Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  She eyed the thorny tangle over the heads of the neatly pruned dahlia beds. It looked as if some feral and not entirely friendly presence had established a beachhead in that corner of the garden and was only biding its time before it flung out its thorny suckers to swallow the whole cloister. “You ought to rip those out,” she said. “They’re taking over everything.”

  “I know.” Cohen smiled wryly. “They’re weeds, really. And they have the most vicious thorns. The thing is, I like them.”

  Li shrugged. “It’s your garden.”

  “So it is,” Cohen said. He strolled down toward the wild end of the garden and settled himself on a low bench already half-engulfed by a particularly predatory moss rose.

  Li circled the garden, poking into the boxes and cabinets that lined the cloister. She found memories of half a dozen people she knew: Nguyen; Kolodny; a few AIs she’d met on Corps missions. Even Sharifi. But not the one person she was looking for.

  “Can’t find it?” Cohen asked. She looked over and saw he was laughing at her.

  “Who says I’m looking for anything?”

  “Have a rose,” he said.

  He plucked a moss-petaled bloom off the bramble behind him and held it out to her. She took it from him —but as she wrapped her fingers around the stem it pricked her.

  “Christ!” She looked at her finger and saw blood welling up from half a dozen punctures.

  “It’s a real rose,” Cohen said. He bent and handed it to her again, holding it gingerly. “Real roses have thorns. That’s why they smell so sweet.”

  She put it to her nose, smelling it. And realized that the rose itself was a memory. A memory of her.

  There she was six years ago. Younger, thinner, but her. This was not Li as she knew herself, though; it was what Cohen remembered. The young CO he had locked horns with during their first tense mission together. A dark whirlwind of a woman, hard, driving, utterly unyielding. Not a person Li herself could imagine liking. Not a person, she realized with a jolt, that Cohen had liked much.

  “Was I really so awful?” she asked.

  “Just a little thorny.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be. As I recall, you pricked my ego not a little.” He grinned. “A certain speech about not having the patience to work with dilettantes comes to mind.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “My dear, it was well worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching a twenty-five-year-old who never finished high school look down her nose at me.”

  “It’s not like I was the first.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s simple bigotry, often as not. You despised me personally. I respected that.”

  Something in his smile made her drop her eyes and turn away. She brushed her finger over the white velvet skin of a petal, then bent her head and put the blossom to her nose again.

  Another memory. Her again, leaning back against the door of an officers’ flop on Alba with a knowing smirk on her face. It was the evening of the first and only night they’d spent together. She remembered standing there. She remembered looking across the room into Roland’s golden eyes, trying to play it cool, wondering what the hell Cohen even saw in her, still half-convinced it was all an elaborate joke at her expense.

  But now she was seeing it through Cohen’s eyes. She felt Roland’s knees tremble and his breath quicken. And she felt something else behind the organic interface, something cleaner, sharper, truer. As if an infinitely complex mechanism had come into alignment, bolts sliding, tumblers clicking and turning over, locking in on her looking back at him, wanting him, making him real. On the dizzying, exhilarating, precisely calculated certainty that nothing, once she touched him, would ever be the same again.

  Christ, she thought. What did I do to him? Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?

  But she had known how he felt, hadn’t she? Why else had she been so unbearably, unforgivably cruel to him?

  She jerked back into the present and saw Cohen sitting on the bench looking up at her, holding his breath like a child who still believed you could make dreams come true just by wanting them hard enough. It was the same look she remembered from that night—and God help her if some awful part of her didn’t still want to slap it off his face.

  He blinked, and her stomach clenched with shame as she realized he’d caught the edge of that thought.

  “You’re a very confused person,” he said.

  “It took you six years and a fortune in wetware to figure that out?”

  “No. It took me five minutes.” He smiled. “It just didn’t seem polite to mention it before now.”

  Something tickled at the back of her mind like the soft trailing ends of fingers. She realized she’d been feeling those fingers for a while. All the time she’d been exploring the sun-drenched garden of Hyacinthe’s memory palace, there had been a little cat-footed thief prowling through the dark passages of her own subconscious, probing her memories, weighing her responses, taking the measure of her own feelings. A little sock-footed soccer-shorts-wearing thief is more like it, she thought.

  “I won’t have you sneaking around inside my head,” she told him. “I won’t have your prying.”

  “Prying? And what do you think you’re doing here?”

  “That’s different. I have to be here. It’s not personal.”

  “Isn’t it?” He bit his lip and looked up at her through Hyacinthe’s dark lashes. “This is as personal as it gets, Catherine. And it doesn’t go one way. The link won’t work until you accept that.”

  “Then I guess it won’t work,” she said.

  She turned away, meaning to leave—and found herself tangled in one of the long suckers that arched out from the rose thicket. “God dammit!” she muttered, trying to pull it off her and only managing to gouge the razor-sharp thorns into her arm through the thin fabric of her shirtsleeve.

  That was when she smelled Gilead.

