Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

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 —truthin 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 killthem?” 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 workfor 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 youhow 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 didscare 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 nota 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 livedown 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 executepeople?”

“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?”