“There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”
Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.
“I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”
“What kind of system?”
“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”
Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.
“Emergent-human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown working toward it.”
“So you’re saying Sharifi was carrying around black-market tech.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the AI on the other end of this wire wasn’t an Emergent.” Sharpe shrugged. “Still, that’s my best guess about what this is. I still think she was wired for some kind of shared operations with an Emergent.”
“Not too many of those around, Sharpe.”
“No, there aren’t.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“The relay station’s field AI?”
Li felt the cold of the autopsy room settle into her bones. What the hell had Sharifi been doing? And who would have let her play that kind of risky game with a field AI when lives depended on every quantum-transport operation? “I’d sure like to see the psychware they were running on that implant,” she said.
“It won’t be in there. Not nearly enough memory. It’ll have been externalized too.”
“And the field AI is conveniently off-line, isn’t it?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
They both stared at the screen for a moment without speaking.
“Well,” Sharpe asked. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Take it out,” Li said.
Most of Li’s encounters with quantum-corrected replication happened when she was sedated into near coma. Cryotechnology made faster-than-light transport, otherwise a potentially lethal ordeal, survivable. And it usually left Li with nothing more significant than a stuffy nose and wandering joint pain.
Biotech extraction was different, though. It was controlled, observable, reassuringly domesticated. A surgical parlor trick. This one took a while. Sharpe didn’t have the necessary information to preset his equipment; he had to fiddle around trying to nail the implant’s quantum signature. But after a long series of finicky adjustments, he established and verified entanglement, uploaded the primary spinstream, reintegrated the entangled data, waited while the comp ran its nested correction protocols. When his terminal told them it was completing the Sharifi transform they both laughed nervously.
Five minutes later, Li held a small package in the palm of her hand: a neatly rolled coil of white ceramsteel filament and a few gel-encased microrelays, all flash-irradiated and wrapped in sterile surgical film.
“It’s so small,” she said.
“Two kilometers,” Sharpe said. “That’s the length of filament, measured end to end, in the average full-body net.”
Li weighed the slender coil in her hand. Why had Sharifi needed to install illegal wetware? And, more troubling, where had she gotten it? “Do you need to keep this?” she asked Sharpe.
“I’d rather.”
“Fine.” She handed it to him. “Just make sure it’s here if I need to look at it again.”
“Can I ask you something?” Sharpe said as she reached the door. His voice sounded strained. “Unofficially?”
Li turned. “Of course.”
“Did you know her?”
“Who? Sharifi?”
Sharpe nodded.
“Not really. I saw her a couple of times. That’s all.”
“I knew her,” Sharpe said. He picked up a scalpel and began fidgeting with it, screwing and unscrewing the threaded fastener that held blade to handle. “I liked her. She was… honest.”
He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so Li waited, watching him fidget.
“Anyway,” he said, flushing, “that’s not the point. The point is, I was given… instructions. After her death. Do those instructions still stand?”
Li stared at him, wondering what kind of political minefield she’d stumbled into. “What are you asking me?”
Sharpe searched her face, eyebrows knit. “Has anyone explained to you how the coroner’s system works in St. Johns?”
Li had to think for a minute before she realized that St. Johns was the actual map name of Shantytown. She shook her head.
“When someone dies in the town limits, I have full authority to conduct any investigations needed to declare a cause of death and close the inquiry. When someone dies on AMC property, the case goes to AMC management. Unless AMC asks me to do an autopsy, I just hold the body pending disposal or, more rarely, shipment. There’s still a death certificate, of course. But Haas fills it out. I don’t do much more than rubber-stamp it.”
“Go on,” Li said. Sharpe was still playing with the scalpel, looking to Li like he was about to slice a fingertip off every time he turned it over.
“In practice, AMC usually has me autopsy everyone who dies in the mine. But not this time. This time I got a bundle of automatic authorizations, all signed by Haas. Except for two: Voyt and Sharifi. On those I got completed death certificates, signed them, and sent them back upstairs.”
“And now you want to do the autopsies.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Why?”
“If you don’t want to tread on Haas’s toes…”
“It’s not Haas’s toes I’m worried about,” Li said.
A voice somewhere near the pit of her stomach whispered something eminently sensible about looking before she leapt. She squashed it.
“Fine,” she said. “Do your autopsies. But no one else sees the results until I sign off on them. Just so I know how low I have to duck if I want to keep my head attached.”
Sharpe looked at her soberly. “I appreciate this.”
“Don’t mention it,” Li said—and her next words were only half-joking. “I’m just giving you enough rope to hang me with.”
Shantytown: 14.10.48.
She should have gone straight back to the heliport when she left the hospital and caught the next shuttle station-side. But she didn’t. Without letting herself think about where she was going she turned left instead of right at the end of Hospital Street and started working her way along the winding, badly paved streets toward the old section of Shantytown.
Most of Shantytown had been thrown up in the first frenzy of the Bose-Einstein Rush. There’d been little money, less time, no planning, and from most angles the town looked like a sprawling collection of modular hab units that someone had dropped by accident and forgotten to come back for. It was only when you got deep into the old town that you began to see the bones of the place, the sealed biopods of the original colony. Few of the pods could still maintain an atmosphere, but the modern town had grown around their radiating spokes like skin grafts encrusting surgical mesh. The result was a warren of narrow alleys and windowless courtyards through which a native could travel for miles without ever seeing sky or showing up on the orbital surveillance grid.