Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  ‹Status,› she queried her oracle across an interface that felt distorted, alien.

  No answer.

  She opened her eyes and saw nothing. She spat out her tongue guard, tried to speak, and realized that the buzzing in her ears was her teeth chattering. She sensed a wall in front of her and put out hands stiff and brittle as sticks to feel it. Her fingers tangled in feedlines, dislodged biomonitors dabbed with adhesive jelly. Wrists and elbows knocked painfully against cold metal, feeding her rising claustrophobia.

  Coffin.

  She pulled the word out of some unexpected reserve of soft memory. It placed her, anchored her. She was in a coffin in the cryobay of a Bose-Einstein transport, waking after a jump. There must have been some malfunction, some glitch in the ship’s systems, or her own, to pull her off ice so early. But it hadn’t been a fatal malfunction, or she wouldn’t be lying here worrying about why she couldn’t remember her own name until her oracle booted.

  ‹Status?› she queried again.

  ‹Evolving sysfiles,› her oracle finally fired back at her.

  All her systems were coming on-line now. Hard data flowed into her mind, buttressing the decohering haze of soft memory. Flesh and silicon, digital and organic systems knit themselves together. Meat and machine recombined in a quantum-faithful replica of the same Major Catherine Li who’d gone into cryo back on Metz.

  She accessed her diagnostic programs and ran through the postjump protocols, checking entangled states, troubleshooting the Sharifi transforms, comparing pre- and postjump file sizes. Everything checked out.

  Good; she didn’t have time for problems. She had to take care of her people. She needed to put Dalloway in for a commendation and ship him out to a new unit before all hell broke loose over Metz. And there was Kolodny’s family to see. Whatever family she had, which Li doubted was much.

  Then she saw the trick her mind had played on her.

  Metz had been over for almost three months. She’d taken care of everything: Kolodny’s family, Dalloway’s transfer, her own preliminary statements for the review board. She’d done it all in a manic three-day race against exhaustion and injury, wired to the gills on pain-suppression programs. Then she’d gone into the rehab tanks. And after that there would have been the cold freeze, the transfer to the jumpship, weeks of sublight travel by Bussard drive to reach Metz’s orbital relay and queue up for transfer.

  How long had she been under? Twelve weeks? Thirteen?

  She felt the old fear rising in her chest, caught herself flipping through directories, cross-checking, fighting to make sense of twisted fragments of soft data.

  Stop, she told herself. You know the rule. Stick to this jump, this place. Let the last one go. Let the hard files pick up the slack. Don’t let the fear get you.

  But the fear got her anyway. It always did. The fear was rational, reasonable, double-blind tested, empirically verifiable. It waited for her at the boarding gate and rode on her shoulder through every jump, every mission, every sweaty early-morning jump-dream. It asked the one question she couldn’t answer: what had she lost this time?

  Decoherence was as slow and subtle as radiation. An unwired traveler could make five or six jumps in a lifetime without losing more than a few isolated dates and names. The real damage was cumulative, caused by the minute drift of spin states over the course of many replications—a slow bleed of information that couldn’t be stanched without sacrificing the quantum parallelism that made replication possible in the first place. It took short-term memory first. Then long-term memory. Then friends and loyalties and marriages. If you didn’t stop in time, it took everything.

  Cybernetics could mask the problem. A field-wired Peacekeeper’s hard memory held backed-up spinfeed of every waking moment, on- and off-duty, since enlistment. And provided you didn’t lie to the psychtechs, the files preserved at least reasonably accurate preenlistment memories. Platformed on an enslaved AI and bolstered by psychotropic drugs, the datafiles could provide a working substitute for lost memories. But jump long enough, and everything you knew, everything that was you, flowed out of the meat and into the machine as inexorably as sand slipping through an hourglass. And Li, her oracle on-line, her hard memory fully reintegrated, could now recall that in the fourteen years, two months, and six days since enlistment she’d made thirty-seven Bose-Einstein jumps.