  What had Cohen said about finding in the memory palace what you brought to it? This was one memory she’d certainly brought in with her. A copy of her own UNSC datafile.

  It was Gilead, sharp and real as if it were happening all over again. There was the mud, the filth, the constant, stomach-wrenching, soul-killing fear. There were the faces of dead friends she no longer remembered grieving for. There were the bodies of soldiers—and not only soldiers, God help her—that she hadn’t until this very moment remembered killing.

  Because this wasn’t the edited spinfeed stored in her datafiles. It was the Gilead of her fears and nightmares and jump-dreams. It was the real Gilead: the original realtime feed that she’d recorded all those years ago. Somehow Cohen had accessed a file Li herself wasn’t cleared to look at, a file that should have been lying dormant in the deadwalled UNSC headquarters archives. And this file was different from the official memory. Different in ways she didn’t want to think about.

  When she saw Korchow’s young, bloodied face looking up at her, when she heard herself saying those words he’d reminded her of back in the cluttered shadows of his antique shop, she broke and ran.

  Shantytown: 5.11.48.

  Has it occurred to you that this might not work?” Cohen asked Korchow a moment later. Li slumped in a chair, drenched in nightmare sweat, unwilling even to look at him.

  “Try again.”

  “God, look at her, Korchow. She’s had it.”

  “One more time.”

  “You keep pushing, she’ll break.”

  “She’s strong enough.”

  “You really are a fool, aren’t you?”

  Korchow didn’t answer. After a moment Li heard the rustle of cloth and the sound of Cohen’s chair scraping against the floor as he stood up. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and left.

  “Why do you think he protects you?” Korchow asked.

  “Guilt,” Li said without looking up. “Or he just feels like it. How the hell should I know?”

  “Do you think a machine can feel guilt?”
Korchow asked. “I would have said no.” Li didn’t answer.

  “I begin to wonder if you two are holding out on me,” Korchow murmured. “And when I ask myself why you would do such a thing, I find I can imagine far too many reasons.”

  “I’m not holding out on you, and you damn well know it.”

  “Then why is it that you can’t seem to manage this relatively simple task?”

  “I don’t know,” Li whispered, her head still in her hands. “Maybe it can’t be done.”

  “Sharifi did it.”

  “I’m not Sharifi.”

  Korchow tapped through a few screens on the console in front of him. Just when Li thought their conversation had come to an end, he spoke again. “I talked to Cartwright this morning. The UN has sent in strikebreaking troops. We’re running out of time.”

  Li looked up at him dully.

  “I’m sure you understand what failure will mean, for you most of all.”

  “I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet. The last thing she saw as she walked out was Korchow’s narrow stare.

  * * *

  She stepped to the street door, opened it and looked out into the alley. It was raining again, hard enough to set the loose roof plates of the nearby houses rattling.

  Korchow hadn’t actually locked her in since Alba, but there was an unspoken agreement that no one would create unnecessary risks of discovery. And where was there to go anyway? Certainly nowhere worth braving the stinging chemical rain to get to. She closed the door, turned back down the hall, and walked into the open space of the geodesic dome.

  Standing under the dome was almost like being outside; it was the one place in the safe house where she didn’t feel cramped and constricted. Today it felt like stepping into an aquarium. Rain pattered on condensation-loaded panels. The evening light, filtered through wet viruflex, took on a soft, velvety, underwater quality. Li rubbed her eyes, stretched, sighed.

  “Enter the love of my life, stage left,” said a voice from somewhere high overhead. She looked up and saw Ramirez’s long legs dangling from the catwalk that circled the upper flank of the dome. “Come sit with me,” Cohen said.

  There was a ladder bolted into the side panels of the dome, she realized. The rungs started out vertical then curved back along the flank of the dome until they finally inverted completely a dozen meters above Cohen’s head. The ladder was meant to be fitted with a climbing rig, but whatever equipment came with it had long ago been cannibalized and put to use somewhere else in Shantytown. How Cohen had gotten up there she didn’t want to think. He probably had only the most theoretical understanding of what happened to people who fell from that kind of height. “I don’t know if I can make it up there,” she said.

  “Of course you can. A little exercise will improve your outlook on life.”

  She snorted. “You sound like Korchow.”

  “Heaven forfend!”

  But he was right, of course. The climb did make her feel better. By the time she threaded her legs through the catwalk railing and sat down next to him, she felt like a kid in a tree house.

  “How long do you think it would take for them to find us if we just stayed here?” she asked.

  “I’m willing to try it if you are,” Cohen said. He pulled out a cellophane-wrapped flat of imported cigarettes. “Want one?”

  “I thought Leo didn’t smoke.”

  “He doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean I can’t sit next to you while you smoke it.”

  “What do you want me to do, blow in your face?”

  “Don’t tease.”

  She blew a smoke ring in his direction. “Thanks for not telling Korchow about…”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t think you’d want me to.”

  “He thinks we’re holding out on him.”

