“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”
Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.
“Emergent-human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown working toward it.”
“So you’re saying Sharifi was carrying around black-market tech.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the AI on the other end of this wire wasn’t an Emergent.” Sharpe shrugged. “Still, that’s my best guess about what this is. I still think she was wired for some kind of shared operations with an Emergent.”
“Not too many of those around, Sharpe.”
“No, there aren’t.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“The relay station’s field AI?”
Li felt the cold of the autopsy room settle into her bones. What the hell had Sharifi been doing? And who would have let her play that kind of risky game with a field AI when lives depended on every quantum-transport operation? “I’d sure like to see the psychware they were running on that implant,” she said.
“It won’t be in there. Not nearly enough memory. It’ll have been externalized too.”
“And the field AI is conveniently off-line, isn’t it?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
They both stared at the screen for a moment without speaking.
“Well,” Sharpe asked. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Take it out,” Li said.
* * *
Most of Li’s encounters with quantum-corrected replication happened when she was sedated into near coma. Cryotechnology made faster-than-light transport, otherwise a potentially lethal ordeal, survivable. And it usually left Li with nothing more significant than a stuffy nose and wandering joint pain.
Biotech extraction was different, though. It was controlled, observable, reassuringly domesticated. A surgical parlor trick. This one took a while. Sharpe didn’t have the necessary information to preset his equipment; he had to fiddle around trying to nail the implant’s quantum signature. But after a long series of finicky adjustments, he established and verified entanglement, uploaded the primary spinstream, reintegrated the entangled data, waited while the comp ran its nested correction protocols. When his terminal told them it was completing the Sharifi transform they both laughed nervously.
Five minutes later, Li held a small package in the palm of her hand: a neatly rolled coil of white ceramsteel filament and a few gel-encased microrelays, all flash-irradiated and wrapped in sterile surgical film.
“It’s so small,” she said.
“Two kilometers,” Sharpe said. “That’s the length of filament, measured end to end, in the average full-body net.”
Li weighed the slender coil in her hand. Why had Sharifi needed to install illegal wetware? And, more troubling, where had she gotten it? “Do you need to keep this?” she asked Sharpe.
“I’d rather.”
“Fine.” She handed it to him. “Just make sure it’s here if I need to look at it again.”
“Can I ask you something?” Sharpe said as she reached the door. His voice sounded strained. “Unofficially?”
Li turned. “Of course.”
“Did you know her?”
“Who? Sharifi?”
Sharpe nodded.
“Not really. I saw her a couple of times. That’s all.”
“I knew her,” Sharpe said. He picked up a scalpel and began fidgeting with it, screwing and unscrewing the threaded fastener that held blade to handle. “I liked her. She was… honest.”
He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so Li waited, watching him fidget.
“Anyway,” he said, flushing, “that’s not the point. The point is, I was given… instructions. After her death. Do those instructions still stand?”
Li stared at him, wondering what kind of political minefield she’d stumbled into. “What are you asking me?”
Sharpe searched her face, eyebrows knit. “Has anyone explained to you how the coroner’s system works in St. Johns?”
Li had to think for a minute before she realized that St. Johns was the actual map name of Shantytown. She shook her head.
“When someone dies in the town limits, I have full authority to conduct any investigations needed to declare a cause of death and close the inquiry. When someone dies on AMC property, the case goes to AMC management. Unless AMC asks me to do an autopsy, I just hold the body pending disposal or, more rarely, shipment. There’s still a death certificate, of course. But Haas fills it out. I don’t do much more than rubber-stamp it.”
“Go on,” Li said. Sharpe was still playing with the scalpel, looking to Li like he was about to slice a fingertip off every time he turned it over.
“In practice, AMC usually has me autopsy everyone who dies in the mine. But not this time. This time I got a bundle of automatic authorizations, all signed by Haas. Except for two: Voyt and Sharifi. On those I got completed death certificates, signed them, and sent them back upstairs.”
“And now you want to do the autopsies.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Why?”
“If you don’t want to tread on Haas’s toes…”
“It’s not Haas’s toes I’m worried about,” Li said.
A voice somewhere near the pit of her stomach whispered something eminently sensible about looking before she leapt. She squashed it.
“Fine,” she said. “Do your autopsies. But no one else sees the results until I sign off on them. Just so I know how low I have to duck if I want to keep my head attached.”
Sharpe looked at her soberly. “I appreciate this.”
“Don’t mention it,” Li said—and her next words were only half-joking. “I’m just giving you enough rope to hang me with.”
Shantytown: 14.10.48.
She should have gone straight back to the heliport when she left the hospital and caught the next shuttle station-side. But she didn’t. Without letting herself think about where she was going she turned left instead of right at the end of Hospital Street and started working her way along the winding, badly paved streets toward the old section of Shantytown.
