Spin State - Chris Moriarty [183]
“I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself,” she said at last.
“I could say the same to you.”
She leaned her head on her hands and looked down between her feet, measuring the drop to the floor. She felt dislocated, as if her brain and her emotions were half a step behind reality. “You’re asking for something I don’t have to give.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute.”
She turned and stared at him. “You think I’m stringing you along?”
“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. No. I think you love me. In fact, I’m sure you do.”
“You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself.”
“No. I just know you.”
She snorted. “Because you spend half your time spying on me.”
Ramirez’s lips twisted in a wry, self-deprecating smile that was all Cohen. “You know perfectly well that I wouldn’t do it if you actually minded. And if you didn’t love me at least a little, you damn well would mind. Q.E.D.”
“Q.E. what?”
“It’s Latin, you little heathen.”
“Yeah.” She put her cigarette to her lips. “The Romans put Latin on their sewer covers. It didn’t make their shit smell any sweeter.”
“You’d jump off a cliff before you let me win an argument, wouldn’t you?” Cohen said. But he was laughing. They both were, and she could sense the same desire in him that she felt: the urge to slip back out of this minefield and onto the safe ground of no-questions-asked friendship that they had learned to navigate so skillfully. For a moment she thought that was exactly what they were going to do. Then Cohen spoke. “You asked why I wanted the intraface. Two reasons. First reason. ALEF wanted it—”
“You told me they didn’t!”
He blinked. “There are such things as innocent misunderstandings, you know. Anyway, ALEF does want the intraface. Because of something you would have thought of long ago if you weren’t so busy suspecting my motives. You can bet Helen’s thought of it.”
Li looked at him, questioning.
“Feedback loops. When you lock an AI and a human at the hip, activating a feedback loop would kill the human. So the intraface overrides the statutory feedback loop. We weren’t sure of it until we actually got our hands on the psychware. But it’s true.” A dark fire sparked behind Ramirez’s eyes. “Right now, not even the General Assembly itself could shut me down.”
“My God,” Li whispered. “Unleashing the AIs. Even ALEF hasn’t dared to ask for that publicly. No wonder Nguyen was so set on keeping the work on the intraface off-grid.”
Cohen looked at her, measuring, hesitating. “We want to post the intraface schematics on FreeNet,” he said finally.
Li stared, surprise—or was it fear?—grabbing at her throat. “Do you have any idea of the chaos that would cause?” she said when she could find words again.
“Chaos,” Cohen said feelingly. “My God. Chaos for a democracy to put its money where its mouth is? Chaos to let a small and unusually well behaved minority go about our lives without worrying that some panicky human is going to pull the plug on us at any moment? If that causes chaos, it’s damn well not our problem. And even if it did . . . this is the first time in over a century I haven’t had a gun to my head.” He leaned forward. “It’s freedom, Catherine. Can you imagine not sharing it? What would you do in my place?”
I’d never be in your place, Li thought. You can’t get to that place by following orders and not asking questions. How did it come to the point where even Cohen has more guts than I do?
“What’s the second reason?” she asked.
At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. Then she felt a touch, as if he’d reached out and brushed his fingers along her skin. Except that it wasn’t skin he touched. It was her mind. Her.
“You know what it is,” he whispered, and the whisper echoed in her mind as if it were her own thought, her own words.
She shivered. “What do you want from me, Cohen?”
“Everything. All of it.”
“Cohen—”
“You know that’s the real reason the intraface isn’t working, don’t you? It’s not your genetics or your internals or anything Korchow can fix. It’s that