Spin State - Chris Moriarty [145]
“Speaking of relying on my own judgment, I could use a little more information.”
Nguyen raised her eyebrows.
“The code Korchow wants. The intraface. It’s Alba-designed.”
“What, you saw a label?” Nguyen sounded politely incredulous.
“I’m not stupid. I know Corps work when I see it. And this is Corps work. Some of the best.”
“What’s your question?” Nguyen’s voice was as cold and hard as virusteel.
Li hesitated.
“The line’s secure.”
“I guess I’m asking just how much of this is about deniability. Whether we gave the intraface to Sharifi. Whether Metz was an off-the-grid contractor—”
“Who said anything about Metz?”
Li froze. Her mind raced as she tried to retreat, retrench, keep Nguyen from finding out just how much she remembered about the raid, and why. “Well,” she stammered, “Cohen said . . .”
Nguyen laughed bitterly. “Cohen.” She dipped a finger into her water and ran it around the rim of the glass, setting the crystal singing. “That brings us to our next topic of conversation,” she said at last. “I take it Korchow doesn’t think he can pull the job off without Cohen?”
“It looks that way.”
“Or someone’s been very careful to make it look that way. If all goes as planned, Cohen will walk away with just what he’s wanted from the beginning: the intraface. We’ll have handed it to him in order to catch Korchow. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Cohen and his friends in ALEF come out winners no matter what happens. And we both know Cohen too well to think that’s a coincidence.”
Li stiffened. “I can’t believe—”
“You can’t?” Nguyen interrupted. “Or you don’t want to?”
A shadow flickered across the windows of Nguyen’s office, sweeping over the planes and hollows of her unsmiling face.
Li shivered. “ALEF doesn’t want the intraface anyway,” she argued. “It’s Cohen who wants it. For personal reasons.”
“Cohen doesn’t have personal reasons. In order to have personal reasons, you have to be a person. Have you ever actually bothered to find out anything about ALEF? About what they advocate?”
“I don’t get involved in politics.”
“Don’t be disingenuous. Your relationship with Cohen is politics.”
Li flushed. “You have the right to look at my private files, but not to tell me what to put in them.”
“I do when your personal life clouds your judgment.”
“That’s not the case here,” Li said. All the same, she felt a twinge of relief at the thought that Nguyen couldn’t download her last dinner with Cohen. Yet.
“Isn’t it?” Nguyen said. “Then why aren’t you asking the questions you should be asking? The questions everyone else is already asking?”
She plucked a fiche from her desk, tapped through the index to pull a file up, and handed it to Li. “Read it.”
The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. This is not idle speculation. It’s reality—a reality that both Syndicates and UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with.
Li looked up at Nguyen. “What is this?”
“Cohen wrote it. It’s a speech he gave at an ALEF meeting last week. An ALEF meeting that was downloaded by known Consortium members.”
“Oh,” Li said, and kept reading—the same words she had seen before back in Cohen’s sunny drawing room:
The Syndicates embody one evolutionary vector: the hive mentality of the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a posthuman collective psychology, including cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from gene-norm.
The UN, in contrast, has launched a series of what might best be described as rearguard actions. On the technological side, we have enslaved AIs (how very revealing programmers’ jargon can be); hardwired, task-dedicated artificial life of every possible description; wired humans and posthumans operating AI-platformed wetware. In essence, a plethora of attempts to subsume nonhuman intelligence into human-controlled operating systems. And in the political sphere, the General Assembly kindly picks up any stray items the technicians fail to account for by slamming the door on consciously engineered posthuman evolution, by slapping AIs with source-code patents,