Spin 01 - Spin State (42 page)

She shut the files, checked that they had downloaded properly, took the datacube out of her pocket, and flushed it down the toilet.

When she walked back into the front room, three moderately pretty girls were huddled halfway down the bar, eyeing Korchow’s man like crows parceling up a particularly fresh piece of carrion. She stepped up and took the seat beside him before the girls could initiate active stalking.

“What’s your name?” she asked. As she spoke, she could feel three resentful stares boring into her back like virusteel-sheathed augers.

Korchow’s man turned sad velvet brown eyes on her and answered as seriously as if she had asked a question that the fate of worlds turned on. “Arkady,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” He had the same curiously formal turn of phrase Bella had, the same air of believing that life was a serious and precarious business and not to be laughed at.

“Buy you a drink?” Li asked.

They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.

“Well?” he said finally.

Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.” “Do I?”

“Maybe too much.”

He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”

A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.” “Have you asked him?”

“Not yet.”

Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw him.

“We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”

“That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.

The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her?
You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.

They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.

She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”

“You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.” “And?”

“And that’s all you need to know.”

“Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her. “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

“My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down. “Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”

Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.

“Not what. Who.”

Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.

And she had done it for Bella.

* * *

Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.

A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.

When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.

The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.

The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.

Li was in a white-hot rage
by the time she got back to the station.

“Anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked Bella when she finally tracked her down.

They stood in Haas’s quarters, Bella backed up against the long sleek sofa and shrinking away from Li.

“She was going to take me with her,” Bella whispered, unshed tears glittering in her eyes like polished condensate. “To the Ring. She already had the tickets.”

“And you never asked how she was going to square things with MotaiSyndicate?” “I told you. She was going to buy out my contract.”

“Even Sharifi didn’t have that kind of money. She cut a deal with Korchow. And you were the gobetween. Did they expect her to fall in love with you, or was that just a windfall?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bella whispered, and now she really was crying.

“Wasn’t it?” Li asked. “Has anything you’ve told me been true, or has it all come from Korchow?” “I never lied to you,” Bella sobbed, just as Li’s comm icon flared in her peripheral vision. “Christ!” Li muttered, and shut the icon off.

“She wanted to do it,” Bella insisted. “It wasn’t just for me. It was for the principle.” “It’s not Sharifi’s motives I’m questioning.”

The comm icon flared again, more urgently. The caller had disabled Li’s call filter and wouldn’t go away now until Li answered.

She made a sharp gesture of annoyance, and Bella flinched, fear rising in her eyes behind the tears. In any other mood, Li would have been horrified; now she felt only a grim satisfaction.

She took another step toward Bella, consciously intimidating the woman, God help her. “What was Korchow buying? And don’t even think about saying you don’t know.”

“I don’t—” Bella swallowed. “Information.”

“Information about Sharifi’s work.”

Bella nodded.

“And you were the go-between. The go-between and the payment.” “No! It wasn’t like that. They just talked.”

“Well, those little talks got your girlfriend killed.”

“I loved her!”

“Like you love me?” Li said nastily. “How convenient.”

“I don’t love you,” Bella said in a voice suddenly tight with anger. “I never said I did. You think having the same geneset is enough? That I’ll fall all over you just because you look like her? You’re nothing but a cheap copy. You wouldn’t understand Hannah if you spent the rest of your life poking and prying!”

Bella swept out of the room before Li could answer—and if she could have slammed the door, Li was sure she would have.

Her comm icon flashed again, and Li opened the line with a feeling of rising fury. “What?” she snarled. Nguyen.

“Have I caught you at a bad time?” the general asked as her sunny office took shape around Li. Li took a deep breath and set her jaw. “Not at all.”

“Well, how do things stand, then?”

Li swallowed. She was drifting into shipwreck waters; any misstep now and she would be past the point at which she could credibly claim to have shared everything with Nguyen.
Keep it true as far as you can
, she told herself, remembering Nguyen’s own advice.
The true lie is the best lie. And the hardest one toget caught in
.

She had told Nguyen about Korchow’s nighttime visit, right up to the moment when he produced the chop shop receipt. Now she described her meeting with Arkady, the files he’d passed to her, his reaction to the news that Cohen was not yet committed, the appointment—only a day and a half away now—in Helena.

“What good will the intraface do him without Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.

It was the first question out of her mouth when Li finished—and Li had been waiting for it, had planned for it. Now she fed her the story Korchow had concocted, passed along his feigned confidence that Syndicate nanotech, Syndicate gene therapy, Syndicate expertise with mingling constructed genesets would be able to make a partial construct work where the UN had needed a full one.

Nguyen appeared to believe it. “We’ll have to take care,” she said. “Korchow’s played the double game before. He stung us badly that way on Maris. Or one of his crèche brothers did. Even the As are hard to tell apart sometimes. Anyway, he’ll have a safe house somewhere. He’ll try to narrow your options, isolate you, push you into a situation where you rely on him for everything.”

