Cohen. Here. Himself.
Alive
.
She swallowed, clamping down on the roaring maelstrom inside her. “Where?”
His smiled broadened. “I’m afraid I can’t really help you with that.”
“Korchow—”
“Not because I’m unwilling, my dear. Because he’s in the Drift. And who can really say where anyone is once they nose their ship into those strange currents?”
“He’s on a DFT ship. You’re saying he’s been kidnapped? By who? DFT prospectors?”
“No, no. It’s much better than that. Can you really imagine him stuck tête-à-tête in the Drift with some grizzled prospector with grease under his fingernails? He’d probably die of mortification—if he didn’t drive his captors to drink or suicide first. No, if my information is correct then he’s managed to get himself into a situation with far greater dramatic potential. You have to hand it to Cohen: He always did have a flair for the dramatic. It was one of the very few things I liked about him. The name William Llewellyn doesn’t happen to mean anything to you, does it?”
Again, Li thought regretfully of her internals. The name seemed to ring a bell, but she couldn’t make the connection with unassisted soft memory.
“Just ask your little friend at the police station. He knows all about the intriguing Mr. Llewellyn. They grew up digging potatoes and shooting varmints together in the Uplands.”
A bell rang somewhere in the belly of the mill and Korchow stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls.
“Break’s over. Too bad we don’t have more time to chat. I’d love to know what you’ve been reading lately.”
“Nothing you’d want to talk about.”
“Hmm,” Korchow said meditatively. But that was all he said. And in the next instant he was turning away.
Li felt a perverse sense of disappointment at his departure. “What’s the matter, Korchow?”
“The matter?
Is
anything the matter?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever talked to you that you haven’t tried to get me to defect to the Syndicates.”
The sly smile stole across his features again, sharpening and refining them and making him look more like the Andrej Korchow of her memories.
“Are you disappointed?” he asked.
“Just curious.”
“I’m afraid I’m not in a position to renew that offer at the moment.”
“So this isn’t just cover?”
“Oh, it’s cover all right. The most serious kind of cover there is.”
She stared, trying to catch up to a conversation that seemed to be slipping sideways on her. “You’re freelance?” she asked finally. The word made no sense to her in relation to a Syndicate clone. What could it even mean to say he was working for himself when his psychology and physiology, his acculturation from birth, were all based on the ideal of the superorganism?
“That’s putting it a bit too strongly,” he told her. “But there have been … disagreements of principle.”
“About their plans for the Drift.”
“If you will. Whatever the reason, the care packages from Gilead are arriving a bit less reliably than they used to.”
As the meaning of Korchow’s words dawned on Li, she began to chuckle softly. Korchow had spent his life doing deniable wet work under deep cover and having his misdeeds passed off as the work of “rogue agents” or “unreliable elements” or “bad apples.” And now he had gone rogue for real? How Cohen would have enjoyed that irony. But Korchow’s next words wiped the smile off her face.
“I wouldn’t laugh if I were you, my dear. There are sharks in the water. They’re circling around looking for our mutual friend, or whatever’s left of him. And soon they’ll notice you, and I won’t be able to save you no matter how much I might wish to. So—purely as a matter of professional courtesy—please don’t pull me under when you go down.”
THE DRIFT
That night Li finally got her chance to talk to Llewellyn—for all the good it did her.
Sital came to her door at the end of the dogwatch, looking like it was the last place she wanted to be in the universe.
“Captain wants to talk to you,” she said in a curt monotone.
And then she said nothing at all for the entire span of the walk around the hab ring to the captain’s quarters.
Llewellyn was just sitting down to a spartan dinner when she arrived, and he didn’t offer her any.
“Good,” he said when she and Sital stepped in. “I need to talk to you. Sit down.”
Li sat.
“You can go, Sital.”
Sital, who was still hovering just inside the doorway, chuffed in frustration. But a moment later Li heard the door whisper open and then close behind her.
Llewellyn leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and stared at her.
“Hello, Catherine.”
She studied the narrow face across the table from her, searching his wolf’s eyes for any sign of what she’d seen on the Titan ship’s bridge. She didn’t see it.
