“Not when the two things you’re networking are a human and an Emergent AI. Think of your own internals. The various systems are platformed on an oracle—a simple, nonsentient AI that’s little more than an intelligent game-playing agent. The oracle routes data and active code back and forth from you to your wetware, translates classical queries into quantum computational functions, tags and produces correct solutions.” He fluttered slim, perfectly manicured fingers. “In broad outline, it’s little different than the shunt through which I receive sensory data and route commands to this or any other wired body. An intraface, however, is an entirely different beast. It merges the AI and the human into a single consciousness.”
“Who controls it?”
“A nonquestion. Like asking which neurons in your brain control your own body. Or asking which of my associated networks is in control of me. We all are.”
“But some of you are more in control than others, right?”
“Ah. Yes. I should have been more precise before. When I say a single consciousness I’m speaking of consciousness not as you understand it, but as I do. I know it’s fashionable to describe human consciousness as Emergent, but really, as soon as you get above the level of the individual neuron, that’s just a metaphor. A true Emergent is a very different animal. Emergent consciousness is born out of a kind of parallel processing that the human mind simply isn’t wired for. Control in such a context is… complicated.”
“And you’d need an Emergent to run it?”
“A very powerful one at that.”
Li looked at him, thinking. “How many Emergents are there who could do it?”
“Not many,” Cohen said, picking at a thread on the cuff of his suit jacket. “Alba’s Emergents, of course, especially if you ran them through AMC’s field AI. Two or three Ring-side AIs, all under depreciable life contracts to DefenseNet or one of the private defense contractors. Any of the cornerstone AIs in FreeNet’s Consortium could run it—and stepping on the Consortium’s toes could certainly explain your little adventure in Freetown.”
“What about ALEF?” Li asked.
“My dear girl, no one who’d ever been to an ALEF meeting would imagine such a thing. Half the older members are decohering because of insufficiently backed-up early FTL transports. A third of the still-functional ones are supremely uninterested in anything but debating theoretical mathematics and experimenting with alternative identity structures. And the rest of us couldn’t agree on where—or even whether—to eat dinner, let alone organize something on this scale.” He sobered abruptly. “Besides, if we were ever caught fooling around with such a thing, TechComm would activate our mandatory feedback loops.” He drew one finger across Roland’s neck in an unmistakable gesture. “All she wrote.”
“The Consortium,” Li said, ignoring the gesture to pursue her suspicions. “They’re supremacists, right?” She had never been able to understand the alien tangle of AI politics, but she did know that much.
“Separatists is probably a better way of describing it. Like I said, most Emergents just aren’t that interested in humans.”
“But the Consortium was the group involved in Tel Aviv, right? The ones who killed the Security Council agent.”
Roland’s hand froze on its way to the ashtray and a shower of ash fell unnoticed onto the carpet’s blue-and-gold arabesques. “Why ask me?” he said sharply. “I wasn’t even there.”
“I’m just pointing out that the Consortium’s member AIs could use this intraface if they had some reason to use it.”
“Of course they could.”
Li swallowed. “And so could you, right? In fact, you could use it better than any other AI. Because you’re more human, aren’t you? Because you process data with emotions, not logic. You’re in all the Emergent-systems textbooks, the only one of the twenty-first-century affective-loop-driven AIs who hasn’t decohered and gone… wherever they go when that happens. You’re practically a species of one.”
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His cigarette crackled and smoked. Another rain of ash fell to the floor. Birds sang beyond the tall windows. And meanwhile Cohen sat so perfectly, unbreathingly still that Roland’s pretty face might have been carved from stone.
When he spoke, it was in a voice as soft and cold as falling snow. “Whatever you’re trying to say, Catherine, why don’t you just go ahead and say it?”
Li looked out at the green leaves trembling beneath snowfields so blindingly white and oceans so brilliantly blue that you could almost imagine you were looking at clouds and sky, almost imagine you were standing on solid ground and not plastered to a spinning ring of vacuum-hardened virusteel. Then she leaned forward and finally asked the question that had been hanging on her tongue since she arrived:
“Was this the target tech on Metz, Cohen? Was it the intraface you were after?”
He shook himself, put his cigarette out, and leaned forward to stare at her. “What makes you think that?”
“The sunburst.” She pointed at the raised shape on the wire’s black sheathing. “It was on the floor there.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to remember that, Catherine.”
She lit a cigarette herself.
“Are you having bleed-through? Have you told the psychtechs?” He sighed. “No. Of course not. You need to, Catherine. You’re playing with fire.”
She scoffed. “You don’t seriously believe the line about memory washing for our own good? To keep us simple soldiers from suffering over the nasty but necessary things they make us do?”
“You know me better than that. But if your soft memory’s breaking into your edited files there’s something seriously wrong with your internals. You’re too heavily wired to risk malfunctioning internals. Go see someone, for Heaven’s sake. I’ll pay if money’s a problem.”
“Who asked you to pay? Answer my question, Cohen. Was this what we went to Metz for?”
“No—”
Li stood up. “I don’t believe you. And I don’t like being lied to.”
“Sit down,” he said—and there was an edge in his voice that made her obey him. “Yes, we were chasing the intraface on Metz. But we weren’t looking for this component. We were looking for the wetware schematics and the psychware source code.” He kept his eyes fixed on hers, watching her reaction. “Look, this isn’t a VR rig or a UN grunt’s wire job. This is a genuine neural net, both on the AI and the human sides of the intraface. You can’t grow that in viral matrix—not when the device itself is still in the experimental stage. You need a body.”
Li shivered. “The constructs we saw in the lab were just… hosts, then?”
“Exactly.”
“And what about that?” She gestured to the wire on the table between them.
“Forget that. It’s nothing. An accessory. The kind of thing you get with the real equipment and shove in a bottom drawer somewhere and forget about. No, the thing you really need is the AI component of the intraface. That’s loaded onto an AI somewhere, probably an AI that’s enslaved to an Emergent network. Find that, and you’ll know exactly who you’re up against.”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Cohen. Who is it? Nguyen was paying you in tech. What were you going to do with it? What does ALEF want it for?”
“They don’t want it,” Cohen said. “I do.”
“Why?”
Cohen started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut and turned away to light another cigarette. “Stay offstream,” he said. “I’ll nose around in ALEF’s databases, chat up a few old acquaintances and see what I can turn up without drawing unwanted attention. You go back down that mine shaft. Find out exactly what Sharifi was doing. And who she was talking to. And don’t call me. Nguyen will certainly have your outgoing mail monitored, and I think it’s safer if we don’t talk until I get an offstream entanglement source set up.”