“I don’t know that we can avoid that.”

“I don’t know that we should. We’ll just have to handle things as they come up. And you’ll need to rely on your judgment.”

“I always do, don’t I?”

Nguyen smiled. “I’m counting on it.”

“Speaking of relying on my own judgment, I could use a little more information.” Nguyen raised her eyebrows.

“The code Korchow wants. The intraface. It’s Alba-designed.”

“What, you saw a label?” Nguyen sounded politely incredulous.

“I’m not stupid. I know Corps work when I see it. And this is Corps work. Some of the best.” “What’s your question?” Nguyen’s voice was as cold and hard as virusteel.

Li hesitated.

“The line’s secure.”

“I guess I’m asking just how much of this is about deniability. Whether we gave the intraface to Sharifi. Whether Metz was an off-the-grid contractor—”

“Who said anything about Metz?”

Li froze. Her mind raced as she tried to retreat, retrench, keep Nguyen from finding out just how much she remembered about the raid, and why. “Well,” she stammered, “Cohen said …”

Nguyen laughed bitterly. “Cohen.” She dipped a finger into her water and ran it around the rim of the glass, setting the crystal singing. “That brings us to our next topic of conversation,” she said at last. “I take it Korchow doesn’t think he can pull the job off without Cohen?”

“It looks that way.”

“Or someone’s been very careful to make it look that way. If all goes as planned, Cohen will walk away with just what he’s wanted from the beginning: the intraface. We’ll have handed it to him in order to catch Korchow. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Cohen and his friends in ALEF come out winners no matter what happens. And we both know Cohen too well to think that’s a coincidence.”

Li stiffened. “I can’t believe—”

“You can’t?” Nguyen interrupted. “Or you don’t want to?”

A shadow flickered across the windows of Nguyen’s office, sweeping over the planes and hollows of her unsmiling face.

Li shivered. “ALEF doesn’t want the intraface anyway,” she argued. “It’s Cohen who wants it. For personal reasons.”

“Cohen doesn’t have personal reasons. In order to have personal reasons, you have to be a person. Have you ever actually bothered to find out anything about ALEF? About what they advocate?”

“I don’t get involved in politics.”

“Don’t be disingenuous. Your relationship with Cohen
is
politics.”

Li flushed. “You have the right to look at my private files, but not to tell me what to put in them.” “I do when your personal life clouds your judgment.”

“That’s not the case here,” Li said. All the same, she felt a twinge of relief at the thought that Nguyen couldn’t download her last dinner with Cohen. Yet.

“Isn’t it?” Nguyen said. “Then why aren’t you asking the questions you should be asking? The questions everyone else is already asking?”

She plucked a fiche from her desk, tapped through the index to pull a file up, and handed it to Li. “Read it.”

The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. This is not idle speculation. It’s reality—a reality that both Syndicates and UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with.

Li looked up at Nguyen. “What is this?”

“Cohen wrote it. It’s a speech he gave at an ALEF meeting last week. An ALEF meeting that was downloaded by known Consortium members.”

“Oh,” Li said, and kept reading—the same words she had seen before back in Cohen’s sunny drawing room:

The Syndicates embody one evolutionary vector: the hive mentality of the cr`eche system, the thirtyyear contract, the construction of a posthuman collective psychology, including cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from gene-norm.

The UN, in contrast, has launched a series of what might best be described as rearguard actions. On the technological side, we have enslaved AIs (how very revealing programmers’ jargon can be); hardwired, task-dedicated artificial life of every possible description; wired humans and posthumans operating AIplatformed wetware. In essence, a plethora of attempts to subsume nonhuman intelligence into humancontrolled operating systems. And in the political sphere, the General Assembly kindly picks up any stray items the technicians fail to account for by slamming the door on consciously engineered posthuman evolution, by slapping AIs with source-code patents, mandatory-feedback-loop legislation, encryption protocols, and, of course, the much-beloved thirty-year death tax.

Humanity has engineered its own obsolescence. They acknowledge it by act if not by deed. It is time for us to acknowledge it. Time for us to rethink the shape of UN politics—perhaps the very shape of the UN itself—and step into a wider, brighter posthuman future.

Li handed the fiche back to Nguyen, who snapped it off with a flourish of her fine-boned hand. “Why show me this?”

“I want you to know what Cohen is capable of.”

“It’s just talk,” Li said uncomfortably. “You know Cohen.”

“That’s my point. He’s using you, Li. The same way he’s used the Security Council. The same way he used Kolodny.”

Li’s stomach contracted into an icy knot. “What do you mean the way he used Kolodny?” she whispered.

“You think what happened on Metz was an accident? He used Kolodny to get what he wanted, and then he left her to die. Left you all to die. Didn’t you understand why the review board tried so hard to find a way to go easy on you? Because we knew it was Cohen’s fault all along—and he was the one person we couldn’t afford to blame publicly.”