Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  Meanwhile the Syndicates did… well, no one knew what they did. No subject of the Syndicates came to UN space. No UN citizen went to the Syndicates. No news escaped from the orbital stations that circled the remote Syndicate homeworlds. The Syndicates had no press and no visible government, unless you counted the shadowy point committees of the individual genelines. They had no political parties or political dissidents. No parents. No children. And, above all, no property.

  Only the Syndicates owned things, and the things they owned were their constructs. They owned their minds, their bodies, their labor, everything. Each construct gave him- or herself completely, intimately—and, if the propaganda was to be believed, willingly. It was not enough to say that they didn’t want freedom. They didn’t believe in freedom. They had, as their political philosophers were endlessly proclaiming, evolved beyond it.

  Only when Li met her first postbreakaway constructs in the interrogation rooms on Gilead did she begin to understand this. They seemed to belong to some other species, one that had nothing to do with humans. The first ten identical prisoners came in, and people commented on them, wondered about them, perhaps even felt sorry for them. Then the next hundred, the next thousand, the next three thousand arrived, and the wondering turned to fear and revulsion. Words failed in the face of such cold, impersonal, mass-produced perfection. Compassion failed. Belief in the universality of human nature failed. Everything failed.

  By the time Li had spent a month on Gilead the only thing she knew for certain about her enemies was that they hated her. No. Hate wasn’t the right word. They despised her, just like they despised every construct who still worked for humans. They despised her the way wolves despise dogs.

  And what about Sharifi? What about the woman who had left so little of herself in this room, who had brought an entire mine down on her head, who had promised to work miracles, then covered her tracks like a thief? What did Sharifi believe in?

  Was she a dog or a wolf?

  Li sighed, picked a fiche from one of the neat stacks, and ran her finger down it, scanning a paragraph at random:

  As Park and others have noted, the parallel wave patterns documented in situ Bose-Einstein strata closely resemble quantum phenomena associated with human brain waves, and with the less well mapped quantum phenomena found in the associative interactions of poststructuralist-model Emergent artificial intelligences.

  And, jotted in the fiche’s digital margin in Sharifi’s handwriting:

  Re: dispersed/colonial nets in organics see Falter, Principia Cybernetica and the Physiology of the Great Barrier Reef, MIT Press, 2017.

  She skimmed the next fiche.

  Handwritten numbers and symbols scrolled up the page. Li knew enough to recognize Hilbert spaces, Poisson brackets, the long sinuous columns of Sharifi transforms, but that was about it. Not even her oracle could actually help her understand them.

  It was Sharifi’s handwriting obviously—and as she watched it scroll up the screen Li remembered a joke Cohen had made the first time he saw her own handwriting. Something about how ex-Catholic school kids always wrote as if Sister Somebody was still standing over their desk with a ruler in hand. And he was right, of course. This was the careful, even, unmistakable script of someone who had survived years of penmanship classes, who had learned to write in poverty, on paper. With Sister Somebody standing over her desk.

  Li had assumed Sharifi was adopted young, had grown up Ring-side, human in all but name. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had started her schooling on Compson’s World, with the nuns? Was there some connection on-planet that everyone had missed? Some deeply buried childhood loyalty that had turned her away from the job she came here to do?

  Li shook her head, struck by a sudden urge to laugh. How did you explain Sharifi? She and Li were as genetically identical as twins—more identical, since the random errors of normal gestation had been assiduously caught and corrected by the birthlabs. They’d been tanked in the same lab. And unless Sharifi’s handwriting was lying, they’d learned their letters and numbers from the same battered secondhand textbooks, starting out each year by erasing the answers last year’s students had penciled in and submitting to the inevitable lecture about Respecting Church Property. Yet here Li stood, a miner’s kid who had struggled through her OCS physics requirement by the skin of her teeth, looking at the equations that had made Sharifi the most important scientist of her generation.