She’d been trying ever since that strange encounter to figure out
what the relationship was between Cohen and Llewellyn. Cohen hadn’t been on shunt, or at least not the kind of binary on/off switch shunt that AIs installed in rented bodies. The shift between Llewellyn and Cohen had been too smooth, almost as if they were both somehow present and conscious in a single body. And anyway, she couldn’t see Llewellyn turning over control of his mind and body to anyone. Certainly not in a combat situation, certainly. Probably not ever.
Now, however, there was no sly smile, no fey glint in the pale eyes, no sign at all of Cohen hovering behind Llewellyn’s austere features.
“Where’s Cohen?”
“He’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“I really need to talk to him.”
“That could be a little complicated.”
“Why? What have you done to him?”
The enigmatic smile broadened. “What have I done to him? Why don’t you ask what he’s done to me?”
Li frowned, uncertain how to take that. “Maybe there’s some problem with the hardware. I could look at it for you.”
“I’m sure.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He knows.”
“Oh.” She felt like crying suddenly. It barely mattered to her whether Cohen didn’t want to talk to her or Llewellyn wouldn’t let him talk to her. The result was the same.
“You look hungry,” Llewellyn said, his voice suddenly gentler. “Have something to eat.”
“I … uh … thanks. Actually, I am.”
She began eating, and got through several mouthfuls before she realized that she was eating off Llewellyn’s plate. There was no other plate on the table. He had simply pushed his unfinished dinner across the table to her. And she had started eating it.
“That’s weird,” she muttered.
She pushed the plate back toward Llewellyn, leaving it stranded somewhere in the middle of the table, claimed by nobody.
Then she looked up into Llewellyn’s eyes—and saw Cohen looking back at her.
For a few moments they just stared at each other across the table. Was it Llewellyn looking back at her, or Cohen? She could see traces of Cohen in every movement, every expression. But they were muted, blurred, almost unrecognizable. It was as if the two of them were fighting back and forth over disputed territory, both of them trying to establish a beachhead in Llewellyn’s mind, and neither of them able to either gain full control or completely lock the other out.
“What do you want from me, Catherine?”
“I want my husband back.”
“That’s all? Forgive me for being suspicious, but I know you better than that. And you don’t strike me as the forgive-and-forget type.”
“Fine. I’ll admit it. I want revenge.”
Something flickered behind Llewellyn’s pale eyes. It wasn’t fear, but it looked to Li like it might be as close to fear as a man like Llewellyn got. “On whom?”
“On whoever killed him.”
Llewellyn lifted his eyes to the ceiling and laughed softly, just as he had when Doyle had challenged him. Li wondered what the gesture meant. It happened when he was challenged, but it was opaque, hidden, secretive—like everything else about the man.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “That’s what he said you’d want.”
“And?” Li prompted.
Another uncomfortable familiar silence.
“So where does that leave us?”
“It doesn’t leave us anywhere,” Llewellyn pointed out. “It leaves you on my ship, under my orders. And it leaves me in control of your … whatever he is.”
“He’s not going to take that lying down.”
Llewellyn gave her a long, hard look. “You think I don’t know that by now?”
“Well then, what are you going to do about it? You can’t just—” She struggled even to find words for what Llewellyn was doing. “You can’t
just hold an Emergent AI prisoner in your skull indefinitely. For a month or two, yes. But not for a lifetime.”
Llewellyn laughed bitterly. “A month or two is as good as a lifetime to me, Catherine. Now are we done here? Or would you like to lecture me about eating my veggies?”
“He could help you, Llewellyn. We could help you.”
“And why exactly would you want to do that?”
She blinked.
“Ah, you see? The truth isn’t quite as pretty as you’d like to pretend it is.” He unfolded his long body from the couch and padded toward the door. He turned back at the last moment, leaning a bony shoulder against the door frame. “Don’t think I’m a monster,” he told her. “I’m doing what I have to do. And for what it’s worth … he’s glad to see you.”
Li caught her breath. “Well, doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it. It tells me you’re likely to be bad for my health.”
“So what are you platformed on, anyway?” Llewellyn asked the ghost. “What did the Uploaders shoot me full of?”
The ghost stretched, looking feline and feminine and dangerous—at least to Llewellyn’s wary eyes. He was wearing an immaculately tailored suit that was the shimmering gray of the predawn sky in the Monongahela Uplands of Llewellyn’s faraway childhood. The shimmer was because there was a thread of silk woven into the wool. Llewellyn knew this because the ghost had told him so.