  She fumbled for the coffin’s latch, found it at her right hip where it always was, popped the lid. It rose in a smooth whisper of hydraulics. She sat up.

  The effort left her wracked with cramps, coughing up thick chunks of mucus. She couldn’t be Ring-side or on Alba, she realized; the Ring and Corps HQ were only one jump from anywhere on the Periphery, and her lungs wouldn’t feel this bad unless she’d been kept under through multiple jumps and layovers. So where was she? And why was she bound for some unknown Periphery planet instead of back to Alba for rehab?

  She swung her legs over the rim of the coffin and felt the cold grid of deckplating under her feet. Bottom rack at least. Thank God for small mercies. She looked around at the cryobay. Racks of coffins rose above her in a brightly lit honeycomb of feedlines and biomonitors. Most of the other passengers were still on ice; cool green vital lines blipped steadily on their status screens. The virusteel deckplating hummed with the distant throb of idling Bussard drives. Somewhere out of sight a skeleton crew would be running postjump checks, evolving systems shut down for replication, signaling to the sublight tugs that would ferry the jumpship beyond the immense starfish arms of the field array.

  Li’s uniform—or rather a quantum-faithful replica of it—lay in the kit drawer beneath her coffin, neatly folded and stowed by a Major Catherine Li, UNSC, who no longer existed. In the right-hand pants pocket she found a wad of tissue just where she always stashed it. In the left-hand shirt pocket she found her cigarettes, already unwrapped by that other Li who knew just how weak her fingers were after jumps these days.

  She leaned against the coffin, uniform piled next to her, and blew her nose.

  Pain rifled through her right shoulder as she raised her hands to her face. She touched the heart of the pain: eight centimeters of knotted scar tissue slicing up her triceps and across the point of her shoulder. It felt nervy to the touch, and when she twisted her head to look at it the scar stood out white against her brown skin.

  Metz’s parting gift. She’d never seen the gunman, but the single shot shredded muscle, tendon, and ligament, and severed the ceramsteel filaments that threaded through her arm from shoulder to fingertip. Her oracle told her it had taken five weeks in the tanks to patch it up, but all she remembered of those weeks was painful awakenings, doctors’ questions, sharp flashes of underwater blue brilliance.

  She got her uniform on without too much fumbling, but when she tried to pull on her boots her fingers wouldn’t grip properly. She tucked the boots under her good arm and staggered down the aisle, weaving like a worn-out drunk. Green arrows led to the exit. Somewhere down the corridor they’d lead her to a cup of coffee and a soft chair where she could smoke her first ritual postjump cigarette.

  * * *

  She stumbled into the passenger lounge just as the transport linked up with its tug and started the slow subluminal drift toward the field array’s perimeter.

  Li had jumped often enough to know the protocol. They would clear the glittering crystal arms of the field array, then kick on the Bussard drives and jump to near lightspeed for the last leg of the journey. Once that happened they’d be in slow time, the communications limbo of a ship traveling at speeds that made relativity a practical rather than theoretical problem. They’d be outstream, cut off from streamspace and the rest of humanity until they dropped back into normal time.

  She slumped into an empty chair, lit her cigarette, and looked around at her fellow passengers. Two Peacekeepers huddled in one corner playing a silent card game. The rest of the passengers were techs, company men, midlevel professionals. People whose expertise made it worth the multiplanetarie
s’ while to pay quantum-transport prices but who didn’t have enough corporate clout to get Ring-side assignments.

  There were no constructs, of course. Partial constructs could theoretically bypass the off-planet travel restrictions and get clearance to hold company or even civil service posts. But geneset assays weren’t cheap, and it didn’t happen often.

  The only obviously posthuman civilian in the lounge sat directly across from Li: a tall dark-skinned woman with a white scar on her forehead. West African, Li thought. Something in her bones, in the long line of her back, suggested the radiation-induced mutations of the old generation ships—ships that had dropped out of slow time after centuries in open space only to find that humanity had exploded past them in the first wave of the FTL era and their chosen planets were already being stripped and boosted into orbit to feed the voracious juggernaut of the Ring’s consumer culture. The woman wore a tech’s orange coveralls, but her hair was pulled back in spare elegant braids and she was crunching numbers on a high-powered streamspace foldout. An engineer? A Bose-Einstein technician?

