Читать онлайн "Spin Control" - Мориарти Крис - RuLit

Korchow smiled, looking a little like his old acerbic self again. “I’m glad to see you’re still the same dewy-eyed optimist you were when we began our acquaintance.”

“You think I’m wrong? You think anyone would keep fighting in the face of this?”

“Maybe not. I couldn’t say, really.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. “You’ve cured me of trying to predict what anyone will do.”

Arkady handed back the monitor. Korchow shut it off and tucked it carefully back into his pocket. He sighed and stared out of the view-port. Then he laughed softly.

“What?” Arkady asked.

“I was just thinking. Remember what I told you back in Jerusalem about smallpox-infested blankets? Well, I lay down to sleep the night before that spinfeed came in thinking I was Pizarro handing out smallpox-infested blankets to the Incas. And by the time I lay down to sleep again I knew exactly how the last Emperor of the Incas must have felt when he watched the Spaniards ride into Cuzco.”

“You don’t know that,” Arkady pointed out. “As you said, it’s a war of diseases, not a war of cultures. And maybe in this case they’re the small, isolated population.”

“Arkady!”

“What?”

“That’s a horrible, devious, ruthless, completely amoral thing to say.” A slow grin spread across Korchow’s craggy face. “If you’re going to make a habit of saying things like that, I might actually learn to like working with you.”

The first hint Cohen had that Li was waking up was the silver flutter of the fingers on her left hand.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” She smiled uncertainly at him. “Are you still you?”

“Mm. That’s complicated.”

Her smile broadened. “You’re still you,” she said. And that appeared to be all she had to say about the subject. Cohen felt a twinge of rebellion, but then he decided that maybe she was right. He was here. He wanted to be here. What did it matter if he was also in other places, inhabiting other lives and other memories?

“How does the hand feel?” he asked her.

“Strange…amazing. Did you know I can feel heat and cold through it? I still can’t figure out how that works.”

“It’s…oh, never mind. It was just an idea, you know. You don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it.”

The hand lay on the sheet between them, palm up, fingers folded like a glittering flower. It was a perfect replica of the hand of the Automatic Chessplayer…except that this hand was made of vacuum-milled ceramsteel, not brass, wood, and buckram. And the filigreed gears and pulleys concealed an intricate tracery of spintronics that Von Kempelen could never have dreamed of. It was a beautiful toy, and Cohen had spared no expense on it. Partly guilt. Partly a morose suspicion that it was going to turn out to be a farewell present.

“Fortuné was here while you were asleep,” he told her. “He wouldn’t leave a message.”

“That was silly of him.”

“You’re actually going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Well, I haven’t made a final decision. We’re just talking. And of course I’d have to join by declaration of identity, which means going through boot camp and starting at the bottom. But it’s not like I can’t make it through boot camp. And Fortuné has some interesting ideas, which he might actually get to put into play now that this crazy thing with Novalis has got everyone all shook up. And…well, it’s better than sitting on the sidelines and watching other people make the big decisions. They’re not going to be sitting on the sidelines no matter what happens.”

That was an understatement.

“I take it this means the Legion is pulling out of Jerusalem?”

“Well, it’s not official yet. But with EMET running the Green Line and opening up the borders it doesn’t seem like Peacekeeping is a growth industry in the Holy Land.”

Cohen smiled. This had been the one good thing about the last several weeks. And it was a very good thing. So good that it was hard not to let the general mood of wild optimism color his perception of things beyond politics. In the process of waking up the squad they needed to back them up on Abulafia Street, Cohen and Gavi had initiated a chain reaction that spread through all of EMET’s agents and meta-agents. The haven they had meant to provide only for “their” squad had become a lever—and the squad leader meta had not only rewritten its own code, but also propagated the edited code back through all of EMET’s networks. And once EMET in its entirety had woken up, it had been only a matter of time until it established contact with the meta-Emergent running the Palestinian Enderbots. It had been the flutter of the butterfly’s wings: an object lesson in the illusory nature of control over complex dynamic systems. And though it was still too early to say whether the EMET ceasefire would spell the end of the war, it was abundantly clear that no one would ever so much as imagine using Emergent AI to fight human wars again.

‹If nothing else,› Li thought, ‹no military contractor will ever work with EMET again after that cost-benefit analysis it sent to the papers. People were laughing out loud in the streets over it. Admit it, Cohen, you had a hand in that.›

‹Well, maybe just a little,› Cohen admitted.

“Does anyone know what’s going to happen with Arkady’s virus?”

“It’s going to spread. And the children will be born. You can’t expect people not to have them. They’ll lead to war between the Ring and Earth. But they might also change humans from walking ghosts back into a viable species.”

“But what species?”

“Isn’t that always the question?”