Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  And she had done it for Bella.

  * * *

  Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.

  A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.

  When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.

  The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.

  The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.

  AMC Station: 25.10.48.

  Li was in a white-hot rage by the time she got back to the station.

  “Anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked Bella when she finally tracked her down.

  They stood in Haas’s quarters, Bella backed up against the long sleek sofa and shrinking away from Li.

  “She was going to take me with her,” Bella whispered, unshed tears glittering in her eyes like polished condensate. “To the Ring. She already had the tickets.”

  “And you never asked how she was going to square things with MotaiSyndicate?”

  “I told you. She was going to buy out my contract.”

  “Even Sharifi didn’t have that kind of money. She cut a deal with Korchow. And you were the go-between. Did they expect her to fall in love with you, or was that just a windfall?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Bella whispered, and now she really was crying.

  “Wasn’t it?” Li asked. “Has anything you’ve told me been true, or has it all come from Korchow?”

  “I never lied to you,” Bella sobbed, just as Li’s comm icon flared in her peripheral vision.

  “Christ!” Li muttered, and shut the icon off.

  “She wanted to do it,” Bella insisted. “It wasn’t just for me. It was for the principle.”

  “It’s not Sharifi’s motives I’m questioning.”

  The comm icon flared again, more urgently. The caller had disabled Li’s call filter and wouldn’t go away now until Li answered.

  She made a sharp gesture of annoyance, and Bella flinched, fear rising in her eyes behind the tears. In any other mood, Li would have been horrified; now she felt only a grim satisfaction.

  She took another step toward Bella, consciously intimidating the woman, God help her. “What was Korchow buying? And don’t even think about saying you don’t know.”

  “I don’t—” Bella swallowed. “Information.”

  “Information about Sharifi’s work.”

  Bella nodded.

  “And you were the go-between. The go-between and the payment.”

  “No! It wasn’t like that. They just talked.”

  “Well, those little talks got your girlfriend killed.”

  “I loved her!”

  “Like you love me?” Li said nastily. “How convenient.”

  “I don’t love you,” Bella said in a voice suddenly tight with anger. “I never said I did. You think having the same geneset is enough? That I’ll fall all over you just because you look like her? You’re nothing but a cheap copy. You wouldn’t understand Hannah if you spent the rest of your life poking and prying!”

  Bella swept out of the room before Li could answer—and if she could have slammed the door, Li was sure she would have.

  Her comm icon flashed again, and Li opened the line with a feeling of rising fury. “What?” she snarled.

  Nguyen.

  “Have I caught you at a bad time?” the general asked as her sunny office took shape around Li.

  Li took a deep breath and set her jaw. “Not at all.”

  “Well, how do things stand, then?”

  Li swallowed. She was drifting into shipwreck waters; any misstep now and she would be past the point at which she could credibly claim to have shared everything with Nguyen. Keep it true as far as you can, she told herself, remembering Nguyen’s own advice. The true lie is the best lie. And the hardest one to get caught in.

  She had told Nguyen about Korchow’s nighttime visit, right up to the moment when he produced the chop shop receipt. Now she described her meeting with Arkady, the files he’d passed to her, his reaction to the news that Cohen was not yet committed, the appointment—only a day and a half away now—in Helena.

  “What good will the intraface do him without Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.

  It was the first question out of her mouth when Li finished—and Li had been waiting for it, had planned for it. Now she fed her the story Korchow had concocted, passed along his feigned confidence that Syndicate nanotech, Syndicate gene therapy, Syndicate expertise with mingling constructed genesets would be able to make a partial construct work where the UN had needed a full one.

  Nguyen appeared to believe it. “We’ll have to take care,” she said. “Korchow’s played the double game before. He stung us badly that way on Maris. Or one of his crèche brothers did. Even the As are hard to tell apart sometimes. Anyway, he’ll have a safe house somewhere. He’ll try to narrow your options, isolate you, push you into a situation where you rely on him for everything.”

  “I don’t know that we can avoid that.”

  “I don’t know that we should. We’ll just have to handle things as they come up. And you’ll need to rely on your judgment.”

  “I always do, don’t I?”

  Nguyen smiled. “I’m counting on it.”

  “Speaking of relying on my own judgment, I could use a little more information.”

  Nguyen raised her eyebrows.

  “The code Korchow wants. The intraface. It’s Alba-designed.”

  “What, you saw a label?” Nguyen sounded politely incredulous.

  “I’m not stupid. I know Corps work when I see it. And this is Corps work. Some of the best.”

  “What’s your question?” Nguyen’s voice was as cold and hard as virusteel.

  Li hesitated.

  “The line’s secure.”

  “I guess I’m asking just how much of this is about deniability. Whether we gave the intraface to Sharifi. Whether Metz was an off-the-grid contractor—”

  “Who said anything about Metz?”

