Hyacinthe had programmed the first rudimentary version of the Game into Cohen’s original Beowulf clusters almost four centuries ago. The Game had started out as a combination of chess, multiagent roleplay, and Turing-style conversational interaction. During the DARPA years it had been briefly and unpleasantly derailed for military research. After Cohen’s Great Escape (but that was another story) he’d assumed full control over his architecture, and the Game had begun to evolve into something too complex, fluid, and internally contradictory to properly be called a game at all.
There were by then some several thousand subsets of gameplay, platformed on a shifting tide of neural networks that might arguably be sentient itself—though not in any way that organics would recognize. Cohen navigated between the various versions of the Game, thanks to a densely swarming vast heterarchy of semiautonomous agents who constantly optimized play based on prior player hits, nonhit interactions, and inscribed player use histories. The whole system had become far too complex for any organic to grasp more than a tiny corner of it. But the basic mission primitives that motivated Cohen remained essentially the same ones that Hyacinthe had written so many centuries ago:
1. Initiate play based on the most current version of the Game;
2. Track player hits, defined as:
i. positive emotive cues as perceived by the pattern recognition ES;
ii. increased playtime and intensity of play
iii. explicit player feedback
3. Expand and evolve the Game to maximize player hits.
4. Assign highest priority to maximizing hits from inscribed players.
That was the curse that Hyacinthe had coded into his core architecture. Cohen needed the Game. He needed to be forsomeone. And he was set apart from every other surviving Emergent AI in that the someone needed to be more or less human.
Ergo Gavi, whom he could not stop loving though he might be a traitor.
Ergo Li, who was sanguinary, secretive, perfectly capable of having done all the horrible things they’d accused her of, and pigheadedly bent on refusing everything Cohen could give her.
All that Cohen was—once you stripped away the extension languages and interface programs and the three-century accumulation of upgrades and patches and extensions—was his accumulated memories of interactions with the Game’s inscribed players. And if Li left, it would mean a reweighting of mission primitives so drastic that Cohen had no real way to predict what new realignment of identities would come out the other side. She had become so deeply ingrained in his networks that when she yanked herself out it would call the bluff on the smoke-and-mirrors cognitive architecture that passed for Cohen’s identity.
And Li knew all about running on smoke and mirrors.
Born in the Trusteeships, she’d been destined for a short, poisonous life as a Bose-Einstein miner. Instead, she’d bought a dead girl’s face and geneset from a chop-shop geneticist, lied her way into the Peacekeepers, and hacked her own memory in order to pass as human. And when it was time to tell all to the psychtechs she’d spun a fake childhood to go with the fake passport and the fake geneset.
She had walked into the maze and cut the thread. All she knew about the childhood she remembered was that it had never happened, at least not to her. The minute she went into the psychtechs’ tanks there was no “before” to go back to. All the fears and joys and tics and habits that connected a whole person to their past led back to enlistment day and stopped. She would never know herself in the way that most humans, floating in the vibrant web of a lifetime’s memories, knew themselves. She would never know what she’d done on Gilead, any more than she’d ever know the child she’d been before she went to Gilead.
That was what had first drawn them together: the woman who had no memories and the machine who was nothing but memories. But Cohen was slowly coming to the heartsick realization that it might also be what drove them apart.
Or at least that was how it seemed to Cohen. But he could be fooling himself. He’d certainly done that before…as router/decomposer was always all too ready to remind him.
By the time he was dressed and presentable, Li had already demolished breakfast for two and most of the morning’s paper.
“How’s your Deep Blue-Kasparov sim going?” she asked from behind the sports page as he sat down across from her.
“Oh, I finished with that ages ago. The whole match was a hoax, it turns out.”
The sports page dropped. “Really?”
That was Li for you: always seduced by the faintest whiff of crime. Could you find a more perfect example of the old truism about cops and robbers being two sides of the same coin? Or, in her case, soldiers and mercenaries.
“Really,” Cohen assured her, doing his best to sound smug. “I’m going to write an article about it for Physical Review Letters.”
“And how do you figure they pulled off the fake?”
“Easy. There was a little man inside Garry Kasparov.”
She groaned and went back to her paper.
Cohen poured himself a glass of what passed for orange juice these days and hunted for the marmalade. “Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes it was.”
Cohen shook out his napkin (Li’s napkin still lay folded on the table, naturally; why use a napkin when you have a sleeve?) and began investigating the viennoiseriesituation.
Grim. Decidedly grim.
“I ought to look up some of my old friends in the Legion while we’re here,” he said. “Maybe they know where to get a decent croissant in this town.”
“What do you want a croissant for? You’re in the Middle East. And you know that thing people are always saying about when in Rome do as the Romans do.”
Cohen had been staring dubiously at the so-called toast, and he expanded his circle of doubt to encompass Li. “The people who are always saying that aren’t French,” he told her. “And if they are, then I can assure you they’re not talking about breakfast.”
Outside, the sunlight flickered across the hoods of passing cars, throwing bright spears of shadow into the room through the still-half-shuttered windows. Cohen froze, distracted by the rhythmic play of light and shadow. What was it that it reminded him of…
By the time he realized Roland was going into a seizure, it was too late to pull him out of it.
“Wake up, Cohen. Come on, wake up. Cohen? Roland!”
Li had him rolled over on his side (Roland’s side, a skittish subsystem nattered at him), and she was hanging on to his hands with a strength that reminded him abruptly of the difference between her ceramsteel-reinforced, half-machine reflexes and Roland’s fragile flesh and bone.
“I forgot my drasticodracostochastic control measures,” he muttered woozily.
“It’s not funny!” Li snapped.
Nor was it. As far as Cohen could tell the packet compression needed to push data downstream from his Ring-based systems to Earth had interfered with the shunt software’s ability to match his data pulses to Roland’s neural firing rhythms. Essentially he’d given him a spintronic version of photoinduced epilepsy. And that was bad. Bad for Roland’s little beating heart. Bad for his finely honed brain too if Cohen couldn’t downclock reliably.
“I’m putting you to bed,” Li said. “No arguments. No questions. And then you’re going to check out and give Roland a proper rest. Twenty-four hours off so he can sleep and have a chance to clear the circuitry.”
“And leave you alone down here?”
“I think I can hold down the hotel room on my own.”
Cohen remembered the sight of Ash’s head bent over Li’s, and felt a sudden rush of jealousy. He was careful to hide it from Li—and equally careful to hide his discreet inquiries about Ash. He buried both of those incriminating processes with a massive “nice” command and pipelined their outputs into a low-traffic subdirectory with instructions to his routing meta-agent to move the files automatically should Li ever happen to access the subdirectory.