Spin Control

THE AUTOMATIC CHESSPLAYER

Cohen lay on the hotel bed and breathed in the tangy scent of the desert overlaid on that dry chalk-smelling laundry detergent that no one seemed to use anywhere outside of Israel.

Li slept beside him, only an arm’s length away, but he felt like he was watching her across a distance of centuries. The light raked her sleeping face and silvered the fine dark down that shadowed her cheeks. He noticed the lines around her eyes, evidence of life’s slow burn. He’d been noticing them more and more lately. It frightened him.

He blinked. He tried to remember the last time he’d blinked and couldn’t. He started to worry in a lackluster kind of way about whether forgetting to blink could damage Roland’s eyes in some way that wouldn’t be covered by the medical rider on the time-share contract.

He felt hollow, as if an invisible hand had reached in through his eyes in the eternity between one blink and the next and carved out whatever passed for his insides. Something was wrong with the shunt, obviously. But it wasn’t anything he could put a finger on, even if he’d had fingers. His myriad active systems still flowed smoothly through optimization subroutines, evaluating spinfeed, performing parity checks, refining his still-sketchy AP maps, ticking through the weak encryption of a half dozen vulnerable protected access points. But it was happening so far away that it seemed like someone else’s life.

It had been a long week. A long night. A hell of a long time in-body.

For the first time in three years, twelve weeks, and fourteen hours, he “lost” certain critical parts of what passed for “his” consciousness…

He woke into Li’s dream.

She stood in a dark hallway. The cool breath of a ceiling fan whispered along her skin, and below the whir of the fan there was another noise: a throaty ticking that made Cohen think, for some reason his associative memory programs could not immediately retrieve, of Garry Kasparov.

It could not be a place Li had ever been in her impossibly brief lifetime. He suspected that her memory was simply recycling footage of some ancient flat film set in Morocco or Alexandria or Arabia. Yet she’d somehow associated a smell with the image: a smell of spice and sandalwood and the genteel decay of rooms waiting out the midday heat behind slatted shutters.

But where had that smell come from? Random spinfeed? Some fragmentary record of a wartime combat jump, its spins decohered by repeated Bose-Einstein jumps until all she remembered was the smell of whatever forgotten desert she had fought and bled in? A piece of her lost childhood that had somehow managed to survive the slash-and-burn deletions that kept her one step ahead of the UNSec psychtechs for the fifteen years when she’d passed as human?

No matter. Though the vision was canned, the smell was real. And if it wasn’t quite the smell of Earth’s deserts as Cohen knew them, it was close enough to fool anyone who hadn’t lived it.

A harsh knife’s edge of sunlight slashed through an ill-hung shutter at the end of the corridor. Li walked to the window, opened it, and looked out over a blazing cityscape that incorporated the more famous bits and pieces of old Jerusalem. For a brief moment, Cohen wondered why her internals didn’t pick up the dream image and supply a current and factually accurate view of the city. Surely they could do that. Was there some patch or cutout that prevented her hard memory from being activated by dreamed images? Or was it in the nature of dreams not to be visible to machines unless the machines knew, at least in the half-light of borrowed memories, what it was to dream?

Then she turned away from the window, and they were in the last place Cohen would ever have expected this particular dream to take them. Home. His home, in one of the AI enclaves of the Orbital Ring. And, for the last three years, her home as well.

They were in the great ballroom. Like the rest of the house it had been boosted up, brick by brick, marble by marble, floorboard by floorboard, from rue du Poids de l’Huile in Toulouse. A lot of beautiful things had vanished in the chaos of the Evacuation, and not even Cohen could begin to save them all. But he’d saved Hyacinthe’s childhood home. And though the tourists were a bit of a pain, it gave him real pleasure to know that people traveled from every far-flung zone of the Orbital Ring to gaze at the formal eighteenth-century façade and the Renaissance staircase and the Roman bricks weathered to the soft pink of a summer sunset, and remember the ville rose and the glories of his beloved lost Gascony. Balls had gone out of style even before the original Hyacinthe was born, and the ballroom now housed Cohen’s automata collection.

