Spin 01 - Spin State (16 page)

“Well, it wasn’t Alba,” Li said. “That much I can tell you.” She peered at the scan, comparing it to her own brain scans taken after her last upgrade, trying to see which of Sharifi’s brain segments were most densely wired. Something about Sharifi’s system seemed off somehow. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “What’s it all wired into? What’s it
for
?”

“Communications,” Sharpe said. “All communications.” He pointed. “Look. Here. Here. Where the dark areas are, and the contrast. If we looked at a scan of a typical cybernetic implant system—yours for example—we would see a much more even distribution of filaments. Some concentration in the motor skills areas. A node somewhere in here for the oracle that it’s all platformed on. Also a high concentration of filament in the speech, hearing, and visual centers. In other words, your spinfeeds, your VR interfaces, your communications systems. Sharifi’s implant is totally different. No oracle, no operating platform, no relays. Just filament. And it’s concentrated almost exclusively in the speech, sight, and hearing centers.”

“So it’s just a fancy net access web?” Li asked, disappointed.

“Not quite.” Sharpe pursed his lips and stepped away from the scanner, pulling his gloves off. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of shunt.”

“A shunt?” Li shook her head, fighting away a brief, untethered image of Kolodny falling. “That’s crazy. Why would someone like Sharifi be wired for a shunt? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”

Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.

“I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”

“What kind of system?”

“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”

Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.

“Emergent–human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown working toward it.”

“So you’re saying Sharifi was carrying around black-market tech.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the AI on the other end of this wire wasn’t an Emergent.” Sharpe shrugged. “Still, that’s my best guess about what this is. I still think she was wired for some kind of shared operations with an Emergent.”

“Not too many of those around, Sharpe.” “No, there aren’t.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “The relay station’s field AI?”

Li felt the cold of the autopsy room settle into her bones. What the hell had Sharifi been doing? And who would have let her play that kind of risky game with a field AI when lives depended on every quantum-transport operation? “I’d sure like to see the psychware they were running on that implant,” she said.

“It won’t be in there. Not nearly enough memory. It’ll have been externalized too.” “And the field AI is conveniently off-line, isn’t it?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

They both stared at the screen for a moment without speaking.

“Well,” Sharpe asked. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Take it out,” Li said.

* * *

Most of Li’s encounters with quantum-corrected replication happened when she was sedated into near coma. Cryotechnology made faster-than-light transport, otherwise a potentially lethal ordeal, survivable. And it usually left Li with nothing more significant than a stuffy nose and wandering joint pain.

Biotech extraction was different, though. It was controlled, observable, reassuringly domesticated. A surgical parlor trick. This one took a while. Sharpe didn’t have the necessary information to preset his equipment; he had to fiddle around trying to nail the implant’s quantum signature. But after a long series of finicky adjustments, he established and verified entanglement, uploaded the primary spinstream, reintegrated the entangled data, waited while the comp ran its nested correction protocols. When his terminal told them it was
completing the Sharifi transform
they both laughed nervously.

Five minutes later, Li held a small package in the palm of her hand: a neatly rolled coil of white ceramsteel filament and a few gel-encased microrelays, all flash-irradiated and wrapped in sterile surgical film.

“It’s so small,” she said.

“Two kilometers,” Sharpe said. “That’s the length of filament, measured end to end, in the average fullbody net.”

Li weighed the slender coil in her hand. Why had Sharifi needed to install illegal wetware? And, more troubling, where had she gotten it? “Do you need to keep this?” she asked Sharpe.

“I’d rather.”

“Fine.” She handed it to him. “Just make sure it’s here if I need to look at it again.”

“Can I ask you something?” Sharpe said as she reached the door. His voice sounded strained. “Unofficially?”

Li turned. “Of course.”

“Did you know her?”

“Who? Sharifi?”

Sharpe nodded.

“Not really. I saw her a couple of times. That’s all.”

“I knew her,” Sharpe said. He picked up a scalpel and began fidgeting with it, screwing and unscrewing the threaded fastener that held blade to handle. “I liked her. She was … honest.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so Li waited, watching him fidget.

“Anyway,” he said, flushing, “that’s not the point. The point is, I was given … instructions. After her death. Do those instructions still stand?”

Li stared at him, wondering what kind of political minefield she’d stumbled into. “What are you asking me?”

Sharpe searched her face, eyebrows knit. “Has anyone explained to you how the coroner’s system works in St. Johns?”

Li had to think for a minute before she realized that St. Johns was the actual map name of Shantytown. She shook her head.

“When someone dies in the town limits, I have full authority to conduct any investigations needed to declare a cause of death and close the inquiry. When someone dies on AMC property, the case goes to AMC management. Unless AMC asks me to do an autopsy, I just hold the body pending disposal or, more rarely, shipment. There’s still a death certificate, of course. But Haas fills it out. I don’t do much more than rubber-stamp it.”

“Go on,” Li said. Sharpe was still playing with the scalpel, looking to Li like he was about to slice a fingertip off every time he turned it over.

“In practice, AMC usually has me autopsy everyone who dies in the mine. But not this time. This time I got a bundle of automatic authorizations, all signed by Haas. Except for two: Voyt and Sharifi. On those I got completed death certificates, signed them, and sent them back upstairs.”

“And now you want to do the autopsies.” “Wouldn’t you?”

“Why?”

