Spin Control

A POLITICALLY USEFUL TOOL

All Arkady ever knew for certain about running the blockade was that he was drugged into dazed half-consciousness for most of the trip.

He remembered the ship; the stretched, surreal claustrophobia of jump dreams; an interlude of bright refracted sunlight slicing through the mirrored canyons of Ring-side skyscrapers; the hard eyes and sunburned faces of the security guards at the El Al boarding gate. Then he was waking up and his fellow passengers were bursting into the chorus of “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” and the shuttle was streaking over impossibly blue water toward the white rooftops and glittering solar panels of Tel Aviv.

Ben Gurion International Airport was a marvel of architectural design, but it had been built a century before the Evacuation and the artificial ice age. By the time they’d been on the ground for five minutes, Arkady’s fingers were aching with cold.

Osnat dove down the concourse, pulling Arkady along in her wake. People hurried past, jostling and pushing. There were so many faces, each one shockingly different from every other, and all hardened by the grim battle of all-against-all that seemed to constitute normal life for humans.

“Who’s that?” Arkady asked, pointing to a vast, grainy photograph that filled most of the wall above the Departures and Arrivals board.

“Theodor Herzl. And don’t point. People are jumpy here.”

Two girl soldiers strode by, automatic weapons held at the half-ready. A man with the reddest hair Arkady had ever seen elbowed between him and Osnat, practically tripping him. While Arkady was still flailing for balance, a raucous group of women barreled into him, several of them with screaming children in tow. They all had the same blond curls and freckled skin, and there was a faint but reassuring similarity to the shape of their faces. Not the clear, clean melody of a single geneset, but something at least approaching the harmonious chord of a Syndicate’s component genelines. The group enveloped Arkady, carrying him along in their wake. When Osnat backtracked to rescue him, he turned to stare over his shoulder, reduced to openmouthed amazement by his first sight of a “family.”

And then came the ads.

There were no visibly wired people in the crowd—ceramsteel filament was Earth-illegal because it had to be manufactured in microgravity—but the airport itself was still on-grid, and the air overhead crackled and glittered with publicity spins.

NORAM-ARC JEWS FOR PEACE NOW said one banner that popped alarmingly into midair just over Arkady’s head. A second ad plunged him into a sunlit grove of frost-resistant oranges populated by smiling kibbutzniks who urged him to “exercise your Right of Return right now” by buying from Kehillot Tehilla Realty. A third spin, which perplexed Arkady enough to bring him to a standstill, proclaimed j-cupid.com “the number one Jewish singles dating and matchmaking service” and advised him in a perky voice that fertility/virility stats on all registered singles were just one click away. “Don’t you deserve someone special?” the voice-over asked in a tone that seemed actually to imply that “special” was a good thing.

Then the thing he had been afraid of from the moment he set foot in UN space finally happened.

“Arkady!” a woman called out in a voice sharp enough to stop him in his tracks.

The woman was short, muscular, probably Korean. She was a soldier out of uniform; he read it in the cut of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the decisive moments of someone who actually knew how to hit people. She was also, quite unmistakably, a genetic construct. But no Syndicate design team would produce a face so functional and so unaesthetic. And no crèche-raised construct would speak so sharply or stare out at the world through such hard, uncompromising, self-sufficient eyes. This woman was a pre-Breakaway construct, spliced and tanked and raised to serve humans. And if she really was the soldier she appeared to be, then she’d chosen to kill for humans too.

The man with her, on the other hand, was anything but a soldier. He slouched elegantly behind his companion, as if he could barely be bothered to pay attention to Arkady. Yet there was a taut, poised, abstracted quality to the beautiful body that set Arkady’s teeth on edge. This wasn’t a person, whispered some atavistic instinct. It was a living doll operated by an unseen and supremely skilled puppetmaster.

Then Arkady remembered that the proper word for it was shunt. He’d just met his first Emergent AI. And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm.

“Arkady,” the woman repeated. “We thought you were dead.”

“Don’t let her frighten you,” the AI drawled with a smile that would have looked perfectly at home on Korchow’s face. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean dead dead.”

Arkady stared at the machine-man, torn between horror and fascination. The AI watched him through wide hazel eyes, a faint shadow of that mocking smile still hovering at the corner of its lips. Somehow Arkady was quite sure that the smile belonged to the machine, and not to the human into whose shunt-suppressed body it had poured some incomprehensible distillation of its component selves. It was a clever, changeable, humorous smile. A smile that would be easy to love but impossible to trust…even if there were anything but a teeming chaos of semiautonomous agents behind it.

“I—I don’t think I know you,” he said, speaking both to the woman and the machine.

“But Korchow—”

The woman fell silent as abruptly as if someone had interrupted her. The AI cocked his head like a dog listening for its master’s voice, and Arkady had the sense that some shared thought had just passed between them in streamspace.

“Oh,” the woman said. “Of course.”

She turned on her heel. Her coat flew open, and the blaring orange of an El Al security seal winked at Arkady from the trigger guard of a holstered pistol. Then they were gone, swallowed by the swirling human tide as quickly as they’d emerged from it.

Osnat frowned nervously at him. “You okay, Arkady?”

“I think so.”

“Was that who I think it was?”

“I don’t know. Who do you think it was?”

“Well, it looked like—no, never mind. That’s crazy. He wouldn’t have the nerve to show his face here.

Any of his faces. You sure you’re okay? You look like shit.”

“I’m fine.”

But he wasn’t fine. They’d known him. They’d known his series name, even if they’d mistaken him, as humans so often did, for another Arkady. And they’d thought he was dead.

