‹There’s more than one Arkady. It’s not like running into a human. You ought to know that.› He glanced at her symmetrical construct’s features and decided not to pursue that line of thought. ‹Anyway, you worry too much.›

And then, with an almost humanly malicious sense of timing, they passed onto a new grid of his access point map, router/decomposer lost the most recent open node and failed to locate a new one, and the bottom fell out of streamspace.

The bus and its passengers drained away around Cohen as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.

What the hell? Cohen queried his routing meta-agent. But if the other AI heard him, he wasn’t answering.

Cohen dialed through the virtually stacked grid coordinates of the local nets, passing over the endless sea of O’s and triple slashes that marked closed nodes and danger points. He toyed briefly with two high-bandwidth nodes chalked with the legends KIND WOMAN TELL SOB STORY and RELIGIOUS TALK WILL GET YOU FOOD. He dropped them both; access with a data trail, however faint, was as bad as no access at all.

The next block was a government system full of high-security data holes (NOTSAFE).

Then the Border Police (BIG DOG—MOVE ON QUICKLY).

He skittered across the spinstream, feeling all contact with Earth slipping away from him. The bandwidth requirements for running a full-body shunt were inconceivable by the standards of human data-pushers—and human tolerances were all that most Earth-to-Orbital hardware was built to handle.

‹Hold for contact,› he messaged to Li’s Ring-side postbox across the low-bandwidth, high-surveillance Orbital-Surface routers, but he might as well have been shouting down a well for all the good it did. If anything went wrong down there while he was offstream, there was nothing he could do for her.

And then he saw it, gleaming through the haze of low-bandwidth static like incoming tracer fire: Two inverted brackets bellied up to each other to form the inverted capital I that marked the unpatrolled entrance ramps to Earth’s wide-open post-Embargo information freeway:

He was back.

He slipped back into the sensory feed from Roland’s cortical shunt like a diver sliding into blood-warm water. The bus and the passengers and the city all took shape around him. Most important, he felt Li’s reassuring presence interpenetrating the edges of his own composite consciousnesses:

He sent the letters blinking across their shared work space in archaic LED green.

‹What the hell was that?› she asked.

‹Nothing. Old programmer’s joke.›

‹Jeez, be serious for once, can’t you?›

“Okay. Sorry about the road bump.”

“I’m sorrier. I thought I was about to be stuck making small talk with Roland for the next two weeks.”

“I thought you liked Roland.”

“A little of Roland goes a long way.” She gave him a sly sideways glance, seemed about to say something, then obviously thought the better of it.

“It’s your fault, anyway.” Cohen stretched coquettishly. “Iwanted to be a girl for this trip.”

“We’re in the land of the Interfaithers and the ultraorthodox, Cohen. One of us needs to be able to pass as a member of the master sex. Besides, if I’d let you shunt through a girl on this trip, any last hope of making you pack sensible shoes would have gone straight out the window.”

“Sensible shoes are bad for the soul,” Cohen kvetched. He ducked his head into the curve of her neck, tasting her familiar skin and the rich musky dust of Earth.

She shrugged him away.

It was barely a shrug. No outsider would have noticed the gesture, even if they’d been looking for it. But to Cohen it was unmistakable.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked after a moment.

Li’s generous lips compressed into a tense line. “Why pay for what you can get for free?”

And there it was, the truth Li could neither change nor live with. The two of them formed a hybrid creature whose realspace body was just the tip of the streamspace iceberg, and Cohen wrote the rules in streamspace. They ran on his networks. They navigated his gamespace. They depended on his processing capacity, which exponentially exceeded anything a mere organic could field—even an organic as heavily wired as Li.

Cohen had the power to go anywhere, see everything, do anything, take anything. Li only had the power to walk away. Not much for a woman who had commanded battalions and led combat drops. Not enough, Cohen was beginning to think.

Cohen’s routing meta-agent interrupted with a message that he’d sorted out the routing bug and was working on a patch for it. It was of course completely unnecessary for router/decomposer to bring such a message to Cohen’s conscious attention. Nor was it necessary to deliver it on a general access spinstream. But router/decomposer had sided with Li on the wardriving issue, and he had a point to make.

Router/decomposer had originally called himself just plain decomposer. And a decomposer was exactly what he was: a fully sentient massively parallel decomposition program supported by a vast Josephson Array currently holding in a low lunar orbit carefully calculated to keep its spin glass lattice operating at a crisp refreshing twenty-seven degrees Kelvin. But when Cohen’s last communications routing meta-agent had decamped in protest over Li’s arrival, decomposer—albeit with endless grumbling over being dragged away from his beloved spin glass research—had also taken over management of Cohen’s ant-based routing algorithms.

When his job changed, decomposer had quite logically changed his name: to router/decomposer, or, among friends, 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110000 01011100 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110011 01100101 01110010.

Functional nomenclature didn’t appeal to Cohen any more than the personality architecture that normally went with it. But router/ decomposer was fabulously good at his job, fully sentient, and eminently capable of spinning off into his own autonomous aggregation. No other Emergent AI came close to matching the seamless integration and dizzying processing speeds Cohen could achieve thanks to router/decomposer’s elegant spinstream routing solutions. And router/decomposer would have applied for his own Toffoli number and gone into business for himself long ago if it were not for what he cogently termed his “low tolerance for the social friction costs of dealing with assholes.”

Needless to say, Cohen tried very hard to keep the social friction costs of dealing with Cohen to a minimum.

‹Do you have any idea how much processing space I’m blowing on your little spy games?› router/decomposer queried.

‹Where’s your sense of adventure,› Cohen joked, ‹and you just a young whippersnapper of a hundred and fifteen?›

Router/decomposer demonstrated his sense of adventure by sending an extremely rude chaotic attractor flickering across the hidden layers of their shared Kohonen nets.

“Tell him to get a real name, will you?” Li said, having caught the tail end of router/decomposer’s dirty joke.

“Tell him yourself,” Cohen answered.

“I would, but he seems to not be speaking to me at the moment.”

“What? Why?”

“Hell if I know.”

‹What’s that about?› Cohen asked router/decomposer on the root-only stream.

‹She keeps asking to access data you’ve made me firewall. It’s embarrassing. Actually,› router/decomposer suggested slyly, still on the root-only stream, ‹it would save a lot of RAM if you’d stop making me lie to her.›

‹It’s notlying!›

‹Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. The point is, our current associative configuration is highly inefficient. And detrimental to your relationship with her.›