“If you don’t want to tread on Haas’s toes …” “It’s not Haas’s toes I’m worried about,” Li said.

A voice somewhere near the pit of her stomach whispered something eminently sensible about looking before she leapt. She squashed it.

“Fine,” she said. “Do your autopsies. But no one else sees the results until I sign off on them. Just so I know how low I have to duck if I want to keep my head attached.”

Sharpe looked at her soberly. “I appreciate this.”

“Don’t mention it,” Li said—and her next words were only half-joking. “I’m just giving you enough rope to hang me with.”

She should have gone
straight back to the heliport when she left the hospital and caught the next shuttle station-side. But she didn’t. Without letting herself think about where she was going she turned left instead of right at the end of Hospital Street and started working her way along the winding, badly paved streets toward the old section of Shantytown.

Most of Shantytown had been thrown up in the first frenzy of the Bose-Einstein Rush. There’d been little money, less time, no planning, and from most angles the town looked like a sprawling collection of modular hab units that someone had dropped by accident and forgotten to come back for. It was only when you got deep into the old town that you began to see the bones of the place, the sealed biopods of the original colony. Few of the pods could still maintain an atmosphere, but the modern town had grown around their radiating spokes like skin grafts encrusting surgical mesh. The result was a warren of narrow alleys and windowless courtyards through which a native could travel for miles without ever seeing sky or showing up on the orbital surveillance grid.

The Riots had broken out here a few months after Li was born, and the UN’s collective memory had never recovered.
Shantytown
was still a code word for violence, treason, terrorism. And it still had the highest percentage of constructs of any city in UN space. Walking its streets again, Li had a sudden memory of her OCS course eight years ago. Of her tangled feelings of shame and disgust when she recognized the urban warfare lab as an exact streamspace replica of old Shantytown’s interlocking tunnels and courtyards. When she recognized the targets’ faces as her own face.

She found the chapel without ever having quite admitted to herself that she was looking for it. She stood before the gate, set her hand on it, pushed it open. As she stepped into the little churchyard she crossed herself.

Our Lady of the Deep stood just where she remembered it: dug into the steep bluff where the prehistoric lake bed Shantytown was built on met the hills that led up to the birthlabs and bootleg mines. The door was open. Li glanced in as she passed, saw the dim cavern of the nave and, like daylight at the end of a mine tunnel, the muted milk white gleam of the Mary Stone.

There was a tawdriness about the churchyard that didn’t show up in her childhood memories. The rectory’s peeling whitewash, the cheap insulation foam packed around badly fitted windows, the toobright colors of artificial flowers, the mottled laminate of headstones peeling under a chemical rain they had never been designed to stand up to. It was almost enough to distract her from the really startling thing about the churchyard: how young everyone in it was.

She walked along the rows looking at birth and death dates. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Twenty-four. Eighteen. And that wasn’t even counting the babies’ graves, half grown over by green-gray clumps of oxygen-producing algae.

She stumbled on the grave she was looking for by accident—and as soon as she saw it she knew that, whatever she’d thought, whatever she’d told herself, she hadn’t been ready to see it. She hadn’t really believed in it, any more than she believed, really, that her father had been dead all these years.

But there it was. Gil Perkins. And the dates, below the name. He’d been thirty-six when he died. Which meant that the old, worn-down, coal-scarred father of her childhood had been younger than she was now.

“Can I help you?” a man’s voice said behind her. She spun around, chest heaving.

A priest. Young. Athletic-looking. Not local. He looked at her with bright-eyed interest. He had an intelligent, sensitive face, the face of a bright young man who believed that people were basically good. He was probably two or three years out of seminary, getting his first taste of poverty, feeling himself on the front lines here, fighting the good fight. Li knew the type. They did a lot of good, but they were in Compson’s World, not of it. They came for a year, or two, or ten, but eventually they always went back to the Helena spaceport and caught a jumpship home. A decision for which Li was in no position to blame them.

“I—was just taking a walk,” she said. “Just looking.”

“Someone you knew?”

“What? Oh … yes. A little.”

“Fifteen years, and he still gets visitors. He must have been the kind of man people remember.” “There was nothing special about him,” Li said.

The priest smiled. “If you say so.”

She looked at his thin, clever, honest face. He was no one she remembered. No one who would know her or would even have heard of her. He was younger than her, for Christ’s sake. Why not take a chance?

“So who visits him?” she asked casually.

“A Mrs… . Oh, I can’t remember her name. She moved to another parish before I got here. Blond.” He grinned. “Irish as green grass and tinkers’ ponies. Tall. About my height.” Then he held up his right hand, and Li knew what he was going to say before he spoke. “Missing part of a finger.”

“Left it in Londonderry,” Li murmured. The words came out in an accent she’d spent the last decade weeding out of her speech. She felt as if someone else had spoken them. Someone whose face she should remember.

“Really? She was a Provo? No shit.” The priest shook his head. “Stubborn buggers. You’d think the UN would just give up and let them stay there.”

“You’d think.”

Li looked back at the headstone. It had started to drizzle, and the rain speckled the laminate face of the marker, spreading across the pale surface like ink stains. She shivered and pulled her collar closer in against her neck.

“I could give her your name,” the priest said. “If you want to talk to her.”

Li caught her breath. “No. No, I don’t think so.” She swallowed, her heart hammering. “I doubt she’d even remember me. And what’s the point of stirring up old memories? People have to get on with life sometime.”