Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.

  “Where did you get this?” she whispered.

  “Where do you think, Major?”

  “I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.”

  “Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.”

  She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.

  “Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”

  It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”

  “I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”

  “You’d imagine wrong, then.”

  “Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”

  “Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”

  Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”

  She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.

  He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.

  “Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.

  Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.

  “Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”

  “I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”

  He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”

  Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.

  “So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still working for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”

  “Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”

  Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.

  “You can go, I said.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow.

  “Yes I am. I can take care of this. And don’t eavesdrop!”

  He cast a last look at Korchow, frowning. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him, Catherine. He’s… well, he’s not nice.”

  “Go home, Cohen.”

  “Going,” he said. And then he did go, leaving a subtle whiff of hand-rolled cigars and extra-vielle behind him.

  “Well,” Korchow said. “I think we understand each other.”

  “What if I don’t show tonight?”

  Korchow merely moved Bella’s fingers in answer, and the tattered yellow receipt reappeared, fluttering as if it had been caught by a stiff breeze. “That would be regrettable.”

  Li looked at the thing in his hands and shivered. If that receipt ever ended up in front of the Service, they would check it out. They would have to. And when they checked, it would be over.

  Fifteen years ago she’d had high confidence. The chop-shop geneticist hadn’t been much, but he’d been the best the meager payout on her father’s life insurance could buy; and his work, if not inspired, had at least been competent. Now, she knew its limits. Knew them in her gut with a wrenching certainty. She’d seen the gene work the best Ring-side labs could do, the work the Corps techs at Alba did. She’d slipped through the cracks this long only because there was no real proof—no proof damning enough to justify testing her. One fifteen-year-old scrap of paper could change that. And when it did, the whole crushing weight of the Security Council bureaucracy would fall on her like mine overload dropping into a collapsing tunnel. Losing her commission would be the least of it. She’d be lucky—or irretrievably indebted to Cohen’s high-priced lawyers—if she escaped without a prison sentence.

  So what? She had other chances, other possibilities. It wasn’t all or nothing anymore. She had options.

  But did she? What else was there for her, really? She loved her job. Was her job. Couldn’t imagine any other life. She thought about private security, about Cohen’s well-paid bodyguards. She remembered the high-tech muscle on the Calle Mexico.

  No way. Not for her.

  She sat on her rumpled bunk looking at the receipt, barely an arm’s length away from her, in the hands of a woman she had just made love to. And she knew she’d do anything, kill anyone, to get it.

  UNCENSORED TOPOLOGY

  All the worlds are there, even those in which everything goes wrong and all the statistical laws break down. The situation is no different from that which we face in ordinary statistical mechanics. If the initial conditions were right the universe-as-we-see-it could be a place in which heat sometimes flows from cold bodies to hot. We can perhaps argue that in those branches in which the universe makes a habit of misbehaving in this way, life fails to evolve; so no intelligent automata are around to be amazed by it.

  —Bryce De Witt

  Shantytown: 25.10.48.

  Li made the meet early and scoped out the place—only sensible, since Korchow had chosen it.

  She found it on the seedy outer fringe of what was euphemistically known as Shantytown’s entertainment district. This part of town looked right at night, somehow. It was less jarringly out of place when you couldn’t see the scrub hills and gypsum flats, or the bleak unterraformed wall of the Johannesburg Massif looming on the horizon.

  It wasn’t raining in Shantytown, but it wasn’t not raining either. The water that dripped from the rooftops and doorways was part rain, part algae-laden condensation. It smelled sharp and fermented, and it wormed under Li’s collar and down her neck like prying fingers.

  She was alone tonight. It hadn’t been easy to keep McCuen from coming, but it had been necessary. He could put things together far too quickly for comfort, and Saints knew what he’d do if he decided she was working for the Syndicates. Besides, if she was going to play the game Nguyen wanted her to play and still give Korchow enough to get that receipt from him, she was going to need some serious maneuvering room.

  She checked her watch. Nearly an hour until the meet. Korchow’s man would arrive early too, of course. She aimed to be earlier still.

  The bar was supposed to be called the Drift, but the only sign Li saw in the window was a flickering, fly-speckled halogen that looked like it must have read “$LOTS” before the L died. Still, this was the place Korchow had described: the narrow housefront sheathed in scaffolding, the bar entrance tucked between a peep show and a ComSat pay terminal, the drunks creaking up the rickety stairs to the second-story
flophouse. She walked by, crossed the street half a block down, skirting around a poisonous mud puddle, and slipped under the jury-rigged arcade that shadowed the facing storefronts.

  A loose panel rattled underfoot. Condensation dripped from mildewed girders and pooled on the walkway. She slipped into a darkened doorway, shook down a cigarette and lit it, masking its glowing tip with a cupped hand.

  Korchow’s man arrived at twenty minutes of. There was no mistaking him; Syndicate birthlabs bred to an idealized pre-Migration genetic norm, and Li doubted anyone that close to human-looking had crossed the Drift’s threshold since the Riots.

  She cursed Korchow for an overeager amateur. Then she saw his cool calculating professional’s face in her mind’s eye; whatever else he was, Korchow was no amateur. No, he wanted Sharifi’s data badly enough to blow the cover of an A Series operative. And he didn’t give a damn if Li got caught. He might even want her to get caught… down the line, when he had what he needed from her. She threw down her cigarette and heard it hiss in standing water as she stepped out of the shadows.

