He was on administrative leave over the Absalom affair when it happened, and within a few months he found himself with a new ceramic compound leg courtesy of Hadassah Hospital’s special amputees unit and a growing realization that his career had died in Tel Aviv.
Yad Vashem had seemed like an escape when Didi first suggested it. Only when he reported to IDF headquarters for the mandatory sperm and blood samples did he realize he’d accepted what amounted, in most people’s minds, to a slow death sentence. No matter, he’d told himself. His exile would be over in a few months, a year at most.
But by now it had lasted almost four years.
He wasn’t sure just when Gavi the traitor had begun to feel more real to him than the man he’d always thought he was. But there were external signs by which he could measure the rate at which his new identity cannibalized his old one. Before his second summer in Yad Vashem he’d stopped writing letters and calling on his former colleagues in hope of a new position. Then his visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, always sporadic, had stopped entirely. And sometime in the third year of his live burial he’d admitted to himself that if his former enemies knew how he felt every time he had to leave the thickness of the Line, they would spirit him straight back to the eighth floor out of sheer spite.
GOLEM had grown out of the routine work of file maintenance that took up so much of Gavi’s time in the first years at Yad Vashem. The number of survivors’ testimonies—the sheer mass of information—contained in the Yad Vashem archives was inconceivable. Those testimonies were the heart of Yad Vashem, the true Monument of the Eternal Name, and one like no other humankind had ever constructed. But monuments of silicon were just as vulnerable to the forces of time and gravity as monuments of marble.
Time passed. Spins decayed. Disks and data cubes crumbled. Files that weren’t recopied and saved on a regular basis lost the one-way battle against entropy. And just as in Europe’s ancient shuls and monasteries, the only files that were recopied were the files people actually used. The Warsaw Ghetto files. The files concerning famous Zionists or writers or artists. But the rest—the men and women and children who had done nothing that History cared about, and had appeared in the testimonies only because they had been someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s lost brother or sister or cousin—those people were slowly being wiped from human memory, just as their killers had meant them to be.
To Gavi the answer had seemed obvious. What was needed was a person. A person who would hold the obscure dead just as beloved as the famous dead. A person who would remember them because he would be them; just as Cohen, or at least some buried part of him, was Hyacinthe; just as Rabbi Loew’s golem had been in some mystical sense the lives and history and souls of the people of the Prague ghetto brought to life.
But there would be nothing mystical about this golem, unless you counted the mystery of how sentience emerged from the swarming maelstrom of data inside an Emergent’s networks. Gavi knew the name of the magic that could bring his golem to life; he had poured over the specs and wiring diagrams and bug reports. It was not the cold clay of Prague he needed, but the cold spin lattices of Cohen’s neural networks.
Of course there were other AIs who had the processing power to handle the job. But none of them was as peculiarly human as Cohen was. None of their personality architectures had been so stable for so long. And none of them was as intimately tied to Israel and to Gavi himself.
Cohen could do it. He could breathe a soul into the archives, and turn dead testimony back into living memory…though with what violence to his own identity no human could begin to guess.
And he would do it, whatever the risk, if Gavi asked him to.
It was precisely that certainty that had kept Gavi from asking.
Gavi caught sight of the tail just as he turned onto King David Street to begin the final approach to Cohen’s hotel. The kid was clearly trying to avoid looking at him: the classic amateur’s gaffe.
Gavi loitered in front of the window of a spintronics store, inspecting the merchandise with minute attention, feeling the rhythm of the crowd as it flowed behind him, listening to the monotonous drone of the crosswalk signals. Then he dashed across the street at the last minute before the light changed, only to loiter again on the far corner waiting for the next light, scanning the crowd all the while for the telltale signs of averted eyes or sudden changes of direction. Then he apparently changed his mind, walked back to the store, went inside, and spent nearly ten minutes haggling over the price of a mobile uplink and left without buying anything. He sauntered down the street for several more blocks, assiduously window-shopping, and repeated the performance at a second store.
In the end he decided that there was only a single team of watchers: a couple, boy and girl, playing well out in front of him, and to the rear a clean-cut young man who looked like his great-great-great-grandparents might have arrived in the Ethiopian airlift. They were kids, diligent but raw.
He thought wistfully of Osnat, who wouldn’t have made such basic mistakes on her first day of training. Then he told himself he couldn’t afford to think of Osnat when he was about to put himself under Cohen’s sharp eyes.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the team worked their plodding way through every classic amateur mistake, and threw in a few new variations for good measure. The teacher in him wanted to walk over, grab them by the collars, and make them do it again, right. But he wasn’t a teacher now. He was a target. A target without backup or a safe house or any of the usual safety nets. And it didn’t take a professional to put a bullet through your skull. He’d learned that in Tel Aviv, even if he hadn’t learned anything else of any earthly use to anyone.
