“Maybe not,” Cohen said. “There are folktales about ghosts who can’t rest until their loved ones stop mourning them. Maybe the dead are meant to fade, Gavi. Maybe the living are meant to forget.”
In Cohen’s dream, Gavi had his leg back. He stood on tiptoe because Cohen had become very tall in the dream, a mute giant of mud and clay.
Your job is done, Gavi said.
As he spoke the words Li was there, calm and clear-eyed, with Didi standing at her side.
Time to forget, they told him.
And then Li put her hands to his face, and gently, so gently, wiped the first letter of the name of truth from his forehead…
“I’ve made a life decision,” router/decomposer announced. “May I tell you about it?”
He was leaving, Cohen decided. What else could it be? And what could his departure mean but hassle and fuss, interviews and arguments, and the inevitable bad feelings that always led to further departures? Everything was falling apart, everyone was leaving him, it was all his fault, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“Of course you can tell me,” he said with the internal equivalent of a forced smile.
“I’m going to change my name.”
“Great! I mean…er, to what?”
“Kuramoto.”
“As in Yoshiki?”
“Correct.”
Yoshiki Kuramoto. The boldly intuitive twentieth-century mathematician who had taken the first real stab at formalizing the emergence of spontaneous synchrony in certain types of complex and mathematically intractable systems, including router/decomposer’s Josephson Arrays and spin glass matrices. If router/decomposer was going to borrow someone else’s name, then Kuramoto’s was a logical, even an elegant choice.
“Why Kuramoto?”
“It’s an aspiration designation,” router/decomposer, now Kuramoto, announced with an ironic flourish that ill concealed his seriousness. “It indicates not what I am but what I aspire to become. And, uhhhh…I’m also quitting. Caltech just offered me a tenure track position in applied mathematics. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. What can I say? Things have been crazy.”
“Well,” Cohen said. “Caltech. That’s quite something. Have they ever hired an AI before?”
“I would seem to be the first.”
“Well, great. Wonderful.”
“It’s irrelevant, of course…but somehow I keep returning to the idea that I’d be…uh, happier, whatever that means, if you supported this decision.”
“I do. Wholeheartedly. Congratulations.”
“Do you mean that? Your affective fuzzy set for this exchange is very difficult to parse.”
“You’re telling me.”
“But you are happy?”
“I’m happy for you.”
Kuramoto chewed on that for a near eternity by AI standards.
“Being happy for someone else sounds like a less desirable state than actually being happy,” he said finally.
“Let’s just say it’s an acquired taste.”
And then—as soon as he was what passed for alone—he dropped his head into his hands and laughed until the tears sprang to Roland’s eyes.
“Where are you going, Catherine?”
“Out.”
“Out to see Ash?”
“You’re behaving badly, Cohen. Stop it. And for what it’s worth I’m not sleeping with her.” Li rubbed the back of one hand across her nose.
“Frankly, I’m too allergic to this hellhole of a planet to even think about sex.”
“Why don’t we sit down and talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you?”
“Since nothing’s bothering me, it would be a short conversation.”
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Didn’t I just say I was?”
“I don’t mean right now. If you’d only talk to me…”
She softened, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that always threw Cohen off-balance. “You can’t help, Cohen. I know you mean well, but…you can’t.”
“So that’s it?” Cohen said. “No discussion? No questions? Just goodbye Cohen and have a nice life?”
He sat down on the bed and crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t help it. And why should he help it, anyway? It wasn’t as if Li was exactly being mature about things. To make matters worse, he could feel across the quiescent intraface that she knew exactly what he was feeling. The memory of their last breakup, with all its attendant humiliation and frustration. The fearful certainty that her departure would open the door to all the old, tired, nasty ghosts that had haunted him before her arrival. The panic at the prospect of losing her for good—a panic that was sharpened rather than blunted by the crippling suspicion that it wasn’t real love, but merely his feedback loops going into emotive overdrive at the prospect of losing an inscribed player. Router/decomposer would say that motives didn’t matter, only actions. But this motive did matter…
“I hope you’ll do me the courtesy of giving me some kind of reasonable notice before you quit,” he said. Was his voice actually trembling? Impossible. But apparently true.
“I wasn’t aware I was an employee,” Li said coldly. “But I’ll get you safely back Ring-side. Glad we got that clear.”
She left, closing the door behind her with a deliberate precision that made Cohen certain she wanted to slam it. He walked across to the window and stood there, one of Roland’s fine-fingered hands splayed on the glass, until he saw her walk out the front door of the hotel and turn down the street toward the Old City. He felt sick. He felt like he was dying. He could feel Roland’s heart pounding in his chest like a wounded bird. Who knew how many years Cohen’s conflicts were taking off the boy’s life? He hadn’t been so out of control since DARPA. And he’d been a hell of a lot smaller and weaker back then.