Most of Shantytown had been thrown up in the first frenzy of the Bose-Einstein Rush. There’d been little money, less time, no planning, and from most angles the town looked like a sprawling collection of modular hab units that someone had dropped by accident and forgotten to come back for. It was only when you got deep into the old town that you began to see the bones of the place, the sealed biopods of the original colony. Few of the pods could still maintain an atmosphere, but the modern town had grown around their radiating spokes like skin grafts encrusting surgical mesh. The result was a warren of narrow alleys and windowless courtyards through which a native could travel for miles without ever seeing sky or showing up on the orbital surveillance grid.
The Riots had broken out here a few months after Li was born, and the UN’s collective memory had never recovered. Shantytown was still a code word for violence, treason, terrorism. And it still had the highest percentage of constructs of any city in UN space. Walking its streets again, Li had a sudden memory of her OCS course eight years ago. Of her tangled feelings of shame and disgust when she recognized the urban warfare lab as an exact streamspace replica of old Shantytown’s interlocking tunnels and courtyards. When she recognized the targets’ faces as her own face.
She found the chapel without ever having quite admitted to herself that she was looking for it. She stood before the gate, set her hand on it, pushed it open. As she stepped into the little churchyard she crossed herself.
; Our Lady of the Deep stood just where she remembered it: dug into the steep bluff where the prehistoric lake bed Shantytown was built on met the hills that led up to the birthlabs and bootleg mines. The door was open. Li glanced in as she passed, saw the dim cavern of the nave and, like daylight at the end of a mine tunnel, the muted milk white gleam of the Mary Stone.
There was a tawdriness about the churchyard that didn’t show up in her childhood memories. The rectory’s peeling whitewash, the cheap insulation foam packed around badly fitted windows, the too-bright colors of artificial flowers, the mottled laminate of headstones peeling under a chemical rain they had never been designed to stand up to. It was almost enough to distract her from the really startling thing about the churchyard: how young everyone in it was.
She walked along the rows looking at birth and death dates. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Twenty-four. Eighteen. And that wasn’t even counting the babies’ graves, half grown over by green-gray clumps of oxygen-producing algae.
She stumbled on the grave she was looking for by accident—and as soon as she saw it she knew that, whatever she’d thought, whatever she’d told herself, she hadn’t been ready to see it. She hadn’t really believed in it, any more than she believed, really, that her father had been dead all these years.
But there it was. Gil Perkins. And the dates, below the name. He’d been thirty-six when he died. Which meant that the old, worn-down, coal-scarred father of her childhood had been younger than she was now.
“Can I help you?” a man’s voice said behind her.
She spun around, chest heaving.
A priest. Young. Athletic-looking. Not local. He looked at her with bright-eyed interest. He had an intelligent, sensitive face, the face of a bright young man who believed that people were basically good. He was probably two or three years out of seminary, getting his first taste of poverty, feeling himself on the front lines here, fighting the good fight. Li knew the type. They did a lot of good, but they were in Compson’s World, not of it. They came for a year, or two, or ten, but eventually they always went back to the Helena spaceport and caught a jumpship home. A decision for which Li was in no position to blame them.
“I—was just taking a walk,” she said. “Just looking.”
“Someone you knew?”
“What? Oh… yes. A little.”
“Fifteen years, and he still gets visitors. He must have been the kind of man people remember.”
“There was nothing special about him,” Li said.
The priest smiled. “If you say so.”
She looked at his thin, clever, honest face. He was no one she remembered. No one who would know her or would even have heard of her. He was younger than her, for Christ’s sake. Why not take a chance?
“So who visits him?” she asked casually.
“A Mrs… Oh, I can’t remember her name. She moved to another parish before I got here. Blond.” He grinned. “Irish as green grass and tinkers’ ponies. Tall. About my height.” Then he held up his right hand, and Li knew what he was going to say before he spoke. “Missing part of a finger.”
“Left it in Londonderry,” Li murmured. The words came out in an accent she’d spent the last decade weeding out of her speech. She felt as if someone else had spoken them. Someone whose face she should remember.
“Really? She was a Provo? No shit.” The priest shook his head. “Stubborn buggers. You’d think the UN would just give up and let them stay there.”
“You’d think.”
Li looked back at the headstone. It had started to drizzle, and the rain speckled the laminate face of the marker, spreading across the pale surface like ink stains. She shivered and pulled her collar closer in against her neck.
“I could give her your name,” the priest said. “If you want to talk to her.”
Li caught her breath. “No. No, I don’t think so.” She swallowed, her heart hammering. “I doubt she’d even remember me. And what’s the point of stirring up old memories? People have to get on with life sometime.”
* * *
McCuen met her at the shuttle gate looking white and stricken.
“Christ,” she said when she saw his face. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Gould. She’s gone.”
“When?”
“Two, three hours ago.”
Li stepped past McCuen and started walking toward HQ. “Three hours isn’t the end of the world, McCuen. She can’t have gotten far.”
