He was wardriving—stealing streamspace time from unsecured local access points instead of going through Kyoto-legal channels. He and Li had argued heatedly about this. But he didn’t want UNSec eavesdropping on some of the Earthside errands he was planning to take care of this trip. There was nothing they’d like better than to slap an expensive corporate felony charge on him, if only for the PR value. And, as he’d pointed out in answer to Li’s objections, if he was going to give someone the power to pull the plug on him, he’d rather hand it to the warchalkers than to either General Nguyen or the boys on King Saul Boulevard.
He’d also pointed out to her (though much good it did) that the worst problems of interfacing on Earth had nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with bandwidth. He had to resort to scattershot prefetching just to be able to carry on a normal conversation. And prefetching, though it always made you look like an idiot sooner or later, was hardly a safety issue in normal circumstances.
Still, she was worried. And he didn’t like to worry her. So he was doing his best to limit the technical complications to his side of the intraface.
‹So what’s Arkady doing here?› Li asked onstream. ‹And am I crazy, or did I get the impression that you knew the woman he was with?›
The question flashed across his networks with the up/down, either/or, black-and-white clarity of the spin states that encoded it. And even before she hung the flesh of letters and syllables on the thought, he could feel the twist of strung-up nerves and vague worst-case-scenario visions that drove the question.
‹I don’t think she recognized me,› Cohen answered.
‹I didn’t ask whether she recognized you. I asked whether you recognized her.›
“Old friend from the office,” Cohen said, going offstream because it was so much easier to be evasive in realspace. “There’s a file on her somewhere or other. Router/decomposer can’t access it at the moment.”
Li groaned internally. ‹Is this going to be another one of those trips where you decide to pack light and end up forgetting to bring the one database you actually needed?›
“Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “you’re assuming it really was Korchow’s Arkady we ran into. I’m not convinced that was an act back there.”
“Neither am I,” Li said aloud, “but I’ve never gotten burned by being too suspicious. And I don’t believe in coincidence. Not that kind. We’re here for—” She glanced around and stopped talking, but he heard the rest of the thought just as he heard all her thoughts. At least all the ones she let him hear. ‹We’re here to bid on a piece of Syndicate tech some alleged defector brought across the line, and suddenly we run into an A Series we last saw in the company of Andrej Korchow? If I let that kind of ‘coincidence’ slide, we’d both be dead by now.›
‹There’s more than one Arkady. It’s not like running into a human. You ought to know that.› He glanced at her symmetrical construct’s features and decided not to pursue that line of thought. ‹Anyway, you worry too much.›
And then, with an almost humanly malicious sense of timing, they passed onto a new grid of his access point map, router/decomposer lost the most recent open node and failed to locate a new one, and the bottom fell out of streamspace.
The bus and its passengers drained away around Cohen as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.
What the hell? Cohen queried his routing meta-agent. But if the other AI heard him, he wasn’t answering.
Cohen dialed through the virtually stacked grid coordinates of the local nets, passing over the endless sea of O’s and triple slashes that marked closed nodes and danger points. He toyed briefly with two high-bandwidth nodes chalked with the legends KIND WOMAN TELL SOB STORY and RELIGIOUS TALK WILL GET YOU FOOD. He dropped them both; access with a data trail, however faint, was as bad as no access at all.
The next block was a government system full of high-security data holes (NOTSAFE).
Then the Border Police (BIG DOG—MOVE ON QUICKLY).
He skittered across the spinstream, feeling all contact with Earth slipping away from him. The bandwidth requirements for running a full-body shunt were inconceivable by the standards of human data-pushers—and human tolerances were all that most Earth-to-Orbital hardware was built to handle.
‹Hold for contact,› he messaged to Li’s Ring-side postbox across the low-bandwidth, high-surveillance Orbital-Surface routers, but he might as well have been shouting down a well for all the good it did. If anything went wrong down there while he was offstream, there was nothing he could do for her.
And then he saw it, gleaming through the haze of low-bandwidth static like incoming tracer fire: Two inverted brackets bellied up to each other to form the inverted capital I that marked the unpatrolled entrance ramps to Earth’s wide-open post-Embargo information freeway:
He was back.
He slipped back into the sensory feed from Roland’s cortical shunt like a diver sliding into blood-warm water. The bus and the passengers and the city all took shape around him. Most important, he felt Li’s reassuring presence interpenetrating the edges of his own composite consciousnesses:
He sent the letters blinking across their shared work space in archaic LED green.
‹What the hell was that?› she asked.
‹Nothing. Old programmer’s joke.›
‹Jeez, be serious for once, can’t you?›
“Okay. Sorry about the road bump.”
“I’m sorrier. I thought I was about to be stuck making small talk with Roland for the next two weeks.”
“I thought you liked Roland.”
“A little of Roland goes a long way.” She gave him a sly sideways glance, seemed about to say something, then obviously thought the better of it.
“It’s your fault, anyway.” Cohen stretched coquettishly. “I wanted to be a girl for this trip.”
“We’re in the land of the Interfaithers and the ultraorthodox, Cohen. One of us needs to be able to pass as a member of the master sex. Besides, if I’d let you shunt through a girl on this trip, any last hope of making you pack sensible shoes would have gone straight out the window.”
“Sensible shoes are bad for the soul,” Cohen kvetched. He ducked his head into the curve of her neck, tasting her familiar skin and the rich musky dust of Earth.
She shrugged him away.
It was barely a shrug. No outsider would have noticed the gesture, even if they’d been looking for it. But to Cohen it was unmistakable.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked after a moment.
Li’s generous lips compressed into a tense line. “Why pay for what you can get for free?”
And there it was, the truth Li could neither change nor live with. The two of them formed a hybrid creature whose realspace body was just the tip of the streamspace iceberg, and Cohen wrote the rules in streamspace. They ran on his networks. They navigated his gamespace. They depended on his processing capacity, which exponentially exceeded anything a mere organic could field—even an organic as heavily wired as Li.
Cohen had the power to go anywhere, see everything, do anything, take anything. Li only had the power to walk away. Not much for a woman who had commanded battalions and led combat drops. Not enough, Cohen was beginning to think.
Cohen’s routing meta-agent interrupted with a message that he’d sorted out the routing bug and was working on a patch for it. It was of course completely unnecessary for router/decomposer to bring such a message to Cohen’s conscious attention. Nor was it necessary to deliver it on a general access spinstream. But router/decomposer had sided with Li on the wardriving issue, and he had a point to make.