Spin 01 - Spin State (12 page)

“No one needs to get hurt!” one of the guards called, his voice shaking with adrenaline. “Don’t do anything stupid!”

And then, for no reason Li could put her finger on, the crisis passed.

The strikers lowered their signs. The guards uncocked their rifles. The crowd broke up and straggled back along the rutted track to Shantytown. Li felt a spasm of relief. No one was going to die. Not today, anyway.

Three hours later,
the smell of the mine still on her hair and skin, Li stood in front of the security seal on the door of Sharifi’s quarters. The tape read her palm implant, dissolved, re-formed behind her as she stepped through.

Sharifi’s quarters were cramped, utilitarian, not much different from Li’s own room a few spokes away. The whole room was no wider than the corridor outside. Five steps took Li from the entrance to the door of the cramped bathroom. A shallow closet ran the length of the left wall. The right wall held a narrow bunk and a drop-down desk cluttered with datacubes and loose stacks of microfiche.

The closet held a few changes of practical-looking clothes, some of them still folded neatly in an Italianmade leather bag that must have cost more than Li made in a month. No family pictures. No personal items. No makeup. Except for the single dress suit hanging in the closet, it was hard to identify even the sex of the room’s last occupant. Whoever Sharifi had been, there was little trace of her here.

On an impulse, Li slipped the suit jacket on and looked curiously at herself in the mirror. It bound around the armpits; she carried a lot more muscle than Sharifi had. It was a little long. But then, Sharifi had been a good two centimeters taller than her—better nutrition and fewer cigarettes. Other than that, it fit. And the color looked good on her. No surprise there.

The smell was a surprise, though. Foreign. A touch of the other woman’s perfume, perhaps. And yet, beneath it, something unnervingly familiar. A memory surfaced, rolled over and sank again. A dog lunging and snarling at a passing miner. The warm glow of hate on its master’s face as he said,
You can smell them, can’t you?

Next to the closet door were the light and livewall controls and the viewport dimmer. Li cleared the floorport, looked down at the planet between her toes, and thought about how the sweep of UN politics and her own life had intersected there. How could they all still be fighting the same battle that was hacked into the burnt-out shells of the birthlabs, the forty-year-old artillery scars fading on the hillsides above Shantytown?

For decades the now-crumbling industrial park had turned out a continuous stream of constructs. Industrial-grade genesets specifically engineered for hard-rock mining, steel smelting, terraforming—all the hard, dangerous jobs that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Sharifi was tanked in those labs. Li herself had been tanked in one of the last production runs before the Riots. It was only the rawest, quirkiest chance that either of them got off-planet; Sharifi adopted by rich Ring-side abolitionists, Li farmed out to a childless miner’s family in one of the last abortive attempts to assimilate constructs into the general population.

The Riots hit eight months after Li was born—about the time Sharifi would have been in university. Shantytown became a battlefield, a maze of tunnels and barricaded cul-de-sacs in which a ragtag band of constructs held off the UN and the planetary militia … for a while, anyway.

A good number of posthumans had joined the rebels. Idealistic students from the university in Helena, back when there still was one. Miners who didn’t care who they shared Compson’s World with as long as it wasn’t the multiplanetaries. The Real IRA, though word on the street in Shantytown had always been that that was purely a money deal. When the dust cleared, Compson’s World was under martial law and the rebel constructs had escaped to a remote system that they renamed Gilead.

For the rest of Li’s life, the fight against the Syndicates dominated human politics. The breakaway constructs created the first fully syndicated genelines. KnowlesSyndicate was born, and then Motai and Bartov and the half dozen others whose names soon became words of fear throughout UN space. The Syndicates annexed one restless colony after another, until they held the whole long arc of the Periphery between Metz and Gilead. Antigenetic sentiment gained ground in the Assembly and on the streets of every UN planet. The word
construct
took on a new and sinister meaning, while the corporations that built the original constructs either closed up shop and abandoned them or went bankrupt in the spate of scandals that followed the breakaway. And every time another ex-colony went over to the Syndicates the UN’s antigenetic faction gained a few seats in the Assembly.

