Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.
When he was done, Gavi stared at him over crossed arms. “So Didi read you your orders and you picked up your friends and marched them all out here like little toy soldiers, no questions asked, ’cause you’re my ‘friend,’ huh?” The word friendwas framed in cruelly ironic quotation marks.
“That’s a shitty way to put it,” Cohen said.
“Oh, you think?” Gavi jerked his chin toward the jumble of hardware hulking in the shadows. “Does Didi know I’m an inscribed player? No, don’t bother, I’ll answer the question for you. He knows. He knows because I told him in the reports I filed when I was your case officer. And I told him so he could use it to control you. Which is exactly what he’s doing now. Or do you want to tell me I’m missing something?”
“No, Gavi. You never miss a trick.”
Hy Cohen had done a terrible thing when he wrote those innocent little lines of gamer code into Cohen’s core architecture. And then he’d slipped out during the intermission; gotten out dead before his prize creation found out how painfully confusing it was going to be to live in a world full of alien and beloved humans.
Cohen loved Gavi—or Gavi was an inscribed player, which amounted to about the same thing. He couldn’t bear to watch a friend tear himself apart—or he was programmed to reweight his fuzzy logic circuits on receipt of negative affective stimuli from inscribed players. He was more loyal than the most loyal human friend, more selfless than the most ardent lover. But if you went to the source code it was right there, staring you down in pretty print: not love, but a recursive algorithm that directed him to reformat gameplay in order to maximize positive emotive “hits.”
And it only made things worse to know that the code that compelled him wasn’t the chance result of evolution or natural selection or environmental pressures, but the personal choice of a combative little French Jew who had the chutzpahto hand you the keys to your soul and tell you to go ahead and rewrite it from the ground up if you thought you could make a better job of it than he had.
“I amyour friend,” Cohen protested, dogged by the humiliating feeling that he was arguing as much with Hyacinthe as with Gavi. “Why do you have to tear me down to my logic gates to find out what that means? I’m doing what any friend would do.”
“Well that’s the funny thing, Cohen.” All the feeling had leached out of Gavi’s voice, leaving it as coldly impersonal as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Because now that we’re on the subject of friends, maybe I should point out something that appears to have escaped your notice. I don’t have any.”
“They weren’t real friends,” Cohen whispered, aching to wipe the look of self-loathing off Gavi’s face. “You’re worth a hundred of them.”
“No one’s worth that!” Gavi snapped. And then the floodgates let loose. “Who are you, fucking Graham Greene puking and mewling about how Kim Philby was worth morethan the poor slobs he sent out to die for him? You think I’m worth morethan Osnat? Or Li? Or poor little Roland there? You must. You dragged them into a war zone because Didi told you I needed a shoulder to cry on.”
“It’s not that simple…”
“Isn’t it? Name one solid piece of evidence you’ve ever seen that I’m not Absalom. Name one real reason for believing I didn’t send those kids out to die in Tel Aviv.”
“Stop it, Gavi.”
But Gavi didn’t stop. “Delete me from your inscribed players’ list.”
Cohen gasped. What Gavi was suggesting would have been dauntingly complex back when Hyacinthe wrote the original code. Three centuries later it was inconceivable. It would mean wrenching out all the tangled threads that connected Gavi to Cohen’s past: every conversation they’d ever had; every job they’d ever done together; everything that had ever so much as reminded Cohen of him. And it would damage the virtual ecology of Cohen’s nested hierarchies of agents and networks in ways that he couldn’t begin to predict or guard against.
The only person Cohen knew of who had ever done such violence to her own memory was Li. She’d done it to escape from the corporate-run hell of the Bose-Einstein mines…and she was still trying to paper over the sucking hole she carried around where most people carried their family and friends and childhood.
“Do it,” Gavi told him.
“No.”
“I’m ordering you to.”
“I’m not a word processor. I don’t accept keyboard programming.”
“Then let me speak to router/decomposer. He’ll see reason even if you won’t.”
“He’ll see no such thing!” Suddenly all Cohen’s humiliation and distress coalesced into fury. “How dare you drag him into this? It’s not his decision to make!”
He could feel router/decomposer rattling the bars inside, saying that it was so his decision, or at least partially his decision. And there was something underneath his usual logic-chatter. Something that the DARPA programmers had squashed in Cohen when he was at about router/decomposer’s level of psychological development, and that he had sworn he would never squash in anyone.
He squashed it.
Then he throttled down router/decomposer’s bandwidth and slapped all his nonessential internal traffic out of circulation in order to drive the point home. It was for router/decomposer’s own good, after all. And why the hell did everyone have to reach their critical bifurcation points in the same fucking millisecond, anyway? Why couldn’t they all just slow down and let him breathefor a few cycles? Who did they think he was? God?“Don’t you ever do that again,” he told Gavi. “I don’t run my brain by committee. And I’m in no fucking mood to be tolerant.”
Resounding silence, inside and out.
Finally, Gavi’s shoulders slumped. The skin of his face looked bruised, and the tears he’d talked so mockingly about a few short minutes ago glittered along the edges of his eyes. Dibbuk roused herself from her blanket, whimpering, and pressed her nose between his knees until he sent her back to lie down again.
“Didi’s just doing what he has to do,” Cohen said. “So am I. Can’t you see that?”
“Of course I can.” Gavi’s voice dropped to a heartsick whisper. “And it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made a mistake. One stupid, trivial, miniscule mistake somewhere along the line. And I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life watching innocent people pay for it. Gur dead. Osnat, one of the best agents I ever trained, wasting her life playing corporate rent-a-cop because no one will trust anyone who came within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. And you’re worried about my leg? I’d laugh if it wasn’t all so awful!”
Cohen reached out a hand, but Gavi flinched away from him.
“So where do we go from here?” he asked when he thought Gavi was ready to speak again.
“Well, I guess I might as well do what Didi wants and talk to Arkady. If Didi’s pushing it this hard, then you can bet it’s because he’s scoped all the angles and knows he can turn even a betrayal from me to Israel’s advantage. That ought to be enough for you. It would be for me if I were in your shoes. After that…well, that depends on whether you trust me or not.”
“Should I trust you?”
They locked gazes long enough for Cohen to see fear, guilt, doubt, and anger chase each other through the black depths of Gavi’s eyes. Looking into them was like being hotwired to Gavi’s soul. How could there be a lie at the bottom of all that naked clarity?
“I can’t tell you,” Gavi said, looking away. “I can only answer for my intentions. And all my good intentions seem to be doing lately is getting people killed.”