  Li froze. Her mind raced as she tried to retreat, retrench, keep Nguyen from finding out just how much she remembered about the raid, and why. “Well,” she stammered, “Cohen said…”

  Nguyen laughed bitterly. “Cohen.” She dipped a finger into her water and ran it around the rim of the glass, setting the crystal singing. “That brings us to our next topic of conversation,” she said at last. “I take it Korchow doesn’t think he can pull the job off without Cohen?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Or someone’s been very careful to make it look that way. If all goes as planned, Cohen will walk away with just what he’s wanted from the beginning: the intraface. We’ll have handed it to him in order to catch Korchow. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Cohen and his friends in ALEF come out winners no matter what happens. And we both know Cohen too well to think that’s a coincidence.”

  Li stiffened. “I can’t believe—”

  “You can’t?” Nguyen interrupted. “Or you don’t want to?”

  A shadow flickered across the windows of Nguyen’s office, sweeping over the planes and hollows of her unsmiling face.

  Li shivered. “ALEF doesn’t want the intraface anyway,” she argued. “It’s Cohen who wants it. For personal reasons.”

  “Cohen doesn’t have personal r
easons. In order to have personal reasons, you have to be a person. Have you ever actually bothered to find out anything about ALEF? About what they advocate?”

  “I don’t get involved in politics.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous. Your relationship with Cohen is politics.”

  Li flushed. “You have the right to look at my private files, but not to tell me what to put in them.”

  “I do when your personal life clouds your judgment.”

  “That’s not the case here,” Li said. All the same, she felt a twinge of relief at the thought that Nguyen couldn’t download her last dinner with Cohen. Yet.

  “Isn’t it?” Nguyen said. “Then why aren’t you asking the questions you should be asking? The questions everyone else is already asking?”

  She plucked a fiche from her desk, tapped through the index to pull a file up, and handed it to Li. “Read it.”

  The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. This is not idle speculation. It’s reality—a reality that both Syndicates and UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with.

  Li looked up at Nguyen. “What is this?”

  “Cohen wrote it. It’s a speech he gave at an ALEF meeting last week. An ALEF meeting that was downloaded by known Consortium members.”

  “Oh,” Li said, and kept reading—the same words she had seen before back in Cohen’s sunny drawing room:

  The Syndicates embody one evolutionary vector: the hive mentality of the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a posthuman collective psychology, including cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from gene-norm.

  The UN, in contrast, has launched a series of what might best be described as rearguard actions. On the technological side, we have enslaved AIs (how very revealing programmers’ jargon can be); hardwired, task-dedicated artificial life of every possible description; wired humans and posthumans operating AI-platformed wetware. In essence, a plethora of attempts to subsume nonhuman intelligence into human-controlled operating systems. And in the political sphere, the General Assembly kindly picks up any stray items the technicians fail to account for by slamming the door on consciously engineered posthuman evolution, by slapping AIs with source-code patents, mandatory-feedback-loop legislation, encryption protocols, and, of course, the much-beloved thirty-year death tax.

  Humanity has engineered its own obsolescence. They acknowledge it by act if not by deed. It is time for us to acknowledge it. Time for us to rethink the shape of UN politics—perhaps the very shape of the UN itself—and step into a wider, brighter posthuman future.

  Li handed the fiche back to Nguyen, who snapped it off with a flourish of her fine-boned hand.

  “Why show me this?”

  “I want you to know what Cohen is capable of.”

  “It’s just talk,” Li said uncomfortably. “You know Cohen.”

  “That’s my point. He’s using you, Li. The same way he’s used the Security Council. The same way he used Kolodny.”

  Li’s stomach contracted into an icy knot. “What do you mean the way he used Kolodny?” she whispered.

  “You think what happened on Metz was an accident? He used Kolodny to get what he wanted, and then he left her to die. Left you all to die. Didn’t you understand why the review board tried so hard to find a way to go easy on you? Because we knew it was Cohen’s fault all along—and he was the one person we couldn’t afford to blame publicly.”

  “He told me it was a malfunction,” Li said, too stunned to understand what Nguyen was saying about her own court-martial, too stunned to hear anything beyond the bare fact of the accusation.

  “Well, he lied. He found the intraface. Then he started going after the wetware specs. Specs he had no business looking at. Specs we couldn’t afford to let him look at. And in doing so, he endangered the security of the mission. We had to pull him off the shunt to stop him.”

  Li put a hand to her forehead, felt the fever rising beneath her skin. “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” Nguyen said. “I cut the link myself.”

  Zona Angel, Arc Section 12: 25.10.48.

  “Hell,” Cohen said. “The beastly thing’s stuck.”

  He was opening a long matte-black canister, capped at both ends with silver disks of stamped metal. He was having a hard time of it, having to use Chiara’s starlet-straight front teeth to pry the lid off.

  “Don’t break her pretty teeth,” Li said, and Cohen laughed.

  “I’d grow her new ones,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to tidy up a little collateral damage.”