“It might be longer…”
She turned on him. “How much longer?” she asked, speaking slowly and very clearly.
“I’m sorry,” McCuen said miserably. “I—she went to bed last night, then in the morning, even though she didn’t go to work, she was using power, water, air. She was onstream. We monitored the calls. No one saw guests go in, and it never occurred to me until I saw them that she wasn’t making those calls. But she wasn’t. They just used her home system to make us think she was.”
Like Li had used Sharifi’s system to fool her way into Gould’s office. Was it a coincidence? A joke? And if not, then what the hell was Gould up to?
“Why didn’t you call me right away when she went missing, McCuen?”
“I did. I tried. You—you were off-grid.”
Of course. She’d gone to old Shantytown. She’d been walking down memory lane, leaving an inexperienced kid in charge while the investigation fell apart. And they were already paying for it.
“Maybe you should go onstream and see if you can find her?” McCuen said. “I—I’m so slow. Maybe you can turn something up. That’s why I came out to meet you.”
“Yes,” Li said. “But not here. In private.”
When they reached HQ the duty officer was waiting for her, wanting to tell her something. She swept past, ignoring him, and waved McCuen into her office.
“All right,” she told him, sitting down on the desk she still hoped she wouldn’t be here long enough to think of as anything but Voyt’s desk. “What kind of time frame are we looking at? When’s the last time someone actually saw her?”
“Last night, Ring-time. Twelve hours.”
“Jesus,” Li said, then saw the stricken look on McCuen’s face and bit the rest of her words back. It was an understandable mistake, even if it was potentially disastrous. They might as well skip the recriminations and just fix it. If they still could.
She closed her eyes briefly as she slipped on-line, then opened them to a disorienting double vision of streamspace superimposed on McCuen’s pale features. “You’ve checked credit access and so forth?” she asked.
“Yes. Nothing.”
She checked again, ticking over bank reports, food and water and air charges, spinstream access debits, looking for the tracks no person in the Ring could help laying down every minute of every day of their conscious lives. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There can’t be nothing. Not unless she’s dead.”
“Dead or using cash.”
“You can’t use cash Ring-side, McCuen. No one takes it. Even the scatter dealers and chop artists want nice clean freshly laundered credit.”
“Maybe she’s not Ring-side,” McCuen said, looking as if he desperately wanted to be wrong.
“You can’t get off the Ring without credit,” Li snapped. Then she caught her breath as gut instinct made a connection that she knew at once had to be right, though she didn’t know how or why.
“Check the shipping records,” she told McCuen. “Get me the name of every ship that’s left on the Freetown run in the last twelve hours.”
Two hours later Li was bending over McCuen’s monitor watching wavering security-cam footage of passengers filing along the boarding gantry of a Freetown-bound cargo freighter.
“Are you sure?” McCuen said when she stopped the tape and pointed.
“I’m sure.”
The silk blouse and expensive handmade jewelry were gone. Gould wore cheap clothes, cheap shoes, carried what little baggage she had in a cheap viruhide shoulder
bag. She had chopped off her fair hair or shoved it under a hat, Li couldn’t tell which. And she was keeping her head down, moving fast, not letting the cameras get a clear view of her. But there was the straight, thin line of her mouth, the arrogant curve of cheekbone and nostril, the air of unbending, unquestioned superiority that made Li perversely glad this woman was running from her.
She pushed that thought away, feeling petty, and told herself she just wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “Check the relay schedules,” she told McCuen. “See if we can intercept the ship before they jump.”
As Gould hefted her bag up the boarding ramp, something at her neck glittered. Li smiled. Gould was wearing a charm necklace: a vacuum-mounted sliver of low-grade Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in a cheap heart-shaped locket of translucent plastex. Pure trash. The kind of trinket street vendors sold to tourists along with the fake Rolexes and the Zone baseball caps. The kind of thing Gould wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in normal life. The woman was nothing if not thorough.
“I can’t find them on the relay queue,” McCuen said, sounding overwhelmed.
Li checked the carrier’s schedule herself, then dove onto the public server to access the flight plan that every carrier had to file with the en route relay stations. But there was no flight plan. They hadn’t filed anything.
Then it dawned on her.
“We’re too late,” she said. “It’s not a jumpship. She’s going to Freetown sublight. And they’re already in slow time. We won’t be able to catch her until they drop out of slow time and into orbit.”
McCuen sat down heavily on one of her battered office chairs. “Why would she do that? And why Freetown?”
“Why Freetown is the easy question. That’s where they’d take cash for a passage and keep your name off the shipping manifest. That’s where you’d cache information you didn’t trust to UN data banks. That’s where you go to fence illegal data. Why slow time is harder to figure. But she’ll be there on”—Li checked the orbits of Earth and Jupiter against the Medusa’s departure time, calculated the approach to Freetown’s circumlunars—“November 9. Twenty-six days.”
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