Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”

Li caught her breath.

“Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found… at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”

“So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”

“I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.

“To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”

Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”

Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenaline-honed senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.

“Of course, you will have to undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”

“I won’t do it,” Li said.

“Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”

“You crazy fuck.”

He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Decline and Fall of Species? ”

“I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and choosing my part. I’m not playing.”

“Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”

Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.

“What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice.

“I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.

It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.

“I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know.

“Read it,” Korchow suggested.

Block letters ran across the top of the page: REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES, S.A., J.M. JOSS, M.D.G.P., B.S., SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING. Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.

Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.

“Where did you get this?” she whispered.

“Where do you think, Major?”

“I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.”

“Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.”

She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.

“Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”

“What do you want?”

“I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”

It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”

“I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”

“You’d imagine wrong, then.”

“Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”

“Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”

Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”

She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.

He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.

“Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.

Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.

“Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”

“I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”

He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”

Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.

“So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still working for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”

“Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”

Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.

“You can go, I said.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow.