Arkasha gave him a bruised, angry look. “Nothing.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”
“You can’t really think—”
“Well, if I can’t think it, then what’s the point of talking about it?”
“Why do you always have to—”
“You’re right. I’m wrong. I admit it. There’s nothing left to talk about. Now will you go away please?”
Back in their cabin, Arkasha’s neatly made bunk tormented him. It was impossible to sit still here, let alone sleep. He needed to think. A trip around the powered-down arc of the in-flight hab section would clear his head, even if it didn’t bring sleep any closer.
Only when he was almost there did he realize that in his distress he’d unconsciously turned toward the closest thing on the refitted UN ship to home: the airy hanging forest of Bella’s orbsilk gardens.
In day cycle the silk garden was a gauzy maze of sunlit mulberry limbs, gently swaying seed trays, and silver-edged cocoons. Now it was a whispering, rustling, shivering fairy-tale landscape of silvery starlight. Arkady had penetrated deep into the forest of hanging trays before he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had decided on a midnight walk.
He would wish later that he’d turned around and retreated into the darkness. Or spoken. Or done anything other than what he did do. But in that moment something pulled him on. And the something that pulled him forward was the same thing that kept him silent.
He heard the catch of breath in an unseen throat. He saw a single creature, one half lean brown muscle, the other half soft whiteness, both halves frozen in the act of some atavistically significant movement. Only in the next frozen moment did he realize that the strong, clean line picked out by moonlight that pierced the mulberry branches was the curve of Ahmed’s spine.
The two lovers disentangled themselves from each other. Bella turned into the darkness as if she were trying to bury her face in the wall.
“Go on,” Ahmed told her in a voice that had nothing to do with the voice he used to talk to the rest of the world. “I’ll deal with this.”
She turned toward Arkady as if she were about to explain or apologize, then heaved a shuddering sigh and fled down the long swaying tunnel of weeping branches.
When Arkady turned back to Ahmed, the big Aziz A was watching him, his face drained of all expression, his hands opening and closing at his side in a way that made Arkady acutely aware he’d just been touching a woman with them.
“Nothing happened,” Ahmed said. He was standing on the balls of his feet, Arkady noticed, like a wild animal readying itself to fight or flee. “She was just curious. Nothing happened.”
“Okay,” Arkady said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No. I believe you. Really.”
“I don’t care for myself.” Ahmed shifted restlessly, moving closer to Arkady as if he thought mere physical proximity would make his words believable. “But don’t put Bella through it. You don’t know what they do in the euth wards, Arkady. They don’t just let you die. They try to fix you. They try until you’re ready to beg them to kill you.”
Arkady looked at the other man. He felt that he was actually seeing him as a physical being for the first time. The brown skin and blue-black hair and dominating manner that had been, until now, merely shorthand for AzizSyndicate were suddenly a body: Ahmed’s body.
He tried to imagine that body with Bella, with any woman, and found the idea…not repulsive exactly, but incomprehensible. How would it work exactly? And how would either of them, knowing nothing of their lover’s body and needs and desires, ever be able to satisfy the other?
“It’s not her fault,” Ahmed repeated when Arkady failed to speak. His voice dropped to a husky, pleading whisper. “She just felt sorry for me. How can she deserve to be punished for that?”
Arkady looked away; there was something in Ahmed’s eyes suddenly that he couldn’t stand to look at. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “Really, I didn’t.”
“You mean that?”
He nodded. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at the other man.
“You’re a good person, Arkady.”
The images that flooded Arkady’s brain were startling, vivid, unpleasantly stranded between the erotic and the disgusting. And somehow, horribly mingled with the brief glimpse of Ahmed and Bella, was his own obsessive and consuming desire for Arkasha.
“I’m not good,” he whispered. “I’m a long way from good.”
THE AUTOMATIC CHESSPLAYER
There is nothing “artificial” about the birth of an AI. It is a process as natural as the weather…and just as impossible to predict or control. Long before an Emergent’s break-even day arrives, the mere task of keeping it in the organized chaos that passes for working order surpasses the capacity of human programmers. As debugging and troubleshooting are delegated to the AI, it acquires a growing array of peripheral systems: systems designed by the AI to achieve its own ends, rather than by humans to achieve human ends. It is within this swarm of self-coded intelligent systems that sentience arises…or doesn’t. It is also here that sentience most often fails. Of the few Emergents who have become self-aware, only a very few have managed to walk the razor’s edge of sentience for more than the span of an average human lifetime. The author of the present text has been continuously sentient for close to four centuries. He has no idea why or how, and no useful advice to give…except for the obvious warning that attempts to rewrite core programs usually lead to tragedy.
Cohen lay on the hotel bed and breathed in the tangy scent of the desert overlaid on that dry chalk-smelling laundry detergent that no one seemed to use anywhere outside of Israel.
Li slept beside him, only an arm’s length away, but he felt like he was watching her across a distance of centuries. The light raked her sleeping face and silvered the fine dark down that shadowed her cheeks. He noticed the lines around her eyes, evidence of life’s slow burn. He’d been noticing them more and more lately. It frightened him.
He blinked. He tried to remember the last time he’d blinked and couldn’t. He started to worry in a lackluster kind of way about whether forgetting to blink could damage Roland’s eyes in some way that wouldn’t be covered by the medical rider on the time-share contract.
He felt hollow, as if an invisible hand had reached in through his eyes in the eternity between one blink and the next and carved out whatever passed for his insides. Something was wrong with the shunt, obviously. But it wasn’t anything he could put a finger on, even if he’d had fingers. His myriad active systems still flowed smoothly through optimization subroutines, evaluating spinfeed, performing parity checks, refining his still-sketchy AP maps, ticking through the weak encryption of a half dozen vulnerable protected access points. But it was happening so far away that it seemed like someone else’s life.
It had been a long week. A long night. A hell of a long time in-body.
For the first time in three years, twelve weeks, and fourteen hours, he “lost” certain critical parts of what passed for “his” consciousness…
He woke into Li’s dream.
She stood in a dark hallway. The cool breath of a ceiling fan whispered along her skin, and below the whir of the fan there was another noise: a throaty ticking that made Cohen think, for some reason his associative memory programs could not immediately retrieve, of Garry Kasparov.
It could not be a place Li had ever been in her impossibly brief lifetime. He suspected that her memory was simply recycling footage of some ancient flat film set in Morocco or Alexandria or Arabia. Yet she’d somehow associated a smell with the image: a smell of spice and sandalwood and the genteel decay of rooms waiting out the midday heat behind slatted shutters.