Dead how? Dead where? What had happened to that other Arkady before he died?

And what did Andrej Korchow have to do with it?

Cohen looked out the window of the Ben Gurion-Jerusalem bus and told himself he needed a new body.

It was impossible to go anywhere quietly in this one. That Hoffman girl had been on the edge of recognizing him. Even the nice boy at El Al Security had waved him to the front of the line far too obviously for discretion. It had been one thing when he’d still been able to travel under his French passport, but the Tel Aviv fiasco had put an end to that and left him with no claim to citizenship or humanity except the one his long-dead inventor’s religion gave him.

And then, of course, there was the irksome detail of being a ghost.

“Why do they keep calling you that?” Li had asked the first time someone did it in front of her. “It’s creepy. Like they actually think you’re him instead of you.”

“It’s just a formality. No one takes it seriously except the religious nuts.”

But Li had been less interested in theological niceties than in the soldierly virtue of loyalty. “Has it ever occurred to you that if they really were your friends, they’d have gotten the hell over it sometime in the last four centuries?”

“Well, they have a point. Technically, I’m only a Jew because Hy Cohen’s mother was one. And it isn’t like he was observant, trust me—”

“I’ll remind you of that self-righteous tone next time I catch you eating oysters.”

“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”

Never mind the absurdity of trying to argue that the vast virtual universe of coevolving neural networks, affective loops, and expert systems called “Hyacinthe” was even remotely the same person as the Hy Cohen who had uploaded the memories of his failing body into the long-junked original hardware.

And never mind that even Hyacinthe was only one of the thirty-four separate sentient and quasi-sentient synthetic entities (this week’s head count) currently enjoying the somewhat debatable benefits of Israeli citizenship under Cohen’s Toffoli number.

And never mind the problematic thirty-fifth wheel: one very sentient and only partially synthetic Catherine Li, formerly of the UN Peacekeepers.

She was sleeping now, caught in the intense, lying web of dreams that still had the power to shock Cohen after half a dozen lifetimes among humans. She slept with her arms crossed over her chest and her boot soles braced on the seat in front of her. Looking at her clenched fists and frowning face, at the faint tracery of ceramsteel snaking under the brown skin, Cohen thought: Even in sleep she defends herself.

Meanwhile the dusty blue-and-white Egged bus rattled up onto the plateau of the Jordan floodplain, and half of Cohen’s associated selves looked out the window or worked on unrelated projects, while the rest eavesdropped on Li’s intermittent dreams and scrambled to keep his Ring-to-Earth connection ticking along at the massive bandwidth required to knit borrowed body and far-flung souls together.

He stretched, appreciating, as he always did, the elastic grace of Roland’s young and exquisitely well tended body. Humans took the pleasures of health and youth for granted—something that was a little harder to do once you’d survived dying of multiple sclerosis. But then taking things for granted seemed to be wired into the human gene pool.

Cohen looked around, taking stock of his fellow passengers in real-space. A smattering of Ring-side tourists and business travelers, conspicuous for the cranial jacks that revealed Earth-illegal wetware and psychware. Young aggressively secular Israelis, whose tanned good looks hinted at weekends spent windsurfing off Tel Aviv’s fashionable beaches—and whose skin-hugging outfits looked like the kind of goods that only slipped through the Embargo because Ring-side customs was too busy fighting real violations to worry about youth fashion. A rickety old Ashkenaz reading the Ha’aretz sports section— Maccabi Tel Aviv Smites Haopel Jerusalem 77-49. Well, at least someone at the Ha’aretz sports desk still had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for the Op-ed page. A large-eyed and unnaturally silent family of Hasidim huddled along the back bench where the ride was always roughest. The usual disturbingly large number of caps and chadors in the dusty green of the Interfaithers. And of course the impossibly young Israeli Defense Force soldiers whose rumpled uniforms made Cohen imagine mothers leaning over balcony railings all over Israel shouting, You’re-going-out-in-public-like-that?

The only thing missing was the Palestinians. Before the war they would have been here on the student passes that were a mere formality during the long peaceful generations of the open border. Laughing with their Israeli friends. Kissing their Israeli girlfriends to the abiding and roundly ignored horror of the ultraorthodox. Locked at the hip, like their two countries—and too young and idealistic to realize that the peace they took for granted was just a pause for station identification.

Li was waking up.

Cohen could feel her all around him, stirring, shifting, running the day’s events through her half-waking mind in a rapid-fire succession of half-formed dreams that cut in and out like the nightly newspin on fast forward. He tried to catch on to the tail of a few dreams as they passed, but he couldn’t make sense of them. And she was aware of him as a vague, alien presence in her mind, though she hadn’t yet awakened enough to identify the intruder.

Spying on her, she called it. And there’d be hell to pay if she caught him at it. He untangled himself from her, erasing his retreating footsteps and feeling hurt, as he always did, that she made him sneak and steal to get what he would have given her for the mere asking.

She twisted, murmuring, and brushed ineffectually at a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He reached out cautiously and pushed it back.

She opened her eyes.

He took his hand away.

“You need a haircut,” he told her.

“I know.” She stretched, yawning and he felt a pang of desire so strong it made his jaw hurt. “Things were so crazy before we left, I forgot. How’s your connection?”

“Fine.”

Not a lie. Just a nonrandom sampling of the available data.

He was wardriving—stealing streamspace time from unsecured local access points instead of going through Kyoto-legal channels. He and Li had argued heatedly about this. But he didn’t want UNSec eavesdropping on some of the Earthside errands he was planning to take care of this trip. There was nothing they’d like better than to slap an expensive corporate felony charge on him, if only for the PR value. And, as he’d pointed out in answer to Li’s objections, if he was going to give someone the power to pull the plug on him, he’d rather hand it to the warchalkers than to either General Nguyen or the boys on King Saul Boulevard.

