Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  Except Cohen, maybe. But Metz had killed that.

  She leaned forward, putting her head between her knees to dispel the spinning nausea of the flashback. That was when she saw it: a yellow-white rectangle wedged against the wall between the bed and the desk. She fished around until she got hold of the thing and lifted it up.

  A book.

  She inhaled its dust, its smell, fingered the acid-gnawed paper. It was a cheap paperback, the kind still printed in the poorer Trusteeships. And this one was from Compson’s now-defunct university press. She turned it over and grinned as she saw the author and title: Zach Compson’s Xenograph.

  It was a classic, of course—a book that had seized on people’s imaginations so strongly that they still called Compson’s World by the flamboyant New Zealander’s name, while the anonymous long-distance survey team that actually discovered the planet had been consigned to oblivion.

  She let the book fall open at random, and read a passage that Sharifi or some prior owner had underlined:

  There was a man who had a stone that sang, they told me. Everywhere I went they talked about this stone. Where it came from. What it meant. How he came to find it.

  They told me there were cathedrals in the earth’s dark places. Rooms where the glass bones of the world hold silence like a river, where stones whisper the secrets of the earth to each other. And those who hear them stay and listen and sleep and die there.

  But a few come back. They walk out of the mountains singing. With stones in their hands.

  This is what they told me, but I never found the man.

  “Glory holes,” Li muttered. “He’s talking about glory holes.” She flipped through the book. It was dog-eared, tattered. Someone had read it again and again, starred and underlined favorite passages.

  Had Sharifi known about the glory hole before she came? Had she seen something in Compson’s half-mystical ramblings about glass bones and singing stones that no one else had seen? Was that what had brought her back to Compson’s World?

  Li set the book on Sharifi’s desk. She stood up, put the wet/dry interface back in its case and tucked it into her uniform’s kangaroo pocket, along with Sharifi’s datebook. She started toward the door. Then she turned around, picked up Sharifi’s battered copy of Xenograph, and put that in her pocket too.

  She set the security seal to notify her if anyone else entered, walked back to her own quarters, pulled on clean shorts and a T-shirt, and collapsed on her narrow bunk without even managing to get herself under the covers.

  * * *

  She couldn’t have been asleep ten minutes when the icon for the peepers in Haas’s office toggled, waking her.

  She maximized the feed from her skinbugs, and there was Haas, in shirtsleeves, standing behind the luminous desk.

  He was talking to someone: a slight figure, whose face was half-turned away from Li. Even in the dim light, Li could make out the pale skin, the dark hair falling over shoulders as tense and frail as bird’s wings.

  “I didn’t tell her,” the witch murmured. “I swear it. I haven’t told anyone.” The tension in her voice was unmistakable.

  “You’d better hope you haven’t,” Haas answered.

  He raised his hand, and the woman flinched as if he’d hit her. Even Li, lying in bed three spokes away, tensed for the blow she thought was coming.

  Haas turned away and shrugged. “Christ,” he said. He walked out of the field of the peepers, and Li heard the clink of ice against glass as he poured a drink. “What a day. I need to relax.” A pause, Haas still out of sight. “Come here.”

  The witch turned, but she moved so slowly that Haas was back at the desk before she could take more than a step toward him.

  “Take that off,” he said.

  She undid her robe and let it slide to the floor.

  “Lie down.”

  She lay back across his desk, passive as a child.

  “No,” he said. “Not that way.”

  He reached across her, into a desk drawer, and pulled out a wetware case. He bent the witch’s head sideways, inserted a jack into an unseen socket, then attached the contact derms at the other end of the wire to his own forehead and ran the wire through his desktop VR rig.

  What happened next was something Li had heard about but never actually seen: a loop shunt, a perversion of the technology every company in UN space used for training spins. Loop shunts were illegal; they’d been banned after that girl bled to death in Freetown. But the psych wards in every spaceport were still full of prostitutes who’d burned their neurons out or cut themselves up or just plain gone crazy using them.