Li walked down the long hall, under the refracted sunlight that rippled through the old glass like water curving over rocks. Her eyes brushed over the polished ivory of the Napier’s Bones, the finger-stained manila of an original Hollerith card from the 1890 census, the boxy control panel of one of the few priceless surviving Altair-8800s.

Not for the first time, Cohen wondered what it was like for Li to live in a neighborhood where the only organic life-forms were expensive purebred house pets and the aesthetically impeccable eternally youthful bodies-for-rent through which the more human AIs preferred to conduct their necessary commerce with organics. He’d always known she must feel something about it, in that shadowy part of her psyche that hovered always a little beyond his reach. Now, in her unguarded dream state, he experienced those feelings as if they were his own.

Fear. Affection. Confusion. Powerlessness. All the creeping horror of the DARPA years. But why? She wasn’t a prisoner. And he certainly wasn’t her jailer. Surely he wasn’t responsible for this?

The ticking was louder now, far louder than it had been when the dream started. Cohen felt like a dust mote trapped inside a giant’s pocket watch.

What are they waiting for? Li asked. Cohen realized with a shock that the they Li was so afraid of was him. And suddenly he knew, because he had felt that same terror in her dreams before, where she was taking him.

The Automatic Chessplayer was the most famous automaton ever built, and most certainly one of the most famous scientific hoaxes ever inflicted on a gullible public. Baptized Von Kempelen’s Turk because of its spectacular gown and turban (no one ever accused Von Kempelen of good taste), the chessplayer had toured all the royal courts of Europe and swiftly become the stuff of legend. Rumors abounded that the Turk was controlled by a demon. Spectators crossed themselves upon entering its presence. Ladies had been known to faint.

The greatest feat of engineering involved in the machine, the thing that made it an automaton in fact as well as fiction, was its left arm. It was undoubtedly the most advanced prosthesis of the premodern era, for it could perform all the complex fine motor movements necessary to move chess pieces across the playing board. As the pamphleteer Carl-Gottlieb Windisch pronounced in 1773, “The invention of a mechanical arm whose movements are so natural, which grasps, lifts, and sets down all with such grace, even if this arm were directed by the two hands of the inventor himself, it alone is so complicated that it would ensure the reputation of many an artist.”

But behind the ingenious arm, Von Kempelen’s Turk was pure flimflam. The trick of the thing lay in the curious construction of the table (more like a cabinet, really) that supported the chessboard and contained the Turk’s machinery. Before each game Von Kempelen would open the three doors in the table’s front panel and hold a candle behind the cabinetry to show there was nothing inside but gears and pulleys and to prove that there was no room for a grown man to hide inside the table.

But there was room. Because the machine with the miraculous arm had been built for a man with no legs.

The first “director” of the Automatic Chessplayer was an otherwise obscure Pole named Joseph Warovski. He lost both legs to a cannonball during some obscure central European land war. He was also, though probably the two things were not related, one of the best chess players on the Continent. Before each exhibition Warovski would remove his artificial legs and seat himself on a cleverly constructed sliding tray inside the cabinet. As Von Kempelen opened the doors, Warovski would slide into the concealed portion of the cabinet and slide the “machinery” into whatever section was currently visible to the befuddled audience.

Things naturally got a bit more complicated after Warovski’s death. At that point, however, the Chessplayer fell into the hands of one of the great con men of all time: a certain Johann Maelzel.

And then things began to get really interesting.

Maelzel concocted and managed to keep a more or less firm grasp on one of the longest-lived conspiracies in the history of the game of chess. Half the chess masters of Europe (the shorter half) conspired with Maelzel to build up the Turk’s legend. The Chessplayer beat Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, and a short list of Europe’s best-known kings, emperors, and celebrities.

