Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“You people really are pathetic,” Arkasha said in a detached, almost conversational tone of voice.

“See? See?”

“Are we done ripping each other apart yet?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a very small and quiet voice. “Does anyone have any ideas about what we should do now, as opposed to whose fault it is?”

“Sedatives might be a good place to start,” Arkasha muttered.

“Oh shut up, Arkasha.” One of the Aurelias sighed, sounding fed up to the point of no return.

Arkady cleared his throat.

“What?” By-the-Book Ahmed said, turning on him savagely.

“Nothing!”

“Gee,” Shrinivas said acidly. “Arkady has nothing to say for himself. That’s a big fucking change.”

Eventually things petered out into an exhausted and hostile silence.

Ahmed sighed. “Look, people. We’re all under a lot of stress. Obviously things aren’t going too well. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that we have to make decisions on the basis of the information we have at any given time. Sometimes later information proves a particular decision not to have been perhaps the best possible one we could have made. That’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way things break. We move forward, and we adjust. Obviously feelings are running high at the moment. But we really don’t have time to cool off and come back later. We need to reach some consensus about where to go from here.”

More silence.

“We could always take a vote,” one of the Aurelias said finally.

The idea was shocking. The fact that someone would even suggest such a crude and, well …humantactic showed how frayed around the edges the consensus-building process had become.

A long dance ensued, during which no one would exactly admit that they liked the idea of taking a vote, but no one would condemn it either. And, of course, in the end they voted…though only with the proviso that if the vote broke purely along lines of Syndicate loyalty, they would throw out two of the Rostov votes to even things up.

The vote didn’t break along Syndicate lines, however.

By-the-Book Ahmed and Bossy Bella were for going back into orbit and calling for instructions. Arkady and Arkasha were for pulling up stakes and moving to the other hemisphere, but the Banerjees and the Aurelias split, with one pairmate opting for cryo and a call for instructions and the other opting for staying put at least temporarily. And that left only Shy Bella and Laid-back Ahmed.

All eyes turned to Bella…who, predictably, either couldn’t make up her mind or was too shy to speak it so bluntly.

Later, in their quarters, Arkasha would tell Arkady that humans had had several mechanisms to deal with this sort of situation, including a thing called abstention, which Arkady thought sounded like a vaguely gruesome first-aid procedure. Probably it was better for everyone, including Arkasha, that he hadn’t admitted to knowing such a thing in public.

“I don’t know. I think I—” Bella broke off abruptly and sneezed into her cupped hands. “I’m sorry,” she said in the humiliated and embarrassed voice of a Syndicate construct admitting to physical weakness. “I must have caught Aurelia’s bug somehow—” She broke off, wracked by another fit of sneezing.

“ Icertainly didn’t give it to you!” Bossy Bella announced as if her sib’s confession were a covert attack on her moral rectitude and ideological purity.

Laid-back Ahmed stared at her for a moment, his normally good-natured face twisted into a disdainful expression that Arkady wouldn’t have thought he was capable of. Then he got up, walked out of the room, and returned with a tissue.

Bella blew her nose—an operation from which they all politely averted their eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking up at Ahmed with a glitter in her eyes that made Arkady wonder if she was running a fever. “I should have thought of it myself. It’s just…I’m so tired…”

Ahmed shook his handsome head, gave Bossy Bella another baleful look, and sat down.

“Why are we even sitting here?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked his sib. “If she can’t make up her mind, then we’ve got four votes for going forward and four for stopping. And even if she sides with Arkasha your vote will cancel hers out.”

“I care what Bella thinks, and so should you,” Laid-back Ahmed said patiently. “And anyway I don’t want to break a tie. I think this is a decision for the life-sciences specialists.”

“She’s not a specialist!” his sib protested. “She’s a B,for God’s sake!”

“Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed asked, ignoring his pairmate.

By-the-Book Ahmed pressed his lips together in a thin disapproving line, folded his arms across his chest, and pushed his chair back from the table. But he didn’t get up. Like everyone else his attention was now riveted on Bella.

“I agree with Arkasha,” she said finally. “Mostly.” She cast an apologetic, slightly defiant look in his direction. “We doneed to move base camp, and there’s too much at stake for us to waste four months of field time going back into cryo while we wait for orders. But I’d like a little more time here first. I think we all ought to try to make sense of the data we’ve got before we move. No trying to make our home Syndicates look good or covering up mistakes in our work. We’ve all got enough expertise—even the Ahmeds—to check each other’s work. And then at least the time here won’t be a total waste.”

Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to take the initiative.

“I’ll go along with that,” Arkady hazarded.

“Me too,” one of the Aurelias said in a subdued voice.

“What about the rest of you?” Laid-back Ahmed asked. “Is everyone on board with this?”

Everyone seemed to be.

“What about you?” he asked his own pairmate.

Ahmed shrugged. The two Aziz A’s locked eyes for a moment. “Okay,” By-the-Book Ahmed said grudgingly. “It sounds sensible. But I want it noted in the ship’s log that I was overruled on this.”

A feeling of shaky relief permeated the room. Disaster narrowly averted once again. Consensus achieved…sort of. Bella had bucked the caste system in a way that was both astonishing and (to the Rostovs and Banerjees at least) highly gratifying. And thank God for Ahmed, Arkady told himself. What the mission would have turned into without his keeping the peace between warring factions didn’t bear thinking.

Arkasha, on the other hand, turned out to have a rather different view of the consult.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said when Arkady finally cornered him in the lab late that night.

“You aren’t still upset about what the Banerjees said? Look, tempers were running high. People won’t remember it in a few days.”

“I’m glad you’reso sure.”

“You’re getting hung up on trivialities, Arkasha. It’s not that big a deal…”

“Is that why you followed the other sheep instead of defending me?” Arkasha said in a voice so low Arkady barely heard the words.

“What are you talking about? I agreed with you. I voted with you! What the hell do you want from me?”

Arkasha gave him a bruised, angry look. “Nothing.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”

“You can’t really think—”

“Well, if I can’t think it, then what’s the point of talking about it?”

“Why do you always have to—”

“You’re right. I’m wrong. I admit it. There’s nothing left to talk about. Now will you go away please?”

Back in their cabin, Arkasha’s neatly made bunk tormented him. It was impossible to sit still here, let alone sleep. He needed to think. A trip around the powered-down arc of the in-flight hab section would clear his head, even if it didn’t bring sleep any closer.

Only when he was almost there did he realize that in his distress he’d unconsciously turned toward the closest thing on the refitted UN ship to home: the airy hanging forest of Bella’s orbsilk gardens.

In day cycle the silk garden was a gauzy maze of sunlit mulberry limbs, gently swaying seed trays, and silver-edged cocoons. Now it was a whispering, rustling, shivering fairy-tale landscape of silvery starlight. Arkady had penetrated deep into the forest of hanging trays before he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had decided on a midnight walk.

He would wish later that he’d turned around and retreated into the darkness. Or spoken. Or done anything other than what he did do. But in that moment something pulled him on. And the something that pulled him forward was the same thing that kept him silent.

He heard the catch of breath in an unseen throat. He saw a single creature, one half lean brown muscle, the other half soft whiteness, both halves frozen in the act of some atavistically significant movement. Only in the next frozen moment did he realize that the strong, clean line picked out by moonlight that pierced the mulberry branches was the curve of Ahmed’s spine.

The two lovers disentangled themselves from each other. Bella turned into the darkness as if she were trying to bury her face in the wall.

“Go on,” Ahmed told her in a voice that had nothing to do with the voice he used to talk to the rest of the world. “I’ll deal with this.”

She turned toward Arkady as if she were about to explain or apologize, then heaved a shuddering sigh and fled down the long swaying tunnel of weeping branches.

When Arkady turned back to Ahmed, the big Aziz A was watching him, his face drained of all expression, his hands opening and closing at his side in a way that made Arkady acutely aware he’d just been touching a woman with them.

“Nothing happened,” Ahmed said. He was standing on the balls of his feet, Arkady noticed, like a wild animal readying itself to fight or flee. “She was just curious. Nothing happened.”

“Okay,” Arkady said.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No. I believe you. Really.”

“I don’t care for myself.” Ahmed shifted restlessly, moving closer to Arkady as if he thought mere physical proximity would make his words believable. “But don’t put Bella through it. You don’t know what they do in the euth wards, Arkady. They don’t just let you die. They try to fix you. They try until you’re ready to beg them to kill you.”

