“You’d jump off a cliff before you let me win an argument, wouldn’t you?” Cohen said. But he was laughing. They both were, and she could sense the same desire in him that she felt: the urge to slip back out of this minefield and onto the safe ground of no-questions-asked friendship that they had learned to navigate so skillfully. For a moment she thought that was exactly what they were going to do. Then Cohen spoke. “You asked why I wanted the intraface. Two reasons. First reason. ALEF wanted it—”
“You told me they didn’t!”
He blinked. “There are such things as innocent misunderstandings, you know. Anyway, ALEF does want the intraface. Because of something you would have thought of long ago if you weren’t so busy suspecting my motives. You can bet Helen’s thought of it.”
Li looked at him, questioning.
“Feedback loops. When you lock an AI and a human at the hip, activating a feedback loop would kill the human. So the intraface overrides the statutory feedback loop. We weren’t sure of it until we actually got our hands on the psychware. But it’s true.” A dark fire sparked behind Ramirez’s eyes. “Right now, not even the General Assembly itself could shut me down.”
“My God,” Li whispered. “Unleashing the AIs. Even ALEF hasn’t dared to ask for that publicly. No wonder Nguyen was so set on keeping the work on the intraface off-grid.”
Cohen looked at her, measuring, hesitating. “We want to post the intraface schematics on FreeNet,” he said finally.
Li stared, surprise—or was it fear?—grabbing at her throat. “Do you have any idea of the chaos that would cause?” she said when she could find words again.
“Chaos,” Cohen said feelingly. “My God. Chaos for a democracy to put its money where its mouth is? Chaos to let a small and unusually well behaved minority go about our lives without worrying that some panicky human is going to pull the plug on us at any moment? If that causes chaos, it’s damn well not our problem. And even if it did… this is the first time in over a century I haven’t had a gun to my head.” He leaned forward. “It’s freedom, Catherine. Can you imagine not sharing it? What would you do in my place?”
I’d never be in your place, Li thought. You can’t get to that place by following orders and not asking questions. How did it come to the point where even Cohen has more guts than I do?
“What’s the second reason?” she asked.
At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. Then she felt a touch, as if he’d reached out and brushed his fingers along her skin. Except that it wasn’t skin he touched. It was her mind. Her.
“You know what it is,” he whispered, and the whisper echoed in her mind as if it were her own thought, her own words.
She shivered. “What do you want from me, Cohen?”
“Everything. All of it.”
“Cohen—”
“You know that’s the real reason the intraface isn’t working, don’t you? It’s not your genetics or your internals or anything Korchow can fix. It’s that you don’t want it to work.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? What happened this afternoon? You bolted like a spooked horse. You want to tell me what that was about?”
“You know what it was about,” she whispered.
“Of course I know. I know things you don’t even remember. Things you’re afraid to remember. When are you going to figure out that I’m the one person you don’t need to hide from?”
But that was a question she couldn’t even begin to answer.
“Look,” Cohen said wearily. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t think there’s much blame left to go around once my part in this has gone under the microscope. I have a stupendous ability to generate objective reasons for doing exactly what I want to do, and this time I surpassed myself. I was helping you. I was helping ALEF. I was helping everyone but myself. It was all so logical, so pristinely selfless. And what has all my ‘helping’ come to? Korchow blackmailing you to let me crawl into your soul and ferret out your deepest secrets.”
Li started to speak, but he barreled on, silencing her. “Was I manipulating you? Maybe. And yes, I was willing to back you into a corner. Or at least go along while Korchow did it. But when you accuse me of playing with you… well, you know it’s not that way. You hold every key to every door. And you didn’t need the intraface to open them. You could have done it years ago if you’d wanted to. It was all yours. All of it. It still is.”
Li turned away and looked out at the gray sky, the last flush of the sun sinking below a cloud-swept horizon. She held out her hand without looking around, and Cohen took it. She squeezed hard, until she felt the knuckles slide under the skin.
He laughed. “Say something. Or I’m going to start begging and embarrass both of us.”
She turned to look at him.
“Oh God, Catherine, don’t cry. I can’t even stand to think about you crying.”
But it was too late for that.
“Do you know how I paid for this?” She gestured at her face. “For the gene work?”
He shook his head.
“My father’s life insurance money.”
“Oh. The dream.”
“Yes, the dream. He went down into the mine with Cartwright and killed himself. They faked it to look like a black-lung death, so I’d have the money to pay the chop shop. Did you know that? Did you sniff out that little secret?”
“No,” he said in a small, quiet voice.
“So you see that dream wasn’t a lie at all. I did kill him. Sure as if I’d put a gun to his head.”
“He was dying anyway. I’ve seen the medical records.”
“Well, he wasn’t dying yet. He could have lived for years. He killed himself to give me that money. And I took it and left and never looked back. And you know what the worst thing is? I didn’t even go down there with him. My mother went. I didn’t. I’ve forgotten every other fucking thing about my childhood. You’d think I could forget that.”
“You were young. Children aren’t always strong. Who the hell is?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“That I don’t even care anymore. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel anything. I don’t remember enough to feel anything. I threw away my home, my family, every memory that makes a real person. And I have nothing to put in their place but fifteen years of lying and hiding.”
“You have me.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want, Cohen. I lost it years ago.”
“I didn’t fall in love with that child you’re so scared of remembering,” Cohen said after a long silence. “I fell in love with you.”
“There’s no such person,” Li said, and pulled her hand away.
Night had fallen. There was no light, no movement in the open space of the dome below them. A light flared overhead, flashing across the sky like a shooting star, and it took Li a moment to realize that the light was there beside her; Cohen had picked up his lighter and was fidgeting absentmindedly, passing Ramirez’s fingers back and forth above the blue flame.
“I’ll call it off,” he said. “I’ll tell Korchow you can’t do it. I’ll figure out how to make him believe it.”
Li laughed bitterly. “You think this is a bridge game? You do that, and he’ll kill me.”
“No. No. I’ll take care of it.”
“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”
“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.
“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point —the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”