Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Li felt a flash of anger at Cohen for… well, for what? For talking about it? For laughing at it? For knowing about it and still enjoying his elegant life? But he was right, just like Sharifi had been right. And hadn’t she gotten off Compson’s as fast as she could? Wasn’t she just as determined to take some of the good life and not think too hard about where the condensate that made it all possible was coming from?

She slid the book back onto the shelf and kept moving along the wall, toward Cohen’s desk. She picked up an open fiche, glanced at the screen:

The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. Both the Syndicates and the UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with this metaevolutionary reality. In the Syndicates we have seen an evolutionary shift toward a hive mind mentality, viz., the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a distinctively posthuman collective psychology, including generalized cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from the gene-norm.

“Don’t you believe in privacy?” Cohen asked, sounding exasperated.

“Only my own. What is this, anyway?”

“A talk I’m giving. A draft. Meaning get your snout out of it.”

She shrugged and put the fiche down. “It doesn’t sound like Sharifi had happy memories of Compson’s. So why did she go back there? And what was she doing underground in the Anaconda?”

“I don’t know. We’d lost touch, rather. But I do have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was. And no matter what Helen claims to believe, Sharifi wouldn’t have sold information. She was a real crusader.” He smiled. “A little like you.”

Li brushed that aside. “I’m just pulling a paycheck.”

“Is that what they call it?” He snorted. “I’ve met better-paid bellhops. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me exactly what you were looking for when the field AI latched on to you.”

“Do you really think it went rogue?” she asked.

“No. Or rather, I stopped thinking that when it went after you. Semisentients just aren’t that interested in humans. Most full sentients aren’t even that interested. No, someone sent it. Someone who is interested in you.”

“Who?”

“Dragons,” Cohen murmured, tracing an elegant figure in the air with the tip of his cigarette. “White Beauties.”

Li’s oracle dipped into the spinstream to figure out what White Beauties were, and what they had to do with imaginary lizards. All she got was a few obscure references to sixteenth-century mapmaking.

Cohen laughed, and she realized he had seen her instream query—and her failure to turn anything up.

“When mapmakers reached the edges of what they knew back on Earth,” he said, “they’d write ‘Here Be Dragons.’ Or if they were a little more prosaic they’d simply leave blank spots. Blank spots which were white, of course, on the old paper maps. Siberia. The Empty Quarter. Deepest Africa. The great explorers called those blank spots White Beauties. Silly of me, perhaps. But what I mean to say is that streamspace is more than the sum of things humans have put there. There are White Beauties in the Stream. Living, sentient systems as unknown and uncharted as those white spaces on the old maps. Humans don’t see them. Or if they do see them, they generally don’t recognize them. But they exist. And you may have bumped up against one, that’s all.”

Li shivered. “You can’t honestly believe that.”

“People have believed stranger things,” he answered. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I’m not making any claims. You asked me for a guess, that’s my guess. For the moment anyway. Like every woman, I reserve the right to change my mind.”

It was an old argument, but one Li couldn’t resist. “You’re not a woman, Cohen.”

“My dear, I’ve been one for longer than you have.”

“No. You’ve been a tourist. It’s different.” Li tapped into her hard files, pulled up her scan of Sharifi’s interface and copied it to him. “Take a look at that and let me know what your woman’s intuition tells you.”

“Well now,” Cohen said, sitting up abruptly. “I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning that.” His upper lip twisted in a crooked little smile. “It was quite entertaining to see you teetering back and forth, trying to decide how far you trusted me.”

“It’s not a matter of trust,” Li said. “It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols.”

“Impertinent monkey.”

He wizarded the file into realspace, opened the case, ran his fingers along the wire, turned it over to look at the raised sunburst.

“It was made for Sharifi,” Li said. “Some kind of wet/dry interface.”

“Intraface.”

“I think she was using it to interface with the field AI—”

“Int ra face.” He sounded pained. “Do you listen to anything I say?”

“Interface, intraface, what’s the difference?”

“Think, Catherine. An interface manages the exchange of data and operating programs between two or more discrete systems. An intraface, in contrast, merges the two into a single integrated system.”

“Pretty academic distinction, Cohen.”

“Not when the two things you’re networking are a human and an Emergent AI. Think of your own internals. The various systems are platformed on an oracle—a simple, nonsentient AI that’s little more than an intelligent game-playing agent. The oracle routes data and active code back and forth from you to your wetware, translates classical queries into quantum computational functions, tags and produces correct solutions.” He fluttered slim, perfectly manicured fingers. “In broad outline, it’s little different than the shunt through which I receive sensory data and route commands to this or any other wired body. An intraface, however, is an entirely different beast. It merges the AI and the human into a single consciousness.”

“Who controls it?”

“A nonquestion. Like asking which neurons in your brain control your own body. Or asking which of my associated networks is in control of me. We all are.”

“But some of you are more in control than others, right?”

“Ah. Yes. I should have been more precise before. When I say a single consciousness I’m speaking of consciousness not as you understand it, but as I do. I know it’s fashionable to describe human consciousness as Emergent, but really, as soon as you get above the level of the individual neuron, that’s just a metaphor. A true Emergent is a very different animal. Emergent consciousness is born out of a kind of parallel processing that the human mind simply isn’t wired for. Control in such a context is… complicated.”

“And you’d need an Emergent to run it?”

“A very powerful one at that.”

Li looked at him, thinking. “How many Emergents are there who could do it?”

“Not many,” Cohen said, picking at a thread on the cuff of his suit jacket. “Alba’s Emergents, of course, especially if you ran them through AMC’s field AI. Two or three Ring-side AIs, all under depreciable life contracts to DefenseNet or one of the private defense contractors. Any of the cornerstone AIs in FreeNet’s Consortium could run it—and stepping on the Consortium’s toes could certainly explain your little adventure in Freetown.”

“What about ALEF?” Li asked.

“My dear girl, no one who’d ever been to an ALEF meeting would imagine such a thing. Half the older members are decohering because of insufficiently backed-up early FTL transports. A third of the still-functional ones are supremely uninterested in anything but debating theoretical mathematics and experimenting with alternative identity structures. And the rest of us couldn’t agree on where—or even whether—to eat dinner, let alone organize something on this scale.” He sobered abruptly. “Besides, if we were ever caught fooling around with such a thing, TechComm would activate our mandatory feedback loops.” He drew one finger across Roland’s neck in an unmistakable gesture. “All she wrote.”