Arkady looked at the other man. He felt that he was actually seeing him as a physical being for the first time. The brown skin and blue-black hair and dominating manner that had been, until now, merely shorthand for AzizSyndicate were suddenly a body: Ahmed’s body.

He tried to imagine that body with Bella, with any woman, and found the idea…not repulsive exactly, but incomprehensible. How would it work exactly? And how would either of them, knowing nothing of their lover’s body and needs and desires, ever be able to satisfy the other?

“It’s not her fault,” Ahmed repeated when Arkady failed to speak. His voice dropped to a husky, pleading whisper. “She just felt sorry for me. How can she deserve to be punished for that?”

Arkady looked away; there was something in Ahmed’s eyes suddenly that he couldn’t stand to look at. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “Really, I didn’t.”

“You mean that?”

He nodded. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at the other man.

“You’re a good person, Arkady.”

The images that flooded Arkady’s brain were startling, vivid, unpleasantly stranded between the erotic and the disgusting. And somehow, horribly mingled with the brief glimpse of Ahmed and Bella, was his own obsessive and consuming desire for Arkasha.

“I’m not good,” he whispered. “I’m a long way from good.”

THE AUTOMATIC CHESSPLAYER

There is nothing “artificial” about the birth of an AI. It is a process as natural as the weather…and just as impossible to predict or control. Long before an Emergent’s break-even day arrives, the mere task of keeping it in the organized chaos that passes for working order surpasses the capacity of human programmers. As debugging and troubleshooting are delegated to the AI, it acquires a growing array of peripheral systems: systems designed by the AI to achieve its own ends, rather than by humans to achieve human ends. It is within this swarm of self-coded intelligent systems that sentience arises…or doesn’t. It is also here that sentience most often fails. Of the few Emergents who have become self-aware, only a very few have managed to walk the razor’s edge of sentience for more than the span of an average human lifetime. The author of the present text has been continuously sentient for close to four centuries. He has no idea why or how, and no useful advice to give…except for the obvious warning that attempts to rewrite core programs usually lead to tragedy.

—HYACINTHE COHEN, TN673-020. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. EU ARC: 2433.

Cohen lay on the hotel bed and breathed in the tangy scent of the desert overlaid on that dry chalk-smelling laundry detergent that no one seemed to use anywhere outside of Israel.

Li slept beside him, only an arm’s length away, but he felt like he was watching her across a distance of centuries. The light raked her sleeping face and silvered the fine dark down that shadowed her cheeks. He noticed the lines around her eyes, evidence of life’s slow burn. He’d been noticing them more and more lately. It frightened him.

He blinked. He tried to remember the last time he’d blinked and couldn’t. He started to worry in a lackluster kind of way about whether forgetting to blink could damage Roland’s eyes in some way that wouldn’t be covered by the medical rider on the time-share contract.

He felt hollow, as if an invisible hand had reached in through his eyes in the eternity between one blink and the next and carved out whatever passed for his insides. Something was wrong with the shunt, obviously. But it wasn’t anything he could put a finger on, even if he’d had fingers. His myriad active systems still flowed smoothly through optimization subroutines, evaluating spinfeed, performing parity checks, refining his still-sketchy AP maps, ticking through the weak encryption of a half dozen vulnerable protected access points. But it was happening so far away that it seemed like someone else’s life.

It had been a long week. A long night. A hell of a long time in-body.

For the first time in three years, twelve weeks, and fourteen hours, he “lost” certain critical parts of what passed for “his” consciousness…

He woke into Li’s dream.

She stood in a dark hallway. The cool breath of a ceiling fan whispered along her skin, and below the whir of the fan there was another noise: a throaty ticking that made Cohen think, for some reason his associative memory programs could not immediately retrieve, of Garry Kasparov.

It could not be a place Li had ever been in her impossibly brief lifetime. He suspected that her memory was simply recycling footage of some ancient flat film set in Morocco or Alexandria or Arabia. Yet she’d somehow associated a smell with the image: a smell of spice and sandalwood and the genteel decay of rooms waiting out the midday heat behind slatted shutters.

But where had that smell come from? Random spinfeed? Some fragmentary record of a wartime combat jump, its spins decohered by repeated Bose-Einstein jumps until all she remembered was the smell of whatever forgotten desert she had fought and bled in? A piece of her lost childhood that had somehow managed to survive the slash-and-burn deletions that kept her one step ahead of the UNSec psychtechs for the fifteen years when she’d passed as human?