In a few short weeks of life with the ghost, Llewellyn had learned more about clothes than he’d learned in his entire lifetime to date. He was obsessed with clothing, Llewellyn had decided. Either that or he talked about clothes on purpose because he knew it annoyed Llewellyn.
It was just the kind of thing he’d do. If he even was a he. He looked like one today—as much as he ever did—but it was hard to tell sometimes. And even though Llewellyn knew they were in some weird folded database where nothing was what it appeared to be and every seemingly inert object was pregnant with meaning and memory, he couldn’t help wondering if the ghost’s borrowed bodies were the memories of real bodies somewhere out in the universe. And if so, were they born this way? Or did he have them surgically altered to be so inhumanly strange and sexless and beautiful?
“What am I platformed on?” the ghost said, interrupting Llewellyn’s
wondering. “Is that what you’re asking? Nothing exotic. Nothing bizarre. Just standard Freetown liveware.”
Llewellyn suppressed a shudder. Freetown was no place he’d ever gone or imagined going, even in his Navy days. It was a symbol more than a place—a symbol of the world that was leaving humans behind, at a delta-V that grew faster every second of every hour of every day.
“But how did they get it off Freetown, though? I thought it was illegal to export DNA-platformed AI anywhere else in UN space without installing a kill switch. I thought the termination loop had to be activated and verified by UNSec before any human with AI in their blood could even get transport papers.”
“It’s not as if it’s the Black Plague,” the ghost said impatiently.
But it was, Llewellyn thought in the small and shrinking part of his mind that the ghost hadn’t contaminated. It was worse than the plague. Bodily illness only stole your body. But this sickness stole your mind, hijacked your memories, took hold of your most secret desires and fears, and twisted them until you didn’t know what you wanted and what the ghost wanted.
It would have been laughable if it wasn’t all so deadly. Llewellyn now had exactly what all the Trannies, Uploaders, and Minskyites flocked to Freetown to look for. He’d been handed a free ticket to their post-Singularity Nirvana. The future was knocking on his brain and etching itself into his body, blood and bone, marrow and sinew. And he wanted none of it.
The ghost sipped his sherry and nibbled delicately at an olive. “They’re very good,” he said complacently. “You really ought to try one.”
“No thanks,” Llewellyn said stiffly. He didn’t like olives. And the perverse creature probably knew he didn’t like them. Which was no doubt why he was so hell-bent on foisting them on him.
“I’m not Hades, you know. It’s not as if you’re going to be stuck here if you accidentally eat anything in my magical kingdom.” He yawned broadly. “I only wish it were that interesting.”
“If you’re so benign,” Llewellyn asked in a voice that sounded so scathingly self-righteous that even he wanted to ask himself when he’d
lost his sense of humor, “then why are you giving me chills, fevers, and a rash that clashes with all the latest fall fashions?”
“Me?” the ghost asked in a convincing display of wounded innocence. “You think I’m doing that? Ha! Step into my parlor and let me show you what’s really going on inside that handsome head of yours.”
And before Llewellyn could figure out which of the many obvious questions to ask, the ghost was unwinding itself from the sofa, setting down its sherry glass, twining its cool, dry fingers into his … and leading him down the garden path.
There was a door at the other end of the courtyard that Llewellyn had never noticed before. The ghost stepped through it, still in undisputed possession of Llewellyn’s hand, and he had no choice but to follow.
The blood-warm Spanish night wrapped around them, filling up Llewellyn’s senses and insinuating itself into every pore. In his initial reconnaissance of the memory palace, he had thought this corner of the walls was only barren cliff face, but now he could see a rough, narrow stairway winding downward through sloping terraces of garden that gave way to weeds and wilderness. The city below them was swathed in darkness, and what lights he could see were yellow and flickering. Not modern Granada. But it was impossible to tell whether this was pre-Migration medieval Granada or some sort of post-Migration primitive enclave. And anyway, what did it matter? Llewellyn had served enough time in the ghost’s databases to know that the city changed day by day and minute by minute. There was no outside here. There was no objective reality, no real city. The world all around them was whatever the ghost said it was.