He slipped into the hotel’s network almost without thinking and shut down its power grid for just long enough to see the lights brown and dim overhead. That didn’t make him feel any better, though, so he bit into the citywide power grid and gave it an experimental squeeze. The results were gratifyingly spectacular. A black wave rippled across the skyline, lights dimming and winking out, the noises of the nighttime city giving way to stunned silence. A murmur rose from the adjacent rooms as his fellow guests chattered excitedly and stepped to their windows. And best of all, he caught a glimpse of Li on a storefront security camera a few blocks away, glancing fearfully over her shoulder into the deepening darkness.
For Christ’s sake, she snapped across the intraface. There are hospitals around here, Cohen. Get a grip on yourself.
In retrospect, he would decide it was the note of disdain in her voice that had really driven him over the edge. An icy wave of fury welled up from the hidden layers of his networks, and in an instant too fast for thought or doubt, he swept it all together, let it cascade down through his systems, gaining power and momentum like an avalanche roaring down a mountainside, and flung the whole lethal storm of data downstream.
He stopped short of actually letting it reach her. And even if he hadn’t, her safety override would have seen it coming and activated her cutouts. But none of that made it all right.
Catherine? he probed. But he was whistling into the wind. The other side of the link was down. And something told him it wouldn’t be coming back up again anytime soon.
He was pulled back to real time by a warm, tickling sensation that turned out to be blood streaming down Roland’s arm. He held up his hand and saw that the palm and wrist were crisscrossed by several vicious and alarmingly deep cuts. The floor beneath his feet glittered with broken glass, and the windowpane in front of him had been reduced to a lethal jigsaw puzzle.
The alarm had gone off when the window broke, of course, so he didn’t have to call anyone. Just stand there holding his wrist and watching poor Roland’s blood puddle on the floor until hotel security arrived to clean up his mess for him.
/> “I’m sorry,” Arkady said. “It’s difficult for me to tell humans apart. Perhaps if you showed me a photograph…?”
“If I showed you a photograph, then how would I know you weren’t just telling me what you thought I wanted to hear?”
Moshe had been all over Arkady since his return from the other side of the Line. Osnat was nowhere in sight. But behind him, her white suit glimmering in the shadows, her coldly beautiful face just visible at the edge of the lamplight, sat Ashwarya Sofaer.
Moshe stepped out of the room and returned with half a dozen pieces of paper. He fanned them out on the table like playing cards. Head shots. Old ID photos of men in uniform, none of them much above twenty.
“No,” Arkady said with relief. “None of these men are him. I’m sure of it.”
But then he saw it. The fourth photograph from the left. The face was thinner and firmer, but the calm brown gaze was the same one that had made him give up his soul and his secrets to Safik.
He looked up to find Moshe’s glasses glittering at him. The mouth beneath the lenses was intent and unsmiling and deadly serious.
And then back to his cell, and back to the waiting.
Osnat was nowhere. Was she gone? Had she been found out? Had she betrayed him to Moshe?
But no. She came in with his dinner. And before he could quite adjust to the idea of her actually being there, she was talking quick and low, telling him to shut up and listen when he tried to interrupt her because there wasn’t time for questions.
“At 1:52 A.M. the lights’ll go out. When they do, count to ten. Then go. Your door will be open. Turn left, count three doors down on your right hand, and take the third left turn—that door should be open too. It takes you into a corridor. Follow it straight ahead and take the fifth right. Go straight ahead through two fire doors, then up half a flight of stairs, and you’re outside. There’s no moon tonight. You’ll have decent cover. But move fast anyway. Your ride out of here will be waiting just past the wire.”
“Osnat—”
“Remember. Left three, left five, right and up the stairs. Don’t waste time and don’t even think about getting lost. If you get yourself caught, there’s not a thing on God’s green Earth I can do for you.”
Arkady woke to the feeling of rough hands on his body. For a split second he thrashed against the pressure. Then someone’s knee slammed into the small of his back, and when he regained his bearings he was on the floor, face pressed into the concrete, with one guard sitting on him and another’s boot planted solidly on the nape of his neck.
A few painful breathless minutes later he was sitting on the floor of a locked and empty cell staring at an ominously disheveled-looking Osnat.
“What happened?” he asked as soon as they were alone.
“Someone sold us out. Obviously.”
Arkady’s eyes flew to the room’s corners.
“There’s no surveillance here. If there was, I’d know about it. Though I could be wrong about that.” She laughed bitterly. “I’ve been wrong about a lot, it seems.”
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is I’ll handle it better after I get some sleep. So stop asking me questions, will you?” She rolled over on her side and pillowed her head on her bunched-up shirt. “And don’t look at me,” she added, giving him one last baleful stare over her shoulder. “I fucking hate it when people watch me while I’m sleeping.”
In the end they did leave in a helicopter…though Arkady seriously doubted it was the one Osnat had hoped they’d be catching. It touched down just before sunset, a bright corporate bird of paradise in the GolaniTech colors, piloted by two hard-faced ex-Sayeret something-or-others. If they recognized the former Captain Hoffman, they weren’t showing her any love.
“Buckle up,” Osnat told Arkady over the rotor noise. “Tight.”
Arkady never really understood what happened next. Were they shot at by someone on the ground? Was it a missile? An RPG? A simply mechanical failure? All he heard was a sharp pop somewhere out in the wind about ten minutes after takeoff.
The chopper jerked sideways, walloped by its own rotor wash, Arkady’s head slammed against the bulletproofed window with a sickening crack, and time took on a stretched surreal quality.
They hit the ground nose first and sideways, sliding through the final feet of their descent with deceptive, almost casual slowness. There was a first jolt, and then a second. And then came the wrenching, shrieking, screeching settling as the rotors began driving them into the ground and tearing the fragile craft apart.
The air stank of fuel and coolant. A lurid light shone in through the window by Arkady’s head. In his dazed confusion he took it for the familiar white flash of the orbital sunsets he’d known all his childhood. Then he saw sparks and realized it was the rotors scraping fire off bare rock.
He looked forward, trying to see why the pilot hadn’t shut off the turbines…and one look was enough to tell him that the pilot was dead. Beside him Osnat had somehow gotten her hands free and was struggling out of her harness. But too late, too late.
Then, suddenly, miraculously, the copilot roused himself and reached out a hand and switched the power off. The machine heaved a final horrible shudder and died. In the stunned silence that followed, Arkady heard a cricket singing in a nearby tree and the soft hiss of a leaking feedline.
“My legs are broken,” the copilot said in a blurred voice.
“Looks like it.” Osnat was bending over him, not to help but to remove his sidearm from its holster and thrust it into her belt where the deep groove of her spine ran down between her back muscles. She reached across the gearbox to the butchered remains of the pilot’s body and took his weapon too. Then she began patting the copilot down, transferring the contents of his pockets into hers.
The copilot said something to Osnat in Hebrew too quick for Arkady to follow. He must have hit his head as well as breaking his legs; he was delirious.
She came aft without answering the man and stooped over Arkady.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Good. See that stand of junipers? No, not that one. Farther back, up at the crest of that hill. You’re going to walk to it. Don’t try to run, but don’t turn around or stop either. And don’t come back down here, no matter what you hear or see or think you hear or see.” She undid Arkady’s bonds. His hands were trembling, he noticed distantly. Hers weren’t. “I don’t need to be worrying about where you are on top of everything else I have to worry about.”
Then he spent almost forty-five minutes sitting under the junipers with no view at all of what was happening below, feeling guilty and terrified. Finally he heard the crack of gunfire, and moments later the whoosh and suck of a fierce explosion.
Osnat walked out of the inferno alone, and holding something in her hands.
“You didn’t get the copilot out?” he asked. Then he saw what was in her hands.
She emptied the chamber and slapped the ammunition clip out with practiced hands. Then she stowed the gun in its holster and strapped the holster onto her body. She had to adjust the holster’s fittings several times; they’d been sized to a man’s broad shoulders. At the sight of her hands on the buckles, Arkady remembered the copilot’s last muttered words and felt his gorge rise.
When she’d adjusted the holster to her satisfaction, Osnat looked at Arkady. There was an odd blank look in her usually sharp eyes; the mechanism was clicking along as smoothly and efficiently as always, but there was nobody at the wheel.
Osnat had pulled other things out of the wreck besides the sidearm and holster—though not, as she pointed out, enough things to raise the suspicion of survivors as long as the flames did their work. Still, they had water, food, and—what seemed far more important now that the cold fall night was pressing down upon the desert—a first-aid kit with its two silvery sleep sacks. She parceled out the supplies between the two of them, giving herself the lion’s share
and merely rolling her eyes at his weak protests.
“Okay,” she said in a horribly normal voice. “Time to take a hike.”
“What made the helicopter crash?” Arkady asked several hours later.
They were facing each other across a small fire that Osnat had lit only after a forced march that took them into the early hours of the morning, and only because Arkady had begun shivering uncontrollably with shock, cold, and exhaustion.
“To me,” Osnat said in the hairsplitting tone of a connoisseur discussing a wine’s bouquet, “it sounded like someone set a timed charge on the tail rotor.”
“What kind of someone?”
“Well, I would have said Ash up to this point. You have to assume she was going to do something to break us out. But that was an awfully risky way to do it.” Her good eye measured him briefly. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it, and I don’t want to freak you out, but it’s pretty fucking unbelievable that we both walked out of that. Whoever set that charge was trying to get us out of GolaniTech’s hands, but they weren’t going to be crying on their pillow if we bought it in the process. I doubt Ash would have made that kind of call without it going up to the eighth floor. Maybe higher.”
“But that would mean—”
“—that Didi has decided to cut his losses and pull the plug on the operation while the tape’s still on the box.”
Arkady squinted across the fire, trying to gauge Osnat’s expression. The air rippled above the flames like running water, and the face beyond the scrim of the sparks was as unreadable as a text written in a dead language.
“What was it like growing up in the Syndicates?” Osnat asked suddenly.
“It was…happy. Until the war. A lot of things changed then.” Suddenly Arkady found himself struggling to articulate something he’d felt often but never put words to. “Before the war we had a very idealistic society. Not perfect. But…honest, somehow. When the UN attacked us, everything went out the window except pure survival.” He laughed softly. “And somehow ‘survival’ always seems to translate into the honest idealists being pushed aside and replaced by dishonest manipulators.”
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