Spin State - Chris Moriarty [53]
“So you’re saying Sharifi was carrying around black-market tech.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the AI on the other end of this wire wasn’t an Emergent.” Sharpe shrugged. “Still, that’s my best guess about what this is. I still think she was wired for some kind of shared operations with an Emergent.”
“Not too many of those around, Sharpe.”
“No, there aren’t.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“The relay station’s field AI?”
Li felt the cold of the autopsy room settle into her bones. What the hell had Sharifi been doing? And who would have let her play that kind of risky game with a field AI when lives depended on every quantum-transport operation? “I’d sure like to see the psychware they were running on that implant,” she said.
“It won’t be in there. Not nearly enough memory. It’ll have been externalized too.”
“And the field AI is conveniently off-line, isn’t it?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
They both stared at the screen for a moment without speaking.
“Well,” Sharpe asked. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Take it out,” Li said.
Most of Li’s encounters with quantum-corrected replication happened when she was sedated into near coma. Cryotechnology made faster-than-light transport, otherwise a potentially lethal ordeal, survivable. And it usually left Li with nothing more significant than a stuffy nose and wandering joint pain.
Biotech extraction was different, though. It was controlled, observable, reassuringly domesticated. A surgical parlor trick. This one took a while. Sharpe didn’t have the necessary information to preset his equipment; he had to fiddle around trying to nail the implant’s quantum signature. But after a long series of finicky adjustments, he established and verified entanglement, uploaded the primary spinstream, reintegrated the entangled data, waited while the comp ran its nested correction protocols. When his terminal told them it was completing the Sharifi transform they both laughed nervously.
Five minutes later, Li held a small package in the palm of her hand: a neatly rolled coil of white ceramsteel filament and a few gel-encased microrelays, all flash-irradiated and wrapped in sterile surgical film.
“It’s so small,” she said.
“Two kilometers,” Sharpe said. “That’s the length of filament, measured end to end, in the average full-body net.”
Li weighed the slender coil in her hand. Why had Sharifi needed to install illegal wetware? And, more troubling, where had she gotten it? “Do you need to keep this?” she asked Sharpe.
“I’d rather.”
“Fine.” She handed it to him. “Just make sure it’s here if I need to look at it again.”
“Can I ask you something?” Sharpe said as she reached the door. His voice sounded strained. “Unofficially?”
Li turned. “Of course.”
“Did you know her?”
“Who? Sharifi?”
Sharpe nodded.
“Not really. I saw her a couple of times. That’s all.”
“I knew her,” Sharpe said. He picked up a scalpel and began fidgeting with it, screwing and unscrewing the threaded fastener that held blade to handle. “I liked her. She was . . . honest.”
He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so Li waited, watching him fidget.
“Anyway,” he said, flushing, “that’s not the point. The point is, I was given . . . instructions. After her death. Do those instructions still stand?”
Li stared at him, wondering what kind of political minefield she’d stumbled into. “What are you asking me?”
Sharpe searched her face, eyebrows knit. “Has anyone explained to you how the coroner’s system works in St. Johns?”
Li had to think for a minute before she realized that St. Johns was the actual map name of Shantytown. She shook her head.
“When someone dies in the town limits, I have full authority to conduct any investigations needed to declare a cause of death and close the inquiry. When someone dies on AMC property, the case goes to AMC management. Unless AMC asks me to do an autopsy, I just hold the body pending disposal or, more rarely, shipment. There’s still a death certificate, of course. But Haas fills it out. I don’t do much more than rubber-stamp it.”
“Go on,” Li said.