He worked his way up King David Street and over to City Tower, where he browsed at the jewelry counters, circled back to the entrance, then turned back at the last moment as if he’d suddenly remembered something he needed. Finally he backtracked to men’s clothing, where he tried on a series of unforgivably loud shirts.
The tail was still there the third time he came out of the dressing room, looking implausibly interested in the new sock selection.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” Gavi said.
The poor kid looked like he’d gotten caught passing notes in class.
“What do you think of the shirt? That bad, huh? How’s Didi, by the way?”
“I, uh…think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
Gavi stared into the blue eyes until they dropped away from his. “No. You’re mistaking me for someone else. An idiot. Now why don’t you take your two little friends and trot back to the Office and tell Didi that if he wants to know where I’m going, he can damn well ask me.”
The next time he came out of the dressing room the boy was gone. But he bought a white button-down shirt, just to be on the safe side, and changed into it, carefully folding away his old LIE4 T-shirt into the bag the salesgirl gave him. He left the store among a crowd of tourists and threw the bag in the nearest trash bin—regretfully, since he’d always liked that T-shirt. Then he skirted around an IDF safe house that he thought might still be active, checked one last time to make sure his babysitters really had gone home, and finally turned toward King David Street.
Cohen was alone.
“How’s your leg?” he asked, ushering Gavi into a hotel suite that would have had his mother screaming about runaway capitalism and the death of the kibbutznik mentality.
“Uh. Fine,” Gavi said. He was always caught off-balance by questions about it—wrong-footed he would have said if he hadn’t learned that other people didn’t find jokes about his leg quite as hysterically funny as he did.
People always talked about phantom pain, but Gavi had never felt it. What he felt those days was mostly …weirdness. The wrenching visual shock of looking down every now and then and realizing that he ended four inches below his right knee…and that he’d forgotten about it. Or, lately, bemused moments of looking down at his actual flesh-and-blood foot and feelin
g that the whole idea of it (a foot? toes? toenails?) was so much less natural and sensible than nice clean ceramsteel that the continuing existence of feet in general could only be evidence of some collective human neurosis.
“You don’t want to put it up? No? Well, can I at least get you something to drink?”
“Fine on all counts.” He peered at Cohen, who seemed even more opaquely unreadable than usual. “Are you all right? You’re doing that freezing thing again.”
“It’s nothing.”
A nothing named Catherine Li, if Gavi guessed right.
“So tell me about this golem of yours,” Cohen said. “I need a little comedy in my life.”
Gavi told him, walking him through the pieces of code he’d painfully stitched together over the past several years, explaining the places where he couldn’t make things work, or couldn’t decide which of several possible imperfect solutions to settle for. He presented it as a programming problem, one that he was submitting to higher authority. Which was perfectly valid, since Cohen’s abilities in that area would put any human to shame. He didn’t mention what the AI must have seen the minute he began looking at the source code: that the glue that would tie it all together and make the impossible, jerry-built kludge of databases and interfaces work was Cohen.
“You know how crazy this is, don’t you?” Cohen said at last. On the surface he was only pointing out a technical problem, but both of them saw the attached moral problem: How could an AI designer create a sentient being only to sentence it to a life dominated by memories that had driven so many humans to despair and suicide? The goal might be idealistically selfless, but for the newborn Emergent trying to come to terms with those memories the reality would be every bit as brutal as what EMET faced on the Green Line.
“Always so encouraging!” Gavi said, choosing to dodge the nontechnical question. “Don’t you know when your kid brings his little crayon scribbles home from school you’re supposed to hang them on the refrigerator, not give him an art history lesson?”
“I’ve never had kids. Strange, isn’t it? Well, I guess not that strange. The people who marry me aren’t exactly the settle down and have three point two children type.” He looked at the source code again. “Actually, Gavi, I don’t think it’s all that far from working. Which should be encouraging, considering the fact that it must be three centuries since an unaugmented human actually tried to write nontrivial source code. Where did you even find the SCHEME manuals?”
“The dump.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, that explains the smell, I guess.”
They talked around the problem for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s various false starts, and what he’d learned from them, and the current state of his work on what Cohen was now jokingly calling Gavi’s Golem.
“Can I ask you something?” Gavi said finally. “About your visit last week, not this.”
“Sure.”
“What’s ALEF after? What’s your endgame?”
“Mine personally, or ALEF’s?”
“Both. Either.”
“ALEF’s actually interested in the tech, insofar as they’re ever interested in anything in any organized fashion.”
“And you?”
The AI sighed. He’d never gotten sighing quite right, Gavi thought. Even his most sincere sighs rang false. Funny how a little thing like that could elude the best wetware. Or maybe the wet wasn’t where the problem was. “I’m after Absalom.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Cohen. I’m very sorry that Didi’s dragged you into this.”
“And what about you, Gavi? What’s your endgame? Why are you still here when there’s a whole universe up there that doesn’t know you’re a traitor to Israel? You could probably even get a real leg if you went Ring-side.”
“Not anymore. They would have had to ship me Ring-side within the first seventy-two hours in order for viral surgery to be any good. And anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to bring my new leg home, would I?”