The Assembly passed the Zahn Act when Li was fourteen, placing all full genetics in UN space under direct Security Council supervision, barring them from the civil service and the military, revoking passports and imposing mandatory registration.

Li’s adoptive parents delayed, hoping the massive destruction of records during the Riots might mean she’d been forgotten. The delay paid off. By the time the registration bureaucracy caught up with them, Li’s mother had a signed and stamped death certificate that said her only daughter had died of vitamin A deficiency—and Li was already making a name for herself in the trenches of Gilead.

Meanwhile the Syndicates did … well, no one knew what they did. No subject of the Syndicates came to UN space. No UN citizen went to the Syndicates. No news escaped from the orbital stations that circled the remote Syndicate homeworlds. The Syndicates had no press and no visible government, unless you counted the shadowy point committees of the individual genelines. They had no political parties or political dissidents. No parents. No children. And, above all, no property.

Only the Syndicates owned things, and the things they owned were their constructs. They owned their minds, their bodies, their labor, everything. Each construct gave him- or herself completely, intimately— and, if the propaganda was to be believed, willingly. It was not enough to say that they didn’t want freedom. They didn’t believe in freedom. They had, as their political philosophers were endlessly proclaiming, evolved beyond it.

Only when Li met her first postbreakaway constructs in the interrogation rooms on Gilead did she begin to understand this. They seemed to belong to some other species, one that had nothing to do with humans. The first ten identical prisoners came in, and people commented on them, wondered about them, perhaps even felt sorry for them. Then the next hundred, the next thousand, the next three thousand arrived, and the wondering turned to fear and revulsion. Words failed in the face of such cold, impersonal, mass-produced perfection. Compassion failed. Belief in the universality of human nature failed. Everything failed.

By the time Li had spent a month on Gilead the only thing she knew for certain about her enemies was that they hated her. No.
Hate
wasn’t the right word. They despised her, just like they despised every construct who still worked for humans. They despised her the way wolves despise dogs.

And what about Sharifi? What about the woman who had left so little of herself in this room, who had brought an entire mine down on her head, who had promised to work miracles, then covered her tracks like a thief? What did Sharifi believe in?

Was she a dog or a wolf?

Li sighed, picked a fiche from one of the neat stacks, and ran her finger down it, scanning a paragraph at random:

As Park and others have noted, the parallel wave patterns documented
in situ
Bose-Einstein strata closely resemble quantum phenomena associated with human brain waves, and with the less well mapped quantum phenomena found in the associative interactions of poststructuralist-model Emergent artificial intelligences.

And, jotted in the fiche’s digital margin in Sharifi’s handwriting:

Re: dispersed/colonial nets in organics see Falter,
Principia Cybernetica and the Physiology of the Great Barrier Reef
, MIT Press, 2017.

She skimmed the next fiche.

Handwritten numbers and symbols scrolled up the page. Li knew enough to recognize Hilbert spaces, Poisson brackets, the long sinuous columns of Sharifi transforms, but that was about it. Not even her oracle could actually help her understand them.

It was Sharifi’s handwriting obviously—and as she watched it scroll up the screen Li remembered a joke Cohen had made the first time he saw her own handwriting. Something about how ex–Catholic school kids always wrote as if Sister Somebody was still standing over their desk with a ruler in hand. And he was right, of course. This was the careful, even, unmistakable script of someone who had survived years of penmanship classes, who had learned to write in poverty, on paper. With Sister Somebody standing over her desk.

Li had assumed Sharifi was adopted young, had grown up Ring-side, human in all but name. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had started her schooling on Compson’s World, with the nuns? Was there some connection on-planet that everyone had missed? Some deeply buried childhood loyalty that had turned her away from the job she came here to do?

