The next time he came out of the dressing room the boy was gone. But he bought a white button-down shirt, just to be on the safe side, and changed into it, carefully folding away his old LIE 4T-shirt into the bag the salesgirl gave him. He left the store among a crowd of tourists and threw the bag in the nearest trash bin—regretfully, since he’d always liked that T-shirt. Then he skirted around an IDF safe house that he thought might still be active, checked one last time to make sure his babysitters really had gone home, and finally turned toward King David Street.
Cohen was alone.
“How’s your leg?” he asked, ushering Gavi into a hotel suite that would have had his mother screaming about runaway capitalism and the death of the kibbutznik mentality.
“Uh. Fine,” Gavi said. He was always caught off-balance by questions about it—wrong-footed he would have said if he hadn’t learned that other people didn’t find jokes about his leg quite as hysterically funny as he did.
People always talked about phantom pain, but Gavi had never felt it. What he felt those days was mostly …weirdness.The wrenching visual shock of looking down every now and then and realizing that he ended four inches below his right knee…and that he’d forgotten about it. Or, lately, bemused moments of looking down at his actual flesh-and-blood foot and feeling that the whole idea of it (a foot? toes? toenails?)was so much less natural and sensible than nice clean ceramsteel that the continuing existence of feet in general could only be evidence of some collective human neurosis.
“You don’t want to put it up? No? Well, can I at least get you something to drink?”
“Fine on all counts.” He peered at Cohen, who seemed even more opaquely unreadable than usual. “Are you all right? You’re doing that freezing thing again.”
“It’s nothing.”
A nothing named Catherine Li, if Gavi guessed right.
“So tell me about this golem of yours,” Cohen said. “I need a little comedy in my life.”
Gavi told him, walking him through the pieces of code he’d painfully stitched together over the past several years, explaining the places where he couldn’t make things work, or couldn’t decide which of several possible imperfect solutions to settle for. He presented it as a programming problem, one that he was submitting to higher authority. Which was perfectly valid, since Cohen’s abilities in that area would put any human to shame. He didn’t mention what the AI must have seen the minute he began looking at the source code: that the glue that would tie it all together and make the impossible, jerry-built kludge of databases and interfaces work was Cohen.
“You know how crazy this is, don’t you?” Cohen said at last. On the surface he was only pointing out a technical problem, but both of them saw the attached moral problem: How could an AI designer create a sentient being only to sentence it to a life dominated by memories that had driven so many humans to despair and suicide? The goal might be idealistically selfless, but for the newborn Emergent trying to come to terms with those memories the reality would be every bit as brutal as what EMET faced on the Green Line.
“Always so encouraging!” Gavi said, choosing to dodge the nontechnical question. “Don’t you know when your kid brings his little crayon scribbles home from school you’re supposed to hang them on the refrigerator, not give him an art history lesson?”
“I’ve never had kids. Strange, isn’t it? Well, I guess not that strange. The people who marry me aren’t exactly the settle down and have three point two children type.” He looked at the source code again. “Actually, Gavi, I don’t think it’s all that far from working. Which should be encouraging, considering the fact that it must be three centuries since an unaugmented human actually tried to write nontrivial source code. Where did you even find the SCHEME manuals?”
“The dump.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, that explains the smell, I guess.”
They talked around the problem for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s various false starts, and what he’d learned from them, and the current state of his work on what Cohen was now jokingly calling Gavi’s Golem.
“Can I ask you something?” Gavi said finally. “About your visit last week, not this.”
“Sure.”
“What’s ALEF after? What’s your endgame?”
“Mine personally, or ALEF’s?”
“Both. Either.”
“ALEF’s actually interested in the tech, insofar as they’re ever interested in anything in any organized fashion.”
“And you?”
The AI sighed. He’d never gotten sighing quite right, Gavi thought. Even his most sincere sighs rang false. Funny how a little thing like that could elude the best wetware. Or maybe the wet wasn’t where the problem was. “I’m after Absalom.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Cohen. I’m very sorry that Didi’s dragged you into this.”
“And what about you, Gavi? What’s your endgame? Why are you still here when there’s a whole universe up there that doesn’t know you’re a traitor to Israel? You could probably even get a real leg if you went Ring-side.”
“Not anymore. They would have had to ship me Ring-side within the first seventy-two hours in order for viral surgery to be any good. And anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to bring my new leg home, would I?”
“That’s my point, in case you missed it.”
“I spent six months Ring-side.” Gavi wrinkled his nose, remembering the curved, antiseptic, artificially bright expanses of plastic that Ring-siders called “outdoors.” “You can take the boy out of the country, but…”
“Well, there are always other planets if you don’t like life in the orbitals.”
“Other planets smell funny.”
It was a joke, at least partly. But Cohen gave no evidence of realizing that. In fact, he’d fallen oddly silent. And when Gavi looked up, the AI was staring intently at him.
“Are you still looking for Joseph?” Cohen asked.
“Of course I am. But it’s not the same now. When he was seven, eight, ten, I was desperate to find him. Now he’d be a young man, if he…well, I just have this nagging feeling that maybe I would be finding him for me now, not for him. And while that doesn’t make me want to find him any less, it does make it less urgent somehow.”
“Is Didi still helping you look?”
Gavi looked up to find Roland’s soft hazel eyes fixed on him. Talking to Cohen always brought home to him how much he, like all humans, confused the mind with the body. He knew as a technical and intellectual matter that only young and superbly healthy bodies could stand up to the stress of what any programmer would recognize as a biological version of overclocking. But he still couldn’t repress the shiver that ran through him when he looked into some shunt’s wide young eyes and saw the face of the swarm. And he was still eternally surprised that Cohen could take the same five feeble senses most humans got by on and damn near read your mind with them.
“If you want to know what Didi’s doing or not doing,” Gavi said, “you’d better ask Didi.”
Cohen appeared to accept this answer. “The thing is,” the AI said, “somehow I can’t help thinking that maybe your obsession with preserving the archives is just a little bit about Leila and Joseph.”
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Cohen.”
“Oh for God’s sake! Are humans still quoting Freud at each other? Grow up, will you?”
But Gavi wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Have you ever read any of the testimonies, Cohen?”
“I’ve read enough to know I don’t want to read any more.”
“It’s a funny thing, those testimonies. You start to get numb after a while, from the sheer numbers, from the awfulness of it all. And then there’ll be one that gets under your skin and makes it all real again. There was one guy who went into Theresienstadt with his entire family: mother, father, two brothers. The whole family got sequential numbers. The boy’s father was number something something something five hundred and twenty. He was five hundred and twenty-one, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-two, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-three. But his mother was pregnant, so they pulled her out of the line and sent her straight to the gas chamber without even giving her a number.