  Li shifted in her chair and wondered why the woman hadn’t paid to have that scar taken off. She was pretty enough to make it worthwhile. Beautiful, actually.

  She caught Li staring at her and smiled, black eyes crinkling at the corners. Li looked away, but not soon enough to miss the sharpening of the woman’s gaze on her too-regular, too-symmetrical features. Not soon enough to miss the unspoken question that lingered behind every first meeting: Was she a construct or wasn’t she?

  Li could have looked up again. Could have asked the woman where they were, what system they were about to dock in. But it would sound silly, a tired variation on a very old pickup line. And there was always the awful risk of rejection. The fear that—even to a posthuman whose genes were warped by centuries of radiation—she, Li, was a monster.

  She lit another cigarette and checked her mail. When she’d weeded out the junk, she was left with three items. A memo from the Metz field hospital explaining what they’d been able to fix in her arm and what they hadn’t, telling her to go in for a checkup when she reached her next posting. A cryptically worded notice that the review board had postponed issuance of its final ruling on the Metz incident pending further fact-gathering. And three messages from Cohen.

  She hadn’t talked to him since Kolodny died. They’d recovered her body, but Dalloway had been right; there was nothing they could do for her. The wet bug had eaten away so much of her brain that when the medtechs showed Li the scans, even she could see Kolodny was never coming back from it.

  Kolodny had written Li’s name into the next-of-kin line on her emergency forms. Without telling her. The revelation shook Li, partly because it reminded her that the next-of-kin line on her own papers was still blank. But Kolodny hadn’t been one to leave things to chance; she’d left precise instructions about what to do if she flatlined.

  Li had followed her instructions to the letter.

  The techs were there when they pulled the plug; they were hacking the precious slivers of communications-grade condensate out of Kolodny’s skull before she was even cold. Li should have known better than to get angry. Christ, she’d done field recoveries herself on a few awful occasions. But it was still like watching vultures pick Kolodny apart. And when it was over, she and Cohen had the worst fight of their lives.

  She’d been going into the tanks, groggy with shock and pain-suppression routines, and she’d wanted to put off talking to him. But he insisted. And then he had the gall to give her technical jargon instead of reasons, excuses instead of explanations.

  “You dropped us,” she’d said at last, on the outer edge of control. “And Kolodny’s dead because of it.”

  “She was my friend too, Catherine.”

  “You don’t have friends,” she’d snapped, her stomach churning with the guilty suspicion that if she hadn’t let things get personal, Kolodny would still be alive. “You’re not wired for it.”

  “Don’t throw my code in my face,” he’d said, though he ought to have known better. “It’s bigoted.”

  “It’s the truth. It’s what you are. You’re wired to twist and manipulate and feed off people. And I’m through with it!”

  That was the last time they’d spoken. One or both of them, she suspected, had gone too far to be forgiven. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to forgive, anyway. Or be forgiven.

  She stared at Cohen’s messages, wavering. Then she deleted them, unopened and unanswered.

  * * *

  Her commsys icon started flashing as soon as they dropped out of slow time. The call came in with no user tag over a stand-alone scrambled Security Council relay. Someone wanted to talk to her in a hurry. Someone important enough to command a private line from Service HQ.

  She toggled the icon, and a high-ceilinged twenty-second-century baroque revival room sprang into three dimensions around her. A tiger maple desk floated on gracefully bowed legs above a pine floor buffed to a smooth gloss by generations of officers’ boots. Each floorboard was as wide as both Li’s hands put side to side, and they were laid down in the unmistakable herringbone pattern of the Security Council Administration Building on Alba. Behind the desk, hands resting on the carved leaves and volutes of her chair’s arms, sat the general.

  General Nguyen was a spare, elegant woman, far into a well-preserved middle age. It was hard not to stare at her, even across a spinstream interface. The slightly crooked nose, the asymmetrical cheekbones, the quirked line of the left eyebrow were like the irregularities in a bolt of raw silk; they enhanced rather than detracted from a fragile, unmistakably human beauty.

  Nguyen looked directly at Li as she came on-line, meeting her eyes in streamspace. It was a politician’s trick, but knowing the trick didn’t make you immune to it. And when Nguyen did it, you felt like she was inches away from you, not light-years.

  “Major,” Nguyen said in a voice that knew how to make itself heard quietly. “It’s good to see you.”

  “General,” Li said.

  Someone spoke to Nguyen from outside the streamspace projection field. “Fine,” she told her unseen assistant. “Tell Delegate Orozco I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She turned back to Li. “Sorry, Major. I’m pressed for time, as usual. The Assembly’s voting on a military appropriations bill that still needs some baby-sitting.” She smiled. “You’ve probably guessed I have a little job for you.”

  Li coaxed her still-numb face into what she hoped was a politely expectant expression. She’d done more than one little job for Nguyen. The general’s jobs were risky; she demanded a level of personal loyalty that could mean bending, if not breaking, the rules. But her rewards were generous. And she remembered favors as tenaciously as she held grudges.

  The general’s next words were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. “You’re from Compson’s World, Major?”

  “Yes.” Li shifted uncomfortably. Mother of God. Not Compson’s. Anywhere but Compson’s World.

  “You’ve never gone home since enlisting?”

  Li didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question; Nguyen had clearance to view her psych files, and in five minutes she could know as much about her personal life as Li herself knew. More, if the barracks scuttlebutt about memory spinning was true.

  “Why not?” Nguyen asked.

  Li started to speak, then bit the words back. “It’s not the kind of place you go home to,” she said finally.

  “Not the kind of place you go home to.” The words sounded like a riddle in Nguyen’s mouth. “Now tell me what you were about to say before you thought the better of it.”

  Li hesitated. Her lips were dry; the urge to lick them was like an itch she knew she was going to have to scratch sooner or later. “I was about to say that when I left I swore I’d die before I went back.”

  “I hope you don’t still feel that way. You’ll be docking at AMC’s orbital station on Compson’s World in a little over four hours.”

  Ng
uyen reached across her desk to a silver tray that held a carafe of ice water and two cut-crystal glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to Li, who raised it to her lips, hearing the chime of ice against crystal.

  The water was good, but the line to Alba was so laced with security protocols that it could only process high-load sensory data in intermittent bursts. She sipped, felt nothing, then got a disorienting headache-cold burst of taste half a second after she’d swallowed. She shook her head and put the glass down.

  “Not where you expected to wake up?” Nguyen asked.

  “I expected to wake up at Alba. I need to be at Alba. I’m running on a field-hospital patch job—”

  “Alba would be a bad place for you just now,” Nguyen interrupted smoothly.

  She caught Li’s look of confusion and raised one immaculately groomed eyebrow. “Haven’t you looked at the review board report?”

  “Not yet. I—”

  “They kicked it upstairs.”

  “Upstairs where?”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you, Major? Loss of personnel in circumstances suggesting misconduct by the commanding officer. Use of lethal force on a civilian. Use of an unauthorized weapon. Where the hell did you think you were, pulling that thing out? Gilead?”

  “They recommended a court-martial?” Li said, trying to get her brain around the idea.

  “Not exactly.”

  Not exactly. Not exactly meant that covert ops wanted the Metz raid kept quiet, that they planned to comb through every fact and opinion and scrap of testimony before they released it. And if that left Li without a defense, no one would lose much sleep over it.

  “When do I testify?” she asked.

  “You already have. We downloaded the Metz data and opened your backup files to the Defender’s Office. You can amend your extrapolated testimony if you like, but I doubt you’ll want to. Your attorney did a good job.”