Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. “Feeling better now?”

  She had to think about it for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What does that mean? Am I adjusting?”

  “No. I just took the intraface off-line.”

  They looked at each other. “Oh,” Li said.

  Cohen stood up, patting her hand. “Don’t worry. You’re still barely conscious. We’ll get on top of it tomorrow.”

  * * *

  But they didn’t get on top of it the next day. Or the day after that. Korchow had set up a lab and medical facility in the safe house, and over the next three days, Li’s universe narrowed to two sterile rooms of monitoring equipment, her own cramped bunk, and the empty echoing dome that functioned as the safe house’s common room.

  The first time they brought the intraface on-line, she ended up curled on the floor, hands over her ears, screaming for someone—anyone—to turn it off. Cohen shut the link down so fast it took him half an hour to get himself straightened out.

  “I’ll go crazy,” Li said when she’d recovered enough to speak. “It’s like a hundred people fighting in my head.”

  “Forty-seven,” Cohen interjected. “Well, this week.”

  “What’s gone wrong?” Korchow asked Cohen. He didn’t even look at Li, just talked past her like she was a piece of tech.

  “Nothing,” Cohen answered, tapping a fingernail on the console in front of him. “It’s an organic software problem.”

  Cohen was shunting through Ramirez, and Li noticed again the cold fire in Leo’s dark eyes, the extra measure of decisiveness in his already-powerful movements. Those two I’d like to have next to me in a fight, she thought—and felt a sudden razor-sharp stab of grief for Kolodny.

  “Sharifi didn’t have these problems,” Korchow said, a threat lurking behind the words.

  Cohen shrugged. “She wouldn’t have, would she? She was interfacing with a simple field AI. And she wasn’t wired for anything but communications. Catherine’s a different beast entirely. You try to crowbar new programs into a military system and all bets are off. You knew that before we started.”

  “Well, what do we do about it?” Li asked.

  Cohen crossed the room more quickly than Li would have thought Ramirez could move. He leaned over and put a cool hand to her forehead. “You don’t do anything. You get your pulse rate down and go to bed. I’ll figure out where we go from here.”

  But the next session was worse. After three hours Li collapsed into a chair, pressing the heels of her hands into her burning eye sockets. “I can’t. I can’t do it again.”

  “Yes you can,” Korchow said. He was still being patient. “Why didn’t the pulse compression work?” he asked Cohen over her head.

  “If I knew, I’d be able to fix it.”

  “Does she need a new signal processor?”

  Li didn’t have to see Cohen to imagine his dismissive shrug.

  “Well, what then?”

  Cohen shook his head. “I have to think.”

  “Let’s check the settings and try it again.”

  Li wanted to say no. That she’d throw up if they tried again. That everything she’d eaten in the last two days had come up already, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. But she was too sick and too tired to say anything.

  It was Cohen who finally came up with the idea of the memory palace. He was shunting through Arkady when he explained it to her, and his excitement set the construct’s dark eyes glinting like freshly fired coal. “It’s an organic problem,” he explained. “We’re trying to integrate AI-scale parallel-processing nets with an organic system that was already obsolete the first time a person put pen to paper. So. If we can’t fight it, we work with it. We try one of the oldest tricks there is—Matteo Ricci’s trick. We build you a memory palace.” Arkady’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Or rather, we give you the keys to mine.”

  It took him twenty hours to put the keys together. Hours she slept through in a desperate attempt to hoard her energy for their final push. It was late morning of the third day after her awakening when she lay down on the couch Arkady had dragged into the lab for her, closed her eyes, jacked in, and found herself alone in a featureles white room.

  “You may have to hunt for the door a bit,” Cohen said at her shoulder. “I haven’t quite got that sorted out yet.” He had a smaller, thinner feeling than usual, she thought. And when she looked around, sure enough, there was Hyacinthe, shoes slung over his shoulders, standing a hair shorter than her in his socks. “The door,” he said insistently.

  She turned and saw a gleaming, intricately carved mahogany door. More of a window than a door, really; its sill was set into the wall at about knee level, and even Li had to duck her head to clear the lintel.

  “Go on,” Cohen said.

  It was so bright on the other side that it took a moment for her eyes to clear. She stood in a five-cornered courtyard. Arcades bright with mosaics surrounded her. Beyond the walls she glimpsed the knife-edged mountains of a dry country.

  She heard the sound of running water and felt cold spray on her face before she saw the fountain. The water poured from a shallow stone shelf as if rising from a spring and riffled down a long sloping stair that ran to the other end of the great courtyard. Li followed the water’s course down to a shadowy portico whose mosaics glinted like eyes in the occasional stray sunbeam. The watercourse ended in a narrow reflecting pool that emptied mysteriously into who knew what. Li stepped across the pool and walked along the portico, her heels clicking on the pavement. She came to a door and opened it.

  A riot of smell and color swept over her. She stood in a long, high-ceilinged hall paved with spiral patterns of marble tesserae. Bright flowers rocketed out of vases painted with rampant lions and romping, grinning dragons. Cabinets lined the walls, their polished glass fronts filled with books, fossils, photographs, playing cards. As she started down the hall, something moved in her peripheral vision. She jumped around—only to realize that one of the painted dragons was tapping its scaled feet and winking at her. She shook her head and snorted. Hyacinthe laughed.

