Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  Li breathed a virtual sigh of relief and relaxed. It was a Riot Grrl, some rich hacker wanna-be hot-dogging on her parents’ VR gear. Real danger was never this pretty, even in streamspace.

  She smiled and shut down the window.

  Nothing happened.

  ‹Out,› she sent. But there was no out.

  Streamspace ground gears on her again. When it phased back in, the Riot Grrl’s eyes were changing color. Blue to brown, brown to near black. And the face around the eyes was changing. Shifting, melting, re-forming until Li was staring at a face she knew far too well. A face she’d last seen fifteen years ago staring back out of the streaky mirror of a Shantytown chop shop.

  She ran, but the hijacker was too fast for her. A hand lashed out before she could turn and clamped down on her jugular.

  She kicked and bit. She tried to shut down the VR window and couldn’t. She tried to drop out of VR into code so she could at least see what she was up against. She tried to shut down everything and found that her realspace feed had been disabled.

  The hand twisted, shooting Li down into pain and darkness.

  * * *

  The pain in her throat eased, and she returned to something like breathing. She was crouching in a dark acrid-smelling place, holding something. Her head throbbed. She felt a dull, itchy sting in her lungs that reminded her of… someplace.

  She couldn’t see clearly, and what she could see—tools, cables, a shadowy computer console—made no sense to her. She was moving, doing something with her hands, manipulating a piece of machinery whose function she couldn’t guess at. She strained to drag her gaze upward, to get some idea of her surroundings. Impossible. Her hands, her eyes, her whole body seemed to be moving of their own volition.

  A claustrophobic panic gripped her. She was ghosting, wired into someone else’s body, experiencing a digitized memory that could be past, present, or pure simulation. She couldn’t control the framed memory. Nor could she tell how heavily it had been edited, or if it was real in the first place. All she could do was ride it out and hope it would let her go when it was done with her.

  A noise. Movement.

  She-the-other stood up, turned, looked.

  A figure emerged from the shadows. A woman, Li thought. But it was hard to tell; her perspective was disjointed, distorted, as if seen through eyes that had no idea what they were looking at.

  The body she was in spoke, but all she heard was a high chattering wail, like the dumb cry of an animal. If there were words in it, they were spoken in a language that meant nothing to her.

  The dark figure moved toward her. For a moment her vision cleared, and she put a face to the shadow—a pale face, shadowed by the long, dark fall of hair.

  The witch.

  She reached out, felt the taut curve of the witch’s waist beneath her hand, drew the girl’s warm body to her.

  * * *

  White light. Endless space. Wind like a knife.

  Mountains rose above her, higher than any mountains could be, rimed with black ice, white with hanging glaciers. The sky burned high-altitude blue above her—a color she’d only seen once before, halo-jumping into the equatorial mountains of Gilead.

  A hawk’s shadow swept overhead, and she heard her own heartbeat, slow and strong, echoing through the vast mineral silence. Then she was out, back on the grid. Safe.

  ‹Cohen?›

  She probed the net, stretching as thin as she dared to.

  ‹Cohen?›

  But he was gone, if he’d ever been there.

  Shantytown: 14.10.48.

  Dr. Leviticus Sharpe met her at the door of the Shantytown hospital. He was wire-thin, knobby-jointed, a good two meters tall. He stooped atop storklike legs, a big man trying hard not to intimidate a small woman. Li didn’t need the help—but she still liked him for it.

  “Welcome to Compson’s World,” he said, smiling. “May you not have to stay long.”

  Sharpe’s office faced away from town, toward the foothills. It was fall in Shantytown, and the scrub oak was turning. Li saw the familiar wash of scarlet in the canyons, the silver-green ripple of rabbit sage on the lowlands.

  “Well,” said Sharpe when they were seated. “Here you are.”

  “You sound like you’ve been expecting me.”

  He blinked. “Shouldn’t I have been?”

  Li spread her hands, palms out, and raised her eyebrows. It was one of Cohen’s habitual gestures, and she felt a flush of annoyance with herself for letting it creep into this conversation.

  “Er…” Sharpe shifted in his chair, looking suddenly uneasy. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here, then, Major.”

  Li shrugged and pulled Sharifi’s wet/dry wire out of her pocket.

  Sharpe peered at it, and Li caught the metallic flash of a contracting shutter ring in his left pupil. A bioprosthetic, some kind of diagnostic device.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wetware isn’t really my bailiwick. Have you tried AMC tech support? The station office is reasonably competent.”

  “The other half of this system is in your morgue.”

  “I doubt that.” He bent to look at the wire again. “Any multiplanetary that owned this kind of tech would have put a repo out on it before the operator’s body was cold.”

  “It’s Hannah Sharifi’s.”

  “Oh,” he said softly. “I see. That’s different, of course.”

