Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“The frightening thing is that you actually mean that!”

Gavi leaned forward and looked deep into Cohen’s eyes. The effect was hypnotic. Mother Nature really did know best, Cohen decided. Put next to Gavi, even Arkady looked like a second-rate knockoff of the real thing.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but did Li really do what they say she did on Gilead? I can’t see you with someone who’d do that.”

“She doesn’t know what she did. They wiped her memory. She only knows what they want her to know.”

“And even you can’t get the real files?”

“Even I can’t get the real files. I’m beginning to wonder if they still exist.”

“You could go crazy over a thing like that,” Gavi said earnestly.

“Yes, you could.” Cohen blinked and shook his head, suddenly bothered by the flickering of one of Gavi’s many monitors. “Can you turn that off? Thanks. No, that one. Yes.”

“Are you still having seizures?” Gavi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “I thought you’d solved that bug long ago.”

“So did I. But I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze Catherine or discuss coupled oscillators. How are you ?”

“Great.”

“Mind wiping that shit-eating grin off your face and giving me an honest answer?”

The grin broadened. “Shitty.”

“Gavi! Come on.”

Gavi gave him a cool, smooth, faintly amused look.

“Why are you acting like this, Gavi?”

“Like what? Like a man talking to someone he hasn’t seen for two years?”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine.” The grin was back in place. “I was going to call you when I was done feeling sorry for myself and ready to come out and play again. Admit it, Cohen. You just don’t like people who don’t need you.”

“No. I love people who don’t need me. That’s why I married Catherine. What I don’t love are people who pretend not to need me because they’re too pigheadedly proud to ask for help when they need it. And will you kindly have the courtesy to stop laughing at me?”

“I’m laughing with you, little AI. And has it occurred to you that you just might be seeing Hyacinthe these days when you look at me? I mean the man, not the interface program.”

“You’ll really do anything to make this about me instead of about you, won’t you?”

Gavi was shaking with repressed laughter now. “Come on, Cohen. If you traipse all the way out here to visit me and then spend the whole time crying on my shoulder about how I’m not crying on your shoulder, it’s just going to be too ridiculous for words.”

“There’s got to be something someone can do. Have you at least talked to Didi?”

“No. And I’m not going to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Honestly, Cohen. What for? So he can tell me he thinks I got three of his boys killed and stashed the blood money in some Ring-side bank account, and the only reason I’m still alive is that I happened to be the dumb schmuck who pulled the future PM out of the way of a bullet once upon a time? You saw the way Osnat looked at me just now. I think we can take her feelings as representative.”

“I just—”

“Look.” Gavi let each word drop slowly and clearly into the silence. “ There is nothing you can do. So do me a favor and forget about it. I have. And by the way, you can stop trying not to stare at my leg.”

“Was I?” Cohen winced. “You’d think having spent the last several years of Hyacinthe’s life in a wheelchair would have cured me of that.”

“It’s not as big a deal as you obviously think it is. I mean, I’m not minimizing it. It’s pretty fucking unpleasant. But I got up this morning and took a nice 10K run before breakfast. I’d have to be even more self-absorbed than I am not to realize it could be a lot worse.” Gavi’s eyes narrowed and his voice took on a not-so-subtle edge. “Okay. Enough small talk. We both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a hall pass from Didi. So what does Didi want from me?”

Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.

When he was done, Gavi stared at him over crossed arms. “So Didi read you your orders and you picked up your friends and marched them all out here like little toy soldiers, no questions asked, ’cause you’re my ‘friend,’ huh?” The word friend was framed in cruelly ironic quotation marks.

“That’s a shitty way to put it,” Cohen said.

“Oh, you think?” Gavi jerked his chin toward the jumble of hardware hulking in the shadows. “Does Didi know I’m an inscribed player? No, don’t bother, I’ll answer the question for you. He knows. He knows because I told him in the reports I filed when I was your case officer. And I told him so he could use it to control you. Which is exactly what he’s doing now. Or do you want to tell me I’m missing something?”

“No, Gavi. You never miss a trick.”

Hy Cohen had done a terrible thing when he wrote those innocent little lines of gamer code into Cohen’s core architecture. And then he’d slipped out during the intermission; gotten out dead before his prize creation found out how painfully confusing it was going to be to live in a world full of alien and beloved humans.

Cohen loved Gavi—or Gavi was an inscribed player, which amounted to about the same thing. He couldn’t bear to watch a friend tear himself apart—or he was programmed to reweight his fuzzy logic circuits on receipt of negative affective stimuli from inscribed players. He was more loyal than the most loyal human friend, more selfless than the most ardent lover. But if you went to the source code it was right there, staring you down in pretty print: not love, but a recursive algorithm that directed him to reformat gameplay in order to maximize positive emotive “hits.”

And it only made things worse to know that the code that compelled him wasn’t the chance result of evolution or natural selection or environmental pressures, but the personal choice of a combative little French Jew who had the chutzpah to hand you the keys to your soul and tell you to go ahead and rewrite it from the ground up if you thought you could make a better job of it than he had.

“I am your friend,” Cohen protested, dogged by the humiliating feeling that he was arguing as much with Hyacinthe as with Gavi. “Why do you have to tear me down to my logic gates to find out what that means? I’m doing what any friend would do.”

“Well that’s the funny thing, Cohen.” All the feeling had leached out of Gavi’s voice, leaving it as coldly impersonal as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Because now that we’re on the subject of friends, maybe I should point out something that appears to have escaped your notice. I don’t have any.”

“They weren’t real friends,” Cohen whispered, aching to wipe the look of self-loathing off Gavi’s face. “You’re worth a hundred of them.”

“No one’s worth that!” Gavi snapped. And then the floodgates let loose. “Who are you, fucking Graham Greene puking and mewling about how Kim Philby was worth more than the poor slobs he sent out to die for him? You think I’m worth more than Osnat? Or Li? Or poor little Roland there? You must. You dragged them into a war zone because Didi told you I needed a shoulder to cry on.”

“It’s not that simple…”

“Isn’t it? Name one solid piece of evidence you’ve ever seen that I’m not Absalom. Name one real reason for believing I didn’t send those kids out to die in Tel Aviv.”