Spin 01 - Spin State (53 page)

“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.”

She didn’t answer.

“I can’t go back to before you,” he said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. But I can’t stand on the threshold waiting for you to make up your mind either. Not forever. I know that’s not what you want me to tell you, but it’s true. You’re breaking my heart. Or whatever you want to call it.” He looked away, and when he spoke again he sounded almost embarrassed. “And I think you’re throwing away something you shouldn’t.”

Li’s face felt cold, her hands and feet numb, as if all the blood had been drained from her body. The rain was falling harder now, pooling at the edges of the geodesic panels and sheeting down the dome’s curve like tears. She watched it fall and tried to pull something, some excuse for an answer out of the void inside her.

“I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself,” she said at last. “I could say the same to you.”

She leaned her head on her hands and looked down between her feet, measuring the drop to the floor. She felt dislocated, as if her brain and her emotions were half a step behind reality. “You’re asking for something I don’t have to give.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute.”

She turned and stared at him. “You think I’m stringing you along?”

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. No. I think you love me. In fact, I’m sure you do.” “You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself.”

“No. I just know you.”

She snorted. “Because you spend half your time spying on me.”

Ramirez’s lips twisted in a wry, self-deprecating smile that was all Cohen. “You know perfectly well that I wouldn’t do it if you actually minded. And if you didn’t love me at least a little, you damn well would mind. Q.E.D.”

“Q.E. what?”

“It’s Latin, you little heathen.”

“Yeah.” She put her cigarette to her lips. “The Romans put Latin on their sewer covers. It didn’t make their shit smell any sweeter.”

“You’d jump off a cliff before you let me win an argument, wouldn’t you?” Cohen said. But he was laughing. They both were, and she could sense the same desire in him that she felt: the urge to slip back out of this minefield and onto the safe ground of no-questions-asked friendship that they had learned to navigate so skillfully. For a moment she thought that was exactly what they were going to do. Then Cohen spoke. “You asked why I wanted the intraface. Two reasons. First reason. ALEF wanted it—”

“You told me they didn’t!”

He blinked. “There are such things as innocent misunderstandings, you know. Anyway, ALEF does want the intraface. Because of something you would have thought of long ago if you weren’t so busy suspecting my motives. You can bet Helen’s thought of it.”

Li looked at him, questioning.

“Feedback loops. When you lock an AI and a human at the hip, activating a feedback loop would kill the human. So the intraface overrides the statutory feedback loop. We weren’t sure of it until we actually got our hands on the psychware. But it’s true.” A dark fire sparked behind Ramirez’s eyes. “Right now, not even the General Assembly itself could shut me down.”

“My God,” Li whispered. “Unleashing the AIs. Even ALEF hasn’t dared to ask for that publicly. No wonder Nguyen was so set on keeping the work on the intraface off-grid.”

Cohen looked at her, measuring, hesitating. “We want to post the intraface schematics on FreeNet,” he said finally.

Li stared, surprise—or was it fear?—grabbing at her throat. “Do you have any idea of the chaos that would cause?” she said when she could find words again.

“Chaos,” Cohen said feelingly. “My God. Chaos for a democracy to put its money where its mouth is? Chaos to let a small and unusually well behaved minority go about our lives without worrying that some panicky human is going to pull the plug on us at any moment? If that causes chaos, it’s damn well not our problem. And even if it did … this is the first time in over a century I haven’t had a gun to my head.” He leaned forward. “It’s freedom, Catherine. Can you imagine not sharing it? What would you do in my place?”

I’d never be in your place,
Li thought.
You can’t get to that place by following orders and not asking questions
.
How did it come to the point where even Cohen has more guts than I do?

“What’s the second reason?” she asked.

At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. Then she felt a touch, as if he’d reached out and brushed his fingers along her skin. Except that it wasn’t skin he touched. It was her mind. Her.

“You know what it is,” he whispered, and the whisper echoed in her mind as if it were her own thought, her own words.

She shivered. “What do you want from me, Cohen?” “Everything. All of it.”

“Cohen—”

“You know that’s the real reason the intraface isn’t working, don’t you? It’s not your genetics or your internals or anything Korchow can fix. It’s that you don’t want it to work.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it? What happened this afternoon? You bolted like a spooked horse. You want to tell me what that was about?”

“You know what it was about,” she whispered.

“Of course I know. I know things you don’t even remember. Things you’re afraid to remember. When are you going to figure out that I’m the one person you don’t need to hide from?”

But that was a question she couldn’t even begin to answer.

“Look,” Cohen said wearily. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t think there’s much blame left to go around once my part in this has gone under the microscope. I have a stupendous ability to generate objective reasons for doing exactly what I want to do, and this time I surpassed myself. I was helping you. I was helping ALEF. I was helping everyone but myself. It was all so logical, so pristinely selfless. And what has all my ‘helping’ come to? Korchow blackmailing you to let me crawl into your soul and ferret out your deepest secrets.”

Li started to speak, but he barreled on, silencing her. “Was I manipulating you? Maybe. And yes, I was willing to back you into a corner. Or at least go along while Korchow did it. But when you accuse me of playing with you … well, you know it’s not that way. You hold every key to every door. And you didn’t need the intraface to open them. You could have done it years ago if you’d wanted to. It was all yours. All of it. It still is.”

Li turned away and looked out at the gray sky, the last flush of the sun sinking below a cloud-swept horizon. She held out her hand without looking around, and Cohen took it. She squeezed hard, until she felt the knuckles slide under the skin.

He laughed. “Say something. Or I’m going to start begging and embarrass both of us.” She turned to look at him.

“Oh God, Catherine, don’t cry. I can’t even stand to think about you crying.” But it was too late for that.

“Do you know how I paid for this?” She gestured at her face. “For the gene work?” He shook his head.

“My father’s life insurance money.”

“Oh. The dream.”

“Yes, the dream. He went down into the mine with Cartwright and killed himself. They faked it to look like a black-lung death, so I’d have the money to pay the chop shop. Did you know that? Did you sniff out that little secret?”

“No,” he said in a small, quiet voice.

“So you see that dream wasn’t a lie at all. I did kill him. Sure as if I’d put a gun to his head.” “He was dying anyway. I’ve seen the medical records.”

“Well, he wasn’t dying yet. He could have lived for years. He killed himself to give me that money. And I took it and left and never looked back. And you know what the worst thing is? I didn’t even go down there with him. My mother went. I didn’t. I’ve forgotten every other fucking thing about my childhood. You’d think I could forget that.”

“You were young. Children aren’t always strong. Who the hell is?”

“That’s not the point.” “Then what is the point?”

“That I don’t even care anymore. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel anything. I don’t remember enough to feel anything. I threw away my home, my family, every memory that makes a real person. And I have nothing to put in their place but fifteen years of lying and hiding.”