  Inside, the Drift was less of a room than a haphazard string of loosely connected hallways. Li sidled through the initial bottleneck and dropped down an unmarked single step into what the regulars probably called the front room.

  Korchow’s man sat halfway down the bar, hunched broodily over a beer. He looked up as Li came in, and their eyes met in the bar mirror. They’d done something to his face—broken the long narrow nose, blurred the lines of jaw and cheekbone—but they hadn’t been able to disguise the unnatural perfection of his features. He could have been Bella’s brother.

  Li passed him by and took a seat toward the other end of the bar, back in the smeary half shadows beyond the cheap lighting panels. The bartender took her order without smiling, and the beer he brought her was flat and yeasty. She drank, eyes scanning the narrow room, and set the glass back down on a bartop still sticky with the faint rings of yesterday’s spilled beers. She was halfway through her second beer when Korchow’s man stood and walked past her into the back room.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” Li asked a minute and a half later.

  The bartender just gestured toward the back and muttered something that might have been “Left.”

  There were tables in the back room, most of them empty. She threaded her way between them and pushed through a narrow door into a dim hallway that gave on the bathroom and the fire door. A surveillance camera blinked in an angle of wall and ceiling, but, as Korchow had promised, the little corner shelf screwed into the wall underneath it was just out of its field of view.

  Korchow’s man came out of the toilet, coat slung over his arm. He squeezed between her and the shelf, mumbling an apology. She let him by, then went into the toilet herself. As she brushed past the shelf her hand slid across the datacube he had left there and palmed it.

  She stepped through the door and scanned the narrow space. No cameras here—though there might be a voice-activated tap hidden in the wall. Even the camera out in the hall was probably no more than nonsentient-monitored company security. Still, why take chances? She went into the stall and sat down. She could feel the cube burning in her pocket. She turned it over, found the download switch by feel, and keyed it.

  Nothing happened.

  She knew what was supposed to be happening, what she hoped was happening. Somewhere in the labyrinth of her internal systems, an encryption program should be filtering through her hard files, searching out the hidden chinks in her internal security programs. If it worked, then Korchow would have opened up a secure protocol in her datafiles—a protocol through which he could pass her datafiles that would never show up on her directories, could never be accessed by Nguyen or any of the Corps psychtechs who had clearance to access her hard files. If it worked, she would see nothing. And neither would her recorder. If it didn’t work, she’d be up on treason charges as soon as she checked in for her next scheduled maintenance.

  And then there was the third possibility, one so disastrous it didn’t bear thinking about. The possibility that Korchow’s program would clash with one of the private kinks she had thrown into her system.

  Please let Korchow have gotten this right, she prayed to whatever saint looked out for cheats and traitors. And please let me be lucky.

  When the data window opened in her peripheral vision, she caught her breath and realized she’d been holding it. She maxed the window, scrolled down the familiar gridlines of her datebook, and waited for Korchow’s encrypted window to appear.

  It opened inside the datebook, an embedded halfscreen that showed up on her retina but left no record of its presence anywhere else in her internal systems. She could read it, work on it, store it, and nothing but the datebook would show in her files. When she had finished with it, Korchow’s program would wipe every trace of it from her systems. She hoped.

  She leaned forward, closing her eyes and putting the heels of her hands against her eyelids in order to get the clearest picture of the data that was scrolling up the screen in front of her. There were four files. The first contained detailed schematics and navigational data for a massive orbital station that Li had no trouble recognizing as Alba, the Corps’s high-security installation in orbit around Barnard’s Star.

  The second file contained an exhaustive description of security protocols, patrol routes and schedules, lab personnel protocols. The third held information on electronic security measures. The fourth file contained interface and requirements specs for what Li assumed had to be Sharifi’s intraface software.

  As she looked at it, she felt a spinning sense of vertigo. It was obviously, flagrantly, completely illegal tech. It could only have been designed for use on an Emergent AI and a posthuman subject, in contravention of more wetware laws than she could count. And yet a dozen little tags and quirks told her that this software could only have been developed at Alba, by the same UNSC programmers who had designed her own software. Nguyen might have had to steal the wetware, but the rest of the intraface—the hardware, the psychware, the source code that ran the intraface into the Emergent—had been sitting at Alba all the time waiting for Sharifi, or any XenoGen construct, to pick them up and use them.

  She shut the files, checked that they had downloaded properly, took the datacube out of her pocket, and flushed it down the toilet.

  When she walked back into the front room, three moderately pretty girls were huddled halfway down the bar, eyeing Korchow’s man like crows parceling up a particularly fresh piece of carrion. She stepped up and took the seat beside him before the girls could initiate active stalking.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. As she spoke, she could feel three resentful stares boring into her back like virusteel-sheathed augers.

  Korchow’s man turned sad velvet brown eyes on her and answered as seriously as if she had asked a question that the fate of worlds turned on. “Arkady,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” He had the same curiously formal turn of phrase Bella had, the same air of believing that life was a serious and precarious business and not to be laughed at.

  “Buy you a drink?” Li asked.

  They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.

  “Well?” he said finally.

  Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.”

  “Do I?”

  “Maybe too much.”

  He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”

  A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw
him.

  “We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”

  “That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.

  The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her? You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.

  They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.

  She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”

  “You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s all you need to know.”

  “Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her.

  “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

  “My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down.

  “Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”

  Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.

  “Not what. Who.”

  Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.