No matter. Though the vision was canned, the smell was real. And if it wasn’t quite the smell of Earth’s deserts as Cohen knew them, it was close enough to fool anyone who hadn’t lived it.

A harsh knife’s edge of sunlight slashed through an ill-hung shutter at the end of the corridor. Li walked to the window, opened it, and looked out over a blazing cityscape that incorporated the more famous bits and pieces of old Jerusalem. For a brief moment, Cohen wondered why her internals didn’t pick up the dream image and supply a current and factually accurate view of the city. Surely they could do that. Was there some patch or cutout that prevented her hard memory from being activated by dreamed images? Or was it in the nature of dreams not to be visible to machines unless the machines knew, at least in the half-light of borrowed memories, what it was to dream?

Then she turned away from the window, and they were in the last place Cohen would ever have expected this particular dream to take them. Home. His home, in one of the AI enclaves of the Orbital Ring. And, for the last three years, her home as well.

They were in the great ballroom. Like the rest of the house it had been boosted up, brick by brick, marble by marble, floorboard by floorboard, from rue du Poids de l’Huile in Toulouse. A lot of beautiful things had vanished in the chaos of the Evacuation, and not even Cohen could begin to save them all. But he’d saved Hyacinthe’s childhood home. And though the tourists were a bit of a pain, it gave him real pleasure to know that people traveled from every far-flung zone of the Orbital Ring to gaze at the formal eighteenth-century façade and the Renaissance staircase and the Roman bricks weathered to the soft pink of a summer sunset, and remember the ville roseand the glories of his beloved lost Gascony. Balls had gone out of style even before the original Hyacinthe was born, and the ballroom now housed Cohen’s automata collection.

Li walked down the long hall, under the refracted sunlight that rippled through the old glass like water curving over rocks. Her eyes brushed over the polished ivory of the Napier’s Bones, the finger-stained manila of an original Hollerith card from the 1890 census, the boxy control panel of one of the few priceless surviving Altair-8800s.

Not for the first time, Cohen wondered what it was like for Li to live in a neighborhood where the only organic life-forms were expensive purebred house pets and the aesthetically impeccable eternally youthful bodies-for-rent through which the more human AIs preferred to conduct their necessary commerce with organics. He’d always known she must feel somethingabout it, in that shadowy part of her psyche that hovered always a little beyond his reach. Now, in her unguarded dream state, he experienced those feelings as if they were his own.

Fear. Affection. Confusion. Powerlessness. All the creeping horror of the DARPA years. But why? She wasn’t a prisoner. And he certainly wasn’t her jailer. Surely he wasn’t responsible for this?

The ticking was louder now, far louder than it had been when the dream started. Cohen felt like a dust mote trapped inside a giant’s pocket watch.

What are theywaiting for?Li asked. Cohen realized with a shock that the theyLi was so afraid of was him.And suddenly he knew, because he had felt that same terror in her dreams before, where she was taking him.

The Automatic Chessplayer was the most famous automaton ever built, and most certainly one of the most famous scientific hoaxes ever inflicted on a gullible public. Baptized Von Kempelen’s Turk because of its spectacular gown and turban (no one ever accused Von Kempelen of good taste), the chessplayer had toured all the royal courts of Europe and swiftly become the stuff of legend. Rumors abounded that the Turk was controlled by a demon. Spectators crossed themselves upon entering its presence. Ladies had been known to faint.

The greatest feat of engineering involved in the machine, the thing that made it an automaton in fact as well as fiction, was its left arm. It was undoubtedly the most advanced prosthesis of the premodern era, for it could perform all the complex fine motor movements necessary to move chess pieces across the playing board. As the pamphleteer Carl-Gottlieb Windisch pronounced in 1773, “The invention of a mechanical arm whose movements are so natural, which grasps, lifts, and sets down all with such grace, even if this arm were directed by the two hands of the inventor himself, it alone is so complicated that it would ensure the reputation of many an artist.”

But behind the ingenious arm, Von Kempelen’s Turk was pure flimflam. The trick of the thing lay in the curious construction of the table (more like a cabinet, really) that supported the chessboard and contained the Turk’s machinery. Before each game Von Kempelen would open the three doors in the table’s front panel and hold a candle behind the cabinetry to show there was nothing inside but gears and pulleys and to prove that there was no room for a grown man to hide inside the table.