  “You didn’t turn up the internal components in your autopsy?” Li checked her hard memory, verified what she thought she’d seen. “You signed her death certificate.”

  He stood up—no longer smiling, no longer stooping—and Li saw the green flash of LEDs as he checked his internal chronometer. “I sign a lot of death certificates,” he said, the friendly, joking tone gone from his voice. “And now, if it’s quite all right, I have patients to see. Tell Haas I said hello.”

  Li felt like she was stuck in a fog. She followed Sharpe down the corridor, half-running to keep pace with his long-legged strides. He pushed through a pair of swinging doors into a scrub room, bent over a deep sink, and started washing his hands.

  Li reached out and turned the water off. “You mind telling me what the hell’s going on here?”

  Sharpe held his soapy hands out, splay-fingered, looking oddly vulnerable. “I doubt you need me to tell you anything, Major. It looks to me like you’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Fine,” Li said. “Cover your ass. But I have a job to do. If you won’t help, get off the tracks and let me by.”

  Sharpe reached past her and turned the water back on. His hand was trembling, but one look at his face told her it was anger, not fear. “Just leave,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in patients you idiots put here. Haas knows I don’t have time to sneak around behind his back doing unauthorized autopsies. And I don’t need another of his petty little loyalty tests. God knows Voyt put me through that hoop enough times.”

  And then, suddenly, it all made sense. Sharpe’s assumption that she would come down to talk to him after the mine fire. His confusion, his suspicion, the smoldering anger that he camouflaged with jokes and polite chitchat.

  “Listen,” Li said. “I don’t know how things were under Voyt, and I don’t know what little arrangement he had with Haas. But I’m not part of it. I came down here myself, not on Haas’s orders. I’m not here to tell you what official line to toe. I want the truth from you. Or at least as much of it as you know. That’s all.”

  “Truth is a complicated concept,” Sharpe said, and she could still hear the suspicion in his voice. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “I want to see Sharifi’s body.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “Mine.”

  She toggled her comm system, wrote and time-stamped an order, sent it to Sharpe’s streamspace coordinates and watched his eyes unfocus momentarily as he read it. He blinked down at her, astonished.

  “Didn’t think I was going to put it in writing, did you?” she sa
id. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossed on her chest, and looked up at him. “You’ve got me filed in the wrong box, Sharpe.”

  “Indeed,” he said. He laughed and rubbed a still-damp hand through his hair. “I apologize for… well, there’s a certain paranoia that goes with being a mine doctor.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He led her back through a warren of hospital wards and corridors toward the rear modules of the hospital building. As they came closer to the morgue, Li started to see evidence of the recent fire.

  They threaded between hospital beds and stacks of boxed medical supplies. Space was always tight in underfunded colonial hospitals, but this one looked like it was about to burst at the seams. Evac and rescue gear was crammed into every corner. Mountains of complicated diagnostic equipment and medical supplies lined the walls, as if someone had cleared out the storage rooms and dumped their contents in any empty space available. As they worked their way down the hallways, Li had to dodge nurses carrying bedpans and burn dressings.

  Finally Sharpe opened one side of a broad double door marked with an orange biohazard decal and led Li through a frigid curtain of irradiated air into a long room stacked with virusteel drawers that looked unnervingly like cryocoffins.

  “All full, unfortunately,” Sharpe said. “Running a brisk trade in dead miners these days.”

  “And of course they all have to be autopsied,” Li said. “Otherwise, how could you prove it was their own damn fault they died down there?”

  Sharpe looked sideways at her and his thin mouth kinked in a sardonic smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, Major.”

  “Here we are,” he said, stopping at a drawer that looked to Li just like all the others. He opened the drawer with a smooth sweep of his lanky arm, and Li found herself face-to-face with Hannah Sharifi.

  “Jesus,” she muttered. “What happened to her?”

  She looked like she’d been hit with a sledgehammer. The right side of her head folded in on itself from jawbone to hairline like a crushed eggshell. And her right hand was a mess. Nails torn off, bloodstains spidering through the lined skin of palm and finger, black burns on her fingertips.

  “That’s how the rescue team found her,” Sharpe said. “The cause of death appears to have been suffocation—not all that surprising in a mine fire.” He lifted the still-intact left hand to show Li the blue fingernails. “The injuries are unusual, but they did find her at the foot of the stairs running into the Trinidad. A lot of people fall there. Those stairs have had running water on them more or less since they opened that level. There’s a spring they haven’t located or can’t drain or something.” He shrugged. “She could have hit her head on cribbing planks, on the walls of the shaft, on any number of things.”

  “What about the hand?”

  “Yes, the hand. Well. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”

  But Li had. On Gilead. In the interrogation rooms. When they went after people’s fingers with Vipers.

  Things had fallen apart on Gilead. The price of playing by the rules had risen so high that no one had been willing to pay it anymore. Or at least no one who survived the place long enough to make a dent in things. And the funny thing about having the rules fall apart was that there always turned out to be some people, in any group, who liked life better without rules.

