“Okay, I’m in,” Cohen said, emerging out of the hallucinatory visions of streamspace like a messenger from the afterlife.
“What does he mean?” Arkady whispered, leaning into Osnat to speak in her ear.
They were still in the abandoned house. Through the ragged window frames Arkady could see the house’s sagging back porch, the rich green slopes of Mount Herzl, the precise geometric lines of the tombs in the military cemetery, the tall trees of Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous Gentile. Mount Herzl was the heart of the Line, the thickest part of the thickness.
Arkady looked out over the dusty scrubland that separated them from the mountain and thought of the deadly tide of AI-controlled weaponry and human muscle patrolling its paths and riverbeds and crumbling roadways. He remembered the figures of tonnage of land mines buried on the Line per year and shuddered. It was hell. Hell masquerading as an earthly paradise. What sort of beings could evade the patrols and the trip wires long enough to liveout there?
Down in the valley bottom a patrol—Israeli? Palestinian?—threaded its way along the riverbed, olive drab ghosts in an olive drab landscape. The wind shifted, and the thick cold smell of gun oil drifted up from the valley bottom.
The soldiers fell silent, watching. The patrol snaked down the valley bottom and vanished. A few minutes passed. Someone heaved a sigh. People around Arkady began to talk again, then to get up and move around and go back to the tasks they’d been engaged in before the patrol appeared.
Cohen stood up, stretching stiff muscles, and walked over to look down at Arkady, who was still crouched on the floor where Osnat had left him.
“How can they not see us?” Arkady asked.
“Because they’re not really here,” the machine explained. “They’re under full-immersion shunts, just like my bodies are. Each one is under the control of an Emergent AI operating in a three-dimensional game space that exactly mirrors the real Green Line.”
“Why?”
“Suicide.” The machine smiled. “And not the romantic kind that Syndicate novelists write about. An Emergent AI’s personality architecture is a lot brittler than the human variety. And Emergents don’t have the benefit of the human hypothalamic-limbic system to help them rationalize killing in wartime. They have to live with it in cold blood, so to speak. And a lot of them turned out not to want to do that. So now we tell them they’re just playing a game in streamspace.”
“And the AIs think the Palestinians are doing the same? I mean, they don’t know there are actual people on the other side of the gun?”
“Right.”
“And what happens if one of the AIs figures it out?”
“Bye-bye, little AI.”
“Oh.”
“Cheer up. That’s what’s going to get us through the Line safe and more or less sound. Because the game can’t look too realistic, of course. The gamespace in which the Emergents think they’re operating is only a simplified model of the real Green Line. And you know the old saying about how there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip? Well, we’re going to engineer a few slips between gamespace and realspace.”
The captain eyed Cohen from across the room. “You know what time it is, right?”
“If that’s a polite way of telling me to hurry up, then allow me to point out, equally politely, that your equipment stinks.”
“Tell it to the Knesset.”
“Nothing’s stopping you from buying it below the line.”
“Are you kiddingme? What kind of putz buys legal equipment with below-the-line money? What the hell’s the point of having a covert ops budget if you waste it on stuff you’re allowed to have?”
Cohen snorted and went back to pecking at the keyboard and peering into the blue depths of the monitor.
Meanwhile the captain straightened up from the monitor and turned to face the room at large. “Listen up, everyone. From here on in we’re in the thickness of the Line and we’re flying below radar as far as IDF’s concerned. You know what that means. We do notwant to be sending any nice young reservists home to their mothers in body bags today, so be bloody damn careful. But if it comes down to choosing who’s going to fill up a body bag, the State of Israel has a hell of a lot more invested in each of you than it does in any eighteen-year-old AI puppet. So act accordingly…and you can cry on my shoulder when we’re all safe at home again. That’s a promise.”
The tenor of activity in the abandoned house changed. One by one the soldiers around Arkady fell silent. The frenetic camaraderie gave way to a tense waiting alertness that reeked of approaching danger. “What’s happening?” he asked Osnat.
“Shh! They’re coming.”
It took Arkady another minute to hear what Li’s enhanced senses and the IDF monitors had told the others: the muffled clank and rustle of a fully equipped infantry squad on the move.
The soldiers on either side of Arkady were shrinking back against the wall, clutching their weapons to their chests. Osnat pulled him back toward the wall by one sleeve. “Get back, Arkady. Give them room.”
They waited. Fabric moved softly against fabric. Someone coughed. Cohen tapped sporadically at the old-fashioned keyboard in front of him, making frustrated faces. The sound of the approaching squad swelled and echoed down the empty street until Arkady began to feel that they must already have passed the open doorway before him—or that time had become stuck in an endlessly repeating loop in which the unseen force was arriving and arriving and never actually here.
“Safeties off,” the captain murmured. He looked sick to his stomach.
“NavMesh is initializing,” Cohen reported finally. “They’re checking the patrol waypoints against the terrain database and updating the blind data. Okay. Now they’re getting a modification to their SeekToViaNavMesh.”
The machine paused, watching some process unfurl in the virtual, and to Arkady unimaginable, world of streamspace. Then it shook its head in apparent exasperation.
“These people have an idea of surface and barrier architecture that the word baroquedoesn’t even begin to cover! No wonder they patrol the Line on foot. If they sped up to a jog, they’d have to stop every other tick to wait for the next state-of-the-world update!”
The machine fell silent.
“You done yet, Cohen?” That was Li, somewhere across the room and out of sight.
“Yes. No. I think so.”
A bootheel scraped in the dust outside. A shadow flitted past the door, too fast for Arkady to have more than a vague sense of color and movement.
“They’re here,” someone whispered.
And they were.
The Enderbots took the house with a seamless and silent deliberation that was at least as terrifying as the cold competence of Syndicate-bred tacticals. One minute the center of the room was empty. The next an impassively staring trio of infantrymen was flowing smoothly into tactically optimal positions from which they were able to cover the entire room and its approaches. Their weapons were equipped with spintronic range finders: a pale beam that quivered through the dusty air and picked out precise blue circles that wandered over the faces and uniforms of the special forces soldiers. Several of the men around Arkady flinched when the beams touched them, but no one broke ranks.
“God,” someone said, “how the hell can they be so young?”
Arkady felt an almost instinctive urge to reach over and shut him up, but it was clear that the voice made no impression on the shunt-driven infantrymen. It was also clear that Cohen had succeeded in hacking NavMesh; the Enderbots, or Enders, as the Israelis called them, disregarded Arkady and the others as if they really had faded into the peeling woodwork of the old building.