“Comm traffic. Mine. You’re hearing me.”
“No,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong, Cohen.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Korchow’s had me running tests all morning. Accessing your internals, running checks, startup subroutines, downloading data. Your commsys is a dinosaur, by the way. A disgrace. I ran a Schor check on your oracle workspace though. Properly. Which those idiots at Alba never do. That should help a bit.”
She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. “Feeling better now?”
She had to think about it for a moment. “Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean? Am I adjusting?”
“No. I just took the intraface off-line.”
They looked at each other. “Oh,” Li said.
Cohen stood up, patting her hand. “Don’t worry. You’re still barely conscious. We’ll get on top of it tomorrow.”
But they didn’t get on top of it the next day. Or the day after that. Korchow had set up a lab and medical facility in the safe house, and over the next three days, Li’s universe narrowed to two sterile rooms of monitoring equipment, her own cramped bunk, and the empty echoing dome that functioned as the safe house’s common room.
The first time they brought the intraface on-line, she ended up curled on the floor, hands over her ears, screaming for someone—anyone—to turn it off. Cohen shut the link down so fast it took him half an hour to get himself straightened out.
“I’ll go crazy,” Li said when she’d recovered enough to speak. “It’s like a hundred people fighting in my head.”
“Forty-seven,” Cohen interjected. “Well, this week.”
“What’s gone wrong?” Korchow asked Cohen. He didn’t even look at Li, just talked past her like she was a piece of tech.
“Nothing,” Cohen answered, tapping a fingernail on the console in front of him. “It’s an organic software problem.”
Cohen was shunting through Ramirez, and Li noticed again the cold fire in Leo’s dark eyes, the extra measure of decisiveness in his already-powerful movements. Those two I’d like to have next to me in a fight, she thought—and felt a sudden razor-sharp stab of grief for Kolodny.
“Sharifi didn’t have these problems,” Korchow said, a threat lurking behind the words.
Cohen shrugged. “She wouldn’t have, would she? She was interfacing with a simple field AI. And she wasn’t wired for anything but communications. Catherine’s a different beast entirely. You try to crowbar new programs into a military system and all bets are off. You knew that before we started.”
“Well, what do we do about it?” Li asked.
Cohen crossed the room more quickly than Li would have thought Ramirez could move. He leaned over and put a cool hand to her forehead. “You don’t do anything. You get your pulse rate down and go to bed. I’ll figure out where we go from here.”
But the next session was worse. After three hours Li collapsed into a chair, pressing the heels of her hands into her burning eye sockets. “I can’t. I can’t do it again.”
“Yes you can,” Korchow said. He was still being patient. “Why didn’t the pulse compression work?” he asked Cohen over her head.
“If I knew, I’d be able to fix it.”
“Does she need a new signal processor?”
Li didn’t have to see Cohen to imagine his dismissive shrug.
“Well, what then?”
Cohen shook his head. “I have to think.”
“Let’s check the settings and try it again.”
Li wanted to say no. That she’d throw up if they tried again. That everything she’d eaten in the last two days had come up already, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. But she was too sick and too tired to say anything.
It was Cohen who finally came up with the idea of the memory palace. He was shunting through Arkady when he explained it to her, and his excitement set the construct’s dark eyes glinting like freshly fired coal. “It’s an organic problem,” he explained. “We’re trying to integrate AI-scale parallel-processing nets with an organic system that was already obsolete the first time a person put pen to paper. So. If we can’t fight it, we work with it. We try one of the oldest tricks there is—Matteo Ricci’s trick. We build you a memory palace.” Arkady’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Or rather, we give you the keys to mine.”
It took him twenty hours to put the keys together. Hours she slept through in a desperate attempt to hoard her energy for their final push. It was late morning of the third day after her awakening when she lay down on the couch Arkady had dragged into the lab for her, closed her eyes, jacked in, and found herself alone in a featureles white room.
“You may have to hunt for the door a bit,” Cohen said at her shoulder. “I haven’t quite got that sorted out yet.” He had a smaller, thinner feeling than usual, she thought. And when she looked around, sure enough, there was Hyacinthe, shoes slung over his shoulders, standing a hair shorter than her in his socks. “The door,” he said insistently.
She turned and saw a gleaming, intricately carved mahogany door. More of a window than a door, really; its sill was set into the wall at about knee level, and even Li had to duck her head to clear the lintel.
“Go on,” Cohen said.
It was so bright on the other side that it took a moment for her eyes to clear. She stood in a five-cornered courtyard. Arcades bright with mosaics surrounded her. Beyond the walls she glimpsed the knife-edged mountains of a dry country.
She heard the sound of running water and felt cold spray on her face before she saw the fountain. The water poured from a shallow stone shelf as if rising from a spring and riffled down a long sloping stair that ran to the other end of the great courtyard. Li followed the water’s course down to a shadowy portico whose mosaics glinted like eyes in the occasional stray sunbeam. The watercourse ended in a narrow reflecting pool that emptied mysteriously into who knew what. Li stepped across the pool and walked along the portico, her heels clicking on the pavement. She came to a door and opened it.
A riot of smell and color swept over her. She stood in a long, high-ceilinged hall paved with spiral patterns of marble tesserae. Bright flowers rocketed out of vases painted with rampant lions and romping, grinning dragons. Cabinets lined the walls, their polished glass fronts filled with books, fossils, photographs, playing cards. As she started down the hall, something moved in her peripheral vision. She jumped around—only to realize that one of the painted dragons was tapping its scaled feet and winking at her. She shook her head and snorted. Hyacinthe laughed.
One side of the hall opened onto a high terrace, and when she looked out she could see the stony ramparts of a crusader’s castle digging their feet into the face of a mountainside that dropped away for miles above a long, green windswept valley. She stepped to the balustrade and leaned out over the void. The stone under her hand felt as hot as if it had been warming under the afternoon sun, but when she looked to the sky it seemed to be morning—the fresh, cool morning of a fall day.
The heat was in the stone, she realized, part of the teeming life the place radiated. Was this all Cohen? The castle? The mountain? This whole world, wherever and whatever it was? She leaned out farther, squinting down the dizzying fall of buttress and mountain, trying to see where the active code stopped and the backdrop started. Instinctively, she dropped out of VR and into the numbers.
Her head spun. The world twisted and rippled around her. Numbers came at her too fast for her to feel them as anything but blinding, paralyzing, dizzying pain. This was a system never designed for human interface, a system never designed at all except in its earliest, most distant beginnings. It wasn’t as alive as a human—the constant chant of the AI-civil-rights proponents—it was more alive. More alive, more complex, more changeable and contradictory. Just more. Cohen must have been insane to think she could exist, let alone function, in this maelstrom.