  One side of the hall opened onto a high terrace, and when she looked out she could see the stony ramparts of a crusader’s castle digging their feet into the face of a mountainside that dropped away for miles above a long, green windswept valley. She stepped to the balustrade and leaned out over the void. The stone under her hand felt as hot as if it had been warming under the afternoon sun, but when she looked to the sky it seemed to be morning—the fresh, cool morning of a fall day.

  The heat was in the stone, she realized, part of the teeming life the place radiated. Was this all Cohen? The castle? The mountain? This whole world, wherever and whatever it was? She leaned out farther, squinting down the dizzying fall of buttress and mountain, trying to see where the active code stopped and the backdrop started. Instinctively, she dropped out of VR and into the numbers.

  Her head spun. The world twisted and rippled around her. Numbers came at her too fast for her to feel them as anything but blinding, paralyzing, dizzying pain. This was a system never designed for human interface, a system never designed at all except in its earliest, most distant beginnings. It wasn’t as alive as a human—the constant chant of the AI-civil-rights proponents—it was more alive. More alive, more complex, more changeable and contradictory. Just more. Cohen must have been insane to think she could exist, let alone function, in this maelstrom.

  She staggered and fell heavily against the railing. He put a hand under her elbow, steadying her. In the same instant, her brain clicked back into the VR interface as if someone had flipped a cutoff switch. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cohen said, and drew her back from the ledge.

  She stared at him for a moment, feeling like a child who had put her hand into the fire only to have an all-seeing adult pull it out miraculously unscathed.

  “You’re all right?” he asked.

  She nodded
and followed him back inside.

  The hall’s internal wall was broken by what seemed to be an infinitely receding line of doors. Cohen was still behind her, one hand on her hip, his mouth inches from her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said. She closed them.

  “What do you hear?”

  “Water.”

  “Good. That’s the fountain. See it?”

  She turned and looked back over her shoulder into the glittering shadows of the portico. “Yes.”

  “If you get lost, just follow the sound of the water and it will bring you back here. Now. How many doors do you see?”

  “I can’t…” She looked down the hall and saw that the illusion of infinity had been just that. “Forty… forty-eight?”

  “Good. Every door is a separate network with its own memory palace. Every room in each palace is a directory. Every object in the room is a datafile. Understand?”

  She nodded.

  “When you want to access a network, you find its proper door. When you want a directory, you find its proper room. When you want a datafile, you just open the drawer, the box, the cabinet, whatever it’s stored in. Just like the standard graphic user interface you’ve used in Corps archives… although I flatter myself that my aesthetic instincts put me a cut or two above the Corps designers. But bear in mind that you’ll still be dealing with a fully sentient AI every time you open one of those doors. And some of them are less… accessible… than the networks you’re familiar with. If you feel… nervous about anything, you can always leave. Always. Just come back here, shut the door behind you, and you’re alone again.”

  “Except for you.”

  He laughed. “You’re in the belly of the beast, my dear. I’m always here. I am here.”

  Li looked around. “Which door should I open?”

  “Whichever one you want.” He looked at her, Hyacinthe’s little boy’s body so slight he actually had to look up to meet her eyes. A small, secret smile slipped across his face. “Try the last door.”

  She walked down the hall, running her hand along the cool marble of the walls, the carved hardwood of the doorframes. Each door was labeled: network designations, Toffoli numbers, directory profiles. The last door, tucked into the farthest corner of the hall as if in an afterthought, had only a single word printed on it: Hyacinthe. She set her hand to the latch, and it opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her.

  A large, bright room, shot butter yellow with morning sunlight. On every wall, row on row of wooden drawers, each drawer with its own polished brass knob, none of them much more than big enough to fit a datacube. There were no labels or schematics on the drawers, but as Li touched them brief images of their contents flashed before her. “What is this place?” she whispered.

  “Me.” Cohen nudged an oriental rug straight with one toe. “Well, that’s the short answer anyway. The long answer would be that I thought this was a good place to start because Hyacinthe is the core network that you’re most familiar with.”

  “Do you actually use this place yourself?”

  “Of course. I shift back and forth between VR and the numbers like you do when you go instream. I won’t use VR much when I’m running under time pressure or handling heavy traffic. But when I have the time and processing space…”

  Li knew how this sort of VR construct worked. The drawers would contain stored data platformed on a nonsentient access program. Behind the walls, where she couldn’t see them without dropping into code, would be the bones of the system: the semisentient operating programs and the sentient net that these memories and datafiles belonged to. She looked down the length of the room and saw that it was one of many, all opening onto a cloistered garden. And every wall, every arcade, every paving stone held a memory. “Christ,” she whispered, “it’s huge.”

  “Infinite, actually,” Cohen called from the garden, where he was restaking a wind-tousled dahlia. “It’s a folded database.”