  Li shut the feed off, but she couldn’t rid herself of the image burning behind her eyelids. Haas’s hands on that white skin. The witch lying across the desk, her long hair spilling over the gleaming condensate, her body moving but her eyes as empty as the black void beyond the viewports.

  Li rolled over, giving herself up to sleep.

  It was a long time coming.

  AMC Station: 14.10.48.

  When she turned on her livewall the next morning the news of Sharifi’s death had broken.

  Even NowNet had been caught off guard, it seemed. They were gearing up for the event, dragging in colleagues, students, distant relatives. But they were using stock feed, old stuff. It was as if Sharifi had dropped off their radar. Coincidence? Or a sign that Sharifi had had reason to lie low in recent years?

  So far the press was sticking to the unfortunate but unavoidable accident angle—though Li couldn’t help wondering how much of that was the truth and how much of it reflected astute maneuvering by Nguyen’s spin flacks.

  Not that it made any real difference to her job. Not yet, anyway. Not unless she screwed up and let the press unearth some piece of the puzzle before she and Nguyen had time to plumb and measure and sanitize it. For the moment, she still had the same clues in hand she’d had when she lay down the night before.

  A death. A fire. A missing dataset. A piece of wetware whose presence in Sharifi’s quarters could mean anything or nothing.

  Li ran her search from her own quarters. She had some privacy there at least, and she didn’t relish the thought of surfacing after a long streamspace run to find herself slumped over her desk or passed out on the duty-room sofa.

  She thought about letting McCuen tag along. In the end she decided against it; she wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the wetware. An unwired keyboarder would slow her down, anyway, leave too plain a trail for corporate security to follow. And she planned to hit sites where unwanted attention could be dangerous.

  The techs had upgraded her interface before Metz, so she did some exploratory muscle flexing before starting the search in earnest. She’d never seen streamspace until she enlisted. But with enlistment came training, wiring, streamspace access. Over the last decade, she’d learned to access the spinstream in a way only a tiny fraction of humanity could imagine. Part of it was raw talent, a knack for reading code the way normal people read words and paragraphs. The rest she owed to the spider’s web of military-grade wetware that threaded through every synapse and made half her thoughts—half her self—silicon.

  Li took every upgrade, every implant, every piece of experimental wetware the Corps offered. The techs loved her. They pushed her construct’s reflexes and immune system to their more-than-human limits until she was a hybrid, genetic machine and electronic machine locked at the hip, a hairbreadth from the wire junkie’s Holy Grail: transparent interface.

  She finished her cross-checks and slipped into the spinstream. A digital riptide swept over her. She coursed over rivers and tidal flats of code, her own mind no more than one thin stream of data, a probabilistic ripple in a living, thinking, feeling ocean.

  But this was the Stream, and it was deeper and stranger than any realspace ocean.

  Dark and fruitful, it had spawned memes, ghosts, religions, philosophies—even, some claimed, new species. It held all the code there was, all the code that ever had been, right b
ack to the first earthbound military intranets of the twentieth century. It was the first true Emergent system humans had created. Built by AIs back in the dark days of the Evacuation, it had spawned its own AIs, generations of them, hosts of them. A galaxy of quantum simulations evolved within it, mimicking every living system that humans had managed to pull off their dying planet—and countless impossible and improbable systems that had never lived on any planet. Even Cohen, vast and ancient among AIs, was a mere speck on the spinstream.

  Today’s job was simple: find out who made Sharifi’s wet/dry interface and why. Li might have to do a little hacking to get that information, but she wouldn’t have to stray outside the human datastream—the well-tended paths of corporate and governmental networks. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even have to risk a trip to Freetown.

  She evolved her interface, logged on to the Ring-side data exchange, and accessed a low-security copy of Sharifi’s genome left stranded in an open database after a minor medical procedure four years ago. She checked it against the DNA built into the wire and confirmed that the interface had been customized for Sharifi. Then she cast her net out over the web.

