Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “What about ALEF?” Li asked.

  “My dear girl, no one who’d ever been to an ALEF meeting would imagine such a thing. Half the older members are decohering because of insufficiently backed-up early FTL transports. A third of the still-functional ones are supremely uninterested in anything but debating theoretical mathematics and experimenting with alternative identity structures. And the rest of us couldn’t agree on where—or even whether—to eat dinner, let alone organize something on this scale.” He sobered abruptly. “Besides, if we were ever caught fooling around with such a thing, TechComm would activate our mandatory feedback loops.” He drew one finger across Roland’s neck in an unmistakable gesture. “All she wrote.”

  “The Consortium,” Li said, ignoring the gesture to pursue her suspicions. “They’re supremacists, right?” She had never been able to understand the alien tangle of AI politics, but she did know that much.

  “Separatists is probably a better way of describing it. Like I said, most Emergents just aren’t that interested in humans.”

  “But the Consortium was the group involved in Tel Aviv, right? The ones who killed the Security Council agent.”

  Roland’s hand froze on its way to the ashtray and a shower of ash fell unnoticed onto the carpet’s blue-and-gold arabesques. “Why ask me?” he said sharply. “I wasn’t even there.”

  “I’m just pointing out that the Consortium’s member AIs could use this intraface if they had some reason to use it.”

  “Of course they could.”

  Li swallowed. “And so could you, right? In fact, you could use it better than any other AI. Because you’re more human, aren’t you? Because you process data with emotions, not logic. You’re in all the Emergent-systems textbooks, the only one of the twenty-first-century affective-loop-driven AIs who hasn’t decohered and gone… wherever they go when that happens. You’re practically a species of one.”

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His cigarette crackled and smoked. Another rain of ash fell to the floor. Birds sang beyond the tall windows. And meanwhile Cohen sat so perfectly, unbreathingly still that Roland’s pretty face might have been carved from stone.

  When he spoke, it was in a voice as soft and cold as falling snow. “Whatever you’re trying to say, Catherine, why don’t you just go ahead and say it?”

  Li looked out at the green leaves trembling beneath snowfields so blindingly white and oceans so brilliantly blue that you could almost imagine you were looking at clouds and sky, almost imagine you were standing on solid ground and not plastered to a spinning ring of vacuum-hardened virusteel. Then she leaned forward and finally asked the question that had been hanging on her tongue since she arrived:

  “Was this the target tech on Metz, Cohen? Was it the intraface you were after?”

  He shook himself, put his cigarette out, and leaned forward to stare at her. “What makes you think that?”

  “The sunburst.” She pointed at the raised shape on the wire’s black sheathing. “It was on the floor there.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to remember that, Catherine.”

  She lit a cigarette herself.

  “Are you having bleed-through? Have you told the psychtechs?” He sighed. “No. Of course not. You need to, Catherine. You’re playing with fire.”

  She scoffed. “You don’t seriously believe the line about memory washing for our own good? To keep us simple soldiers from suffering over the nasty but necessary things they make us do?”

  “You know me better than that. But if your soft memory’s breaking into your edited files there’s something seriously wrong with your internals. You’re too heavily wired to risk malfunctioning internals. Go see someone, for Heaven’s sake. I’ll pay if money’s a problem.”

  “Who asked you to pay? Answer my question, Cohen. Was this what we went to Metz for?”

  “No—”

  Li stood up. “I don’t believe you. And I don’t like being lied to.”

  “Sit down,” he said—and there was an edge in his voice that made her obey him. “Yes, we were chasing the intraface on Metz. But we weren’t looking for this component. We were looking for the wetware schematics and the psychware source code.” He kept his eyes fixed on hers, watching her reaction. “Look, this isn’t a VR rig or a UN grunt’s wire job. This is a genuine neural net, both on the AI and the human sides of the intraface. You can’t grow that in viral matrix—not when the device itself is still in the experimental stage. You need a body.”

  Li shivered. “The constructs we saw in the lab were just… hosts, then?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And what about that?” She gestured to the wire on the table between them.

  “Forget that. It’s nothing. An accessory. The kind of thing you get with the real equipment and shove in a bottom drawer somewhere and forget about. No, the thing you really need is the AI component of the intraface. That’s loaded onto an AI somewhere, probably an AI that’s enslaved to an Emergent network. Find that, and you’ll know exactly who you’re up against.”

  “That’s what I’m asking you, Cohen. Who is it? Nguyen was paying you in tech. What were you going to do with it? What does ALEF want it for?”

  “They don’t want it,” Cohen said. “I do.”

  “Why?”

  Cohen started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut and turned away to light another cigarette. “Stay offstream,” he said. “I’ll nose around in ALEF’s databases, chat up a few old acquaintances and see what I can turn up without drawing unwanted attention. You go back down that mine shaft. Find out exactly what Sharifi was doing. And who she was talking to. And don’t call me. Nguyen will certainly have your outgoing mail monitored, and I think it’s safer if we don’t talk until I get an offstream entanglement source set up.”

  He rose and looked at his wristwatch, a paper-thin affair of buttery pink gold whose smooth face was embossed with a stylized Templar’s cross. Time was up. Li had clearly gotten all the answers she was going to get today.

  “Come on then.” He smiled, catching up her hand in his and coaxing her to her feet. “Let’s go out through the garden. Perhaps the birds will be out. Did I tell you that our bioresearch division has reengineered a naturally reproducing cliff swallow? And I have a new lilac to show you. One that even your barbarously practical soul will appreciate.”

  He drew her arm through his, and they stepped through the tall doors together into the green-speckled sunlight of his personal jungle.

  Anaconda Strike: 16.10.48.

  They were bringing the rats back in when Li and McCuen got to the pithead the next morning.

  They brought them in traps and dented rusty cages and every imaginable kind of container. The miners even humped them in from Shantytown on the surface shuttles when they came on shift. Six full traps traveled down in the cage with Li and McCuen, and when they hit pit bottom the pit ponies were already waiting to load them onto the coal carts and send them trundling off into the mine’s far corners. Judging from the heap of empty cages piling up at pit bottom, Li guessed the relocation had been in full swing for at least a shift or two.

  No manager showed up to stop it. They wouldn’t dare; some of the fiercest wildcat strikes in Compson’s history had sparked over the poisoning of mine rats. Miners loved their rats. Befriended them. Believed in them. The rats smelled poison gas long before any human or posthuman could, and they were attuned to the roof’s settling and cracking, to the silent hang-ups that preceded a big cave-in. When the rats left the mine, disaster was on the horizon. If the rats stayed, it was safe—or at least no riskier than usual.

  “How can they stand it?” McCuen muttered as they started down the main gangway.

  Li followed his gaze to a miner who was sitting on a gob pile breaking off pieces of his sandwich and tossing them to a trio of rats. It made an eerie picture: the black of the man’s coal-coated skin, the black of the rats’ fur, their round black eyes riveted on the grimy fingers that re
ached again and again into the gleaming lunch pail.

  “They’re pretty clean,” she said. “You can’t catch much from them except plague. And even that you’re more likely to get from people these days.”

  McCuen just shook his head and made a spitting sound in his throat. “You thought about Gould any more?” he asked.

  Li shrugged.

  “Why go slow time?” McCuen asked. “That’s what I keep wondering.”

  They were traveling down the main gangway now. It was still wide enough to walk two abreast, but the ceiling was already lowering overhead, forcing McCuen to duck his head and stoop, miner fashion.

  “You sound like you have a theory,” Li hazarded.

  “Well, not really… but…”

  “But what?”

  “It just occurred to me that maybe the point isn’t just to get… whatever it is… Gould herself, I’d guess… to Freetown, but to keep anyone else from getting hold of her until she gets there.”

  Li stopped, struck by the idea. “You’re saying she’s using the flight as a kind of dead drop.”

  “Well, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but… yeah. I mean, once that ship dropped into slow time, it was gone. No radio contact. No way to stop it or board it or even find it. It doesn’t even exist as far as we’re concerned.”

  “Not until it gets to Freetown.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re assuming that it doesn’t matter to her if we find out what it is before she gets there.”

  “Right.”

  “Because… ?”

  “Because once she gets there it’ll already be too late for us to stop her?”

  Li stood staring at the ground, at the coal dust already caking her boots, her mind racing.

  “It was just a thought,” McCuen said. “I guess it doesn’t really make sense when you look at it that way.”

  “No,” Li said slowly. “It makes sense. It makes all kinds of sense.”

  He looked over at her, his face a pool of lamplit white in the darkness. “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “Follow up on our other leads and hope to hell that sometime in the next three weeks we crack this thing.”

  McCuen grinned. “Other leads meaning Louie?”

  “Other leads meaning Louie.”

  Six linear kilometers from the shaft by Li’s measurement, they turned a sharp kink in the gangway and dropped into the long, high-roofed chamber that was the temporary home of cutting face South 8. The survey crews must have come through and ruled out the presence of any worthwhile crystal deposits; the miners had already blasted a large section of coal and were taking it down with a track-mounted rotary cutter. The big machine threw up a spume of stove-grease black diesel smoke and made enough noise to start a roof fall all by itself. There was no point in talking to anyone while they were cutting, so Li and McCuen took refuge in the most sheltered corner they could find and watched.

  Someone must have seen them; when the crew stopped to break down the cutter and move the tracks up, the foreman pushed his cutting goggles up onto his forehead and walked over to them.

  “Louie,” McCuen said, grinning.

  Louie was easily Haas’s size, but he wasn’t carrying any creeping desk-job fat on his big frame. He was all wiry knotted miner’s muscle—a man who looked built to take down mountains. He pulled a grimy rag out of his coveralls and wiped his hands with it. It looked to Li like he was just moving the accumulated coal dust and diesel grease from one big-knuckled finger to another.

  When he’d finished redistributing the dirt, he pulled a tobacco tin out of a hidden pocket and offered it around. Li and McCuen both refused. Louie pulled a swag out and planted it in one cheek.

