Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  03:51:02.

  ‹Bad news.›

  ‹What?›

  ‹I found the data. But I can’t access it from here. You’ll need to get into another lab and jack a remote terminal before I can get it.›

  Li checked their time and swallowed.

  After a tense silence, Cohen said, ‹What do you want to do?›

  She twitched, nerves stretched to the breaking point. ‹What do you mean, what do I want to do? We go get it.›

  ‹You’re sure?›

  ‹Of course I’m sure.›

  04:01:00.

  She looked around the corner, saw an empty passage and started forward. ‹Cohen?› she asked.

  ‹?›

  ‹What you said about the lab AI. How did you survive so long? How did you survive being beaten?›

  A pulse of emotion flowed over the line, but this one was pure AI—one of those ripples in the numbers that put the lie to the illusion of Cohen’s humanness, that reminded Li how foolish it was to let herself imagine she understood anything that happened on the other side of the interface. ‹I didn’t survive it,› he answered when the numbers smoothed out. ‹I’ve never been beaten.›

  Then she passed through another security grid and lost him.

  04:03:41.

  She was deep in the lab section. Security was so solid here that the station’s admins hadn’t even tried to make the researchers observe normal security protocols. Whiteboards lined the walls, markers and erasers hooked into the low-g racks along their bottom rims. She passed a board that was covered with quantum equations, another, half-erased already, that held only two clean and concise Bussard drive efficiency calculations, the kind Li had wrestled with in her OCS math courses. Rounding one corner, she almost knocked over a half-full coffee cup someone had left sitting on the floor. She heard footsteps, scrambled into the ceiling pipes just in time to watch a skinny bald man shuffle past in rumpled pajamas. She smiled and wished Cohen could see him.

  Alba was so big, its curve so slight, that it was easy to get disoriented. Especially easy for Li, just off the much smaller AMC Compson station, where the tight curve of the life-support ring was always rising in front of your feet, telling you where you were. Corridors branched off the backbone of the big hoop, running three or four hundred meters on either side. The fancy offices and conference rooms would be on the edges, in the relatively few rooms with side windows. The storage areas, the secured labs, and the deadwalled comps would be where Li was, in the narrow white world of the internal corridors.

  04:06:27.

  She’d made it. Here was the cross corridor Cohen had sent her to, and the fifth door. She scanned the room beyond the door. Empty. She picked the lock, using the code Cohen had already pulled off the system. Then she stepped through the door and crossed a mostly empty lab to a desktop terminal tucked behind an antiquated multichannel quantum ansible. She undid her suit’s hood and jacked in. This time there was no gatekeeper, no dark presence lurking behind the system. She opened the comm menu, trembling with relief. She dialed the number.

  And heard the unmistakable metallic click of the safety lifting off a neural disruptor.

  “Turn around,” said a hard voice. “Slowly. That is, if you want to be alive in ten seconds.”

  She froze, raised her hands carefully, and turned. The guard was five meters away—just out of kicking range. Everything about him was cold, hard, professional. Li’s hope died as soon as she looked at him. He gestured at her rifle. “Eject the charge clip.”

  She ejected it.

  “Now throw it.”

  She dropped it on the floor in front of her. The prongs of the disruptor jerked toward her chest. “Kick it over here.”

  She kicked it.

  “And the rifle.”

  She sent that skittering across the floor behind the charge clip—her last hope rattling away across grip-treated deckplating.

  “You alone?” he asked. Just as she opened her mouth to answer, the comp rang.

  They both jumped. The muzzle of the disruptor flicked toward her again. “Step away from the terminal,” he said over the second ring. Li took a deep breath, flexed her knees and rolled.

  She planned her roll to carry her behind the terminal’s condensate array, thinking the guard wouldn’t fire on her if it meant destroying the precious crystals inside it. She thought wrong.

  As she rolled, she heard the whip-crack shot of the disruptor and felt the charge hit her. This hit had nothing to do with the throbbing numbness that followed a shot from a little handheld disruptor, though. It felt like someone had taken a hot scalpel and carved a hand-sized chunk out of her back, leaving every severed nerve exposed and screaming.