  Li had seen her twice, both times from a distance. Sharifi had done a guest lecture stint at Alba when Li was taking her OCS course. The academically ungifted Li had carefully avoided taking any classes with her, but Sharifi was already notorious—a person you couldn’t help noticing.

  Li had noticed her, all right. She had watched her. Secretly. Guiltily. Convinced that any overt show of interest in the other woman would betray her—or at the very least arouse dangerous suspicions. She’d wiped more of her own files that semester than in all her time at the front; she gave herself away every time she looked at Sharifi.

  That semester had been before the Nobel Prize, though decades after the work that won the prize. Sharifi had been under consideration for a chair in quantum physics at Alba, but she hadn’t gotten it—for the obvious reason. There had been some kind of protest, Li remembered. A senior human professor threatened to resign unless Sharifi got tenure. In the end, he’d backed down, and Sharifi had withdrawn her candidacy and gone into some private-sector research job.

  But it was a long way from Ring-side universities and research parks to digging up rocks at the bottom of a Bose-Einstein mine. What had Sharifi been doing in the Anaconda? What could have been worth the risk when she knew, as anyone raised on Compson’s World must know, what could happen?

  Li plucked a leather-covered book off the desk and leafed through it. A flap inside the front cover held a clutter of business cards and, tucked inside a soft fold of leather meant to hold a notepad or a stylus, a dog-eared piece of cardstock that looked like it had spent a day or two in someone’s pocket. Li picked it up, noticing the unfamiliar feel of paper under her fingertips, and realized she’d seen something like it before. It was a shipping receipt, the kind of thing they gave you when you rented a locker or posted realspace mail on a freighter. The printed number on the front face would be the locker number, or maybe the drop number of the package itself. She turned the chit over, looking for the ship’s name, and found only an eight-pointed star knotted through the letter M.

  She tucked the shipping recept back into the front flap and flipped through the notebook’s pages. There were half a dozen sheets of fiche, divided by tabs: lab notes, logs, addresses, appointments. She tapped the appointments page and got a polite, impersonal access-denied message. She tapped into the book’s operating platform, found the hash log, and stripped Sharifi’s password off it without breaking a computational sweat. She grinned, feeling irrationally better about the whole investigation; brilliant or not, Sharifi had at least been human enough to commit the most laughably elementary security gaffes. Maybe Li really could catch up to her.

  She scanned the daily entries, found the usual appointments and reminders, scattered jottings of notes, names, streamspace coordinates. One page held a list of names, none of them familiar. Another held a long, close-written paragraph that appeared to be a transcription of a conversation about data transfer protocols with a person whose name Sharifi had, perhaps carelessly, perhaps on purpose, omitted.

  Li tapped up the page that matched the day of Sharifi’s death. Nothing. She flipped back one day and saw the letter B written in the 7P.M. slot. Too late for a work appointment. Dinner?

  Just above it Sharifi had scrawled a set of Ring-side spin coordinates, and beside them the name Gilly and two words that raised Li’s hackles: Life Insurance.

  The livewall in Sharifi’s quarters turned out to be in the last place any rational person would consider putting it: on the bathroom door. Hadn’t the station designers ever heard of reading on the john? Or was this so
me devious, petty-minded plot to prevent time-wasting by station employees?

  Li flicked the wall into life, tapped up a streamspace directory, and zoomed in on the blazing quarter arc of the Zona Libre.

  The coordinates took her to the NowNet Science Publishing Division, S.A., on the 438th floor of the Pan-American Building, Avenida de las Américas. Must have a nice view, Li thought. And the monthly rent must be enough to pay off the national debts of half the planets on the Periphery.

  She cross-checked NowNet’s office directory against Sharifi’s on-station user files and found what she was looking for within seconds: a call on the day before Sharifi’s death to one Gillian Gould, Senior Science Editor. A long call. She read Gould’s address out loud, told the wall to put her through, and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the underpowered station net struggled through the Ring-side server’s handshakes and VR resets.