  “So,” he said, looking McCuen up and down. “Massa treatin’ you all right in the big house?”

  “Very funny,” McCuen said. He turned to Li. “Louie and I went to school together.”

  Louie laughed. “Grade school, anyway. That’s all the school one of us had.”

  “Major Li would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Ask and you shall receive!” Louie said, throwing out his strong, coal-slicked arms expansively. “Answers, that is. I ain’t giving away World Series tickets.”

  One of the cutters on break walked over, eyeing them curiously. Louie glanced at him, then looked back at Li and McCuen. “So,” he asked, “you think the Mets are gonna sweep?”

  Li snorted.

  “She’s just bitter,” McCuen said.

  The cutter passed by and turned down a side tunnel.

  “Right,” Louie said. “He’s taking a piss. That’ll take twenty seconds or so, after which he’ll fuck around for a minute or so to avoid getting back to work. Which means you got about a minute and a half before he comes back to see what we’re talking about. Walls got ears down here.”

  He listened while Li explained what she was looking for, then turned to McCuen. “You can trust her,” McCuen said after a moment.

  “Yeah, but can I trust you?”

  “You know you can.”

  Louie stared hard at McCuen for a moment. Then he turned back to Li. “Sharifi didn’t have a regular crew,” he said. “That’s why you can’t find them in the pit logs. Haas just let her pull miners off slow faces. Most of them are back on the Trinidad now, poor buggers.”

  “Do you think you could get us a complete list?”

  He shrugged. “Easier if I just let ’em know you’re looking for them. Plus there’s nothing written down that way.”

  “You didn’t work for her, did you?” Li asked.

  “You crazy? I still won’t go down there.”

  “So how’d she get the others to go?”

  “Easy.” Louie laughed and his eyes widened in the white circles left by his cutting goggles. “She paid union scale. She actually put a sign up at pit bottom saying she’d pay scale. Wish I could have seen Haas’s face when he read it.”

  “How’d she know what union scale was?” Li asked, knowing the answer already.

  Louie shrugged his massive shoulders.

  Li glanced behind her to make sure the miner who’d gone off to piss was still out of earshot. “Was this a union project? Was there an official push on it?”

  Louie caught her drift instantly. The union pushed members toward specific cutting faces or veins depending on its own often obscure political or economic goals. Union approval of Sharifi’s project would have meant better-qualified, more highly motivated workers. Union workers. And union oversight, even if the cat-and-mouse game of union and management meant that no one could risk publicly admitting they were union. Had Sharifi been politically savvy enough to know that? Or had the union approached her on its own initiative?

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Louie said, looking fixedly at Li. There was a message in his stare, but whatever it was she couldn’t read it.

  “But you might have heard something.”

  “Some things I try not to hear.”

  “Who’s the pit rep?” Li asked.

  Louie’s face shut like a slamming door.

  “Oh, come on!” McCuen sounded exasperated. “You know goddamn well who the pit rep is. It was your damn brother two elections ago!”

  Louie stared at McCuen, and Li could see half a lifetime of distrust and resentment in his broad face. “All I know,” he said, “is that you pull your paycheck out of Haas’s back pocket just like the rest of the Pinkertons. And if you think I’m going to roll over just because we—”

  “Fine,” Li interrupted; she could hear footsteps moving toward them up the drift. “Just drop a word in the right ears, okay?”

  “Right.” Louie bent to check his lamp. “See you around, Brian.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” McCuen snapped.

  Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”

  “I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”

&nbs
p; * * *

  The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.

  “Independents,” McCuen said. “They’re so damn sure the company’s going to steal their strikes, they’d rather die than tell the safety crews where to look for them. We’ll just have to go out and hunt him down. If you think it’s worth it.” He looked doubtful.

  “You know him?” Li asked.

  “Sure,” McCuen said. “Everyone does.” He made a circling gesture near his temple with one finger: crazy.

  The rest of the shift ran together in a blur of dripping walls and flickering lamplight. They soon passed beyond the AMC-wired sections of the mine and into regions lit only by miners’ lamps and the occasional battery-powered emergency bulb. They poked their way up crooked drifts and adits, past brattices too rotten to push more than a whisper of fresh air through the dank tunnels. At each turning of the way they stopped and listened and followed the echoes of miners’ picks.

  They relived the same ghostly scene ten, twelve, fifteen times. They caught the first faint tapping of rock hammers, glimpsed refracted lamplight glittering on the hewn and splintered walls. Then men emerged from the darkness, speared on the narrow beams of Davy lamps, their eyes glittering like coal under running water.

  “The priest?” Li would ask. “Cartwright?”

  And each little clot of men would send them on deeper, into smaller tunnels.

  As the ventilation faltered, the air grew hotter. Soon Li was sweating, straining just to pull enough air through the mouthpiece of her rebreather. McCuen rolled his coveralls down, tied the arms around his waist, and took his shirt off. Li did the same, but left her T-shirt on; she still had a string of pearls from her underground days, and she’d just as soon not spark awkward questions about whether a certain Catherine Li had worked underground and who had known her back then.