He’d also pointed out to her (though much good it did) that the worst problems of interfacing on Earth had nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with bandwidth. He had to resort to scattershot prefetching just to be able to carry on a normal conversation. And prefetching, though it always made you look like an idiot sooner or later, was hardly a safety issue in normal circumstances.

Still, she was worried. And he didn’t like to worry her. So he was doing his best to limit the technical complications to his side of the intraface.

‹So what’s Arkady doing here?› Li asked onstream. ‹And am I crazy, or did I get the impression that you knew the woman he was with?›

The question flashed across his networks with the up/down, either/or, black-and-white clarity of the spin states that encoded it. And even before she hung the flesh of letters and syllables on the thought, he could feel the twist of strung-up nerves and vague worst-case-scenario visions that drove the question.

‹I don’t think she recognized me,› Cohen answered.

‹I didn’t ask whether she recognized you. I asked whether you recognized her.›

“Old friend from the office,” Cohen said, going offstream because it was so much easier to be evasive in realspace. “There’s a file on her somewhere or other. Router/decomposer can’t access it at the moment.”

Li groaned internally. ‹Is this going to be another one of those trips where you decide to pack light and end up forgetting to bring the one database you actually needed?›

“Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “you’re assuming it really was Korchow’s Arkady we ran into. I’m not convinced that was an act back there.”

“Neither am I,” Li said aloud, “but I’ve never gotten burned by being too suspicious. And I don’t believe in coincidence. Not that kind. We’re here for—” She glanced around and stopped talking, but he heard the rest of the thought just as he heard all her thoughts. At least all the ones she let him hear. ‹We’re here to bid on a piece of Syndicate tech some alleged defector brought across the line, and suddenly we run into an A Series we last saw in the company of Andrej Korchow? If I let that kind of ‘coincidence’ slide, we’d both be dead by now.›

‹There’s more than one Arkady. It’s not like running into a human. You ought to know that.› He glanced at her symmetrical construct’s features and decided not to pursue that line of thought. ‹Anyway, you worry too much.›

And then, with an almost humanly malicious sense of timing, they passed onto a new grid of his access point map, router/decomposer lost the most recent open node and failed to locate a new one, and the bottom fell out of streamspace.

The bus and its passengers drained away around Cohen as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.

What the hell? Cohen queried his routing meta-agent. But if the other AI heard him, he wasn’t answering.

Cohen dialed through the virtually stacked grid coordinates of the local nets, passing over the endless sea of O’s and triple slashes that marked closed nodes and danger points. He toyed briefly with two high-bandwidth nodes chalked with the legends KIND WOMAN TELL SOB STORY and RELIGIOUS TALK WILL GET YOU FOOD. He dropped them both; access with a data trail, however faint, was as bad as no access at all.

The next block was a government system full of high-security data holes (NOTSAFE).

Then the Border Police (BIG DOG—MOVE ON QUICKLY).

He skittered across the spinstream, feeling all contact with Earth slipping away from him. The bandwidth requirements for running a full-body shunt were inconceivable by the standards of human data-pushers—and human tolerances were all that most Earth-to-Orbital hardware was built to handle.

‹Hold for contact,› he messaged to Li’s Ring-side postbox across the low-bandwidth, high-surveillance Orbital-Surface routers, but he might as well have been shouting down a well for all the good it did. If anything went wrong down there while he was offstream, there was nothing he could do for her.

And then he saw it, gleaming through the haze of low-bandwidth static like incoming tracer fire: Two inverted brackets bellied up to each other to form the inverted capital I that marked the unpatrolled entrance ramps to Earth’s wide-open post-Embargo information freeway:

He was back.

He slipped back into the sensory feed from Roland’s cortical shunt like a diver sliding into blood-warm water. The bus and the passengers and the city all took shape around him. Most important, he felt Li’s reassuring presence interpenetrating the edges of his own composite consciousnesses:

He sent the letters blinking across their shared work space in archaic LED green.

‹What the hell was that?› she asked.

‹Nothing. Old programmer’s joke.›

‹Jeez, be serious for once, can’t you?›

“Okay. Sorry about the road bump.”

“I’m sorrier. I thought I was about to be stuck making small talk with Roland for the next two weeks.”

“I thought you liked Roland.”

“A little of Roland goes a long way.” She gave him a sly sideways glance, seemed about to say something, then obviously thought the better of it.

“It’s your fault, anyway.” Cohen stretched coquettishly. “I wanted to be a girl for this trip.”

“We’re in the land of the Interfaithers and the ultraorthodox, Cohen. One of us needs to be able to pass as a member of the master sex. Besides, if I’d let you shunt through a girl on this trip, any last hope of making you pack sensible shoes would have gone straight out the window.”

“Sensible shoes are bad for the soul,” Cohen kvetched. He ducked his head into the curve of her neck, tasting her familiar skin and the rich musky dust of Earth.

She shrugged him away.

It was barely a shrug. No outsider would have noticed the gesture, even if they’d been looking for it. But to Cohen it was unmistakable.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked after a moment.

Li’s generous lips compressed into a tense line. “Why pay for what you can get for free?”

And there it was, the truth Li could neither change nor live with. The two of them formed a hybrid creature whose realspace body was just the tip of the streamspace iceberg, and Cohen wrote the rules in streamspace. They ran on his networks. They navigated his gamespace. They depended on his processing capacity, which exponentially exceeded anything a mere organic could field—even an organic as heavily wired as Li.