But there was room. Because the machine with the miraculous arm had been built for a man with no legs.

The first “director” of the Automatic Chessplayer was an otherwise obscure Pole named Joseph Warovski. He lost both legs to a cannonball during some obscure central European land war. He was also, though probably the two things were not related, one of the best chess players on the Continent. Before each exhibition Warovski would remove his artificial legs and seat himself on a cleverly constructed sliding tray inside the cabinet. As Von Kempelen opened the doors, Warovski would slide into the concealed portion of the cabinet and slide the “machinery” into whatever section was currently visible to the befuddled audience.

Things naturally got a bit more complicated after Warovski’s death. At that point, however, the Chessplayer fell into the hands of one of the great con men of all time: a certain Johann Maelzel.

And then things began to get really interesting.

Maelzel concocted and managed to keep a more or less firm grasp on one of the longest-lived conspiracies in the history of the game of chess. Half the chess masters of Europe (the shorter half) conspired with Maelzel to build up the Turk’s legend. The Chessplayer beat Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, and a short list of Europe’s best-known kings, emperors, and celebrities.

But the conspiracy succeeded at a price. For the collaboration between man and automaton was plagued by misfortune, death, and insanity. Several of the directors died or went crazy or developed catastrophic claustrophobia. The one woman (never named) who operated the automaton was rumored to have become barren, for reasons that the most respected Parisian surgeons were ghoulishly eager to speculate about. And the machine’s most famous director, Jacques Mouret, was completely paralyzed: struck down, as the broadsheets of the day put it, by the Curse of the Turk.

It was Mouret who finally unmasked the automaton in a tell-all newspaper interview given from his deathbed in exchange for the fleeting solace of a few bottles of high-proof liquor. By then, however, the Chessplayer, Maelzel, and Maelzel’s debts had already lit out for America.

The Curse of the Turk finally caught up with Maelzel in Cuba. During an exhibition game in Havana he contracted yellow fever. He died on the ship home to Philadelphia, and the Chessplayer was purchased at auction by a glorified curiosity shop called Peale’s Museum, or in some historical sources, the Chinese Museum. Whatever it was called, the place was no match for the Curse of the Turk. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1878, giving rise to the widespread assumption that “Maelzel’s dead chessplayer” (as it was by then called) was permanently, and not merely circumstantially, deceased.

Until Cohen rediscovered it—and rescued it and put it in the great ballroom of the house from rue du Poids de l’Huile so that Li’s subconscious could hang all her fears on its broad shoulders.

The Turk was playing the Qf3 Nc6 gambit at the moment: the same strategy that had checkmated Napoleon in just twenty-four moves during the bloody campaign of Wagram. It slid the pieces across the board with a long stick, its mechanical arm whirring and chuttering as the ancient gears grabbed and slipped and slid against each other. But Cohen noticed this with only a tiny fraction of his currently integrated consciousnesses. Because mostly what they were noticing was that Li was utterly, shatteringly terrified.

And as he looked up at the massive cloaked torso of the Turk, at the turbaned head, he understood why. He knew the face around those dead glass eyes. It was his face…Roland’s face…

“Cohen!”

Li was staring down at him, her lips pursed, the smooth curve of her forehead furrowed with a fine network of curving parallel wrinkles.

“You okay?” she asked in a light, carefully neutral tone that told him just how bad he must look.

He mustered a smile, feeling Roland’s skin itchin one of those neural feedback loops that he’d long ago given up trying to track through the vast labyrinth of patched and rewritten and expanded source code that ran his shunt subroutines.

“You gave me a nightmare,” he told Li.

“I don’t have nightmares.”

“Maybe you have them and just don’t remember them.”

“What’s the difference?”

A shofarblew somewhere nearby, some lone musician practicing for Rosh Hashanah.

“What is that?” Li asked.

“The shofar.A ceremonial ram’s horn. They blow it during the Yamim Noraim,the High Holy Days. This is when every Jew is supposed to review his actions over the past year—they call it the Arithmetic of the Soul in Hebrew—and do penance. They blow the shofarto symbolize that the Book of Life will stand open for ten days and even the worst sinner can be entered into it as long as he repents before nightfall on Yom Kippur.”

