‹Oh really? If you know so much about humans, why don’t you stop backseat driving and get your own?›

‹Nah,› router/decomposer said placidly. ‹I’m more the heckling-from-the-sidelines type than the do-it-yourself type. Besides, I tried shunting once. It was…squishy. A little bit of human goes a hell of a long way. That’s why I like Li. A little human, but not toohuman. Now if you’d just take my advice and—›

‹Don’t you have anythinguseful to do right now?›

‹Not until you fuck up again.› An affective fuzzy set drifted downstream and dispersed across Cohen’s neural networks like the icy plume of a mountain river mingling with the sea. It “felt” like all router/decomposer’s algorithms: as cold and complicated and inhuman as his beloved quantum spin glass. But the emotion that the set expressed was all too human: smug self-righteousness. ‹Seriously, though. I still think you need to back off and give Li a little more space.›

‹That’s not the way the Game works. As you damn well know.›

‹Bet I could figure out how to tweak the Game so you could do it.›

‹Tweak my soul, you mean.›

That earned Cohen another rude attractor. ‹Souls are just obsolete social engineering for monkeys. And even if you get some perverse kick out of pretending to believe in such fairy tales, the Game is not your soul. It was a damn sloppy piece of code when Hy wrote it three hundred years ago, and it hasn’t improved with age. Code is written to be rewritten, and this piece is long due for an overhaul. Seriously, Cohen, do you see mechasing after humans like a codependent golden retriever?›

“So how did you get him to stop talking to you?” Cohen asked Li out loud. “And can Ido it?”

But Li was laughing too hard to answer. And when he probed her thoughts across the intraface the only coherent words he could get out of her were ‹Down, Fido, down!›

It was too bad, but there it was.

If you wanted to get from Ben Gurion International Airport to modern Jerusalem, you had to go down the Jaffa Road. And if you went down the Jaffa Road, you had to go past the Line.

Every year there was talk of moving the road or building a new highway that would swing out to the north and away from the dirty zone. But every year the planning board put it off until next year…mainly because building a new road would mean admitting that the war wasn’t just a passing inconvenience but a permanent fixture on the landscape. It was the same kind of mentality you saw in every low-level, multigenerational civil war: Lebanon, Ireland, Iraq, America. On the one hand, no one wants to be on the losing side of sectarian violence. On the other hand, no one was foolish enough to think that anyone could “win” such a war. And since no one quite understood how or why peace had disintegrated into bloodshed, most people still nursed a vague hope that a reverse process might occur (Cohen thought of it as a kind of sociopolitical phase transition) in which the chaos of war would spontaneously reorganize itself into peace.

Years went by like this, with people schizophrenically dividing their time between waiting for peace to break out and trying to schedule the war around the weddings and brises and bar mitzvahs and funerals that willkeep happening even when there’s a combat zone around the corner. And in the meantime, the streets weren’t getting fixed, and the real estate market was crashing, and the plumbing was getting iffy…and Jerusalem was starting to look more and more like a city whose back had been broken on the rack of civil war.

Nowhere was the disintegration more visible than in the spreading no-man’s-land that leached out from the Line toward the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. Biohazard signs began to sprout on street corners like poisonous mushrooms. The divided highway deteriorated into a rough two-lane strip of pavement as it approached the last habitable houses. Then even the two-lane died of a slow bleed, giving way to mortar-pocked dirt, sporadically bulldozed to smooth out what was left of the roadbed.

As the Line got closer the passengers got tenser. A screaming match broke out at the back of the bus between a paunchy middle-aged ultra-orthodox man and a scantily dressed young woman whose skimpy T-shirt had ridden up to expose what Cohen at first assumed was a charmingly old-fashioned bit of cosmetic scarring.

“What’s she saying?” Li asked, her spinstream-assisted Hebrew completely unequal to the fast and furious pace of the argument.

“She asked him to close the window. He refused.”

The young woman was now actually pulling up her shirt and pointing to her stomach while the ultraorthodox averted his eyes in horror. And the scars weren’t cosmetic at all, it turned out; they were old shrapnel wounds.

“Then,” Cohen translated on the fly, “he told her to cover up her arms if she was cold. So she told him to fuck off. So he told her get on the next Ring-bound shuttle if she didn’t want to be a real Jew. And now she’s shouting about how she spent two years on the Line and she doesn’t have to take this shit from some schmuck ultraorthodox draft dodger and how would he like to see her scars. All of them.” He grinned, caught between pride and embarrassment. “Welcome to Israel.”

“The Line,” Li said when the screaming match in the back of the bus had finally subsided. “As in the Green Line?”

Cohen nodded absently, craning out the window for his first view of what was left of the Old City.

“That girl was an Enderbot?”

As if summoned into existence by the word, a squad of soldiers crossed the road in front of them, forcing the bus to a grinding halt. It wasn’t a checkpoint; these soldiers were coming off the Line, smeared with red dirt and dressed in bulky desert camouflage NBC gear.

Without stopping to think whether it was a good idea, Cohen reached out across streamspace and sampled the squad leader’s spinstreams. Red flags must be going up all over EMET headquarters; but if he could hack their spins that easily, then whoever was handling security over there richly deserved to be hauled onto the carpet.

Besides, he told himself, it was as good a way as any to let Didi know he was coming.

As the squad dropped off the far side of the roadbed, one of the soldiers looked back. Her eyes were startlingly green, and the coin-shaped derm marks of long-term cortical shunt use were dead white against the sun-browned skin of her temples. She was Sephardic, of course; the well-heeled children of the Ashkenazim were back in the EMET programming bunkers running the AIs, not under shunt and facing live fire and land mines. A few leftist politicians had suggested rotating reservists through the Line on regular intervals, but it would have cost too much to install even the low-grade IDF shunts in such numbers. And what politician really wants to send his campaign contributors’ kids home in body bags? So the privileged children of the Ashkenazim sat under full-spectrum lights in the IDF programming bunkers and pampered and debugged and lied to the tactical AIs. And the children of Iraqis, North Africans, and Ethiopians collected the combat pay and the bullets and the genetic damage.

“So that’s EMET.” Li’s voice was flat and expressionless.

“Yep. EMET meet Catherine. Catherine meet EMET, the latest and allegedly greatest stage in the evolution of military-applications Emergent AI. You want a war, EMET can run it for you from the lowest private to the fattest general. And Israel’s just the field trial. If little EMET runs this war well enough, he’ll put soldiers out of business permanently…except for the shunt-controlled cannon fodder.”

Li glanced after the soldiers. She looked sick. “Was that girl under shunt?”

“I can’t tell,” Cohen lied.

But of course he could. And even for him it was hard to imagine that there was anything even remotely human behind those blank killer’s eyes. Was that what Li saw when she looked at him? The thought sent a shudder through Roland’s body that router/ decomposer’s best buffering algorithms couldn’t suppress.