  Cohen drew in a little breath and glanced at her. “He told you that?”

  “After you left.”

  He started to speak. Then he stopped and Li could see his face shut down as he pushed back some thought he wasn’t willing to share with her.

  “You expected the intraface to just work?” she asked, wondering what he’d been about to say. “What did you actually think would happen?”

  “I thought it would be like associating with another AI. You set the exchange protocols, open your files, and they can more or less handle their own adjustment process.” He shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought it through.”

  She glanced over and saw only Ramirez’s handsome profile, the glossy forelock falling over his brow. “Not thinking things through ahead of time isn’t like you,” she said.

  “Oh, but it is. You’d be amazed at how stupid I can be when it really matters.” He leaned forward against the railing, rested his head on his folded arms, and looked at her. “When you’re running at eight billion operations per picosecond, it’s astonishing how fast a bad judgment call can snowball. Let alone the real idiocies.”

  She smoked in silence for a while, letting the ash fall off the tip of her cigarette and spiral down toward the distant floor like coal-colored snowflakes.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “In what sense?”

  “Come on, Cohen. I don’t have the energy for your games right now.”

  “It’s not a game with you. It never has been.”

  She turned to find him still staring at her, Ramirez’s eyes intent and motionless. Why had she never noticed how extraordinarily white the whites of his eyes were, how sharp and fine the line between light and dark was where the white met the iris?

  The dome fell silent, except for the whoosh of filtered air pushing through the antiquated life-support system and the faint crackle of the ash burning down on Li’s cigarette.

  She swung her feet out over the void, and one foot struck Ramirez’s. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” Cohen said.

  She moved her legs a little away from his.

  “I was thinking about Alba,” he said after a moment. “You passed out before we got you inside. Well, before I got you inside. I was so terrified we’d be too late, I snatched Arkady and did everything myself. Poor kid. He was very gracious about it. Still, it looked tight there for a while. Really tight. I thought we’d all had it.”

  He lit a cigarette, put it to his lips—and then made a frustrated face and put it out on the railing.

  “That sort of moment puts you in a regretful mood,” he said. “Makes you wonder if you’ve wasted time.”

  “You can’t let yourself think that way,” Li told him. “You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “Oh, I’m years past worrying about that, I assure you.”

  “What do you mean?” Li asked, as the oddness of what Cohen had said about Alba struck her. “What do you mean you thought we’d had it? You can’t… you have backups, don’t you?”

  “In theory.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Of course I have backups. But so far, only four full sentients have actually had their critical systems go down. None of the backups worked for any of them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Li asked, cringing at the self-justifying edge in her voice. “Why didn’t I know about it? I’ve never heard of an AI dying.”

  “It’s not dying exactly. They just… they’re not themselves anymore. There’s no there there. If that makes any sense.”

  “I would never have asked for your help if I’d known that.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you didn’t know, isn’t it?”

  “There’s nothing good about it, Cohen.”

  He twitched impatiently. “Don’t waste my time wallowing in guilt because I’m doing what I want to do. It’s beneath you.”

  He’d left the pack of cigarettes lying on the grating between them, and Li pulled out a second one, lit it, and took a shaky drag. “What about the mine?” she asked, knowing already what the answer would be. “What happens when we have
to get you into the glory hole?”

  “Same thing. I download the criticals and anything else we can store off-line. That’s what Ramirez is setting up.”

  “Sweet Mary,” Li said. “I know what you told Korchow but… you’re not really going to download everything onto some home-brewed Freetown system, are you?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “What the hell for? Why trust them? How do you know they won’t…” She couldn’t finish the thought.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes locked on her face. “But I’m the only one who can give them what they’re looking for. And as long as that’s the case, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to trust them. Besides.” He smiled. “I like their plans. They’re ambitious and idealistic.”

  “They’re crazy!”

  “That’s not so obvious,” Cohen said, his voice as level as if he weren’t talking about the people who were going to hold his life in their hands a few days from now. “There’s no arguing with the fact that someone or something has taken over the field AI. And Cartwright’s convinced me that he has, if not total control, at least significant influence over whoever or whatever it is.”

  “What if it’s the Consortium controlling the field AI, Cohen? They won’t cut you any slack, you’ve told me as much.”

  “It’s not them,” Cohen said. He sounded bemused, dreamy. “I felt it when Cartwright was showing me what he’s done. It’s… I don’t know what it is. But I want to know.” He shook off whatever daydream had caught him. “Besides, Leo’s bunch is doing good work. They’re building their network to last. And to work in the mine, too. I’ve never seen so much sheathing go into one system.”

  “How much sheathing they’re using isn’t the point—”

  “No, it’s not. The point is what I was trying to tell you before your little crisis of conscience. When you were out there and I didn’t think we were going to get to you in time, I realized I might wake up in a few days and not know anything about what had happened except that we left for Alba together… and you never came back. And I’ll tell you, Catherine, though God knows I ought to know better by now than to even think about telling you such things, it made me not want to wake up.”