Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

A POLITICALLY USEFUL TOOL

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare…will be vastly different than it is today…the distinction between military and commercial space systems—combatants and noncombatants—will become blurred…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

– Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. A Report of the Project for the New American Century. (SEPTEMBER 2000)

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 deaddead.”

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 knownhim. 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’aretzsports section– Maccabi Tel Aviv Smites Haopel Jerusalem 77-49.Well, at least someone at the Ha’aretzsports 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:

][

OPEN NODE SKY’S THE LIMIT

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:

HELLO WORLD

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. “Iwanted 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 notlying!›

‹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 toohuman. Now if you’d just take my advice and—›

‹Don’t you have anythinguseful 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 mechasing 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 Ido 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 willkeep 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.