Cohen had the power to go anywhere, see everything, do anything, take anything. Li only had the power to walk away. Not much for a woman who had commanded battalions and led combat drops. Not enough, Cohen was beginning to think.

Cohen’s routing meta-agent interrupted with a message that he’d sorted out the routing bug and was working on a patch for it. It was of course completely unnecessary for router/decomposer to bring such a message to Cohen’s conscious attention. Nor was it necessary to deliver it on a general access spinstream. But router/decomposer had sided with Li on the wardriving issue, and he had a point to make.

Router/decomposer had originally called himself just plain decomposer. And a decomposer was exactly what he was: a fully sentient massively parallel decomposition program supported by a vast Josephson Array currently holding in a low lunar orbit carefully calculated to keep its spin glass lattice operating at a crisp refreshing twenty-seven degrees Kelvin. But when Cohen’s last communications routing meta-agent had decamped in protest over Li’s arrival, decomposer—albeit with endless grumbling over being dragged away from his beloved spin glass research—had also taken over management of Cohen’s ant-based routing algorithms.

When his job changed, decomposer had quite logically changed his name: to router/decomposer, or, among friends, 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110000 01011100 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110011 01100101 01110010.

Functional nomenclature didn’t appeal to Cohen any more than the personality architecture that normally went with it. But router/ decomposer was fabulously good at his job, fully sentient, and eminently capable of spinning off into his own autonomous aggregation. No other Emergent AI came close to matching the seamless integration and dizzying processing speeds Cohen could achieve thanks to router/decomposer’s elegant spinstream routing solutions. And router/decomposer would have applied for his own Toffoli number and gone into business for himself long ago if it were not for what he cogently termed his “low tolerance for the social friction costs of dealing with assholes.”

Needless to say, Cohen tried very hard to keep the social friction costs of dealing with Cohen to a minimum.

‹Do you have any idea how much processing space I’m blowing on your little spy games?› router/decomposer queried.

‹Where’s your sense of adventure,› Cohen joked, ‹and you just a young whippersnapper of a hundred and fifteen?›

Router/decomposer demonstrated his sense of adventure by sending an extremely rude chaotic attractor flickering across the hidden layers of their shared Kohonen nets.

“Tell him to get a real name, will you?” Li said, having caught the tail end of router/decomposer’s dirty joke.

“Tell him yourself,” Cohen answered.

“I would, but he seems to not be speaking to me at the moment.”

“What? Why?”

“Hell if I know.”

‹What’s that about?› Cohen asked router/decomposer on the root-only stream.

‹She keeps asking to access data you’ve made me firewall. It’s embarrassing. Actually,› router/decomposer suggested slyly, still on the root-only stream, ‹it would save a lot of RAM if you’d stop making me lie to her.›

‹It’s not lying!›

‹Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. The point is, our current associative configuration is highly inefficient. And detrimental to your relationship with her.›

‹Oh really? If you know so much about humans, why don’t you stop backseat driving and get your own?›

‹Nah,› router/decomposer said placidly. ‹I’m more the heckling-from-the-sidelines type than the do-it-yourself type. Besides, I tried shunting once. It was…squishy. A little bit of human goes a hell of a long way. That’s why I like Li. A little human, but not too human. Now if you’d just take my advice and—›

‹Don’t you have anything useful to do right now?›

‹Not until you fuck up again.› An affective fuzzy set drifted downstream and dispersed across Cohen’s neural networks like the icy plume of a mountain river mingling with the sea. It “felt” like all router/decomposer’s algorithms: as cold and complicated and inhuman as his beloved quantum spin glass. But the emotion that the set expressed was all too human: smug self-righteousness. ‹Seriously, though. I still think you need to back off and give Li a little more space.›

‹That’s not the way the Game works. As you damn well know.›

‹Bet I could figure out how to tweak the Game so you could do it.›

‹Tweak my soul, you mean.›

That earned Cohen another rude attractor. ‹Souls are just obsolete social engineering for monkeys. And even if you get some perverse kick out of pretending to believe in such fairy tales, the Game is not your soul. It was a damn sloppy piece of code when Hy wrote it three hundred years ago, and it hasn’t improved with age. Code is written to be rewritten, and this piece is long due for an overhaul. Seriously, Cohen, do you see me chasing after humans like a codependent golden retriever?›

“So how did you get him to stop talking to you?” Cohen asked Li out loud. “And can I do it?”

But Li was laughing too hard to answer. And when he probed her thoughts across the intraface the only coherent words he could get out of her were ‹Down, Fido, down!›

It was too bad, but there it was.

If you wanted to get from Ben Gurion International Airport to modern Jerusalem, you had to go down the Jaffa Road. And if you went down the Jaffa Road, you had to go past the Line.

Every year there was talk of moving the road or building a new highway that would swing out to the north and away from the dirty zone. But every year the planning board put it off until next year…mainly because building a new road would mean admitting that the war wasn’t just a passing inconvenience but a permanent fixture on the landscape. It was the same kind of mentality you saw in every low-level, multigenerational civil war: Lebanon, Ireland, Iraq, America. On the one hand, no one wants to be on the losing side of sectarian violence. On the other hand, no one was foolish enough to think that anyone could “win” such a war. And since no one quite understood how or why peace had disintegrated into bloodshed, most people still nursed a vague hope that a reverse process might occur (Cohen thought of it as a kind of sociopolitical phase transition) in which the chaos of war would spontaneously reorganize itself into peace.

