Li shut the feed off, but she couldn’t rid herself of the image burning behind her eyelids. Haas’s hands on that white skin. The witch lying across the desk, her long hair spilling over the gleaming condensate, her body moving but her eyes as empty as the black void beyond the viewports.
Li rolled over, giving herself up to sleep.
It was a long time coming.
AMC Station: 14.10.48.
When she turned on her livewall the next morning the news of Sharifi’s death had broken.
Even NowNet had been caught off guard, it seemed. They were gearing up for the event, dragging in colleagues, students, distant relatives. But they were using stock feed, old stuff. It was as if Sharifi had dropped off their radar. Coincidence? Or a sign that Sharifi had had reason to lie low in recent years?
So far the press was sticking to the unfortunate but unavoidable accident angle—though Li couldn’t help wondering how much of that was the truth and how much of it reflected astute maneuvering by Nguyen’s spin flacks.
Not that it made any real difference to her job. Not yet, anyway. Not unless she screwed up and let the press unearth some piece of the puzzle before she and Nguyen had time to plumb and measure and sanitize it. For the moment, she still had the same clues in hand she’d had when she lay down the night before.
A death. A fire. A missing dataset. A piece of wetware whose presence in Sharifi’s quarters could mean anything or nothing.
Li ran her search from her own quarters. She had some privacy there at least, and she didn’t relish the thought of surfacing after a long streamspace run to find herself slumped over her desk or passed out on the duty-room sofa.
She thought about letting McCuen tag along. In the end she decided against it; she wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the wetware. An unwired keyboarder would slow her down, anyway, leave too plain a trail for corporate security to follow. And she planned to hit sites where unwanted attention could be dangerous.
The techs had upgraded her interface before Metz, so she did some exploratory muscle flexing before starting the search in earnest. She’d never seen streamspace until she enlisted. But with enlistment came training, wiring, streamspace access. Over the last decade, she’d learned to access the spinstream in a way only a tiny fraction of humanity could imagine. Part of it was raw talent, a knack for reading code the way normal people read words and paragraphs. The rest she owed to the spider’s web of military-grade wetware that threaded through every synapse and made half her thoughts—half her self—silicon.
Li took every upgrade, every implant, every piece of experimental wetware the Corps offered. The techs loved her. They pushed her construct’s reflexes and immune system to their more-than-human limits until she was a hybrid, genetic machine and electronic machine locked at the hip, a hairbreadth from the wire junkie’s Holy Graiclass="underline" transparent interface.
She finished her cross-checks and slipped into the spinstream. A digital riptide swept over her. She coursed over rivers and tidal flats of code, her own mind no more than one thin stream of data, a probabilistic ripple in a living, thinking, feeling ocean.
But this was the Stream, and it was deeper and stranger than any realspace ocean.
Dark and fruitful, it had spawned memes, ghosts, religions, philosophies—even, some claimed, new species. It held all the code there was, all the code that ever had been, right back to the first earthbound military intranets of the twentieth century. It was the first true Emergent system humans had created. Built by AIs back in the dark days of the Evacuation, it had spawned its own AIs, generations of them, hosts of them. A galaxy of quantum simulations evolved within it, mimicking every living system that humans had managed to pull off their dying planet—and countless impossible and improbable systems that had never lived on any planet. Even Cohen, vast and ancient among AIs, was a mere speck on the spinstream.
Today’s job was simple: find out who made Sharifi’s wet/dry interface and why. Li might have to do a little hacking to get that information, but she wouldn’t have to stray outside the human datastream—the well-tended paths of corporate and governmental networks. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even have to risk a trip to Freetown.
She evolved her interface, logged on to the Ring-side data exchange, and accessed a low-security copy of Sharifi’s genome left stranded in an open database after a minor medical procedure four years ago. She checked it against the DNA built into the wire and confirmed that the interface had been customized for Sharifi. Then she cast her net out over the web.
She switched from VR to binary, running on the numbers, diving into the sea of pure code behind streamspace. The shift was like setting off a rocket. Dropping into the numbers freed her from her brain’s spatial perceptions, silenced the tyrannical chattering of her inner ear. More important, it freed up all the processing space that was devoted to generating the simulated sensorium that was the only window into streamspace for the vast majority of human operators. For Li—for any real hacker—dropping into the numbers was like coming home.
She knew in broad terms what she was looking for, even if she didn’t yet know where she would find it. She needed a hit from a big corporate R D player. The kind of player with enough financial muscle to produce cutting-edge tech with an impossibly long research-to-market horizon—and enough political muscle to risk violating human bioresearch ethics guidelines. But she couldn’t go in through the front door. She needed a fluff file. Something public domain, relatively unguarded. Something she could access without attracting unwanted attention. Something that would let her slip past the corporate gatekeepers.
She caught a promising datastring and hooked on to it, sliding through layered databases like a diver finning through the currents and thermals of a turbulent ocean. The string led her to the public-access page of CanCorp’s Ring-based bioresearch division. CanCorp was one of the four or five multiplanetaries Li thought could have produced Sharifi’s interface—and sure enough a quick and dirty cross-check told her CanCorp was one of Sharifi’s most generous corporate sponsors.
She switched back into VR to follow the string; on the off chance that CanCorp security was monitoring its public site, she wanted to look like an ordinary tourist when she got there. To her annoyance, she was detoured five times on her way. First, a saccharine commercial jingle for some overpriced health snack that tasted like mildew. Then an earnest pitch from the Reformed Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, delivered by an implausibly clear-skinned teenager in a cheap blue suit and a plastic name tag. Then, loaded onto a single and annoyingly persistent banner, a docu-ad about the Heaven’s Gate Gene Therapy Institute, a Ring-generated public-service announcement about a listeria epidemic in the Ring’s NorAm Sector, and a disorienting full-immersion apocalyptic simulation from some computer-literate Interfaither splinter group.
She slid out of the Interfaither sim with jelly legs, a throbbing head, and a serious beef with whoever had decided that they were a bona fide religion entitled to public-access streamtime. When she finally reached the CanCorp page, it didn’t tell her much. But it did have a link to a “work in progress” section on which the division’s researchers (or, more likely, the division’s public relations staff) posted sanitized biographies and dumbed-down descriptions of current research. She ran a new search and pulled streamspace coordinates for three CanCorp researchers.