  She scrambled sideways and crouched in the uncertain shelter of the ansible, struggling to force air into her still-convulsed lungs. A sour copper taste flooded her mouth; her teeth had clamped shut on the tip of her tongue when the charge hit.

  “Goddamn,” she heard the guard mutter. His footsteps echoed across the room, stopped beside the mainframe. She heard the hiss of indrawn breath as he looked at the screen. Then she realized the phone wasn’t ringing anymore. Cohen was in.

  If she could just distract the guard for a few moments, keep him from focusing on what was happening unseen inside the comp, maybe Cohen could get the data out. And then maybe he could get her out. If he decided to stick around and do it.

  She stood up and drew her Beretta in a single smooth movement. It was crazy, a crazy gun to be shooting off. But she was so deep inside the station, there was no real risk of a breach into hard vacuum. And it was all she had left to shoot with, anyway.

  The guard saw her drawing on him, then saw what she was drawing. The blood drained from his face as completely as if he’d already taken a heart shot. “I’ve got three men forty seconds away,” he said. “You’ll never get out of here. Don’t make it worse than it has to be.”

  She looked at his pale face, at the familiar uniform, and she came as close as she’d ever come to losing her nerve. I can’t shoot him, she thought. Not for this.

  But it turned out that she could.

  He rolled and came up shooting for her head, at killing range. She aimed with the hardwired precision of ceramsteel and squeezed off a single shot. He went down in a spray of blood before her conscious mind even understood she had shot him.

  Getting across the small room to where he lay was the hardest thing Li could ever remember doing. She’d fired on hardwired reflex, but as soon as the disruptor clattered out of his hands, the enemy trying to shoot her turned into what he really was: a UN grunt, bleeding out onto the same pale blue uniform she’d worn all her adult life. One of her own. A comrade. As she stumbled toward him, elbows still locked in firing position, she knew he’d seen her face. She was going to have to choose between killing him in cold blood and letting herself be identified.

  Luck and a clean shot saved her; he was dead by the time she reached him. She looked at him, hot blood welling up in her mouth. An image of Nguyen flashed through her mind, sitting behind her graceful desk, wearing silk, talking about need-to-know security and how she’d be on her own if the Alba raid went wrong. She spit, and it wasn’t only her blood that tasted bitter to her.

  04:09:50.

  She walked back across the room and jacked back in.

  ‹What’s going on?› Cohen asked. ‹You’re setting off alarms all through the system.›

  ‹Guard caught me.›

  ‹You’re okay?›

  She felt her still-frozen side. ‹Yes.›

  ‹Is he?›

  ‹No.›

  An infinitesimal pause. ‹Well, let’s get you out of there.›

  ‹Do we have the software?›

  ‹Yes. Now go!›

  ‹Which way?› A grid flashed onto her internals. Red pulses converged on the lab from three sides. The only gap in the circle—and it was closing even as she looked at it—was the long corridor back up to the hydroponics domes.


  ‹I don’t know if I can make it.›

  ‹You have to make it.›

  She jacked out and ran.

  04:11:01.

  She hit two guards at the first intersection and barreled past before they could even draw on her. The pressure suit’s sealed hood hid her face, and she didn’t plan to shoot anyone else. Not for this. Now it was only her flagging body and the clock she was fighting.

  She hit the first hydroponics dome at a tendon-snapping sprint and was through the open containment door and halfway across before she realized she had made it.

  The dome was separate from the main curve of the station—a self-contained, light-flooded globe of zero-g-manufactured viruflex. Li’s feet clattered on a narrow catwalk between stacked, dripping algae flats. High overhead, bright heating panels blazed on the station’s underbelly. Below her, clearly visible between the catwalk’s gridplate, curved a finger’s width of clear viruglass… and beyond that only bright, blinding sunlight.