But the conspiracy succeeded at a price. For the collaboration between man and automaton was plagued by misfortune, death, and insanity. Several of the directors died or went crazy or developed catastrophic claustrophobia. The one woman (never named) who operated the automaton was rumored to have become barren, for reasons that the most respected Parisian surgeons were ghoulishly eager to speculate about. And the machine’s most famous director, Jacques Mouret, was completely paralyzed: struck down, as the broadsheets of the day put it, by the Curse of the Turk.

It was Mouret who finally unmasked the automaton in a tell-all newspaper interview given from his deathbed in exchange for the fleeting solace of a few bottles of high-proof liquor. By then, however, the Chessplayer, Maelzel, and Maelzel’s debts had already lit out for America.

The Curse of the Turk finally caught up with Maelzel in Cuba. During an exhibition game in Havana he contracted yellow fever. He died on the ship home to Philadelphia, and the Chessplayer was purchased at auction by a glorified curiosity shop called Peale’s Museum, or in some historical sources, the Chinese Museum. Whatever it was called, the place was no match for the Curse of the Turk. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1878, giving rise to the widespread assumption that “Maelzel’s dead chessplayer” (as it was by then called) was permanently, and not merely circumstantially, deceased.

Until Cohen rediscovered it—and rescued it and put it in the great ballroom of the house from rue du Poids de l’Huile so that Li’s subconscious could hang all her fears on its broad shoulders.

The Turk was playing the Qf3 Nc6 gambit at the moment: the same strategy that had checkmated Napoleon in just twenty-four moves during the bloody campaign of Wagram. It slid the pieces across the board with a long stick, its mechanical arm whirring and chuttering as the ancient gears grabbed and slipped and slid against each other. But Cohen noticed this with only a tiny fraction of his currently integrated consciousnesses. Because mostly what they were noticing was that Li was utterly, shatteringly terrified.

And as he looked up at the massive cloaked torso of the Turk, at the turbaned head, he understood why. He knew the face around those dead glass eyes. It was his face…Roland’s face…

“Cohen!”

Li was staring down at him, her lips pursed, the smooth curve of her forehead furrowed with a fine network of curving parallel wrinkles.

“You okay?” she asked in a light, carefully neutral tone that told him just how bad he must look.

He mustered a smile, feeling Roland’s skin itch in one of those neural feedback loops that he’d long ago given up trying to track through the vast labyrinth of patched and rewritten and expanded source code that ran his shunt subroutines.

“You gave me a nightmare,” he told Li.

“I don’t have nightmares.”

“Maybe you have them and just don’t remember them.”

“What’s the difference?”

A shofar blew somewhere nearby, some lone musician practicing for Rosh Hashanah.

“What is that?” Li asked.

“The shofar. A ceremonial ram’s horn. They blow it during the Yamim Noraim, the High Holy Days. This is when every Jew is supposed to review his actions over the past year—they call it the Arithmetic of the Soul in Hebrew—and do penance. They blow the shofar to symbolize that the Book of Life will stand open for ten days and even the worst sinner can be entered into it as long as he repents before nightfall on Yom Kippur.”

“I thought only Catholics did guilt.”

He snorted. “And where do you think you people got it from?”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.” He didn’t have to ask what part of yesterday she was sorry about; the memory of the nasty fight they’d had on the way home from Didi’s house was still fresh enough to have both of them on edge. “I shouldn’t have gotten personal. It’s just that I think you’re letting Didi use you.”

“Last time I checked, letting the Mossad use you was the dictionary definition of a sayan.”

“But you let him manipulate you.”

“Everyone lets people manipulate them, Catherine. It’s called having friends.”

“You know what I’m talking about.” She dropped her voice, the way she always did when she couldn’t avoid this particular topic. “The Game. Didi’s not an inscribed player, is he?”

“No! You think I wouldn’t have told you? I can’t believe you think I wouldn’t tell you that!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down. I just…but Gavi is, right?”

“What’s your point?”

“That you’re not thinking straight.”

