Router/decomposer had originally called himself just plain decomposer. And a decomposer was exactly what he was: a fully sentient massively parallel decomposition program supported by a vast Josephson Array currently holding in a low lunar orbit carefully calculated to keep its spin glass lattice operating at a crisp refreshing twenty-seven degrees Kelvin. But when Cohen’s last communications routing meta-agent had decamped in protest over Li’s arrival, decomposer—albeit with endless grumbling over being dragged away from his beloved spin glass research—had also taken over management of Cohen’s ant-based routing algorithms.
When his job changed, decomposer had quite logically changed his name: to router/decomposer, or, among friends, 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110000 01011100 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110011 01100101 01110010.
Functional nomenclature didn’t appeal to Cohen any more than the personality architecture that normally went with it. But router/ decomposer was fabulously good at his job, fully sentient, and eminently capable of spinning off into his own autonomous aggregation. No other Emergent AI came close to matching the seamless integration and dizzying processing speeds Cohen could achieve thanks to router/decomposer’s elegant spinstream routing solutions. And router/decomposer would have applied for his own Toffoli number and gone into business for himself long ago if it were not for what he cogently termed his “low tolerance for the social friction costs of dealing with assholes.”
Needless to say, Cohen tried very hard to keep the social friction costs of dealing with Cohen to a minimum.
‹Do you have any idea how much processing space I’m blowing on your little spy games?› router/decomposer queried.
‹Where’s your sense of adventure,› Cohen joked, ‹and you just a young whippersnapper of a hundred and fifteen?›
Router/decomposer demonstrated his sense of adventure by sending an extremely rude chaotic attractor flickering across the hidden layers of their shared Kohonen nets.
“Tell him to get a real name, will you?” Li said, having caught the tail end of router/decomposer’s dirty joke.
“Tell him yourself,” Cohen answered.
“I would, but he seems to not be speaking to me at the moment.”
“What? Why?”
“Hell if I know.”
‹What’s that about?› Cohen asked router/decomposer on the root-only stream.
‹She keeps asking to access data you’ve made me firewall. It’s embarrassing. Actually,› router/decomposer suggested slyly, still on the root-only stream, ‹it would save a lot of RAM if you’d stop making me lie to her.›
‹It’s not lying!›
‹Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. The point is, our current associative configuration is highly inefficient. And detrimental to your relationship with her.›
‹Oh really? If you know so much about humans, why don’t you stop backseat driving and get your own?›
‹Nah,› router/decomposer said placidly. ‹I’m more the heckling-from-the-sidelines type than the do-it-yourself type. Besides, I tried shunting once. It was…squishy. A little bit of human goes a hell of a long way. That’s why I like Li. A little human, but not too human. Now if you’d just take my advice and—›
‹Don’t you have anything useful to do right now?›
‹Not until you fuck up again.› An affective fuzzy set drifted downstream and dispersed across Cohen’s neural networks like the icy plume of a mountain river mingling with the sea. It “felt” like all router/decomposer’s algorithms: as cold and complicated and inhuman as his beloved quantum spin glass. But the emotion that the set expressed was all too human: smug self-righteousness. ‹Seriously, though. I still think you need to back off and give Li a little more space.›
‹That’s not the way the Game works. As you damn well know.›
‹Bet I could figure out how to tweak the Game so you could do it.›
‹Tweak my soul, you mean.›
That earned Cohen another rude attractor. ‹Souls are just obsolete social engineering for monkeys. And even if you get some perverse kick out of pretending to believe in such fairy tales, the Game is not your soul. It was a damn sloppy piece of code when Hy wrote it three hundred years ago, and it hasn’t improved with age. Code is written to be rewritten, and this piece is long due for an overhaul. Seriously, Cohen, do you see me chasing after humans like a codependent golden retriever?›
“So how did you get him to stop talking to you?” Cohen asked Li out loud. “And can I do it?”
But Li was laughing too hard to answer. And when he probed her thoughts across the intraface the only coherent words he could get out of her were ‹Down, Fido, down!›
It was too bad, but there it was.
If you wanted to get from Ben Gurion International Airport to modern Jerusalem, you had to go down the Jaffa Road. And if you went down the Jaffa Road, you had to go past the Line.
Every year there was talk of moving the road or building a new highway that would swing out to the north and away from the dirty zone. But every year the planning board put it off until next year…mainly because building a new road would mean admitting that the war wasn’t just a passing inconvenience but a permanent fixture on the landscape. It was the same kind of mentality you saw in every low-level, multigenerational civil war: Lebanon, Ireland, Iraq, America. On the one hand, no one wants to be on the losing side of sectarian violence. On the other hand, no one was foolish enough to think that anyone could “win” such a war. And since no one quite understood how or why peace had disintegrated into bloodshed, most people still nursed a vague hope that a reverse process might occur (Cohen thought of it as a kind of sociopolitical phase transition) in which the chaos of war would spontaneously reorganize itself into peace.
Years went by like this, with people schizophrenically dividing their time between waiting for peace to break out and trying to schedule the war around the weddings and brises and bar mitzvahs and funerals that will keep happening even when there’s a combat zone around the corner. And in the meantime, the streets weren’t getting fixed, and the real estate market was crashing, and the plumbing was getting iffy…and Jerusalem was starting to look more and more like a city whose back had been broken on the rack of civil war.
Nowhere was the disintegration more visible than in the spreading no-man’s-land that leached out from the Line toward the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. Biohazard signs began to sprout on street corners like poisonous mushrooms. The divided highway deteriorated into a rough two-lane strip of pavement as it approached the last habitable houses. Then even the two-lane died of a slow bleed, giving way to mortar-pocked dirt, sporadically bulldozed to smooth out what was left of the roadbed.
As the Line got closer the passengers got tenser. A screaming match broke out at the back of the bus between a paunchy middle-aged ultra-orthodox man and a scantily dressed young woman whose skimpy T-shirt had ridden up to expose what Cohen at first assumed was a charmingly old-fashioned bit of cosmetic scarring.
“What’s she saying?” Li asked, her spinstream-assisted Hebrew completely unequal to the fast and furious pace of the argument.
“She asked him to close the window. He refused.”
The young woman was now actually pulling up her shirt and pointing to her stomach while the ultraorthodox averted his eyes in horror. And the scars weren’t cosmetic at all, it turned out; they were old shrapnel wounds.