  Finally the NowNet logo blossomed on-screen, followed a half beat later by a 2D view of an attractive young man sitting at a suspiciously neat desk. He wore the inevitable Ring-side business blue suit, and his neck was encased in the stiff bead-and-bone latticework of a tribal collar.

  The collar had to be fake; no mere salary puller could afford genuine Earth imports. But even the good fakes were expensive. And this was a good fake. All in all, the living, breathing image of the up-and-coming junior editor.

  “Gillian-Gould’s-office-may-I-ask-who’s-calling?” he said in a tone that told Li precious few people talked to Gillian Gould without appointments.

  Then he looked into his monitor and nearly jumped out of his ergonomically correct chair. “Dr. Sharifi! Sorry. If you’ll just give me a minute, I’ll get her out of her meeting for you.”

  Li blinked in surprise, but he was gone before she could say anything. She accessed the wall settings and saw that Sharifi had activated an extrapolated presentation program—a streamspace interface that put a business-appropriate talking head on the line so you could hold business meetings in your shorts, or while you were eating breakfast, or whatever. Li hesitated, then deactivated the presentation program just as Gould came on-screen.

  Gould had perfect posture and the sort of washed-out Anglo-Saxon face that Li had never been able to read worth a damn. Like her assistant, she wore a tribal collar. Unlike her assistant’s collar, Gould’s was genuine. It nestled against her throat, half-hidden by a smoke gray linen blouse. But the bone was real bone; the beads antique bottle glass; the knots actually hand-tied by some shirtless old woman in the Sub-Saharan Cultural Preserve. And all shipped into orbit at a cost Li couldn’t begin to imagine. Nobody was better at looking rich than rich liberals.

  “Hannah!” Gould said, smiling. Then she saw Li.

  The smile shut down like someone had shot the lights out. “What is this?” Gould asked, her blue eyes cold enough to freeze running water.

  Li swiped the scan plate at the bottom of the screen and let her ID do the talking. “Just a few routine questions.”

  “Fine,” Gould said. “But I’m recording this.”

  Li blinked and put on her boring face. “The official Fuhrman-locked recording will be available to you immediately, Ms., ah”—she paused and pretended to look down at the book in her hand—“Gould. After all, this isn’t a criminal investigation.”

  “Of course not,” Gould said, backpedaling.

  “What’s your relationship to Hannah Sharifi?” Li asked.

  “Cousin.”

  “But—”

  “Her adoptive mother was my father’s sister.”

  “I see. When did you last speak with her?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  Lie number one, Li thought, her eyes nailed to Gould’s carotid artery where it emerged from the intricate beadwork of the tribal collar. “Approximately?”

  “Within the last few weeks probably. We talk a lot.”

  Li considered asking Gould about Sharifi’s “life insurance” but decided not to. Information was power, and it rarely paid to show a suspect your cards when you were still shuffling them. “Did she send you anything by surface mail since then?” she asked instead.

  “She might have.”

  “I see,” Li said again. She wasn’t quite able to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  A line appeared between Gould’s pale eyebrows. “I have nothing to hide. She often sent me drafts of her work.”

  “What? You’re a physicist too?”

  “I’m her editor. She had two books in the works with me.”

  “Had?”

  The line deepened. “One book’s gone into final production.”

  “Did she usually ship her manuscripts solid mail?”

  “She dislikes working on electronic galleys.”

  “She must dislike it a lot. Real mail’s slow. And pricey.”

  “She has poor eyesight.”

  “Bad eyesight,” Li said. “A construct?”

  She gave Gould a blank, eyebrows-raised look—a look that had squashed trench mutinies and broken strong men in interrogation.

  It slid off Gould like water. Which just went to show that nasty looks worked better when there was a real possibility of backing them up with something a little more solid than harsh language.

  “Are we done?” Gould said. “I really am busy, so unless you have any more questions about my cousin’s reading habits… ?”

  A minute later the conversation was over.

  It was true what people said, Li thought as the screen shut down. Ring-siders really were a different species.