  She looked back and saw her pursuers charging through the open pressure door behind her. Okay. Next dome. And she’d have to be quicker this time. She sprinted across the slick decking, skidding on a wet patch, wrenching herself upright, pushing her ligaments and tendons to near rupture. Another corridor, ribbed with heavy struts, armored with virusteel. At the end, like the lights of an oncoming train, more sunlight.

  She raced into the second dome, whirled to face her pursuers, leveled the Beretta at them. They skidded to a stop and threw themselves into the inadequate shelter of the corridor’s pressure struts. “What the hell are you doing?” one of them shouted.

  She jerked the gun at him. “I’d stay there if I were you.”

  He looked at her, and she knew he was thinking about whether she would shoot or not, whether he could talk her down or not. She saw his eyes flick toward her shoulder, note the blood on her sleeve, the partly repaired rent in her suit. She watched him consider what it meant to go into hard vac in an emergency pressure suit, even one that wasn’t compromised. She saw him think about suicide attacks. That thought, and the single heartbeat of indecision that accompanied it, gave her the time she needed. She stepped to the catwalk railing and let herself fall backwards over it like a diver flipping off the side of a landing boat.

  She’d planned to catch herself and hang from the walkway just long enough to get the first few critical shots off before she fell. But she’d forgotten about her shoulder. Her hand came up a fraction of a second too late. She felt the rail slip between her weakened fingers, just too far away to grab hold of.

  This would be the time to pop that emergency chute, she thought, and remembered an idiotic joke from jump school about a malfunctioning parachute. She aimed the Beretta between her feet and squeezed off two shots. As the shots hit the dome, the containment plates slammed down at both ends of the catwalk, locking the guards out. A spider’s web of fractures raced across the dome, but it held. Then the curve of cold, hard viruflex was rushing up at her and it was time to think about not getting her legs broken.

  She landed hard, but she kept her knees together, thank God. She even managed to hang on to the Beretta through her tuck and roll. As she hit the dome, she felt a ripple run through the viruflex like an earthquake. She caught her breath, twisted onto her stomach. For a fraction of a second, she lay there belly to space, blinking at the blazing infinity of stars reflected in the shattered viruflex. Then the dome blew and launched her into a blinding, glittering glass storm.

  She couldn’t orient herself in the spinning chaos of algae, metal, viruflex shards, so she let herself drift. She’d played her whole hand, maybe her last hand. Now it was up to Cohen to pull it out of the hole. If he could. If he was willing to risk it.

  ‹Suit breach,› her oracle told her. ‹Reestablish outside pressure in seventy seconds maximum.›

  She counted to seventy, but no ship showed up to rescue her. According to her scans, she and her debris field were the only things moving this side of the vast station.

  She opened her eyes. The glittering storm still whirled around her, but it had dispersed enough for her to see open space beyond it. Stars wheeled across the far horizon. The station rose and set in her visor as if it were orbiting her. She watched its gossamer wings flash in the perfect, blinding light of the void and thought about the life she’d lived.

  Then a door opened, blinding white in the black star field, and a silver line rippled out like the hand of God and caught her.

  COLLAPSE OF THE WAVE FUNCTION

  Imagine a card game. The dealer—let’s call her Life—shuffles her deck, which is a little larger than the usual fifty-two. She draws one card, shuffles again, draws again. We see one and only one card at each draw, and it is from this one card—one among an infinite number of undrawn cards—that we construct all our theories, all our notions of the universe.

  But what does the dealer see? If Coherence Theory is right, she sees every card. In fact, she does more than see them. She deals them. Every card. On every draw.

  Can we construct meaning from a universe in which anything is possible and everything that is possible actually happens? Of course we can. We do it every day. Consciousness, memory, causality are the architecture of that meaning—the architecture of the universe-as-we-see-it.

  The real question is: can we construct a theory that transcends the universe-as-we-see-it and tells us something about the universe-as-it-is? Can we look into the shuffle?

  —Tape 934.12. Physics 2004. Lecture 1 (H. Sharifi): Introduction to Quantum Gravity.