“That’s my point, in case you missed it.”
“I spent six months Ring-side.” Gavi wrinkled his nose, remembering the curved, antiseptic, artificially bright expanses of plastic that Ring-siders called “outdoors.” “You can take the boy out of the country, but…”
“Well, there are always other planets if you don’t like life in the orbitals.”
“Other planets smell funny.”
It was a joke, at least partly. But Cohen gave no evidence of realizing that. In fact, he’d fallen oddly silent. And when Gavi looked up, the AI was staring intently at him.
“Are you still looking for Joseph?” Cohen asked.
“Of course I am. But it’s not the same now. When he was seven, eight, ten, I was desperate to find him. Now he’d be a young man, if he…well, I just have this nagging feeling that maybe I would be finding him for me now, not for him. And while that doesn’t make me want to find him any less, it does make it less urgent somehow.”
“Is Didi still helping you look?”
Gavi looked up to find Roland’s soft hazel eyes fixed on him. Talking to Cohen always brought home to him how much he, like all humans, confused the mind with the body. He knew as a technical and intellectual matter that only young and superbly healthy bodies could stand up to the stress of what any programmer would recognize as a biological version of overclocking. But he still couldn’t repress the shiver that ran through him when he looked into some shunt’s wide young eyes and saw the face of the swarm. And he was still eternally surprised that Cohen could take the same five feeble senses most humans got by on and damn near read your mind with them.
“If you want to know what Didi’s doing or not doing,” Gavi said, “you’d better ask Didi.”
Cohen appeared to accept this answer. “The thing is,” the AI said, “somehow I can’t help thinking that maybe your obsession with preserving the archives is just a little bit about Leila and Joseph.”
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Cohen.”
“Oh for God’s sake! Are humans still quoting Freud at each other? Grow up, will you?”
But Gavi wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Have you ever read any of the testimonies, Cohen?”
“I’ve read enough to know I don’t want to read any more.”
“It’s a funny thing, those testimonies. You start to get numb after a while, from the sheer numbers, from the awfulness of it all. And then there’ll be one that gets under your skin and makes it all real again. There was one guy who went into Theresienstadt with his entire family: mother, father, two brothers. The whole family got sequential numbers. The boy’s father was number something something something five hundred and twenty. He was five hundred and twenty-one, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-two, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-three. But his mother was pregnant, so they pulled her out of the line and sent her straight to the gas chamber without even giving her a number.
The oldest son is the only one who survives. He goes to America. He makes a life for himself, a good life. But as he gets to be around the age his parents were when they died, he starts to have nightmares about his mother. He becomes obsessed by the fact that the Germans didn’t give her a number, that there’s no record of her death, no proof. It’s not that he thinks she’s alive, you understand. He saw her get sent into the nonworkers line, and he doesn’t have any illusions about what that meant. But he can’t process the idea that she just…vanished.
So he saves up his money. He goes back to Poland. He advertises in the newspapers, literally for years, offering a reward to anyone who can give him a photograph of his mother, anyone who even remembers his mother. No one ever answers. This woman had grown up, gone to university, taught grade school, been a daughter and a wife and a mother. But it was like she’d never existed. The Germans had simply wiped her from the face of history.
“That’s what’s happening to the testimonies, Cohen. When I took over, we’d already
lost four hundred thousand files irretrievably. The rest are going. It’s only a matter of time. I want to save them. Not just for now. Forever.”
He looked up to find Cohen staring at him.
“I know. I know you think it’s a waste of my time. But, Cohen, I’m the first caretaker who’s had the expertise to actually fix it instead of sending endless unanswered spinmail to the Knesset budget office asking for funding that never quite arrives. If I don’t do it, who will?”
Cohen just kept looking at him, utterly still. “I know what you’re asking me to do,” he said finally. “And I know what I owe you.”
Gavi sliced his hand through the air abruptly. “You don’t owe me anything. If I hadn’t been afraid you’d say just that, I would have asked you for help far sooner. Hell, maybe I would even have answered your spinmails!”
“Oh.” Cohen grinned. “Now you tell me.”
“Cohen—”
“I know, I know.”
“—if you can’t say no, then how can I ever ask you for anything?”
“Harrumph. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you and Catherine and router/decomposer were all talking about me behind my back. By the way, Gavi, have you noticed that you practically went into orbit last week at the suggestion that I might lift a finger to help revive your career and now you’re cheerfully asking me to risk decoherence in order to help you with some quixotic scheme that no one else will take on for love or money?”
“What’s your point, little AI?”
“Nothing. Just thought I’d mention it. Sometimes you remind me the tiniest little bit of Leila.”
Gavi smiled—but his smile faded as he realized that he had heard her name on Cohen’s lips without feeling the old familiar pang of grief. “I wish I could remember her like you remember her,” he whispered, not trusting his voice well enough to speak out loud.
Spin Control ss-2 Page 39