  Li stared, breathless. How could anyone—any ten people—have that many memories? What a weight of the past to be buried under. She walked through the rooms, tentatively, running her hands along the wood but not quite daring to open anything. The memories were grouped in rough categories, and as Li worked her way through the place she began to see hidden links, make telling connections. In the arcade along the fringe of the garden, a whole long wall was given over to a mosaic of books, films, paintings, each compressed into a tiny, emotion-laden point of color. Another room seemed to contain only memory upon memory of Earth, most of them collected in the final few years before the Evacuation. Then came a white, silent room that was entirely empty. As she penetrated deeper into the complex, she saw that most of the memories in the outer rooms were other people’s. Cohen’s own memories were concentrated in the sunny, quiet arcade along the garden’s southern exposure. And in the garden itself were people—all the people Cohen had ever known during his long, long life.

  “Come look at these,” Cohen said.

  She went.

  “All these are Hyacinthe.” He gestured at a narrow row of drawers just inside the door. “The person, not the network. They should be quite easy for you to access. Go ahead, have a look.”

  She opened the drawer he pointed to. It was empty. “What—?”

  He smiled. “What’s the closest sense to memory?”

  Li blinked. “Smell.”

  “So?”

  She bent over the drawer and sniffed. It smelled of cedar, and of the old-fashioned furniture wax that infused every piece of wood in Cohen’s realspace house. She had a ridiculous momentary image of one of his impeccably dressed French maids getting down on her immaculate knees to scrub at the floors and baseboards of the ethereal memory palace. Then she caught the smell underneath the other smells: the smell of the memory itself.

  The room around her disappeared. She stood on a steep scree slope, her face warmed by the golden sun of pre-Migration Earth. A glacier snaked away like a river below her. Behind her loomed a near-vertical wall of rock and ice whose very shadow was like a little death. She turned and craned her neck to look up the soaring granite column above her. This was the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, her oracle told her. The most spectacular route up the most beautiful rock face on the planet. Given the state of the glacier winding below her, this couldn’t be much after the turn of the twenty-first century. Italy lay south, on the other side of that colossus. To the west, the Mont Blanc glittered under a sky blue enough for the most cautious climber to gamble on.

  “Planning on helping?” someone said behind her.

  She turned and saw a woman crouched on the slope below her coiling a brightly colored climbing rope. She handled the rope expertly, without wasted motion, lean climber’s muscles bunching and flexing under her sunburned skin. Lucinda, Li thought. Her name is Lucinda.

  Lucinda looked up, her eyes (which Li somehow knew were blue) hidden behind mirrored glasses. Li saw her own doubled reflection staring back out of the lenses: a dark, narrow-faced greyhound of a man that could only be Hyacinthe Cohen himself.

  “I love you,” Li heard Hyacinthe saying in a voice that was kissing cousin to Cohen’s voice. And she shivered, because she knew that love. She felt the heat of it, remembered living it. Remembered not just this moment, but everything. The whole life of a man who had died two centuries ago.

  Lucinda just grinned up at her with the warmth of a shared joke, and said, “I know.”

  “Interesting,” Cohen said as the memory palace took shape around her again. “I wouldn’t have expected you’d see Cinda.”

  “You don’t see the same thing every time?”

  “As time passes, I become more and more inclined to sacrifice retrievability for… other values. Surprising what surfaces. As if what I bring in with me sets the direction. Most AIs, including some of my own associates, find it ridiculously inefficient. But then”—he smiled complacently—“I’m not most AIs.”

  She looked around. How far did this go on? And what, or who, wa
s lurking in all those other memory palaces?

  “What’s bothering you?”

  She hesitated. “It seems so… human.”

  “Well, in many ways Hyacinthe is human.”

  “You talk about him as if he weren’t you.”

  “He’s not all of me. But he is the first.”

  “So he controls… the others?”

  Cohen made a hairsplitting face. “ Controlsis too strong a word. I’d say he… mediates. I know you think I’m an inveterate navel-gazer, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never really thought much about it. Do you think about how you walk down the street? Or how your stomach works?”

  “It’s just that I can’t square it with…”

  “With what made you almost fall off the front porch before?” She thought he was waiting for her to smile at the front-porch quip, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Do you have to reconcile it?”

  She had no answer to that.

  “If it’s any comfort to you, most of the sentients in my shared net have the same reaction. They can’t get any perspective on the system without my mediating. It doesn’t mean I control them. They have their own ideas and opinions. But they’re guests here. And as it’s my house, they follow my rules. Mostly.”

  Li looked at him uncertainly, hesitating between the many questions jostling in her mind and not finding any she was willing to ask just yet. She wandered down the rows of drawers, opening a few of them, with Cohen always just behind her, watching, commenting. Slowly, without quite admitting to herself where she was going, she worked her way back toward the garden.

  It was a curious garden, wild, heavy with the smell of earth and roses. The near end was well kept up, planted in neatly tended French beds of herbs and flowers, almost formal compared to Cohen’s realspace jungle. But at the far end the ground and even parts of the palace itself had been overrun by a fierce sprawling thicket of wild roses.