Chris Moriarty - Spin State

But Li had. On Gilead. In the interrogation rooms. When they went after people’s fingers with Vipers.

Things had fallen apart on Gilead. The price of playing by the rules had risen so high that no one had been willing to pay it anymore. Or at least no one who survived the place long enough to make a dent in things. And the funny thing about having the rules fall apart was that there always turned out to be some people, in any group, who liked life better without rules.

Li hadn’t been one of them—or at least she didn’t think she’d been. She’d been outside most of the interrogation rooms most of the time, doing her best to forget what happened on the other side of all those carefully closed doors. But it wasn’t like she didn’t know—like they didn’t all know—where the information they based their decisions on came from. And every time she tried to remember what had really happened on Gilead she felt like she was trying to force two versions of the war into a slot in her mind that only had room for one.

She shook her head, pushing the memories away. Sharifi was no Syndicate prisoner. And this wasn’t Gilead, not by a long shot.

“She probably damaged it trying to stop her fall,” Sharpe said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone come in with burns. There are a lot of loose wires down there. It’s easy to get confused and grab one, even if you know what you’re doing.”

Li looked down at the body. Now that she was over the first shock, she could see past the injuries to the face under them. It was her face, of course. The face she remembered from those sliding-away days before her enlistment. The face she still wore in dreams sometimes. It was like looking at her own corpse.

Sharifi’s uninjured hand lay on her stomach, palm down. A white crescent of scar tissue marked the web of skin between thumb and forefinger, and Li reached out and touched it. It was important somehow—material proof that it wasn’t her lying on the ice-cold metal, but another woman. Someone with her own life, her own mind, her own history. A stranger.

She realized Sharpe was watching her and pulled her hand back self-consciously. She cleared her throat. “Are we going to be able to get anything out of that mess?”

“I think so. The damage isn’t really as extensive as it looks. And ceramsteel is a lot tougher than brain tissue.” He grinned. “Not that I have to tell you that, Major.”

Li snorted and fingered her right shoulder. She’d slept on it wrong and woken this morning to the unmistakable sting of frayed filament ends cutting into muscle and tendon. She should probably ask Sharpe to look at it, she thought, remembering the field tech’s memo. But not now. Not with Sharifi lying between them.

“Let’s see what we see,” Sharpe said. He manipulated the controls of Sharifi’s drawer and slid it onto a ceiling-mounted track system that connected the storage area to the autopsy room.

What they saw when Sharpe got his allegedly temperamental scanner up and running was startling. Sharifi’s backbrain—muscle memory, smell, autonomic functions—was as pristine as any planet-bound civilian’s. She had the VR relays that you would expect to see in an academic who, after all, made her living and did her research on the web. But other than that, Sharifi had died with more or less the same backbrain she’d been born with: the brain of someone who had never needed military-applications streamspace access and who had made no more than a handful of Bose-Einstein jumps in her lifetime.

Sharifi’s frontbrain told a different story, though. It lit up the screen like a Freetown data haven. Whatever was in there looked to Li’s untrained eyes like a white-hot thousand-legged spider—a spider that had wormed its way into every fold, every cranny between Sharifi’s shattered temples.

“What the hell is that?” Li asked.

Sharpe let out a long slow whistle. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” he said. “We have now passed far, far beyond the limits of my technical expertise. I can tell you this much, though. It was all put in at once. And not long ago.”

“Three months ago,” Li said.

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Yes, that sounds right. Usually a web this extensive will be built up by accretion. Multiple generations of filament, even redundant networks layered on top of each other. Different-age scar tissue. By the time most people are this wired, they’re carrying around almost as much dead tech as live tech. But this job was done in a single operation. Ring-side clinic, of course. Or Alba.” He glanced at Li. “To be honest, it looks more like military work to me than anything else.”

“Well, it wasn’t Alba,” Li said. “That much I can tell you.” She peered at the scan, comparing it to her own brain scans taken after her last upgrade, trying to see which of Sharifi’s brain segments were most densely wired. Something about Sharifi’s system seemed off somehow. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “What’s it all wired into? What’s it for ?”

“Communications,” Sharpe said. “All communications.” He pointed. “Look. Here. Here. Where the dark areas are, and the contrast. If we looked at a scan of a typical cybernetic implant system—yours for example—we would see a much more even distribution of filaments. Some concentration in the motor skills areas. A node somewhere in here for the oracle that it’s all platformed on. Also a high concentration of filament in the speech, hearing, and visual centers. In other words, your spinfeeds, your VR interfaces, your communications systems. Sharifi’s implant is totally different. No oracle, no operating platform, no relays. Just filament. And it’s concentrated almost exclusively in the speech, sight, and hearing centers.”

“So it’s just a fancy net access web?” Li asked, disappointed.

“Not quite.” Sharpe pursed his lips and stepped away from the scanner, pulling his gloves off. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of shunt.”

“A shunt?” Li shook her head, fighting away a brief, untethered image of Kolodny falling. “That’s crazy. Why would someone like Sharifi be wired for a shunt? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”

Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.

“I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”

“What kind of system?”

“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”

Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.

“Emergent-human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown working toward it.”