Years went by like this, with people schizophrenically dividing their time between waiting for peace to break out and trying to schedule the war around the weddings and brises and bar mitzvahs and funerals that will keep happening even when there’s a combat zone around the corner. And in the meantime, the streets weren’t getting fixed, and the real estate market was crashing, and the plumbing was getting iffy…and Jerusalem was starting to look more and more like a city whose back had been broken on the rack of civil war.

Nowhere was the disintegration more visible than in the spreading no-man’s-land that leached out from the Line toward the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. Biohazard signs began to sprout on street corners like poisonous mushrooms. The divided highway deteriorated into a rough two-lane strip of pavement as it approached the last habitable houses. Then even the two-lane died of a slow bleed, giving way to mortar-pocked dirt, sporadically bulldozed to smooth out what was left of the roadbed.

As the Line got closer the passengers got tenser. A screaming match broke out at the back of the bus between a paunchy middle-aged ultra-orthodox man and a scantily dressed young woman whose skimpy T-shirt had ridden up to expose what Cohen at first assumed was a charmingly old-fashioned bit of cosmetic scarring.

“What’s she saying?” Li asked, her spinstream-assisted Hebrew completely unequal to the fast and furious pace of the argument.

“She asked him to close the window. He refused.”

The young woman was now actually pulling up her shirt and pointing to her stomach while the ultraorthodox averted his eyes in horror. And the scars weren’t cosmetic at all, it turned out; they were old shrapnel wounds.

“Then,” Cohen translated on the fly, “he told her to cover up her arms if she was cold. So she told him to fuck off. So he told her get on the next Ring-bound shuttle if she didn’t want to be a real Jew. And now she’s shouting about how she spent two years on the Line and she doesn’t have to take this shit from some schmuck ultraorthodox draft dodger and how would he like to see her scars. All of them.” He grinned, caught between pride and embarrassment. “Welcome to Israel.”

“The Line,” Li said when the screaming match in the back of the bus had finally subsided. “As in the Green Line?”

Cohen nodded absently, craning out the window for his first view of what was left of the Old City.

“That girl was an Enderbot ?”

As if summoned into existence by the word, a squad of soldiers crossed the road in front of them, forcing the bus to a grinding halt. It wasn’t a checkpoint; these soldiers were coming off the Line, smeared with red dirt and dressed in bulky desert camouflage NBC gear.

Without stopping to think whether it was a good idea, Cohen reached out across streamspace and sampled the squad leader’s spinstreams. Red flags must be going up all over EMET headquarters; but if he could hack their spins that easily, then whoever was handling security over there richly deserved to be hauled onto the carpet.

Besides, he told himself, it was as good a way as any to let Didi know he was coming.

As the squad dropped off the far side of the roadbed, one of the soldiers looked back. Her eyes were startlingly green, and the coin-shaped derm marks of long-term cortical shunt use were dead white against the sun-browned skin of her temples. She was Sephardic, of course; the well-heeled children of the Ashkenazim were back in the EMET programming bunkers running the AIs, not under shunt and facing live fire and land mines. A few leftist politicians had suggested rotating reservists through the Line on regular intervals, but it would have cost too much to install even the low-grade IDF shunts in such numbers. And what politician really wants to send his campaign contributors’ kids home in body bags? So the privileged children of the Ashkenazim sat under full-spectrum lights in the IDF programming bunkers and pampered and debugged and lied to the tactical AIs. And the children of Iraqis, North Africans, and Ethiopians collected the combat pay and the bullets and the genetic damage.

“So that’s EMET.” Li’s voice was flat and expressionless.

“Yep. EMET meet Catherine. Catherine meet EMET, the latest and allegedly greatest stage in the evolution of military-applications Emergent AI. You want a war, EMET can run it for you from the lowest private to the fattest general. And Israel’s just the field trial. If little EMET runs this war well enough, he’ll put soldiers out of business permanently…except for the shunt-controlled cannon fodder.”

Li glanced after the soldiers. She looked sick. “Was that girl under shunt?”

“I can’t tell,” Cohen lied.

But of course he could. And even for him it was hard to imagine that there was anything even remotely human behind those blank killer’s eyes. Was that what Li saw when she looked at him? The thought sent a shudder through Roland’s body that router/ decomposer’s best buffering algorithms couldn’t suppress.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to go under shunt in combat,” Li muttered.

“The casualty rates are a lot lower when the AIs run things.”

“Some things are worse than dying. To wire yourself into a semisentient…”

“They’re not semisentients. EMET’s component AIs are fully sentient, right down to the individual squad member level.”

Li snapped around to stare at him. “So every one of those soldiers is being run by a fully sentient Emergent?”

“Of course. Human consciousness is an operating system for the human body. Any AI that can operate a human body well enough to take it into combat has to be at least as self-aware as the average human.” More so, in practice; AIs didn’t have the armature of instinct, autonomic reflexes and hormones that humans had to fall back on.

“But how do they get past the termination problem?”

It would be called a suicide problem, Cohen thought bitterly, if it were humans instead of AIs killing themselves. The termination problem had been the stumbling block of every attempt to automate land combat since the dawn of Emergent AI. It turned out that Emergent AIs who were sentient enough to handle real-time nonvirtual ground combat were also sentient enough to suffer from most of the psychiatric disorders that afflicted human soldiers. And since AI identity architecture was far more brittle than the human equivalent, the result was suicide. Hard on the public stomach. And even harder on the AI programmers, who had an unfortunate tendency to get attached to their lab rats.

In the course of their long war, carried out in punctilious observance of the letter of Embargo law, the Israelis and the Palestinians (the Palestinians had their own version of EMET too, of course) had worked through every variation and iteration of the termination problem.

