Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Haas jabbed a thick finger toward the planet surface. “We can’t store more than a month’s worth of production up here, and TechComm closed the main relay to private traffic as soon as the field AI flatlined. I pink-slipped two thousand miners last week. Another month of this and there’ll be kids starving in Shantytown.”

They were probably starving already, Li thought. The line between living and dying was desperately thin in a mining town. Sometimes it took no more than a missed paycheck to push a family across it.

“I swear I’d rather do business with the Syndicates,” Haas went on. “At least when their tech breaks down, they fix it. Or shoot it. It’s enough to make you support bilateralism.”

Then he met Li’s eyes and paled as he remembered who he was talking to.

She just watched him. So Haas was for secession—or at least willing to consider the idea. Li doubted that secessionist talk would still get a man thrown into provisional detention on Compson’s World these days, but it would certainly get Haas into hot water with his corporate superiors. Fine, she thought. Let the son of a bitch squirm.

But in the end she couldn’t follow through.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like to watch the Haases of the world squirm. But not over politics. And not at her hands.

“Forget it,” she said. “I’ve been to the dance enough times to know saying something isn’t doing it. And I’m here to investigate Sharifi’s death, not your politics.”

But she still rubbed her hand along her chair arm as she stood up, coating the brush-finished steel with a fine layer of dead skin cells. Reprogramming skinbugs for surveillance wasn’t legal, exactly. But she’d never seen anyone actually get in trouble over it. And if she turned up any really good dirt, she’d be able to wring some mileage out of it, warrant or no warrant.

As she turned to leave, she thought she heard a rustle from the shadows behind the big desk. She stopped, listened, and could have sworn she smelled perfume. She looked toward Haas, but he’d gone back to his paperwork and didn’t seem to notice.

Was someone watching? Had there been a silent audience to their meeting?

No, she decided. No women in the walls here. Just the little noises any station made. Just heat turning on and off, air sighing through ventilators.

Just nothing.

Haas and his crew were waiting in the shuttle’s cramped passenger compartment by the time Li boarded. She stripped and donned her borrowed miner’s kit in the aisle. Most of the other passengers looked away. Haas didn’t.

The kit included a microfilament climbing harness, a rebreather and oxygen canister, a first-aid kit with endorphin-boosters, syntheskin patches, and an old-fashioned viral tourniquet. Li hoisted the harness and pulled it on, wincing as the familiar motion strained her damaged arm. The full kit weighed less than the infantryman’s gear Li had carried back in the Syndicate Wars, but just the feel of webbing on her shoulders reminded her of all the things that could go fatally wrong in the deep shafts of a Bose-Einstein mine.

Haas loomed over her, looking even bigger now that he wasn’t quarantined behind his vast desk. His bad mood seemed to have vanished; he sounded almost pleasant as he introduced Li to the various geologists and engineers on the survey team. The one person he didn’t introduce was the woman next to him, and Li knew why as soon as she looked at her.

It was there in the surreal color of her violet eyes, the inhuman, almost repellent perfection of her face. No human geneticist would have designed such a face. Nature had never meant humans to look like that. She could be only one thing: a postbreakaway A or B Series Syndicate-built genetic construct.

Haas intercepted Li’s glance at the woman and put a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “And here’s our witch, of course,” he said offhandedly.

The witch stood as still under Haas’s hand as a well-trained animal, but something in the set of her shoulders said his touch was less than welcome. Or did Syndicate constructs even think that way? Could like and dislike be programmed in the crèches? Could feelings be spliced out of the perfect, unvarying, simulation-tested genesets? Or were the wrong feelings just forbidden—along with every other unprogrammable thing that made up an individual?

Li said her name and held out her hand.

The witch hesitated, then reached out tentatively, like an explorer greeting possibly dangerous natives. Her hand felt restless as a bird in Li’s grasp, and she kept her head down so that Li saw just the pale curve of forehead, the dark hair falling away from a part as straight as a knife blade.

Li watched her surreptitiously as they took their seats and the pilots went into the final preflight checks. She’d spent half her adult life fighting the Syndicates, but she’d rarely been so close to a high-series construct. This one would have been tanked in the orbital birthlabs above the Syndicate home planets. She would have grown up in a crèche full of her twins, never seeing a face that wasn’t hers, never hearing a voice or feeling a touch that wasn’t hers. And if she’d lived long enough to end up here, then she’d survived the one-year cull, the eight-year cull, the constant barrage of norm-testing that routed out physical and psychological variations in order to achieve the disciplined, unquestioning, unvarying perfection that the Syndicate designers insisted on.

Li glanced around at the other passengers. Even the ones who weren’t looking at the witch were focused on her, aware of her, orbiting her like iron filings lining up under the influence of a magnet. They were seduced by the beautiful face, the graceful body, the woman she appeared to be. But Li saw battle lines forming along the Great Divide of Gilead’s southern continent. She saw a flesh-and-blood statement of Syndicate ideology, Syndicate superiority, Syndicate disdain for human values.

Maybe Nguyen was right, Li thought. Maybe she didn’t understand politics. Maybe she was just that stereotypical, vaguely pitiful figure: an old soldier who couldn’t look peace in the eye. But was she the only old soldier who thought the UN was selling off hard-earned victories to pad the multiplanetaries’ profit margins? Was she the only UN construct who thought the thirty-year contracts were still slavery—even if the new slave masters were constructs, not humans? Why was this woman here? What could she offer that was worth the risk of her presence?

“Best investment we ever made,” Haas said, as if in answer to Li’s unspoken questions. “First six months after we picked up her MotaiSyndicate contract, we tripled production and halved our payroll. Fantastic, huh?”

“Yeah,” Li said. “Fantastic. Bet the union loves it.”

“What?” Haas looked like he was giving serious thought to spitting. “Someone’s been selling you fairy tales, Major. There is no union.”

He shot an arm past Li’s face and lifted the window shade to check their progress toward the planet. They were well into the atmosphere, pinions of flame streaking the shuttle’s wings, the coalfield spread out like a map below them. Li scanned the broad floodplain, leveled by an ocean that had dried up three geologic ages before humans set foot on Compson’s World. Headframes and mine buildings curved along the valley’s edge, following the coal seam. Far above, their jagged spires already flashing red in the dawn, loomed the Black Mountains, ramping up in serried cliffs and ridgelines toward the Continental Divide.

It took her a moment to put her finger on what was wrong with the view. There was a thick haze hanging around the mountains’ shoulders, up around the four-thousand-meter level. And farther down, a wash of bright oxygenated green swept the feet of the cliffs. When Li had last seen those cliffs they were above the atmosphere line, bathed in the dull orange of native lichens. This wasn’t the planet she’d left behind, and the sheer breadth of the human encroachment in that fifteen years was chilling.