“You’ve been talking to router/decomposer too much.”

“Well, sometimes he’s easier to talk to than you are.”

“That’s because he agrees with you.”

“No. He’s just less…conflicted.”

“That’s because there’s less of him to be conflicted.”

“You don’t have to be condescending,” she said sharply.

“I’m not being condescending!” Cohen stopped and forced himself to continue in a more reasonable tone of voice. “That’s as ridiculous as you being condescending to your big toe.”

“Last time I checked my big toe didn’t have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.”

“Excuse me, Catherine, but what are we actually fighting about?”

Li crossed her arms, set her jaw, and stared stoically into the middle distance. He’d clearly struck a nerve. But why? And what did it have to do with “condescending” to router/decomposer?

“Do you think,” Cohen said, “that maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talk about sometime?”

She gave him a wry look. “Yes, I do think maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talk about sometime. But if we talk about it now, it’s only going to go one way. And I don’t want that. Necessarily.”

Relief trickled through Cohen like snowmelt, freeing systems that had been frozen in a holding pattern of anxiety. “And just when do you think you’ll be ready to talk about it?” he asked.

She sat up and looked intently at him. “That’s not like you. You’re usually the first one to put off till tomorrow what we could fight about today.”

But despite all his good intentions, Cohen couldn’t keep from pushing.

“The thing is,” he said, “I’m rapidly approaching achievement of the convergence criteria indicating termination of this particular iterative process.”

Every other person he’d ever been married to (except the mathematician, whose failings had gone far beyond the merely syntactical) would have asked what the hell he meant by that. Li just looked at him, her eyes level and calm, and said, “Are you asking for a divorce?”

“No! God!” He sat up, the room spinning around him. “You’re so far beyond paranoid there isn’t even a word for it! I’m just asking you to talk to me about whatever it is you’re so”—he backed carefully away from the inflammatory word afraid—“whatever it is that’s making you shut me out.”

“What if it’s something you can’t change?”

“I can change a lot, Catherine.”

The shadow of an unpleasant thought drifted across her face. He couldn’t hear it. She’d shut him out completely. And though he could have broken the door down instead of standing outside knocking on it, he knew that there was no future for the two of them on the far side of such an act of violence.

He waited. She looked at him, knowing that he was waiting. Letting him wait.

“You can’t change me,” she said.

Cohen stood under the shower, luxuriating in the feel of hot water running over Roland’s skin. Water smelled different on Earth. Better. And like so many of life’s small physical pleasures, it couldn’t be simulated no matter how state-of-the-art your streamspace connection was.

On the other hand, the water also turned off sooner on Earth than it did Ring-side. Even the outrageous room rates at the King David only bought you an extra thirty seconds or so on the clock. And, Israel being Israel, a call to the front desk was more likely to get you a lecture about water conservation than a longer shower.

Cohen sighed. This was starting out to be a bad day. And he, or Roland more likely, had a headache. And he really didn’t need any Israeli attitude in his morning.

He snuck a feeler into the hotel’s ambient AI systems and confirmed the first impressions gleaned through casual contacts over the last week. It was a primitive decision-tree-based expert system not even worthy of being called intelligent in any real sense. He hacked it, made his way to the shower defaults, changed the four-minute cutoff to a ten-minute cutoff. And since he felt like being a nice guy (and didn’t relish having to explain himself when the hack was discovered), he changed the allowances for all of his 212 fellow guests as well as himself.

Not that he actually enjoyed the shower, of course. Because instead of luxuriating in the hot water pummeling Roland’s back, he stood there, wreathed in steam, and brooded about the Game.

Hyacinthe had programmed the first rudimentary version of the Game into Cohen’s original Beowulf clusters almost four centuries ago. The Game had started out as a combination of chess, multiagent roleplay, and Turing-style conversational interaction. During the DARPA years it had been briefly and unpleasantly derailed for military research. After Cohen’s Great Escape (but that was another story) he’d assumed full control over his architecture, and the Game had begun to evolve into something too complex, fluid, and internally contradictory to properly be called a game at all.

