Spin State - Chris Moriarty [176]
She staggered and fell heavily against the railing. He put a hand under her elbow, steadying her. In the same instant, her brain clicked back into the VR interface as if someone had flipped a cutoff switch. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cohen said, and drew her back from the ledge.
She stared at him for a moment, feeling like a child who had put her hand into the fire only to have an all-seeing adult pull it out miraculously unscathed.
“You’re all right?” he asked.
She nodded and followed him back inside.
The hall’s internal wall was broken by what seemed to be an infinitely receding line of doors. Cohen was still behind her, one hand on her hip, his mouth inches from her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said. She closed them.
“What do you hear?”
“Water.”
“Good. That’s the fountain. See it?”
She turned and looked back over her shoulder into the glittering shadows of the portico. “Yes.”
“If you get lost, just follow the sound of the water and it will bring you back here. Now. How many doors do you see?”
“I can’t . . .” She looked down the hall and saw that the illusion of infinity had been just that. “Forty . . . forty-eight?”
“Good. Every door is a separate network with its own memory palace. Every room in each palace is a directory. Every object in the room is a datafile. Understand?”
She nodded.
“When you want to access a network, you find its proper door. When you want a directory, you find its proper room. When you want a datafile, you just open the drawer, the box, the cabinet, whatever it’s stored in. Just like the standard graphic user interface you’ve used in Corps archives . . . although I flatter myself that my aesthetic instincts put me a cut or two above the Corps designers. But bear in mind that you’ll still be dealing with a fully sentient AI every time you open one of those doors. And some of them are less . . . accessible . . . than the networks you’re familiar with. If you feel . . . nervous about anything, you can always leave. Always. Just come back here, shut the door behind you, and you’re alone again.”
“Except for you.”
He laughed. “You’re in the belly of the beast, my dear. I’m always here. I am here.”
Li looked around. “Which door should I open?”
“Whichever one you want.” He looked at her, Hyacinthe’s little boy’s body so slight he actually had to look up to meet her eyes. A small, secret smile slipped across his face. “Try the last door.”
She walked down the hall, running her hand along the cool marble of the walls, the carved hardwood of the doorframes. Each door was labeled: network designations, Toffoli numbers, directory profiles. The last door, tucked into the farthest corner of the hall as if in an afterthought, had only a single word printed on it: Hyacinthe. She set her hand to the latch, and it opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her.
A large, bright room, shot butter yellow with morning sunlight. On every wall, row on row of wooden drawers, each drawer with its own polished brass knob, none of them much more than big enough to fit a datacube. There were no labels or schematics on the drawers, but as Li touched them brief images of their contents flashed before her. “What is this place?” she whispered.
“Me.” Cohen nudged an oriental rug straight with one toe. “Well, that’s the short answer anyway. The long answer would be that I thought this was a good place to start because Hyacinthe is the core network that you’re most familiar with.”
“Do you actually use this place yourself?”
“Of course. I shift back and forth between VR and the numbers like you do when you go instream. I won’t use VR much when I’m running under time pressure or handling heavy traffic. But when I have the time and processing space . . .”
Li knew how this sort of VR construct worked. The drawers would contain stored data platformed on a nonsentient access program. Behind the walls, where she couldn’t see them without dropping