At first EMET’s AIs had full real-time interface with the Line: helmet-mounted digital cameras, roving RPVs, real-time SyWO and SpySat feed. The result had been a rash of synthetic psychiatric disorders and self-terminations.

Next they tried running the Line with semisentients. Total carnage. Skyrocketing human casualty rates. Peace marches. Demonstrations. Shoving matches in the Knesset. The IDF backed off the semisentients faster than you could say “preterm election.”

Then they’d developed EMET.

EMET was a recursive acronym for EMET Military-Applications Emergent Tactical Systems. But the real significance of the acronym was as much mythic as technological. EMET—truth in Hebrew—was the word Rabbi Loew of Prague carved on his golem’s forehead in order to bring dead clay to life. And when the golem’s work was done, the Rabbi had simply erased the first letter of truth from its forehead, making it MET: dead.

And that was exactly what the IDF did to EMET. When one of EMET’s AIs realized that the game wasn’t a game and the blood was real, they hard booted it and wiped its memory banks. Just like the original golem, EMET contained both truth and death separated by a single breath. But while truth had given life to Rabbi Loew’s golem, for EMET’s AIs discovering the truth of who they were and what they did was a death sentence.

“They kill them?” Li asked, grasping the essence of EMET in as little time as it took Cohen to think about it.

“It’s nice to know you see it that way.”

“Of course I do!” Li snapped, conveniently forgetting that no court in UN space would charge killing an AI as murder. “That’s the most hypocritical…how can you work for these people?”

Cohen resisted the urge to squirm, even though he knew perfectly well that Li would interpret Roland’s unnatural stillness as exactly the overcompensation it was. “That’s complicated. Actually, it’s not complicated. It’s my country.”

‹That’s the most complicated thing of all,› she said instream.

He probed her feelings about EMET. Not pushing, just throwing out the merest suggestion that he was there and listening. Half a dozen vague associations swirled through the phase space in which he “saw” her cortex’s neural burst patterns. They traced a series of chaotic attractor wings that encoded the continuous shaping and reshaping of memory both humans and AIs called consciousness. Relief that she had gotten to be a real soldier instead of a zombie…no matter how badly it had ended. Memories of all the times she had fought her way out of cold sleep after a combat jump wondering what she’d forgotten this time, and whether she’d lost it to randomly decohering spins or UNSec memory washing. Fear at the way that memories long lost to her conscious mind could still twist her emotions. One memory that retained all its raw emotional power despite the invasive UNSec memory washing: standing under the deep blue sky of Gilead watching Andrej Korchow bleed out in a steaming pool of blood and coffee. And permeating all the rest—grooving itself into the older memories so that it would always be associated with them—a cold panic at the thought of the Enderbots struggling toward sentience only to be pushed back under by the cold hand on the keyboard.

“I hate it too,” he said, knowing she would understand all the chaotic and contradictory feelings behind the words. “But what can I do?”

Li reached over and set her hand lightly on Cohen’s.

He could “see” through the link between them that she was watching Roland’s hands, the skin around his eyes, the corners of his mouth—all the little telltales she used to divine Cohen’s feelings through the veil of another person’s flesh. Over the years her relationship to Roland’s body had settled into a placid affection that she half-consciously associated with her few fragmented memories of her own parents’ marriage. That was what he felt in her now as she put her arms around him.

“I love you,” she said, and meant it.

A human lover would have been happy.

But Cohen wasn’t human. And inside he could feel her letting go even as she held him. Drifting away, not with anger or resentment but with a kind of dull resignation.

She loved him more than she had ever imagined she could love anyone. But she was going to leave him anyway. And if there was anything he could do to stop it, she couldn’t tell him what it was because she didn’t even remember why she was leaving.

The left-behind bomb exploded at eight in the morning on Easter Sunday of 2049.

“Democracy of the bomb, twenty-first-century style,” Osnat told Arkady as their chopper thundered over the Line just high enough to be out of range of any locals crazy enough to take potshots at them. “Some maniac from Hoboken decided the Rapture wasn’t getting here fast enough, and he had to do his little bit to help Armageddon along. The cleanup stalled out after Phase One: the Old City and the Temple Mount. Now the UN keeps whining about funding and asking for new environmental impact reports. And meanwhile they’re offering state-subsidized tank babies to anyone who’ll emigrate.”

“But why would the UN want you to emigrate?” Arkady asked, bewildered by the welter of unfamiliar terminology.

Osnat looked at him as if he’d said something almost comically stupid. “Water,” she said, as if that was all the answer his question demanded.

Arkady nodded, less to indicate understanding—he understood almost nothing that came out of Osnat’s mouth—than in the hope that a nod might elicit some more information that would make sense of what came before.

It didn’t, but he was learning to live with being terminally confused.

The Left-Behind Bombing had been the last poisonous shot fired in the War on Terror. An angry young man had stolen a genetic weapon designed to lower Sunni birthrates in Iraq without affecting neighboring ethnic groups. The targeting hadn’t quite lived up to the defense contractor’s hype, and the explosion had single-handedly wiped the most holy sites of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism off the political map.

“It really is green,” Arkady breathed, staring down at the burgeoning wilderness of the Line. “It’s alive.”

“Chernobyl Effect,” Osnat explained. “Contamination’s bad, but humans are worse. The Line’s just about the healthiest real estate in the Middle East these days as long as you don’t happen to be human.”

Arkady caught his breath at a fluid and briefly glimpsed dun-and-gray form passing under the scattered trees along the canal bank. “Is that a horse?”

“Wild donkey,” Osnat answered. She was staring down at the Line too, her eyes gone so pale in the weak winter sunlight that from where Arkady sat they seemed to be transparent. “Horses are extinct now. Even on the Line.”