There were by then some several thousand subsets of gameplay, platformed on a shifting tide of neural networks that might arguably be sentient itself—though not in any way that organics would recognize. Cohen navigated between the various versions of the Game, thanks to a densely swarming vast heterarchy of semiautonomous agents who constantly optimized play based on prior player hits, nonhit interactions, and inscribed player use histories. The whole system had become far too complex for any organic to grasp more than a tiny corner of it. But the basic mission primitives that motivated Cohen remained essentially the same ones that Hyacinthe had written so many centuries ago:

1. Initiate play based on the most current version of the Game;

2. Track player hits, defined as:

i. positive emotive cues as perceived by the pattern recognition ES;

ii. increased playtime and intensity of play

iii. explicit player feedback

3. Expand and evolve the Game to maximize player hits.

4. Assign highest priority to maximizing hits from inscribed players.

That was the curse that Hyacinthe had coded into his core architecture. Cohen needed the Game. He needed to be for someone. And he was set apart from every other surviving Emergent AI in that the someone needed to be more or less human.

Ergo Gavi, whom he could not stop loving though he might be a traitor.

Ergo Li, who was sanguinary, secretive, perfectly capable of having done all the horrible things they’d accused her of, and pigheadedly bent on refusing everything Cohen could give her.

All that Cohen was—once you stripped away the extension languages and interface programs and the three-century accumulation of upgrades and patches and extensions—was his accumulated memories of interactions with the Game’s inscribed players. And if Li left, it would mean a reweighting of mission primitives so drastic that Cohen had no real way to predict what new realignment of identities would come out the other side. She had become so deeply ingrained in his networks that when she yanked herself out it would call the bluff on the smoke-and-mirrors cognitive architecture that passed for Cohen’s identity.

And Li knew all about running on smoke and mirrors.

Born in the Trusteeships, she’d been destined for a short, poisonous life as a Bose-Einstein miner. Instead, she’d bought a dead girl’s face and geneset from a chop-shop geneticist, lied her way into the Peacekeepers, and hacked her own memory in order to pass as human. And when it was time to tell all to the psychtechs she’d spun a fake childhood to go with the fake passport and the fake geneset.

She had walked into the maze and cut the thread. All she knew about the childhood she remembered was that it had never happened, at least not to her. The minute she went into the psychtechs’ tanks there was no “before” to go back to. All the fears and joys and tics and habits that connected a whole person to their past led back to enlistment day and stopped. She would never know herself in the way that most humans, floating in the vibrant web of a lifetime’s memories, knew themselves. She would never know what she’d done on Gilead, any more than she’d ever know the child she’d been before she went to Gilead.

That was what had first drawn them together: the woman who had no memories and the machine who was nothing but memories. But Cohen was slowly coming to the heartsick realization that it might also be what drove them apart.

Or at least that was how it seemed to Cohen. But he could be fooling himself. He’d certainly done that before…as router/decomposer was always all too ready to remind him.

By the time he was dressed and presentable, Li had already demolished breakfast for two and most of the morning’s paper.

“How’s your Deep Blue-Kasparov sim going?” she asked from behind the sports page as he sat down across from her.

“Oh, I finished with that ages ago. The whole match was a hoax, it turns out.”

The sports page dropped. “Really?”

That was Li for you: always seduced by the faintest whiff of crime. Could you find a more perfect example of the old truism about cops and robbers being two sides of the same coin? Or, in her case, soldiers and mercenaries.

“Really,” Cohen assured her, doing his best to sound smug. “I’m going to write an article about it for Physical Review Letters.”

“And how do you figure they pulled off the fake?”

“Easy. There was a little man inside Garry Kasparov.”

She groaned and went back to her paper.

Cohen poured himself a glass of what passed for orange juice these days and hunted for the marmalade. “Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes it was.”

