Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

Cohen had been staring dubiously at the so-called toast, and he expanded his circle of doubt to encompass Li. “The people who are always saying that aren’t French,” he told her. “And if they are, then I can assure you they’re not talking about breakfast.”

Outside, the sunlight flickered across the hoods of passing cars, throwing bright spears of shadow into the room through the still-half-shuttered windows. Cohen froze, distracted by the rhythmic play of light and shadow. What was it that it reminded him of…

By the time he realized Roland was going into a seizure, it was too late to pull him out of it.

“Wake up, Cohen. Come on, wake up. Cohen? Roland! ”

Li had him rolled over on his side (Roland’s side, a skittish subsystem nattered at him), and she was hanging on to his hands with a strength that reminded him abruptly of the difference between her ceramsteel-reinforced, half-machine reflexes and Roland’s fragile flesh and bone.

“I forgot my drasticodracostochastic control measures,” he muttered woozily.

“It’s not funny!” Li snapped.

Nor was it. As far as Cohen could tell the packet compression needed to push data downstream from his Ring-based systems to Earth had interfered with the shunt software’s ability to match his data pulses to Roland’s neural firing rhythms. Essentially he’d given him a spintronic version of photoinduced epilepsy. And that was bad. Bad for Roland’s little beating heart. Bad for his finely honed brain too if Cohen couldn’t downclock reliably.

“I’m putting you to bed,” Li said. “No arguments. No questions. And then you’re going to check out and give Roland a proper rest. Twenty-four hours off so he can sleep and have a chance to clear the circuitry.”

“And leave you alone down here?”

“I think I can hold down the hotel room on my own.”

Cohen remembered the sight of Ash’s head bent over Li’s, and felt a sudden rush of jealousy. He was careful to hide it from Li—and equally careful to hide his discreet inquiries about Ash. He buried both of those incriminating processes with a massive “nice” command and pipelined their outputs into a low-traffic subdirectory with instructions to his routing meta-agent to move the files automatically should Li ever happen to access the subdirectory.

Instead of executing the command, router/decomposer sent an un-characteristically snide message floating across the lowest layer of Cohen’s internal traffic:

‹You’ve got me shuttling things around so fast I don’t even know where to find them. And anyway, how do you expect her to trust you when you’re playing a thousand and one moving files with her?›

‹Did I ask for your advice on my sex life?› Cohen snapped.

He regretted it immediately. Patience might be running thin, but squashing intrasystem feedback was a textbook-perfect recipe for losing good associates.

He sent an apology rippling through the local system. The routing meta sent back something suspiciously like a shrug.

Li blinked and shook her head slightly.

She’d caught on to the edge of something there. But it wasn’t the routing meta. So what, then? He catenated the several hundred mostly routine processes he happened to be running at the moment, but saw nothing when he passed them in review that could explain that little shiver he’d felt in her.

Perhaps it really had been nothing; sometimes all it took was an accidental glimpse at the traffic on the other side of the firewall he kept between her and his core systems.

“You scare me sometimes,” she said.

It was a lie. A lie by omission, anyway. He’d sensed the first wordless thought that those words replaced: You scare me. No sometimes about it.

Cohen hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give Roland a chance to catch up on his beauty rest. You know where to find me if you need me.”

He paused to set the various trap commands that would alert him if the hotel’s formidable security systems were breached. He thought about setting a hash log on Li’s own internals to see if she went anywhere while he was gone, but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of her catching him at it. Then he released his various selves into streamspace, abandoning Roland’s exhausted body to the sleep it so desperately needed.

Li snapped into wakefulness. A minute and a half before her internals were set to wake her. She opened her eyes and lay in absolute stillness, savoring the wired wide-awake feeling that always came to her before a mission.

But there was no mission today. No last-minute fixes to see to. No orders to follow, good or bad. That life was over. All she was following today was a name, whispered into her ear as she stepped into Didi’s armored car.

She hadn’t decided what to do about that name.

Or whether to tell Cohen about it.

It can’t hurt to talk, she told herself in the last dark corner of her mind that she’d managed to shelter from Cohen’s devouring presence. I’ll just see what she wants. And then I can tell him about it. What harm can that do?

She eased out of bed, though she knew her caution was pointless; Roland was sleeping the sleep of the dead, his body worn down by the relentless assault of Cohen’s presence. Still, there was something corpselike about the faces when Cohen had used them hard. And he was using Roland very hard indeed on this trip.

Outside, the city was mean and yellow with the khamsin. Cohen had said the winds had gotten worse when their seasons shifted. Li figured that had to be true; no people in their right minds would have settled here with this banshee spitting at them.

A quick dogtrot took her up King David Street and cutting over toward the neighborhood that showed up on the Legion maps as Mea Shearim. She passed the sign at the quarter’s entrance, which she vaguely remembered Cohen pointing out to her a few days ago. It was written in Hebrew and English, but not UN-standard Spanish, which was odd, she thought, if they wanted the tourists to understand it:

REQUEST AND WARNING TO WOMEN VISITING OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOT TO APPEAR IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN SHORT GARMENTS (NOT COVERING THE KNEE) IN SHORT-SLEEVED CLOTHING (NOT COVERING THE ARM). THE TORAH OBLIGATES TO DRESS IN MODEST ATTIRE THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE BODY

No problem there, Li joked to herself. The accused pleads guilty to the charge of being a golem instead of a woman.

Cohen claimed that the ultraorthodox neighborhoods had shifted—the hidden life of cities, he’d called it—and that the sign was maintained more for historic than for enforcement purposes. But it was awfully well maintained, Li thought. And she’d seen enough of the version of human history maintained Ring-side to know that people mostly maintained the pieces of history they agreed with.

She twitched her shirt cuffs over her wrists—Cohen, in one of his usual old-maidly excesses of caution had made her order a bunch of new shirts with particularly long sleeves before they left—and checked that her jacket collar was covering her neck reasonably well. Then she straightened her back and stepped out a little more soldierly…just in case anyone in those narrow little alleys happened to be looking her way and thinking about anything.