  Well, she’d gotten something out of the call. Gould had lied about when she had last seen Sharifi, and probably about the package and Sharifi’s eyesight as well. Most important, she’d never asked the one question any friend or relative should have asked: where was Sharifi?

  She checked the time—8A.M., local. High time for good little security officers to be in the office. “McCuen?” she said, toggling her comm.

  “Here,” said his disembodied voice in her ear, so quickly that he must have been hanging over his terminal waiting for her call.

  She didn’t initiate a VR link. If she’d thought about it, she could have put a name to her reluctance to have McCuen see her standing in Sharifi’s quarters. But she didn’t let herself think about it.

  “Gillian Gould,” she said, relaying the realspace address and streamspace coordinates. “I want a watch on her. Twenty-four hours a day. I want to know who she talks to, where she goes, what she buys, what she reads. Everything.”

  “What’s up?”

  “She’s Sharifi’s cousin.”

  “We’re putting Sharifi’s cousin under surveillance? Why?”

  Li hesitated, torn between the knowledge that she would need help—help McCuen was better qualified to give than anyone else on-station—and the fear that sooner or later anything she told him would work its way back to Haas.

  Or would it? And when had she gotten so suspicious, anyway?

  “Gould knows Sharifi’s dead,” she said cautiously, telling herself that McCuen was smart and capable and it wouldn’t hurt to play him out a little line and see what he did with it. “She knew it before I called her.”

  An eerie quavering floated over the line, making Li’s mind run to banshees and Becky circles. It took her a long moment to realize it was McCuen whistling.

  “Fuck,” he said, sounding very young and very impressed.

  “Yep,” she told him, grinning. Fuck indeed.

  She signed off, cut the link, and looked at Sharifi’s desk again, thinking. She bent down and started pulling its flimsy drawers open. The top two drawers gave up nothing, but when she opened the bottom drawer, she saw a long slim black case tucked in behind some datacubes.

  Status lights blinked soothingly on its upper surface, but aside from the lights, the case was plain matte black without labels or corporate logos. Li had seen similar cases before. They tended to be wrapped around expensive experimental wetware.

  T
his one was no exception. Its interior was lined with a thick layer of viral jelly, warm and moist as the inside of a mouth, maintaining its precious cargo at 99.7 percent humidity and a nice sterile four degrees above body temperature. And couched in the jelly like a pearl necklace was a finger-thick braid of silicon-coated ceramsteel.

  It was a wet/dry interface. One end terminated in a standard-sized plug designed to fit an external silicon-based dataport. The other end—the one that necessitated the fancy storage system—was wetware, tank-grown nerve tissue shaped for a high-capacity cranial socket. The whole device had the sleek, understated look of top-of-the-line custom work. Hacker’s gear.

  Li turned the interface over, looking for a maker’s mark or serial number. She felt a slight roughness under her fingers on the underside of the dry socket. She turned the wire over and saw a stylized sunburst —the same one she had last seen on the floor of the Metz laboratory.

  “Kolodny,” she breathed, as a choking panic boiled up inside her.

  Her internals fought it. Cognitive programs lurched into action, vetting meat memory, sorting out immediate threats from remembered ones, shunting the images that had triggered her panic into firewalled compartments where they could be hormonally adjusted—or, in the worst case, purged. Endorphins pumped through her system to combat the sudden rush of adrenaline. Once again, she wondered just how crazy she would be when the psychtechs were finally done with her.

  Half a minute later her breathing was back to normal. Two minutes later her psych program flashed Kolodny’s face across her internals.

  Li expected this, had prepared for it. She sorted stubbornly through one of Sharifi’s fiche piles, breathing and pulse even, until the diagnostic program finished its prying and Kolodny’s picture faded behind her eyes.

  Mother of Christ, she thought in the dark corner of her mind she’d always managed to keep from the psychtechs. Were the panics and flashbacks just normal long-term jump effects? Or were they malfunctions spawned by the kinks she’d put in her own systems to hide her damning preenlistment memories? She didn’t know, and there was no one she could ask.