No one was immune. Everyone had something to prove or some illusion too sweet to surrender. Even the blessed ones—the ones like Gavi, who seemed to walk through the morass of human greed and pettiness without being tarnished by it—even they had their dumb blonde and their rented Ferrari.
“Not Gavi,” Cohen said.
“Even Gavi.”
“Not Gavi.”
“If you really believe that,” Didi said so smoothly that Cohen didn’t hear the trap spring until he was well and truly caught, “I’m giving you the chance to prove it.”
“And what guarantee do I have that you won’t throw him to the wolves again in the name of playing it safe?”
Instead of answering Didi bent to inspect the trunk of the nearest cedar of Lebanon. From inside the house Cohen heard the boisterous opening bars of a Chopin mazurka.
“The tree’s dying,” Didi said. He tore a piece of bark from the great trunk and rubbed it between his fingers until the red dust drifted down and settled on the garden path like a bloodstain. “There are worms in the wood. The tree surgeon wants to cut down this tree before the rot spreads to the others. It seems a terrible waste. My daughters grew up playing in this tree. I thought it would outlive me. But he says that if we wait too long the rot will spread and we’ll lose the entire grove. And one tree, however beloved, doesseem a small price to pay for the safety of all the rest.”
They left through the garage, just like they’d come in.
As he stepped into Didi’s car for the drive home, Cohen turned back and saw Li and Ash standing together in the hallway. Ash was stooping, her sleek head bent over Li’s to whisper in the smaller woman’s ear. Li stood there like the rock she was, arms crossed over her chest, brow knit, lips pursed, nodding intently.
“What was that about?” Cohen asked when she was settled in the car next to him.
“Nothing. She was Mossad liaison to UNSec for three years. Just asking me about some mutual friends.”
But in the silence behind the words he felt her mind flinch away from his, and he tasted the bittersweet taint of a guilty secret.
FRUSTRATION
(Random Walks on a Rugged Fitness Landscape)
EMET, and the Palestinian response to EMET, changed the nature of war itself. Combat on the Green Line was no longer a contest between armies of individual humans or posthumans, but a quasi-biological arms race between two vast and coevolving Emergent AIs. The battlefield became a fitness landscape. Tactical planning gave way to spin glass modeling, virtual annealing, and drift-enhanced memory-based learning algorithms. War was plucked from the realm of human ethics and morality and transplanted in brave new ground where words like guilt, heroism, cowardice,and sacrificewere just the linguistic echo of an obsolete weapons platform.
And why would i want to help you?” Osnat asked when Arkady finally got the chance to plead his case with her.
She had a habit of turning her head when she spoke to fix her good eye on you. It reminded Arkady of old spinfeed of hawks.
“Because…,” he began. But he didn’t have a reason. Not unless the vague feeling that she was the only human who didn’t hate or despise him was a reason.
“Arkady—” she began, then stopped abruptly. “It’d be a lot easier to talk to you if I knew your real name.”
“I don’t have any other name.”
“Then what was all that nonsense Korchow was spewing back there about designations and categories? How many Arkadys are there, anyway?”
Moshe’s question again. But it sounded different on Osnat’s lips.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “There were six hundred in my cohort.”
“And when you meet another one of them, he’s just—”
“Arkady.”
“Except for this Arkasha person.”
“Korchow was exaggerating a bit there.” Arkady shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a nickname. He’s not the only person who ever had a nickname.”
Osnat hesitated visibly, took a breath, and let it out on a repressed sigh. “What’s the deal with Korchow, anyway?” she asked in a tone that made him think it wasn’t the question she’d meant at first to ask. “I didn’t think any of the Syndicates even made a K Series.”
“They don’t. Korchow’s just a name for humans to use. His real name’s Andrej.”
He could see her puzzling through that one.
“It’s phonetic. KnowlesSyndicate is authorized for more A Series than any other Syndicate. And there aren’t a lot of names with AK. It’s a joke, of sorts.”
“Not a very funny one.”
“Most KnowlesSyndicate jokes aren’t very funny, except to them. They’re spies. What do you expect?”
It was weeks before he understood the full import of the raised eyebrow that comment earned him.
“So I take it Arkady isn’t a KnowlesSyndicate name?”
He blinked in surprise and mild offense, then told himself that all constructs probably looked alike to humans. “Rostov. I’m a researcher. A scientist.”
A forager after knowledge, one of his teachers had liked to say. Arkady always thought of that phrase when he saw ants at work.
He glanced across his cell, reassuring himself that the little honey-pot ants he’d lured into his prison were still with him. They ought to be; he’d been sharing a sizable portion of his scanty meals with them. And what sensible swarm wouldn’t opt for a plentiful and reliable food source in this easy-to-navigate, predator-free landscape of linoleum tiles? Arkady’s arrival had single-handedly turned the marginal territory of a small young swarm into prime habitat, and he took some satisfaction from imagining their nests’ frenetic expansion, with foragers passing the fruit of their foraging on to the nestbound minor workers, and the queen lying vast and fertile at the heart of her brood.
“So, fine. You’re not a spy,” Osnat snapped. “Then why are you working for Korchow?”
“Why do you take Moshe’s orders?”
“Taking orders is what soldiers are for.”
“But you’re not a soldier anymore.”
A momentary hesitation. “No.”
“You’re—is the word employee? —an employee of GolaniTech. Along with Moshe. And you both work for Ashwarya Sofaer. Why?”
Her lips tightened in annoyance. “Because she pays us.”
“But Moshe treats you differently than the others. Why?”
A slow, mocking smile spread across her face. “If you’re asking have I slept with him, the answer’s no.”
“Even though you’re a workpair?”
“You seem to have a pretty odd idea of office etiquette, if you don’t mind my saying so. And does everyone in the Syndicates expect complete strangers to answer personal questions on demand?”
“There are no strangers in the Syndicates. We’re all brothers.”
“Sure you are. You and the Interfaithers and every other wacko religious cult in the history of the universe.”
Her eyes wandered restlessly across the room.
“Ugh!” she said. “Fucking ants.” And before Arkady understood what she was about to do, she strode across the room and began stamping out his little foragers.
He leapt up, so horrified that all speech, all thought, fled his mind. He crossed the room in two steps and knocked her sideways and grabbed her arm to keep her away from them.
At which point the world turned upside down and exploded.
He must have caught her completely by surprise, he realized later, or she wouldn’t have hurt him so badly. When the pain receded, he was sitting on the bed with no idea how he’d returned there, panting, and feeling like his stomach and kidneys were about to burst. And Osnat was holding a wet towel to his jaw.