“I thought only Catholics did guilt.”

He snorted. “And where do you think you people got it from?”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.” He didn’t have to ask what part of yesterday she was sorry about; the memory of the nasty fight they’d had on the way home from Didi’s house was still fresh enough to have both of them on edge. “I shouldn’t have gotten personal. It’s just that I think you’re letting Didi use you.”

“Last time I checked, letting the Mossad use you was the dictionary definition of a sayan.”

“But you let him manipulate you.”

“Everyone lets people manipulate them, Catherine. It’s called having friends.”

“You know what I’m talking about.” She dropped her voice, the way she always did when she couldn’t avoid this particular topic. “The Game. Didi’s not an inscribed player, is he?”

“No! You think I wouldn’t have told you? I can’t believe you think I wouldn’t tell you that!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down. I just…but Gavi is, right?”

“What’s your point?”

“That you’re not thinking straight.”

“You’ve been talking to router/decomposer too much.”

“Well, sometimes he’s easier to talk to than you are.”

“That’s because he agrees with you.”

“No. He’s just less…conflicted.”

“That’s because there’s less of him to beconflicted.”

“You don’t have to be condescending,” she said sharply.

“I’m not being condescending!” Cohen stopped and forced himself to continue in a more reasonable tone of voice. “That’s as ridiculous as you being condescending to your big toe.”

“Last time I checked my big toe didn’t have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.”

“Excuse me, Catherine, but what are we actuallyfighting about?”

Li crossed her arms, set her jaw, and stared stoically into the middle distance. He’d clearly struck a nerve. But why? And what did it have to do with “condescending” to router/decomposer?

“Do you think,” Cohen said, “that maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talkabout sometime?”

She gave him a wry look. “Yes, I do think maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talk about sometime. But if we talk about it now, it’s only going to go one way. And I don’t want that. Necessarily.”

Relief trickled through Cohen like snowmelt, freeing systems that had been frozen in a holding pattern of anxiety. “And just when do you think you’ll be ready to talk about it?” he asked.

She sat up and looked intently at him. “That’s not like you. You’re usually the first one to put off till tomorrow what we could fight about today.”

But despite all his good intentions, Cohen couldn’t keep from pushing.

“The thing is,” he said, “I’m rapidly approaching achievement of the convergence criteria indicating termination of this particular iterative process.”

Every other person he’d ever been married to (except the mathematician, whose failings had gone far beyond the merely syntactical) would have asked what the hell he meant by that. Li just looked at him, her eyes level and calm, and said, “Are you asking for a divorce?”

“No! God!” He sat up, the room spinning around him. “You’re so far beyond paranoid there isn’t even a word for it! I’m just asking you to talk to me about whatever it is you’re so”—he backed carefully away from the inflammatory word afraid—“whatever it is that’s making you shut me out.”

“What if it’s something you can’t change?”

“I can change a lot, Catherine.”

The shadow of an unpleasant thought drifted across her face. He couldn’t hear it. She’d shut him out completely. And though he could have broken the door down instead of standing outside knocking on it, he knew that there was no future for the two of them on the far side of such an act of violence.

He waited. She looked at him, knowing that he was waiting. Letting him wait.

“You can’t change me,” she said.

Cohen stood under the shower, luxuriating in the feel of hot water running over Roland’s skin. Water smelled different on Earth. Better.And like so many of life’s small physical pleasures, it couldn’t be simulated no matter how state-of-the-art your streamspace connection was.

On the other hand, the water also turned off sooner on Earth than it did Ring-side. Even the outrageous room rates at the King David only bought you an extra thirty seconds or so on the clock. And, Israel being Israel, a call to the front desk was more likely to get you a lecture about water conservation than a longer shower.

Cohen sighed. This was starting out to be a bad day. And he, or Roland more likely, had a headache. And he really didn’t need any Israeli attitude in his morning.

He snuck a feeler into the hotel’s ambient AI systems and confirmed the first impressions gleaned through casual contacts over the last week. It was a primitive decision-tree-based expert system not even worthy of being called intelligent in any real sense. He hacked it, made his way to the shower defaults, changed the four-minute cutoff to a ten-minute cutoff. And since he felt like being a nice guy (and didn’t relish having to explain himself when the hack was discovered), he changed the allowances for all of his 212 fellow guests as well as himself.