Spin State - Chris Moriarty [138]
Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?”
He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”
“Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”
“She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”
“Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do you want?”
“Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”
“I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”
“It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”
Li stared at him.
“It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”
Li caught her breath.
“Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found . . . at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”
“So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”
“I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.
“To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”
Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”
Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenaline-honed senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.
“Of course, you will have to undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”
“I won’t do it,” Li said.
“Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”
“You crazy fuck.”
He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Decline and Fall of Species?”
“I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and