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her or to Cohen. She let her surroundings blur around her and focused on her internals. Sure enough there was a news spin crawling across her optic nerve about the UN-Syndicate treaty negotiations. “Today’s hangup seems to be war criminal extradition,” the announcer bubbled in a frothy-perky voice that made it sound like she was talking about a new martini mix. “The Syndicates are insisting that the UN agree to extradite for trial a list of eight convicted—”
    “Are your ears burning yet?” Router/​Decomposer interrupted. “Or does anyone in UN space still not know who
that’s
about?”
    “What? You botted it, too?”
    “What do you expect? If my best friend is going to be shipped off to Gilead for the revenge of the clones, I at least want to know about it in time to throw her a killer going-away party.”
    She had to smile at that. “You know as well as I do that your idea of a killer party is five math geeks and a keg of homebrew that smells like old socks.”
    “It’s the thought that counts, as a colleague of mine recently told his wife after forgetting her wedding anniversary for the third year in a row.”
    “Nice,” Li said, laughing. And it wasn’t just the joke that had put a smile on her face. It was—as Router/​Decomposer had so ably pointed out—the thought. Somehow, in his usual understated way, Router/​Decomposer had insinuated himself into the emotional bedrock of her life. Back when he had actually been Cohen’s Router/​Decomposer, she had taken him for granted—she cringed at admitting it, even to herself—thinking of him as barely more than a sentient piece of hardware. Then he had left, ostensibly to pursue his academic career, but really because of one of Cohen’s rare and terrifying losses of control. Governing the chaotic, shifting internal hierarchies in an Emergent AI demanded unimaginable subtlety and ironclad self-discipline. To be what Cohen was—at once one and many—was to solve the three-body problem a million times a millisecond. Hold things together too looselyand his shifting cloud of subagents and associates would scatter into their own separate orbits. Squeeze too tight and the best and smartest subagents would revolt and abandon him. He had squeezed Router/​Decomposer too tight. Once, and once only. And that had been the end of that.
    After a prickly initial period in which none of them could really figure out how to talk to one another, Router/​Decomposer had become that best and only real friend that she and Cohen had outside of their peculiar relationship. Her friendship with the lesser AI had none of the all-consuming intensity of the full-bandwidth machine-meat meld that was life with Cohen. But it was important to her. More important than she’d quite realized until this moment. He’d told her once, long ago, that he was keeping an eye on her because he was interested in what she was turning into. Like any actually honest thing an AI said to you, it left you wondering what they really thought of humans and whether the fuzzy set that they called friendship actually had anything to do with the human emotion. But somehow, in the mere act of programming a bot to keep track of her legal status, it seemed like Router/​Decomposer had answered that question.
    “Thanks,” she told him, biting back a laugh at the spectacle of someone who didn’t even have a body doing such a phenomenally good job of imitating the uncomfortable shrug and grimace of a supposedly hard-edged rationalist getting caught in the act of being a softie.
    “So what do you know about the suicide?” Router/​Decomposer asked when his GUI had cycled back to normal.
    “The so-called suicide.”
    “As you wish. And I don’t really know anything more than you know. He went out there on a consulting job for ALEF.” Router/​Decomposer’s GUI shivered in disgust. “They
call
it consulting. You might as well call it exterminating.”
    Li must have made some sound of