Cohen shook out his napkin (Li’s napkin still lay folded on the table, naturally; why use a napkin when you have a sleeve?) and began investigating the viennoiserie situation.

Grim. Decidedly grim.

“I ought to look up some of my old friends in the Legion while we’re here,” he said. “Maybe they know where to get a decent croissant in this town.”

“What do you want a croissant for? You’re in the Middle East. And you know that thing people are always saying about when in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Cohen had been staring dubiously at the so-called toast, and he expanded his circle of doubt to encompass Li. “The people who are always saying that aren’t French,” he told her. “And if they are, then I can assure you they’re not talking about breakfast.”

Outside, the sunlight flickered across the hoods of passing cars, throwing bright spears of shadow into the room through the still-half-shuttered windows. Cohen froze, distracted by the rhythmic play of light and shadow. What was it that it reminded him of…

By the time he realized Roland was going into a seizure, it was too late to pull him out of it.

“Wake up, Cohen. Come on, wake up. Cohen? Roland!”

Li had him rolled over on his side (Roland’s side, a skittish subsystem nattered at him), and she was hanging on to his hands with a strength that reminded him abruptly of the difference between her ceramsteel-reinforced, half-machine reflexes and Roland’s fragile flesh and bone.

“I forgot my drasticodracostochastic control measures,” he muttered woozily.

“It’s not funny!” Li snapped.

Nor was it. As far as Cohen could tell the packet compression needed to push data downstream from his Ring-based systems to Earth had interfered with the shunt software’s ability to match his data pulses to Roland’s neural firing rhythms. Essentially he’d given him a spintronic version of photoinduced epilepsy. And that was bad. Bad for Roland’s little beating heart. Bad for his finely honed brain too if Cohen couldn’t downclock reliably.

“I’m putting you to bed,” Li said. “No arguments. No questions. And then you’re going to check out and give Roland a proper rest. Twenty-four hours off so he can sleep and have a chance to clear the circuitry.”

“And leave you alone down here?”

“I think I can hold down the hotel room on my own.”

Cohen remembered the sight of Ash’s head bent over Li’s, and felt a sudden rush of jealousy. He was careful to hide it from Li—and equally careful to hide his discreet inquiries about Ash. He buried both of those incriminating processes with a massive “nice” command and pipelined their outputs into a low-traffic subdirectory with instructions to his routing meta-agent to move the files automatically should Li ever happen to access the subdirectory.

Instead of executing the command, router/decomposer sent an un-characteristically snide message floating across the lowest layer of Cohen’s internal traffic:

‹You’ve got me shuttling things around so fast I don’t even know where to find them. And anyway, how do you expect her to trust you when you’re playing a thousand and one moving files with her?›

‹Did I ask for your advice on my sex life?› Cohen snapped.

He regretted it immediately. Patience might be running thin, but squashing intrasystem feedback was a textbook-perfect recipe for losing good associates.

He sent an apology rippling through the local system. The routing meta sent back something suspiciously like a shrug.

Li blinked and shook her head slightly.

She’d caught on to the edge of something there. But it wasn’t the routing meta. So what, then? He catenated the several hundred mostly routine processes he happened to be running at the moment, but saw nothing when he passed them in review that could explain that little shiver he’d felt in her.

Perhaps it really had been nothing; sometimes all it took was an accidental glimpse at the traffic on the other side of the firewall he kept between her and his core systems.

“You scare me sometimes,” she said.

It was a lie. A lie by omission, anyway. He’d sensed the first wordless thought that those words replaced: You scare me. No sometimes about it.

Cohen hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give Roland a chance to catch up on his beauty rest. You know where to find me if you need me.”

He paused to set the various trap commands that would alert him if the hotel’s formidable security systems were breached. He thought about setting a hash log on Li’s own internals to see if she went anywhere while he was gone, but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of her catching him at it. Then he released his various selves into streamspace, abandoning Roland’s exhausted body to the sleep it so desperately needed.