Spin State - Chris Moriarty [146]
Humanity has engineered its own obsolescence. They acknowledge it by act if not by deed. It is time for us to acknowledge it. Time for us to rethink the shape of UN politics—perhaps the very shape of the UN itself—and step into a wider, brighter posthuman future.
Li handed the fiche back to Nguyen, who snapped it off with a flourish of her fine-boned hand.
“Why show me this?”
“I want you to know what Cohen is capable of.”
“It’s just talk,” Li said uncomfortably. “You know Cohen.”
“That’s my point. He’s using you, Li. The same way he’s used the Security Council. The same way he used Kolodny.”
Li’s stomach contracted into an icy knot. “What do you mean the way he used Kolodny?” she whispered.
“You think what happened on Metz was an accident? He used Kolodny to get what he wanted, and then he left her to die. Left you all to die. Didn’t you understand why the review board tried so hard to find a way to go easy on you? Because we knew it was Cohen’s fault all along—and he was the one person we couldn’t afford to blame publicly.”
“He told me it was a malfunction,” Li said, too stunned to understand what Nguyen was saying about her own court-martial, too stunned to hear anything beyond the bare fact of the accusation.
“Well, he lied. He found the intraface. Then he started going after the wetware specs. Specs he had no business looking at. Specs we couldn’t afford to let him look at. And in doing so, he endangered the security of the mission. We had to pull him off the shunt to stop him.”
Li put a hand to her forehead, felt the fever rising beneath her skin. “You’re sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure,” Nguyen said. “I cut the link myself.”
Zona Angel, Arc Section 12: 25.10.48.
Hell,” Cohen said. “The beastly thing’s stuck.”
He was opening a long matte-black canister, capped at both ends with silver disks of stamped metal. He was having a hard time of it, having to use Chiara’s starlet-straight front teeth to pry the lid off.
“Don’t break her pretty teeth,” Li said, and Cohen laughed.
“I’d grow her new ones,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to tidy up a little collateral damage.”
They sat in his high-ceilinged drawing room, the chandeliers casting rippled reflections in the hand-laid panes of the garden doors. Chiara looked as beautiful as ever, perched like a bright bird on the sofa; but Li thought there was a pinched quality to the lovely face, a puffy hint of tiredness around the hazel eyes. She nearly asked Cohen if he was feeling all right—before she reminded herself that it wasn’t Cohen she was looking at. That whether some pretty girl felt tired or sad or sick had not a thing to do with the enigma sitting across the table from her.
He got the canister open at last, with a little grunt of satisfaction, and slid out a long shiny tube of architect’s fiche, which he unfurled on the low table between them. When one corner of the sheet refused to lie flat he borrowed Li’s beer to weight it down.
Li squinted doubtfully at the blank surface. “We’re supposed to read the plans off that? You’ve got something against VR now?”
“Only that I’ve been running VR scenarios ever since you sent me Korchow’s files, without getting anywhere near figuring out how to crack this nut.”
Li had been doing the same thing herself and coming up just as dry. But telling Cohen that now seemed less than productive.
He tapped the fiche. It whirred softly and lit up, casting a cool blue glow on the belly of Cohen’s wineglass, the curving flank of Li’s beer bottle. A spidery web of lines spread across the sheet and coalesced into a long, shallow curve like the arc of a twenty-kilometer-long suspension bridge. Cohen tapped in another command, and the ghostly parallelograms of solar arrays formed above and around the arc. “There. Alba. A place you ought to recognize faster than I do.”
“I guess,” Li said doubtfully.
Cohen snorted. “Spoken like a true member of the virtual generation. It took humans two hundred