Spin State - Chris Moriarty [52]
“What the hell is that?” Li asked.
Sharpe let out a long slow whistle. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” he said. “We have now passed far, far beyond the limits of my technical expertise. I can tell you this much, though. It was all put in at once. And not long ago.”
“Three months ago,” Li said.
He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Yes, that sounds right. Usually a web this extensive will be built up by accretion. Multiple generations of filament, even redundant networks layered on top of each other. Different-age scar tissue. By the time most people are this wired, they’re carrying around almost as much dead tech as live tech. But this job was done in a single operation. Ring-side clinic, of course. Or Alba.” He glanced at Li. “To be honest, it looks more like military work to me than anything else.”
“Well, it wasn’t Alba,” Li said. “That much I can tell you.” She peered at the scan, comparing it to her own brain scans taken after her last upgrade, trying to see which of Sharifi’s brain segments were most densely wired. Something about Sharifi’s system seemed off somehow. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “What’s it all wired into? What’s it for?”
“Communications,” Sharpe said. “All communications.” He pointed. “Look. Here. Here. Where the dark areas are, and the contrast. If we looked at a scan of a typical cybernetic implant system—yours for example—we would see a much more even distribution of filaments. Some concentration in the motor skills areas. A node somewhere in here for the oracle that it’s all platformed on. Also a high concentration of filament in the speech, hearing, and visual centers. In other words, your spinfeeds, your VR interfaces, your communications systems. Sharifi’s implant is totally different. No oracle, no operating platform, no relays. Just filament. And it’s concentrated almost exclusively in the speech, sight, and hearing centers.”
“So it’s just a fancy net access web?” Li asked, disappointed.
“Not quite.” Sharpe pursed his lips and stepped away from the scanner, pulling his gloves off. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of shunt.”
“A shunt?” Li shook her head, fighting away a brief, untethered image of Kolodny falling. “That’s crazy. Why would someone like Sharifi be wired for a shunt? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”
Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.
“I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”
“What kind of system?”
“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”
Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.
“Emergent–human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown