule; bad associations.”

  “I take it the planet’s terraformed, then?”

  “That’s what they went out there to find out. And given what they seem to have brought back with them, I’d say the answer is yes.”

  “Is this something UNSec ought to know about?”

  “Well, I’m sure UNSec would think it was.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I’m a live-and-let-live kind of boy. And UNSec has a nasty habit of breaking planets so other people can’t use them. A good planet’s a terrible thing to waste.”

  Didi smiled slightly. “Okay, we’ll let it ride for now.”

  Which they both knew only meant that they would let it ride until either Didi or the PM decided it was time not to let it ride.

  “All right then.” Didi leaned back in his chair, caught sight of a food stain on his tie, peered at it, scrubbed at it. And then abandoned the effort,
having only succeeded in making the tie wrinkled as well as stained. “You’ve answered my first two questions—what the virus is and who put it there—with more questions. Now what about the one question we ought to be able to answer: Why the hell should we be interested in it?”

  “Well,” Cohen said slowly, “I know why ALEF is interested. Immortality, if you want to stick a name on it.”

  “But you’ve already got that.”

  “Not strictly speaking. No more than an ant swarm or a beehive does. And AIs have life spans just like any other superorganism. Even the ones that don’t collapse prematurely under the weight of their own competing identities.”

  “But how does an organic virus make a machine live longer?”

  “Because the underlying dynamics are the same whether you’re dealing with organic or synthetic superorganisms. We’re interested in any mechanism that propagates beneficial mutations across a population while somehow repressing harmful ones.”

  “Controlling evolution, essentially.”

  “Well…tweaking it. I think this would fall into what Syndicate genetic designers call the ‘soft chaos control’ theory of directed evolution. It’s what makes the quality of their genetic engineering so superior to the UN version. And it’s exactly the kind of biocomputing concept that holds the most promise for resolving the problem of decoherence in Emergents. Along with all the other dysfunctions that, tellingly, have the same names in AI design as they do in ecophysics: brittleness, perturbation intolerance, maladaptive red queen regimes, and so forth…” Cohen cleared his throat and shifted in the hard-backed chair. “But none of that answers the question of why Israel would be interested.”

  “We’re not,” Didi said blandly, “or we wouldn’t be letting GolaniTech sell Arkady to the highest bidder.”

  “That’s pure spin, and you know it,” Cohen objected. “You’re taking some heavy risks to do this. I don’t care how greedy GolaniTech is or how uninterested you are. They wouldn’t be running this thing if they didn’t have at least tacit approval at the highest level—”

  “—which doesn’t necessarily mean from me—”

  “Granted. Still. This is treaty-banned tech any way you slice it, and if you weren’t after something, you would have damn well made sure that Arkady never made it to Earth.”

  At that instant a decorous knock at the door was followed by Arik’s sleek head—and by one hand, held wrist out to put the boy’s IDF-issue wristwatch on full display. The watch’s crystal was cracked, Cohen noticed. Personally he thought that was taking the look a little far.

  “Time,” Arik murmured in tones that would have done an English butler proud.

  “Oh, yes,” Didi said. “Thank you, Arik. Give us…shall we say five minutes?”

  The boy retreated, closing the door as carefully and silently as he’d opened it.

  “Well?” Didi looked around inquisitively. “I think we’ve about covered the things we need to cover. I’m just asking you two to go forward and keep your ears open and let me know what you hear. That’s all. And now let’s get home before I get in trouble for making Zillah overcook the lamb shanks.”

  That was when Cohen finally figured out three things that hould have been obvious from the start:

  1. Their hour-long wait by the elevators had been no accident, because;

  2. Didi’s office was bugged, and;

  3. Didi was cheerfully spoon-feeding his own specially mixed barium meal to whoever was on the other end of the bug.

  The underground parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters was probably one of the most heavily secured pieces of real estate on the planet. So it was amusing to see Li and the four hard-jawed Mossad bodyguards fingering their weapons and peering into the shadows as if they were stepping into the OK Corral instead of a well-lit, thoroughly guarded, and obviously empty garage. Or it would have been humorous if he hadn’t known how deadly earnest they all were.

  The Mossad’s motor pool wasn’t taking any chances either; Didi’s government-issue Peugeot sedan had blastproof windows and armor-plated coachwork. They got in—one of Didi’s young men in front with the driver, the other two flanking Didi on the forward-facing seat, and Li and Cohen facing them across the foot well—and the car pulled up the ramp into the late-afternoon traffic on King Saul Boulevard with the muffled clank of ceramic compound antimine flooring.

