Spin State - Chris Moriarty [45]
Li shut the feed off, but she couldn’t rid herself of the image burning behind her eyelids. Haas’s hands on that white skin. The witch lying across the desk, her long hair spilling over the gleaming condensate, her body moving but her eyes as empty as the black void beyond the viewports.
Li rolled over, giving herself up to sleep.
It was a long time coming.
AMC Station: 14.10.48.
When she turned on her livewall the next morning the news of Sharifi’s death had broken.
Even NowNet had been caught off guard, it seemed. They were gearing up for the event, dragging in colleagues, students, distant relatives. But they were using stock feed, old stuff. It was as if Sharifi had dropped off their radar. Coincidence? Or a sign that Sharifi had had reason to lie low in recent years?
So far the press was sticking to the unfortunate but unavoidable accident angle—though Li couldn’t help wondering how much of that was the truth and how much of it reflected astute maneuvering by Nguyen’s spin flacks.
Not that it made any real difference to her job. Not yet, anyway. Not unless she screwed up and let the press unearth some piece of the puzzle before she and Nguyen had time to plumb and measure and sanitize it. For the moment, she still had the same clues in hand she’d had when she lay down the night before.
A death. A fire. A missing dataset. A piece of wetware whose presence in Sharifi’s quarters could mean anything or nothing.
Li ran her search from her own quarters. She had some privacy there at least, and she didn’t relish the thought of surfacing after a long streamspace run to find herself slumped over her desk or passed out on the duty-room sofa.
She thought about letting McCuen tag along. In the end she decided against it; she wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the wetware. An unwired keyboarder would slow her down, anyway, leave too plain a trail for corporate security to follow. And she planned to hit sites where unwanted attention could be dangerous.
The techs had upgraded her interface before Metz, so she did some exploratory muscle flexing before starting the search in earnest. She’d never seen streamspace until she enlisted. But with enlistment came training, wiring, streamspace access. Over the last decade, she’d learned to access the spinstream in a way only a tiny fraction of humanity could imagine. Part of it was raw talent, a knack for reading code the way normal people read words and paragraphs. The rest she owed to the spider’s web of military-grade wetware that threaded through every synapse and made half her thoughts—half her self—silicon.
Li took every upgrade, every implant, every piece of experimental wetware the Corps offered. The techs loved her. They pushed her construct’s reflexes and immune system to their more-than-human limits until she was a hybrid, genetic machine and electronic machine locked at the hip, a hairbreadth from the wire junkie’s Holy Grail: transparent interface.
She finished her cross-checks and slipped into the spinstream. A digital riptide swept over her. She coursed over rivers and tidal flats of code, her own mind no more than one thin stream of data, a probabilistic ripple in a living, thinking, feeling ocean.
But this was the Stream, and it was deeper and stranger than any realspace ocean.
Dark and fruitful, it had spawned memes, ghosts, religions, philosophies—even, some claimed, new species. It held all the code there was, all the code that ever had been, right back to the first earthbound military intranets of the twentieth century. It was the first true Emergent system humans had created. Built by AIs back in the dark days of the Evacuation, it had spawned its own AIs, generations of them, hosts of them. A galaxy of quantum