Chris Moriarty: Spin Control

The entire city drifted and planed like the veil of snowflakes that fluttered from the sky. There was no traffic, just a slow Yom Kippur tide of bicycles gliding through the white streets with the frictionless silence of watch gears. Women’s faces looked pale and vulnerable without their everyday armor of cosmetics, and men glanced at each other over their bundled scarves with the solemn amazement of children.

The house on Abulafia Street was just as Cohen remembered it. Tall walls, a high gate, and a garden as hidden as the one Solomon sang of. Surely the house must have been a caravanserai . Six centuries ago it would have been a relay on a camel-powered network as vital as the quantum spin-encrypted interplanetary web of streamspace. Now it was just a dusty ruin: a waypoint on a forgotten road between two nowheres.

He stepped through the little door cut into the bottom left-hand corner of the gate. A door within a door. Hyacinthe had loved those little doors, so common in the Mediterranean architecture of his native city. That childish love of pattern and paradox had perhaps been a first hint of the intricate twistiness that would be so characteristic of his later work.

The courtyard lay empty under the white sky. Snow weighed down the few leaves still rattling on the rose vines and drifted in the corners of the winter-stilled fountain. There were no lights on in the main house, but a line of footprints skirted along one side of the courtyard. The prints were faint and fading; a long undulating snowdrift had covered them here and there so that they seemed to have been the work of a being who possessed the power of flight, but only sometimes.

Suddenly Cohen felt very alone. And the fact that he was alone by design—that he’d winnowed his active programs down to the bone and told most of his associates to wait Ring-side for their own safety—didn’t make him feel any less alone.

He feathered along the still unfamiliar edge of the EMET interface he and Gavi had hacked last night. All quiet. As it should be. They would need every advantage they could get to make this work, including the advantage of surprise. The Yad Vashem golem he didn’t have to look at. He could smell the black reek of its despair. He could track its tortured progress behind the firewalls he had built around it…walls that would burn like tinderwood if the flickering spark of quasi-sentience ever exploded into the real thing.

The footprints veered off toward a mean little side door half-hidden by a leafless corpse that looked like it had once been a lilac tree. Cohen followed the footprints inside and waited for Roland’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. The tracks continued: not footprints now but merely icy flecks and puddles on wooden boards scarred and hollowed by generations of travelers’ feet.

He climbed a flight of stairs that twisted back on itself to give onto the second-story balcony, and continued around the angle of the balcony past rows of lawn furniture stacked up against the walls like enchanted courtiers in a fairy tale. The house was largely abandoned, and the punishing hand of time and weather had lain heavily on it; Cohen saw missing tiles, exposed lath and stucco, even the narrow hides of mice and squirrels.

The footprints were crisper up here, and now Cohen could see that two people had passed this way. One large and flat-footed. The other small enough to set his heart pounding.

Before he even reached the right door, Turner began speaking to him from the shadows. He turned in at the point Turner’s voice seemed to be coming from and found himself in a room, bare and dark, with no furniture but one battered chair that Turner had pulled in from the next room to judge by the grooves it had cut in the dusty floor. The only other thing in the room besides Turner and his chair was a small, crumpled pile of clothing propped up in the angle of one corner.

Li.

Her eyes were closed, but he could see her breath on the air.

“She’s running a bit of a fever,” Turner said. “You might want to get that looked at.”

Li’s left arm was in a sling and tucked inside a jacket that someone had flung over her slumped shoulders. There was no way for Cohen to estimate the extent of the damage. But even leaving aside the horror hidden by the sling, it was clear that they had worked her over with ferocious thoroughness.

“So much for the mighty Peacekeepers.” Turner sounded almost wistful. “Oh well. Maybe she was behind on her upgrades.”

Cohen started toward Li, only to run smack into a guard who came at him out of nowhere. The pink face and well-fed body were all-American, but the gun in his beefy hand was bleeding-edge Peacekeeper tech.

Turner lumbered to his feet with a lurching clumsiness that Cohen suspected the man could put on and off like old socks. “Well, whaddaya say?” he asked as pleasantly as if there wasn’t a gun around for miles. “Should we take the nickel tour?”

Cohen pulled himself together and forced his eyes away from Li’s face. “Let’s just get it over with.”

Arkady stood outside the door in the gate while Gavi knocked. Then he followed Gavi into the courtyard, bending his head to avoid the sagging lintel. As they stepped into the high narrow space he couldn’t help glancing around in search of Arkasha.

“Don’t worry,” Turner called from the second-story balcony. “He’ll be here soon enough. They have to get through the checkpoint at King Hussein Bridge. And the snow’s slowing everything down today.”

It took Arkady a moment to see Cohen, slightly behind Turner and almost lost in the shadows. The AI gave no sign of recognizing him or Gavi. He barely gave any sign of being alive.

“Have the Palestinians’ Enderbots been held up at the bridge too?” Gavi asked.

It didn’t sound like a joke to Arkady, but Turner laughed anyway. “They’ll be along.”

“And you’ve looked at the source code?”

“I’ve had my people look at it.”

“The Enderbots won’t step in unless something goes wrong. They’re just here to make sure everyone stays honest.”

“Who wouldn’t be honest?” Turner asked on one of his wide, white, brutal smiles.

Half a minute later the Enderbots arrived. They flowed through the courtyard like water, skimming along the walls and pooling in the corners, imposing upon the spare geometry of the courtyard an invisible and deadly calculus of kill zones and lines of fire and angles of attack and retreat. Arkady looked for Osnat among the Enders. But he couldn’t recognize her behind any of the tinted goggles and red monitor eyes ranked around the courtyard’s edge.

When PalSec’s Enders arrived, the process unfolded a second time, just as smoothly and in the same eerie silence. By the time the two opposing squads of Enderbots finally sorted themselves out and came to rest, you could barely distinguish two separate armies in the motionless ranks of dusty uniforms, free of all sign of rank or unit, with only the stylized corporate logos on weapons and equipment to distinguish one force from the other.

Then they waited. Gavi shifted his weight nervously from flesh-and-blood leg to prosthesis and back again. He looked like he was struggling just as hard as Arkady to keep his eyes from straying around in search of Osnat.

Finally Arkasha arrived. And the symmetry held. Like Arkady, he came with only one companion: the green-eyed Yusuf.

As they passed by Gavi and Arkady, Yusuf slowed. The carefree, frivolous mask Yusuf had worn the two times Arkady had met him was gone, and he looked young and scared and angry.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he hissed at Gavi.

Gavi didn’t answer. When Arkady finally tore his eyes away from Arkasha to glance at Gavi, he saw him staring at Yusuf with the pained, confused look of a dog who’s just been stepped on and is trying to figure out if it was by accident.