Never mind the absurdity of trying to argue that the vast virtual universe of coevolving neural networks, affective loops, and expert systems called “Hyacinthe” was even remotely the same person as the Hy Cohen who had uploaded the memories of his failing body into the long-junked original hardware.
And never mind that even Hyacinthe was only one of the thirty-four separate sentient and quasi-sentient synthetic entities (this week’s head count) currently enjoying the somewhat debatable benefits of Israeli citizenship under Cohen’s Toffoli number.
And never mind the problematic thirty-fifth wheeclass="underline" one very sentient and only partially synthetic Catherine Li, formerly of the UN Peacekeepers.
She was sleeping now, caught in the intense, lying web of dreams that still had the power to shock Cohen after half a dozen lifetimes among humans. She slept with her arms crossed over her chest and her boot soles braced on the seat in front of her. Looking at her clenched fists and frowning face, at the faint tracery of ceramsteel snaking under the brown skin, Cohen thought: Even in sleep she defends herself.
Meanwhile the dusty blue-and-white Egged bus rattled up onto the plateau of the Jordan floodplain, and half of Cohen’s associated selves looked out the window or worked on unrelated projects, while the rest eavesdropped on Li’s intermittent dreams and scrambled to keep his Ring-to-Earth connection ticking along at the massive bandwidth required to knit borrowed body and far-flung souls together.
He stretched, appreciating, as he always did, the elastic grace of Roland’s young and exquisitely well tended body. Humans took the pleasures of health and youth for granted—something that was a little harder to do once you’d survived dying of multiple sclerosis. But then taking things for granted seemed to be wired into the human gene pool.
Cohen looked around, taking stock of his fellow passengers in real-space. A smattering of Ring-side tourists and business travelers, conspicuous for the cranial jacks that revealed Earth-illegal wetware and psychware. Young aggressively secular Israelis, whose tanned good looks hinted at weekends spent windsurfing off Tel Aviv’s fashionable beaches—and whose skin-hugging outfits looked like the kind of goods that only slipped through the Embargo because Ring-side customs was too busy fighting real violations to worry about youth fashion. A rickety old Ashkenaz reading the Ha’aretzsports section— Maccabi Tel Aviv Smites Haopel Jerusalem 77-49.Well, at least someone at the Ha’aretzsports desk still had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for the Op-ed page. A large-eyed and unnaturally silent family of Hasidim huddled along the back bench where the ride was always roughest. The usual disturbingly large number of caps and chadors in the dusty green of the Interfaithers. And of course the impossibly young Israeli Defense Force soldiers whose rumpled uniforms made Cohen imagine mothers leaning over balcony railings all over Israel shouting, You’re-going-out-in-public-like-that ?
The only thing missing was the Palestinians. Before the war they would have been here on the student passes that were a mere formality during the long peaceful generations of the open border. Laughing with their Israeli friends. Kissing their Israeli girlfriends to the abiding and roundly ignored horror of the ultraorthodox. Locked at the hip, like their two countries—and too young and idealistic to realize that the peace they took for granted was just a pause for station identification.
Li was waking up.
Cohen could feel her all around him, stirring, shifting, running the day’s events through her half-waking mind in a rapid-fire succession of half-formed dreams that cut in and out like the nightly newspin on fast forward. He tried to catch on to the tail of a few dreams as they passed, but he couldn’t make sense of them. And she was aware of him as a vague, alien presence in her mind, though she hadn’t yet awakened enough to identify the intruder.
Spying on her, she called it. And there’d be hell to pay if she caught him at it. He untangled himself from her, erasing his retreating footsteps and feeling hurt, as he always did, that she made him sneak and steal to get what he would have given her for the mere asking.
She twisted, murmuring, and brushed ineffectually at a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He reached out cautiously and pushed it back.
She opened her eyes.
He took his hand away.
“You need a haircut,” he told her.
“I know.” She stretched, yawning and he felt a pang of desire so strong it made his jaw hurt. “Things were so crazy before we left, I forgot. How’s your connection?”
“Fine.”
Not a lie. Just a nonrandom sampling of the available data.
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.