“Wild,” Arkady said, picking up on the earlier word. “You mean naturally reproducing.”

“Yeah.” Her voice sank to near background noise as she craned her neck out the far window to keep the donkey in her line of vision.

“Those early genetic weapons were pretty unpredictable. Mostly they boiled down to dumping massive loads of pesticides and synthetic estrogens and heavy metals and hoping that the combined toxin load would do the job. The Temple Mount bomb scrambled horse, human, and songbird DNA beyond repair. Donkeys, on the other hand, are still breeding like rabbits. Actually, rabbits are still breeding like rabbits, come to think of it. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how well the ants are doing.” She sighed—a sigh that was all out of proportion with the not-very-serious problem of too many ants. “On the other hand, the bombing did scare us into three centuries of peace. I guess that counts for something.”

“What started up the war again, Osnat?”

“Hell if I know. It was like everyone just woke up one morning and decided to flush it all down the toilet.”

She frowned down at the treetops while the silence (a relative notion in the ear-shattering roar of the helicopter) stretched to uncomfortable lengths.

“You must remember the open border,” Arkady ventured finally.

“I grew up with it. I was already in college when the war started.”

Arkady had read about the open border, a fact of life in Israel and Palestine during the centuries of shocked peace that followed the Left-Behind Bombing. The whole concept of the border—of any border—had seemed impossibly theoretical until now, as incomprehensible to Syndicate eyes as everything else about the human notions of countries and national loyalties. Now, watching the shadow of their chopper flicker over the hills and valleys, Arkady could finally match words to reality.

There were fences down there. And the only fences Arkady had ever seen in his life were the ones crèchelings put up at the back of playing fields during field trips to Gilead to stop stray balls from rolling away. They really meant it, he realized, looking at those fences. The idea of “owning” a piece of a planet might seem as quaint as witchcraft to him, but these people were willing to kill each other over it.

“Did you know any Palestinians before the war?” Arkady asked Osnat.

“My first boyfriend was Palestinian. My parents loved him. Thought he was a good influence on me.” She smirked. “I was not a well-behaved adolescent.”

Arkady blinked, taken aback by the sheer number of unthinkables in that reply. “And what’s he doing now?”

Her smile shut down like an airlock slamming closed. “He’s dead. All those nice boys I grew up with are dead. On both sides.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And for what? So we can listen to the bastards in the Knesset make patriotic speeches.”

She lit a cigarette and smoked it, hunched over the little flame like a dog trying to keep someone from stealing its bone.

“This used to be the most beautiful country,” she said finally. Arkady would hear those words, or some version of them, so many times over the coming weeks, and from so many people on both sides of the Line, that they would come to seem like an epitaph for the Jerusalem Osnat’s generation had grown up in. “I wish you could see what it was like before the war. They were even talking about opening up the cleaner parts of the Line and turning them into an international peace park.” She turned away and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette as if she’d lost the stomach for it. “Ah, fuck, I don’t know why I’m even telling you.”

Arkady made a helpful face but Osnat was staring out the window, seeing only the past and its long-buried dead.

“Oh well.” She sounded almost friendly for a moment. “Not your problem. Just dodge the mortars for a few weeks and you’re out of here.”

“And you?”

“And me what?”

“Why don’t you leave?”

She jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward him abruptly enough to make him flinch. “Bingo. Just the question I ask the bitch in the mirror every morning.”

“And?”

“And you’ll be the first to know if I ever get a straight answer out of her.”

Arkady must have fallen asleep after that. When he woke the city was gone and they were flying over empty desert.

Waves of sand ran away to the horizon under towering dust-brown thunderheads that the pilot seemed to be flying into at every moment. The sun shone feebly through the enveloping haze, though Osnat’s sunburned face testified to its destroying power.

Arkady shifted uncomfortably. He’d hoped that flying would relieve the constant ache of full gravity. But, flying or earthbound, he was still sucked onto this spinning rock like a bug in a wind tunnel, every joint popping and aching until it was hard to believe his ancestors had survived long enough to make it off the planet.

Night was falling, and suddenly he identified something that had been pricking at the edge of his mind for several minutes.

“There are lights down there!”

“What?” Osnat had dozed off too, judging by the soft, bleary-eyed face she turned toward him. “Sure. No big deal. Someone’s got a generator.”

“But…aren’t we still over the Line?”

She glanced at her bulky wristwatch. “Yep.”

“People live down there?”

She cocked her head, turning her good eye on him. “What, you thought all that prime real estate was empty just because of a piddly few birth defects?”

“Who are they?”

“They’re called Ghareebeh. Arabic for stranger.”

“So they’re Arabs?”

“Some of them. Some of them are the children of Jewish settlers who refused to leave. Some of them are just poor schmucks born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“But how do they live?”

“Let’s just say they don’t drink the water if they can afford not to. Like I told you, those were the wild frontier days of genetic weaponry.” Her voice took on a more sarcastic edge than usual. “Now we’re more environmentally responsible.”

“Osnat?”

“What?”

“Can you answer a question?”

“Ask it and I’ll let you know.”

“Who’s Absalom?”

“It’s a code name.” She sounded as flatly objective as if she were summarizing the results of a peer-reviewed scientific study. “Most people on this side of the Line think the man behind the code name was Gavi Shehadeh.”

“A Palestinian.”