Li shook her head, struck by a sudden urge to laugh. How did you explain Sharifi? She and Li were as genetically identical as twins—more identical, since the random errors of normal gestation had been assiduously caught and corrected by the birthlabs. They’d been tanked in the same lab. And unless Sharifi’s handwriting was lying, they’d learned their letters and numbers from the same battered secondhand textbooks, starting out each year by erasing the answers last year’s students had penciled in and submitting to the inevitable lecture about Respecting Church Property. Yet here Li stood, a miner’s kid who had struggled through her OCS physics requirement by the skin of her teeth, looking at the equations that had made Sharifi the most important scientist of her generation.

Li had seen her twice, both times from a distance. Sharifi had done a guest lecture stint at Alba when Li was taking her OCS course. The academically ungifted Li had carefully avoided taking any classes with her, but Sharifi was already notorious—a person you couldn’t help noticing.

Li had noticed her, all right. She had watched her. Secretly. Guiltily. Convinced that any overt show of interest in the other woman would betray her—or at the very least arouse dangerous suspicions. She’d wiped more of her own files that semester than in all her time at the front; she gave herself away every time she looked at Sharifi.

That semester had been before the Nobel Prize, though decades after the work that won the prize. Sharifi had been under consideration for a chair in quantum physics at Alba, but she hadn’t gotten it—for the obvious reason. There had been some kind of protest, Li remembered. A senior human professor threatened to resign unless Sharifi got tenure. In the end, he’d backed down, and Sharifi had withdrawn her candidacy and gone into some private-sector research job.

But it was a long way from Ring-side universities and research parks to digging up rocks at the bottom of a Bose-Einstein mine. What had Sharifi been doing in the Anaconda? What could have been worth the risk when she knew, as anyone raised on Compson’s World must know, what could happen?

Li plucked a leather-covered book off the desk and leafed through it. A flap inside the front cover held a clutter of business cards and, tucked inside a soft fold of leather meant to hold a notepad or a stylus, a dog-eared piece of cardstock that looked like it had spent a day or two in someone’s pocket. Li picked it up, noticing the unfamiliar feel of paper under her fingertips, and realized she’d seen something like it before. It was a shipping receipt, the kind of thing they gave you when you rented a locker or posted realspace mail on a freighter. The printed number on the front face would be the locker number, or maybe the drop number of the package itself. She turned the chit over, looking for the ship’s name, and found only an eight-pointed star knotted through the letter
M
.

She tucked the shipping recept back into the front flap and flipped through the notebook’s pages. There were half a dozen sheets of fiche, divided by tabs: lab notes, logs, addresses, appointments. She tapped the appointments page and got a polite, impersonal access-denied message. She tapped into the book’s operating platform, found the hash log, and stripped Sharifi’s password off it without breaking a computational sweat. She grinned, feeling irrationally better about the whole investigation; brilliant or not, Sharifi had at least been human enough to commit the most laughably elementary security gaffes. Maybe Li really could catch up to her.

She scanned the daily entries, found the usual appointments and reminders, scattered jottings of notes, names, streamspace coordinates. One page held a list of names, none of them familiar. Another held a long, close-written paragraph that appeared to be a transcription of a conversation about data transfer protocols with a person whose name Sharifi had, perhaps carelessly, perhaps on purpose, omitted.

Li tapped up the page that matched the day of Sharifi’s death. Nothing. She flipped back one day and saw the letter
B
written in the 7P .M . slot. Too late for a work appointment. Dinner?

Just above it Sharifi had scrawled a set of Ring-side spin coordinates, and beside them the name
Gilly
and two words that raised Li’s hackles:
Life Insurance
.

The livewall in Sharifi’s quarters turned out to be in the last place any rational person would consider putting it: on the bathroom door. Hadn’t the station designers ever heard of reading on the john? Or was this some devious, petty-minded plot to prevent time-wasting by station employees?

Li flicked the wall into life, tapped up a streamspace directory, and zoomed in on the blazing quarter arc of the Zona Libre.

The coordinates took her to the NowNet Science Publishing Division, S.A., on the 438th floor of the Pan-American Building, Avenida de las Américas.
Must have a nice view
, Li thought.
And the monthly rent must be enough to pay off the national debts of half the planets on the Periphery.