  She switched from VR to binary, running on the numbers, diving into the sea of pure code behind streamspace. The shift was like setting off a rocket. Dropping into the numbers freed her from her brain’s spatial perceptions, silenced the tyrannical chattering of her inner ear. More important, it freed up all the processing space that was devoted to generating the simulated sensorium that was the only window into streamspace for the vast majority of human operators. For Li—for any real hacker—dropping into the numbers was like coming home.

  She knew in broad terms what she was looking for, even if she didn’t yet know where she would find it. She needed a hit from a big corporate R D player. The kind of player with enough financial muscle to produce cutting-edge tech with an impossibly long research-to-market horizon—and enough political muscle to risk violating human bioresearch ethics guidelines. But she couldn’t go in through the front door. She needed a fluff file. Something public domain, relatively unguarded. Something she could access without attracting unwanted attention. Something that would let her slip past the corporate gatekeepers.

  She caught a promising datastring and hooked on to it, sliding through layered databases like a diver finning through the currents and thermals of a turbulent ocean. The string led her to the public-access page of CanCorp’s Ring-based bioresearch division. CanCorp was one of the four or five multiplanetaries Li thought could have produced Sharifi’s interface—and sure enough a quick and dirty cross-check told her CanCorp was one of Sharifi’s most generous corporate sponsors.

  She switched back into VR to follow the string; on the off chance that CanCorp security was monitoring its public site, she wanted to look like an ordinary tourist when she got there. To her annoyance, she was detoured five times on her way. First, a saccharine commercial jingle for some overpriced health snack that tasted like mildew. Then an earnest pitch from the Reformed Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, delivered by an implausibly clear-skinned teenager in a cheap blue suit and a plastic name tag. Then, loaded onto a single and annoyingly persistent banner, a docu-ad about the Heaven’s Gate Gene Therapy Institute, a Ring-generated public-service announcement about a listeria epidemic in the Ring’s NorAm Sector, and a disorienting full-immersion apocalyptic simulation from some computer-literate Interfaither splinter group.

  She slid out of the Interfaither sim with jelly legs, a throbbing head, and a serious beef with whoever had decided that they were a bona fide religion entitled to public-access streamtime. When she finally reached the CanCorp page, it didn’t tell her much. But it did have a link to a “work in progress” section on which the division’s researchers (or, more likely, the division’s public relations staff) posted sanitized biographies and dumbed-down descriptions of current research. She ran a new search and pulled streamspace coordinates for three CanCorp researchers.

  She hesitated. So far she’d only hit on sparsely monitored public-access sites, sites where her presence would pass unnoticed as long as she didn’t do anything that made someone decide to take a closer look at the hit logs for the current time frame. Now, however, she was crossing into more delicate territory. Territory where there would be a price for sloppiness.

  But that was why Nguyen had sent her, of course. Nguyen knew her. She’d told Li her career was riding on this mission and then she’d turned her loose, knowing she’d get the job done, knowing she was willing to risk everything on every throw, every time.

  Five minutes later an obscure CanCorp research assistant sent a message to the network administrator. Six minutes later, Li opened a blind window on the administrator’s account and started surfing the internal mail archives of CanCorp’s entire R D division.

  CanCorp security had been thorough, Li noted with a professional’s appreciation. They had good eSec protocols and they hadn’t been shy about slapping the wrists of employees who violated them. But researchers never took security seriously, and CanCorp’s researchers were no exception.

  Three of the facility’s designers still had archived mail talking about a prototype device similar to Sharifi’s wire. The project had been terminated twenty-eight months ago. The one prototype of the interface had been sent to an off-site storage room from which, according to later inventories, it had simply… vanished.

  Li cursed in frustration, surfaced briefly to a disorienting image of her quarters on-station, then plunged back in.

  Let’s go at this from another angle, she told herself. Look for the organic component.