She wrapped her arms across her chest and huddled into the corner of her seat. “Half-Palestinian. His mother was Jewish. I don’t know the whole story. Just that he was some kind of war hero back in the days when the soldiers on the Line were real soldiers, not Enderbots. And then he went into AI work. Or maybe he was already doing it before the war started, I don’t know. Anyway, he was working on EMET when the Mossad tapped him for counterintelligence work. Just compsec at first, but he didn’t stay stuck there for long. Didi Halevy moved him into counterintelligence. And then…he climbed. And not just by riding Didi’s coattails. No one ever accused Gavi of not being good at his job.”

“And what did he do to make Moshe hate him so much?”

“He turned traitor.”

“So he’s in…prison?”

“No.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “Maybe he had a horse—that’s what we call it when someone has a friend in high places to protect him. Or maybe it was just too embarrassing for the people who promoted him and trusted him. All I know is he’s still alive.”

Arkady digested the staggering implications of that statement. “You mean you still execute people?”

“Of course not. We’re not the Americans, for God’s sake. But you can always arrange a nice clean traffic accident.”

They set down on a gritty landing strip hacked out of the same straggling scrub oak and juniper that Arkady could have found on almost any of the terraformed planets he’d worked on in the last decade. The pilot flew in low and fast and lifted off again before they’d even cleared the rotor wash.

Osnat hustled Arkady across the tarmac to a small half-track whose paint had been scoured so clean by wind and sand that Arkady couldn’t read its markings.

“I’ll have to ask you to get in the back,” she said. “Sorry.”

The back of the half-track was unlit and smelled strongly of biodiesel and some unclean animal that he gradually identified as human. He climbed in and found a blanket to sit on.

“Just keep your mask on,” Osnat told him, “and remember this is for your own safety too. There are a lot of people around here who’d kill you on sight if they knew what you were. And they don’t all work for the UN.” Then she rolled the steel door down with a clatter, leaving Arkady in darkness.

The truck stopped so many times that Arkady lost count. The first few stops were at traffic intersections, he thought. Another two were at checkpoints. But though he heard the border police checking the truck over, they never opened up the back or asked him for his papers.

Other stops had no obvious purpose. The truck would simply pull over to the side of the road, gravel crackling under the wheels, and wait. Sometimes Osnat and the drivers got out, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they waited for a minute, and sometimes they waited for what felt like hours. Once, very late into the night, he heard Osnat’s voice:

“Look at that! Back a day and I already have a mosquito bite. How can you get a mosquito bite in the middle of a fucking desert in the middle of a fucking ice age?”

One of the men said something in Hebrew too riddled with slang for Arkady to make sense of.

“Not unless you pay better than the army does,” Osnat said succinctly, and everybody laughed again.

Eventually Arkady dropped off to sleep, only jolting awake when the engine shuddered to a halt again. He heard voices, footsteps. Then the steel door rattled up to reveal Osnat flanked by two powerfully built young men, both gripping snub-nosed carbines in their broad farmer’s hands.

“Out,” Osnat said.

They hurried him across a dark parking lot toward a low shed that was the only building Arkady could see anywhere this side of the undulating desert horizon. Despite the visible weapons, Arkady had the feeling that discipline had relaxed here. What was the point of theatrics, after all, when he didn’t stand a chance of crossing the waterless waste that surrounded them?

The shed turned out to be the top end of a flight of stairs that plunged down three stories without a single door opening off it in any direction. The stairs bottomed out in front of a steel fire door. The fire door opened on a cramped room with nothing in it but a ratty couch and a dilapidated workstation. Sitting on the couch, sipping Turkish coffee with his sandaled feet up on a crate of RPG rounds, sat Moshe.

He raised his glass to Arkady. “Good news. The first round of the auction kicks off the day after tomorrow at the King David Hotel.”

“Auction?” Arkady asked, confused. “What auction?”

“Oh right. You slept through all that. Turns out—excuse me.” Moshe rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a frayed and crumpled handkerchief, and blew his nose with loud abandon. “Turns out Israel’s not interested in your genetic weapon after all. My betters have decided to put you back on the market and see if they can make back the money we blew getting you here.”

“But I defected to Israel. I never agreed to—”

“You’re right. It’s not very nice of us.” Moshe had been wearing his usual shorts and T-shirt when they’d arrived, but now the guards were rattling up and down the stairs bringing in supplies from the half-track, and a cold wind whistled down the stairwell. Moshe fished a sweater out from between the frayed cushions of the couch and pulled it over his head so that his next words were muffled. “You want to call the whole thing off and go home?”

“I can’t go home.” Arkady let all the fear and uncertainty and isolation of the past weeks well up in his voice. “It’s too late for that. They’ll kill me.”

Moshe straightened his glasses and hunched forward to stare at Arkady. “I wish I knew whether it was your skin or your career prospects you were really worried about. The thing is, Arkady, we might be willing to help…but you haven’t given us any reason to take much of a chance on you.”

“But Arkasha’s work—”

“Wake up and smell the coffee. Your so-called genetic weapon is for the public in front of the curtain. If someone’s willing to pay for it, we’re happy to take their money. But if you want us to commit to you, you’re going to have to bring something better than cloned bugs to show-and-tell.”

“Like what?”

Moshe gave him a level stare. “Like Absalom.”

“And if I give you Absalom?”

“Political asylum. Guaranteed. For you and Arkasha. In Israel, not some corporate black hole where they’ll pull your fingernails out just to make extra sure you’re telling them everything.”

“I don’t know if—”

“It’s a take-it-or-leave-it deal, Arkady. And it’s all I got. So do yourself a favor and take the time to think about it.”

“How long do I have?”

“Until the auction. Oh, and did I mention Korchow was going to be there? What’s the matter, Arkady? You look a little nervous. Not so eager to see your old friends again?”