  It was nothing all that new to Cohen; Hyacinthe had driven the autobahns back when private cars were still legal and seen Porsches and BMWs romping through their native habitat at upward of two hundred kilometers an hour. Li, however, was enthralled. She inspected the floor and the doors, predictably pleased to meet a new piece of semi-military hardware. “I’ve never been in an actual car,” she said. “Is this a Mercedes?”

  One of Didi’s bodyguards gave a strangled-sounding cough.

  “Oh,” Li said after a moment. She cleared her throat, started to mutter something about being sorry, and fell abruptly silent.

  “Never mind.” Didi leaned forward to pat her knee. “History just has a longer half-life here. Now tell me about your home planet.”

  “It looks a lot like Israel, actually. Rocks and sky. Desert and mountains.”

  “But without people, yes?”

  “Mostly. Most of it people can’t live on yet. And even where they can, I wouldn’t exactly call it healthy.”

  “And its history?”

  “There is none. It’s not much older than I am.”

  “A planet with no history,” Didi said. He turned to the agent next to him. “The perfect place for a week on the beach, don’t you think? They could sell vacations there. Jerusalemites would snap them up like falafel.”

  “Any Interfaithers there?” the other guard asked.

  “Not as bad as here.”

  The Israelis exchanged significant glances with each other.

  Cohen gazed at Didi, wondering if this turn of the conversation was entirely coincidental. “Is it true they’re expected to win another eight seats in the Knesset this election?” he asked, nudging the conversation along and wondering what surprises would emerge from the after-dinner chitchat.

  But Didi just spread his hands in the characteristic shrug that was the Israeli reply to all life’s unanswerable questions from politics to tomorrow’s weather.

  “I love my country enough to believe that she will outgrow her infatuation with the men of God and violence,” he said simply.

  “I’ve heard a lot of people say that about their countries,” Cohen said.

  “And were any of them ever right?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Didi opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment the car turned onto a residential street and they passed a large extended family out for a walk in the last warmth of the dying afternoon. A clucking, fussing, cosseting parade of aunts and uncles and grandparents. A pair of anxious-looking parents—and they had good reason to look anxious, given the recent wave of vigilante assaults on “bad” parents. And finally that fragile bird, rare enough in the blighted land of milk and honey to turn heads and kill conversations: a child.

  As they passed, the child stumbled slightly and vanished into a dense thicket of protective adult arms. Cohen remembered Hyacinthe’s free-ranging childhood, littered with broken bones and private triumphs, and wondered what it would do to this generation of children to grow up never allowed to play or fall or risk themselves.

  He glanced at his fellow passengers. Li was indifferent. Didi had glanced at the child when it first appeared, but was now staring impassively through the windshield at the road ahead. But it was the look on the faces of Arik and the other young men that would stamp itself on Cohen’s memory of this moment. Intent. Utterly still. Mortally hungry.

  So this is what extinction looks like.

  Didi’s house was perfectly ordinary, no less modest and no more obviously well fortified than any other house in its affluent Tel Aviv suburb. The only thing that set it apart from it
s neighbors were the towering trunks of the five cedars of Lebanon that had been planted there, or so the young recruits whispered, when the legendary Rafi Eitan still owned the house.

  The car pulled into a garage full of the usual clutter of bicycles and sports equipment. From there they filed solemnly into the entry, where they were introduced with all due ceremony to Didi’s wife and twin daughters. Li examined the daughters with interest—as well she might, Cohen thought. Their willowy height and their cool, even-featured beauty belonged to the Ring, not to Earth. They might look like their parents in the more predictable ways, but there were other things about them, equally predictable, that put them a lot closer to the posthuman end of the genetic spectrum. The girls were the legacy of a long-ago Ring-side tour of duty under diplomatic cover, and they were at once Didi’s greatest pride and his deepest sorrow. His pride because of their obvious intelligence and beauty, and because they’d chosen—unlike so many of the Ring-bred children of affluent Israelis—to take advantage of the family unification exemption and complete their education and military service in Israel. His sorrow because the genetic engineering that had made their birth possible had also stripped them of the Right of Return that would have been theirs if their very DNA hadn’t been banned technology under the Kyoto Addendum.

  Zillah greeted Cohen with special warmth. “Don’t eat too much over drinks,” she murmured as they kissed each other in greeting, “I’ve made lamb shanks. And you know what it takes to make me stay home from work and cook all day.”

  “Dinner at eight?” Didi asked her.

  She checked her watch. “Let’s say eight-fifteen. See you all then.” She turned to the guards, who were eyeing the twins with an enthusiasm that made Cohen think lust was about to give ambition a run for its money. “Can I make you boys a sandwich in the meantime?”

  A minute later Cohen was looking around Didi’s study, wondering how recently the place had been swept for bugs…and who had swept it, given that Didi didn’t seem to trust the sweepers at the Office.