  She accessed Sharifi’s medical records again and put together an itinerary for her last few months Ring-side. Then she cross-checked Sharifi’s whereabouts against all the clinics licensed to install the kind of specialized internal wetware Sharifi needed. Match: one discreet, expensive private clinic in the Zona Camilia.

  The operation had been paid for from an unnumbered Freetown account. And twenty hours before Sharifi checked in, the clinic received a bonded and insured shipment of medical supplies from one Carpe Diem, an obscure colonial net-access provider that had never logged a single shipment to the Zona Camilia clinic before or after.

  Carpe Diem turned out to be a bona fide though not particularly profitable operating company that held down a solid chunk of the civilian streamspace access market in the Lalande 21185 metaorbitals. Li quickly pierced its security perimeter and slipped into the internal operations database. She found exactly what should have been there: payroll, billing records, internal corporate documents, and a reasonably active unofficial e-mail dialogue to substantiate the actual existence of Carpe Diem’s alleged 479 on- and off-site employees.

  But when she hacked the accounting department, she got a different story. Enough money was flowing through Carpe Diem to fund a small but technologically sophisticated war. Payments, large and numerous, some of them to the same players involved in installing Sharifi’s tech. And for every transfer out, the files showed a corresponding transfer in.

  Whoever made the transfers had cared enough to cover their tracks. The incoming transfers were never exactly equal to the outgoing ones, and they showed up on the Carpe Diem accounts with lead times varying from two days to two months before the equivalent outbound transfers. It would have been extremely hard to prove a connection.

  But Li didn’t need proof; she just needed a track to put her nose to.

  She traced the money through two bankruptcies, five anonymous holding companies, and a string of numbered bank accounts scattered across eight star systems.

  At one point she felt a presence, as if a great bird hung above her, rising on a strong head wind, the currents of cyberspace breaking across its pinioned wings. Something brushed along the edge of her mind. A blue-bright eternity of open spaces flashed before her eyes and was gone before she could even be sure she’d seen it.

  ‹Cohen?› she thought, then bit the thought back hurriedly
. She was running in binary, deep in the numbers, dispersed over the net as far as an organic operator could risk spreading herself. She knew from experience that a mere thought could draw Cohen like chum drew a waiting shark. And she didn’t need him showing up. She wasn’t even close to ready to talk to him.

  The money trail dried up in the heavily shielded datacore of an offshore account in Freetown’s finance sector. Li reset her safety cutout and crossed onto FreeNet before she had time for second thoughts.

  FreeNet was older and wilder than the rest of streamspace. It was off the UN grid, ungoverned by the safety protocols of the white-market sectors, the virtual homeland of black marketeers, hijackers, infoanarchists, and the rogue AIs of the Consortium.

  Li’s cutout offered some protection even there; if her vital signs changed too drastically, it would shunt her into a firewalled decompression program until it could get her safely off-line. But that only helped against outright net assassination. A cutout wouldn’t stop wet bugs. Li remembered Kolodny and shivered.

  She spent half the day on FreeNet, riding the stream until her back ached and her eyes burned. All she found were firewalls, dead ends, cul-de-sacs. She cursed, fatigue bearing down on her. There were no answers here. Just boxes within boxes, questions within questions.

  Common sense and the urge for self-preservation were both telling her to give up. The motto of the FreeNetters might be “Information seeks its own freedom,” but in practice FreeNet was made for hiding data, not finding it. And, like Freetown’s realspace streets, it was a place you could get killed for asking too many questions. Or asking any questions at all about the wrong people.

  The hijacker nabbed her twenty seconds after she crossed back onto the UN grid.

  The first sign of trouble was a subtle ripple in the numbers. Streamspace froze, shuddered, desynchronized around her. When it clicked back into place, she was nose to nose with a blue-eyed Hispanic face. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Baby fat padding jaw and cheekbone. Hard-edged, industrial-finish nose ring. Good unkinked genes.