Spin State - Chris Moriarty [65]
Li shivered. “You can’t honestly believe that.”
“People have believed stranger things,” he answered. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I’m not making any claims. You asked me for a guess, that’s my guess. For the moment anyway. Like every woman, I reserve the right to change my mind.”
It was an old argument, but one Li couldn’t resist. “You’re not a woman, Cohen.”
“My dear, I’ve been one for longer than you have.”
“No. You’ve been a tourist. It’s different.” Li tapped into her hard files, pulled up her scan of Sharifi’s interface and copied it to him. “Take a look at that and let me know what your woman’s intuition tells you.”
“Well now,” Cohen said, sitting up abruptly. “I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning that.” His upper lip twisted in a crooked little smile. “It was quite entertaining to see you teetering back and forth, trying to decide how far you trusted me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust,” Li said. “It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols.”
“Impertinent monkey.”
He wizarded the file into realspace, opened the case, ran his fingers along the wire, turned it over to look at the raised sunburst.
“It was made for Sharifi,” Li said. “Some kind of wet/dry interface.”
“Intraface.”
“I think she was using it to interface with the field AI—”
“Intraface.” He sounded pained. “Do you listen to anything I say?”
“Interface, intraface, what’s the difference?”
“Think, Catherine. An interface manages the exchange of data and operating programs between two or more discrete systems. An intraface, in contrast, merges the two into a single integrated system.”
“Pretty academic distinction, Cohen.”
“Not when the two things you’re networking are a human and an Emergent AI. Think of your own internals. The various systems are platformed on an oracle—a simple, nonsentient AI that’s little more than an intelligent game-playing agent. The oracle routes data and active code back and forth from you to your wetware, translates classical queries into quantum computational functions, tags and produces correct solutions.” He fluttered slim, perfectly manicured fingers. “In broad outline, it’s little different than the shunt through which I receive sensory data and route commands to this or any other wired body. An intraface, however, is an entirely different beast. It merges the AI and the human into a single consciousness.”
“Who controls it?”
“A nonquestion. Like asking which neurons in your brain control your own body. Or asking which of my associated networks is in control of me. We all are.”
“But some of you are more in control than others, right?”
“Ah. Yes. I should have been more precise before. When I say a single consciousness I’m speaking of consciousness not as you understand it, but as I do. I know it’s fashionable to describe human consciousness as Emergent, but really, as soon as you get above the level of the individual neuron, that’s just a metaphor. A true Emergent is a very different animal. Emergent consciousness is born out of a kind of parallel processing that the human mind simply isn’t wired for. Control in such a context is . . . complicated.”
“And you’d need an Emergent to run it?”
“A very powerful one at that.”
Li looked at him, thinking. “How many Emergents are there who could do it?”
“Not many,” Cohen said, picking at a thread on the cuff of his suit jacket. “Alba’s Emergents, of course, especially if you ran them through AMC’s field AI. Two or three Ring-side AIs, all under depreciable life contracts to DefenseNet or one of the private defense contractors. Any of the cornerstone AIs in FreeNet’s Consortium could run it—and stepping on the Consortium’s toes could certainly explain your little