  They sat in his high-ceilinged drawing room, the chandeliers casting rippled reflections in the hand-laid panes of the garden doors. Chiara looked as beautiful as ever, perched like a bright bird on the sofa; but Li thought there was a pinched quality to the lovely face, a puffy hint of tiredness around the hazel eyes. She nearly asked Cohen if he was feeling all right—before she reminded herself that it wasn’t Cohen she was looking at. That whether some pretty girl felt tired or sad or sick had not a thing to do with the enigma sitting across the table from her.

  He got the canister open at last, with a little grunt of satisfaction, and slid out a long shiny tube of architect’s fiche, which he unfurled on the low table between them. When one corner of the sheet refused to lie flat he borrowed Li’s beer to weight it down.

  Li squinted doubtfully at the blank surface. “We’re supposed to read the plans off that? You’ve got something against VR now?”

  “Only that I’ve been running VR scenarios ever since you sent me Korchow’s files, without getting anywhere near figuring out how to crack this nut.”

  Li had been doing the same thing herself and coming up just as dry. But telling Cohen that now seemed less than productive.

  He tapped the fiche. It whirred softly and lit up, casting a cool blue glow on the belly of Cohen’s wineglass, the curving flank of Li’s beer bottle. A spidery web of lines spread across the sheet and coalesced into a long, shallow curve like the arc of a twenty-kilometer-long suspension bridge. Cohen tapped in another command, and the ghostly parallelograms of solar arrays formed above and around the arc. “There. Alba. A place you ought to recognize faster than I do.”

  “I guess,” Li said doubtfully.

  Cohen snorted. “Spoken like a true member of the virtual generation. It took humans two hundred millennia to figure out how to read, and they’re forgetting it in a matter of centuries. Anyway.” He tapped the sheet emphatically. “These are the plans the contractor worked from. They’re much more detailed than what Korchow gave you. And, more important, I pulled them from the contractor’s files without having to go into the UNSC databases and get flagged for querying classified material.”

  “Oh, right,” Li said as the flat image began to make sense to her. “There’s the commissary. And the main labs.” She grinned. “I’ve spent enough time in the tanks there to recognize them.”

  “Indeed,” Cohen said. “But we’re not cracking the main labs. Our target is down here: biotech R D.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been in that level,” Li said.

  “You wouldn’t have. It’s very hush-hush. All controlled tech work. Even the researchers live in separate quarters. It’s a quarantine zone, really; look how the bulkheads cut all the way across the station on the lab levels.”

  He tapped a section of the fiche, and the zone enlarged, revealing a warren of windowless, dead-end corridors and security checkpoints highlighted in red. “You’ll have to get through two security checkpoints on your way in, here and here.”

  Li pointed to a cluster of bulging growths on the station’s outer skin. “What’s that?”

  “Algae farm. Part of the oxygen cycle. But look here.” He pointed her back into the station’s interior. “Now what’s the job in front of us? One, we get you onto the station and into the lab wing. Two, you access the lab’s central database and manually open a line to the ship. Three, I go
through the lab AI’s files, fielding any interference he sees fit to throw at us, and figure out which comp the intraface files are on. Four, you go get them. Five—and this is the real kicker—we get out without being detected. Or, in a less optimistic but more realistic scenario, at least without being positively identified.”

  Li nodded, a little bemused at hearing all this from Chiara’s pretty mouth, especially since she’d always suspected the girl was rather stupid.

  She picked up her beer, and the corner of the fiche popped up. She hunted around for something to set on it, and came up with a moldering first edition of Doctor Faustus.

  “Can we do it?” she asked.

  “Not in any way you’re likely to be very enthusiastic about, I’m afraid.” Cohen tapped up the scale on the area of the plans that included the lab spoke. “Physically, I have no idea where the intraface is. All I do know is that it’s in this lab. Unfortunately, the lab files—personnel, inventory, everything—are deadwalled.”

  “Like Metz.”

  “Worse than Metz.” He looked up at her. “Alba has a weapons-grade semisentient.”

  A chill worked its way down Li’s spine and settled in her stomach. She hated logging on to semisentients. Her fear was unreasonable—or so she had tried many times to convince herself. Sometimes she wondered if it was just blind prejudice; the one time she’d mentioned it to Cohen, he’d gotten so offended it had taken weeks to smooth his ruffled feelings.

  But still.

  There was something sharklike about the big semisentients: brute computing power, unfettered by hard programming or by the all-too-human qualms and foibles of fully sentient Emergents. Logging on to a semisentient was like swimming in dark bottomless water. Impossible to believe that the wordless menace that lurked behind their numbers could become Cohen. Terrifying to think that Cohen was only a few operations, a few algorithms removed from them—and that no one could say for certain where to draw the line between the two.

  “So how do we get you in?” Li asked.

  Cohen raised an eyebrow. “You assume a lot. I haven’t agreed to help you yet.”