  Li hadn’t been one of them—or at least she didn’t think she’d been. She’d been outside most of the interrogation rooms most of the time, doing her best to forget what happened on the other side of all those carefully closed doors. But it wasn’t like she didn’t know—like they didn’t all know—where the information they based their decisions on came from. And every time she tried to remember what had really happened on Gilead she felt like she was trying to force two versions of the war into a slot in her mind that only had room for one.

  She shook her head, pushing the memories away. Sharifi was no Syndicate prisoner. And this wasn’t Gilead, not by a long shot.

  “She probably damaged it trying to stop her fall,” Sharpe said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone come in with burns. There are a lot of loose wires down there. It’s easy to get confused and grab one, even if you know what you’re doing.”

  Li looked down at the body. Now that she was over the first shock, she could see past the injuries to the face under them. It was her face, of course. The face she remembered from those sliding-away days before her enlistment. The face she still wore in dreams sometimes. It was like looking at her own corpse.

  Sharifi’s uninjured hand lay on her stomach, palm down. A white crescent of scar tissue marked the web of skin between thumb and forefinger, and Li reached out and touched it. It was important somehow—material proof that it wasn’t her lying on the ice-cold metal, but another woman. Someone with her own life, her own mind, her own history. A stranger.

  She realized Sharpe was watching her and pulled her hand back self-consciously. She cleared her throat. “Are we going to be able to get anything out of that mess?”

  “I think so. The damage isn’t really as extensive as it looks. And ceramsteel is a lot tougher than brain tissue.” He grinned. “Not that I have to tell you that, Major.”

  Li snorted and fingered her right shoulder. She’d slept on it wrong and woken this morning to the unmistakable sting of frayed filament ends cutting into muscle and tendon. She should probably ask Sharpe to look at it, she thought, remembering the field tech’s memo. But not now. Not with Sharifi lying between them.

  “Let’s see what we see,” Sharpe said. He manipulated the controls of Sharifi’s drawer and slid it onto a ceiling-mounted track system that connected the storage area to the autopsy room.

  What they saw when Sharpe got his allegedly temperamental scanner up and running was startling. Sharifi’s backbrain—muscle memory, smell, autonomic functions—was as pristine as any planet-bound civilian’s. She had the VR relays that you would expect to see in an academic who, after all, made her living and did her research on the web. But other than that, Sharifi had died with more or less the same backbrain she’d been born with: the brain of someone who had never needed military-applications streamspace access and who had made no more than a handful of Bose-Einstein jumps in her lifetime.

  Sharifi’s frontbrain told a different story, though. It lit up the screen like a Freetown data haven. Whatever was in there looked to Li’s untrained eyes like a white-hot thousand-legged spider—a spider that had wormed its way into every fold, every cranny between Sharifi’s shattered temples.

  “What the hell is that?” Li asked.

  Sharpe let out a long slow whistle. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” he said. “We have now passed far, far beyond the limits of my technical expertise. I can tell you this much, though. It was all put in at once. And not long ago.”

  “Three months ago,” Li said.

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Yes, that sounds right. Usually a web this extensive will be built up by accretion. Multiple generations of filament, even redundant networks layered on top of each other. Different-age scar tissue. By the time most people are this wired, they’re carrying around almost as much dead tech as live tech. But this job was done in a single operation. Ring-side clinic, of course. Or Alba.” He glanced at Li. “To be honest, it looks more like military work to me than anything else.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Alba,” Li said. “That much I can tell you.” She peered at the scan, comparing it to her own brain scans taken after her last upgrade, trying to see which of Sharifi’s brain segments were most densely wired. Something about Sharifi’s system seemed off somehow. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “What’s it all wired into? What’s it for ?”

  “Communications,” Sharpe said. “All communications.” He pointed. “Look. Here. Here. Where the dark areas are, and the contrast. If we looked at a scan of a typical cybernetic implant system—yours for example—we would see a much more even distribution of filaments. So
me concentration in the motor skills areas. A node somewhere in here for the oracle that it’s all platformed on. Also a high concentration of filament in the speech, hearing, and visual centers. In other words, your spinfeeds, your VR interfaces, your communications systems. Sharifi’s implant is totally different. No oracle, no operating platform, no relays. Just filament. And it’s concentrated almost exclusively in the speech, sight, and hearing centers.”

  “So it’s just a fancy net access web?” Li asked, disappointed.

  “Not quite.” Sharpe pursed his lips and stepped away from the scanner, pulling his gloves off. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of shunt.”

  “A shunt?” Li shook her head, fighting away a brief, untethered image of Kolodny falling. “That’s crazy. Why would someone like Sharifi be wired for a shunt? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”

  Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.

  “I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”

  “What kind of system?”