Ben Gurion International Airport was a marvel of architectural design, but it had been built a century before the Evacuation and the artificial ice age. By the time they’d been on the ground for five minutes, Arkady’s fingers were aching with cold.
Osnat dove down the concourse, pulling Arkady along in her wake. People hurried past, jostling and pushing. There were so many faces, each one shockingly different from every other, and all hardened by the grim battle of all-against-all that seemed to constitute normal life for humans.
“Who’s that?” Arkady asked, pointing to a vast, grainy photograph that filled most of the wall above the Departures and Arrivals board.
“Theodor Herzl. And don’t point. People are jumpy here.”
Two girl soldiers strode by, automatic weapons held at the half-ready. A man with the reddest hair Arkady had ever seen elbowed between him and Osnat, practically tripping him. While Arkady was still flailing for balance, a raucous group of women barreled into him, several of them with screaming children in tow. They all had the same blond curls and freckled skin, and there was a faint but reassuring similarity to the shape of their faces. Not the clear, clean melody of a single geneset, but something at least approaching the harmonious chord of a Syndicate’s component genelines. The group enveloped Arkady, carrying him along in their wake. When Osnat backtracked to rescue him, he turned to stare over his shoulder, reduced to openmouthed amazement by his first sight of a “family.”
And then came the ads.
There were no visibly wired people in the crowd—ceramsteel filament was Earth-illegal because it had to be manufactured in microgravity—but the airport itself was still on-grid, and the air overhead crackled and glittered with publicity spins.
NORAM-ARC JEWS FOR PEACE NOW said one banner that popped alarmingly into midair just over Arkady’s head. A second ad plunged him into a sunlit grove of frost-resistant oranges populated by smiling kibbutzniks who urged him to “exercise your Right of Return right now” by buying from Kehillot Tehilla Realty. A third spin, which perplexed Arkady enough to bring him to a standstill, proclaimed j-cupid.com “the number one Jewish singles dating and matchmaking service” and advised him in a perky voice that fertility/virility stats on all registered singles were just one click away. “Don’t you deserve someone special?” the voice-over asked in a tone that seemed actually to imply that “special” was a good thing.
Then the thing he had been afraid of from the moment he set foot in UN space finally happened.
“Arkady!” a woman called out in a voice sharp enough to stop him in his tracks.
The woman was short, muscular, probably Korean. She was a soldier out of uniform; he read it in the cut of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the decisive moments of someone who actually knew how to hit people. She was also, quite unmistakably, a genetic construct. But no Syndicate design team would produce a face so functional and so unaesthetic. And no crèche-raised construct would speak so sharply or stare out at the world through such hard, uncompromising, self-sufficient eyes. This woman was a pre-Breakaway construct, spliced and tanked and raised to serve humans. And if she really was the soldier she appeared to be, then she’d chosen to kill for humans too.
The man with her, on the other hand, was anything but a soldier. He slouched elegantly behind his companion, as if he could barely be bothered to pay attention to Arkady. Yet there was a taut, poised, abstracted quality to the beautiful body that set Arkady’s teeth on edge. This wasn’t a person, whispered some atavistic instinct. It was a living doll operated by an unseen and supremely skilled puppetmaster.
Then Arkady remembered that the proper word for it was shunt.He’d just met his first Emergent AI. And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm.
“Arkady,” the woman repeated. “We thought you were dead.”
“Don’t let her frighten you,” the AI drawled with a smile that would have looked perfectly at home on Korchow’s face. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean deaddead.”
Arkady stared at the machine-man, torn between horror and fascination. The AI watched him through wide hazel eyes, a faint shadow of that mocking smile still hovering at the corner of its lips. Somehow Arkady was quite sure that the smile belonged to the machine, and not to the human into whose shunt-suppressed body it had poured some incomprehensible distillation of its component selves. It was a clever, changeable, humorous smile. A smile that would be easy to love but impossible to trust…even if there were anything but a teeming chaos of semiautonomous agents behind it.
“I—I don’t think I know you,” he said, speaking both to the woman and the machine.
“But Korchow—”
The woman fell silent as abruptly as if someone had interrupted her. The AI cocked his head like a dog listening for its master’s voice, and Arkady had the sense that some shared thought had just passed between them in streamspace.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Of course.”
She turned on her heel. Her coat flew open, and the blaring orange of an El Al security seal winked at Arkady from the trigger guard of a holstered pistol. Then they were gone, swallowed by the swirling human tide as quickly as they’d emerged from it.
Osnat frowned nervously at him. “You okay, Arkady?”
“I think so.”
“Was that who I think it was?”
“I don’t know. Who do you think it was?”
“Well, it looked like—no, never mind. That’s crazy. He wouldn’t have the nerve to show his face here.
Any of his faces. You sure you’re okay? You look like shit.”
“I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. They’d knownhim. They’d known his series name, even if they’d mistaken him, as humans so often did, for another Arkady. And they’d thought he was dead.
Dead how? Dead where? What had happened to that other Arkady before he died?
And what did Andrej Korchow have to do with it?
Cohen looked out the window of the Ben Gurion-Jerusalem bus and told himself he needed a new body.
It was impossible to go anywhere quietly in this one. That Hoffman girl had been on the edge of recognizing him. Even the nice boy at El Al Security had waved him to the front of the line far too obviously for discretion. It had been one thing when he’d still been able to travel under his French passport, but the Tel Aviv fiasco had put an end to that and left him with no claim to citizenship or humanity except the one his long-dead inventor’s religion gave him.
And then, of course, there was the irksome detail of being a ghost.
“Why do they keep calling you that?” Li had asked the first time someone did it in front of her. “It’s creepy. Like they actually think you’re him instead of you.”
“It’s just a formality. No one takes it seriously except the religious nuts.”
But Li had been less interested in theological niceties than in the soldierly virtue of loyalty. “Has it ever occurred to you that if they really were your friends, they’d have gotten the hell over it sometime in the last four centuries?”
“Well, they have a point. Technically, I’m only a Jew because Hy Cohen’s mother was one. And it isn’t like he was observant, trust me—”
“I’ll remind you of that self-righteous tone next time I catch you eating oysters.”
“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”