Spin State - Chris Moriarty [22]
“It’s not about special rights for Emergents,” he was saying in answer to a question Li hadn’t heard. “It’s simply a question of the basic respect owed to all persons, whether they’re running on code or genesets. The limited-suffrage faction would like to have things both ways. All pigs are equal, according to our opponents—but some pigs are more equal than others. That’s a step away from equality, not toward it.”
He was shunting through Roland, a golden-haired, golden-eyed boy who could have passed for a girl except for the coppery shadow above his upper lip. Li had met the kid once when he came by Cohen’s place on his day off. They’d had a surreal tea during which he’d explained earnestly to her over buttered scones and Devonshire cream that he was putting himself through medical school on what Cohen paid him.
The woman hanging on Cohen’s, or rather Roland’s, arm would have been taller than him even without the three-inch heels. Li recognized her face from the fashion spins, but she couldn’t tell if the carefully painted features were natural or synthetic.
“So what you’re after is one-for-one universal suffrage?” a reporter asked, seizing on Cohen’s last words. “That sounds like a nod toward repealing the genetics laws.”
Cohen laughed and put up a hand, fending off the question. “That’s someone else’s cause,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to break up a squabble between primates.”
“And what would you say to those who claim that your own connections with the Consortium have had a negative impact on the AI suffrage movement?” asked another reporter.
Cohen turned toward the reporter slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe what Roland’s ears were hearing. Li wondered if the reporter noticed the slight pause before his smile, if he understood the fury that lurked behind that serene, inhuman stillness.
“There is no connection with the Consortium,” Cohen said coolly, “and our opponents’ attempts to portray a legal association like ALEF as the political arm of the Consortium or any of its component AIs are, quite simply, slanderous.”
“Still,” the reporter pursued. “You can’t deny that your . . . lifestyle has clouded the issue in these hearings.”
“My lifestyle?” Cohen unleashed his most dazzling smile on the camera. “I’m as boring as a binary boy can be. Just ask my ex-wives and -husbands.”
Li rolled her eyes, hacked into the livewall’s controls, and flipped to the sports feed.
“Whoever did that, beer on me!” called a drunken voice from one of the back tables. Li ignored it; she was busy watching the Yankees’ new phenom deliver a filthy curveball.
“There you go,” the cook said, handing her noodles over the scratched countertop. Li turned her hand palm up as she took the plate from him, baring the silver matte lines of her wire job where the ceramsteel ran just under the skin of the inner wrist.
“So you’re our sports fan,” he said. “How d’you like the Yanks for the Series?”
“I like ’em fine.” Li grinned. “They’re gonna lose, of course. But I still like them.”
The cook laughed, the coal scar standing out neon-bright along his jawline. “Come back for game one, and I’ll give you a free meal. I need one goddamn person in here who’s not a Mets fan.”
Li left the noodle shop and walked on, eating as she went. The streets and arcades were filling up. The graveyard shift had come up from the mine, and second-shift workers were making their way to the planet-bound shuttles. The bars were all open. Most of them were running spinfeed, but a few had live music even at this time of the morning.
The crackling moan of a badly amplified fiddle stopped Li in her tracks outside one bar. A girl’s voice rose above the fiddle, and suddenly Li was smelling disinfectant, bleached sheets, the mold-heavy air of Shantytown. A pale old-young man lay in a hospital bed, his skin several