  Shantytown: 3.11.48.

  She woke up in dark water, cradled in the hot salt tears of a medtank.

  She imagined she was breathing though she knew she was hooked to an umbilical line, her lungs suffused with superoxygenated saline solution. She imagined she could feel smart bugs swarming over her organs and membranes though she knew she couldn’t.

  Her arm was mercifully silent for the first time since Metz, but a new pain had replaced it. It radiated from her backbrain and licked hotly at her eyes and temples.

  The intraface.

  She had bleary memories of Cohen explaining the process and the risks to her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was an equipment upgrade. Routine maintenance. You trusted the mechanics not to damage a pricey piece of technology and hoped they put you under for longer than the pain lasted. Start thinking more than that and you were well on your way to a career-ending wetware phobia.

  She slipped in and out of consciousness several more times before she really surfaced. Once the lights came on. Someone in a scrub suit peered down at her and spoke to another person outside her line of vision. She tried to ask where she was, but her lungs were full of saline, useless. Later there was prodding, splashing, the cold bite of air on her skin. Then a sense of being rolled under bright lights, of warm blankets and merciful quiet.

  * * *

  “Catherine,” Bella said, taking Li’s dripping hand in hers. “Are you back with us?”

  Only it wasn’t Bella behind the violet eyes. Bella had never looked at her that way. It was Cohen. Where were they? What had happened on Alba? Did she even remember?

  “Shantytown,” Cohen said, answering her unspoken questions. “Daahl’s safe house. Arkady and I managed to pick you up after you shot your way out of there. That was, er, characteristically unsubtle. And impressive.”

  “How long… how long was I under?”

  “Five days.” He put a hand to her brow, brushing her hair back. “You were dreaming. Do you remember?”

  She shook her head. Her skull was buzzing, humming, drowning out his words.

  “About a man. Dark. Thin. He had a blue scar on his face.” Cohen ran a finger down Bella’s smooth cheek.

  “My father,” Li said.

  “You killed your father?”

  “What?” Li asked, her heart suddenly hammering in her chest. “Are you crazy?”

  He blinked. “I saw it.”

  “You—that’s a
dream. A nightmare. It didn’t happen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because… I just do, that’s all. Sweet Jesus!” Li closed her eyes and tried to still the spinning of the room around her.

  “You love him,” Cohen said after a minute or two.

  “I don’t even remember him.”

  “Even so.”

  She shook her head again. The noise kept drumming on her ears. Like rainwater running down a spout. Like standing in a crowded room full of people speaking a foreign language.

  “So.” Cohen spoke slowly, as if he were thinking through a complex equation. “How do you keep straight what’s a dream and what’s not?”

  “Don’t you dream? I thought all sentients dreamed.”

  “Not like that.” He looked horrified. “If I think it, even when I’m asleep, it happened. Exactly the way I remember it. But your brain just… lied to you.”

  “Cohen,” Li asked, as the hum inside her head climbed to a higher, more urgent pitch, “how did you see that dream?”

  The violet eyes sparkled. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

  She started to answer, but the noise in her skull exploded, drowning out every thought but pain. She grabbed her head and curled into fetal position on the narrow bed. Red spots swam before her eyes, hemorrhaged, flooded her vision. The buzzing rose to a high wail. Her sight tunneled down to a pinprick of light, blacked out altogether. “Hush,” he said, bending over her.

  Slowly the wail trailed off to a low moan and her vision cleared. “What the hell was that?” she panted.

  “Traffic.” She heard him stand up and cross the room, heard running water, felt the cool touch of water as he wiped a damp cloth across her forehead.

  Traffic?

  “Comm traffic. Mine. You’re hearing me.”

  “No,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong, Cohen.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Korchow’s had me running tests all morning. Accessing your internals, running checks, startup subroutines, downloading data. Your commsys is a dinosaur, by the way. A disgrace. I ran a Schor check on your oracle workspace though. Properly. Which those idiots at Alba never do. That should help a bit.”