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did have a talent for evoking the irrational in people.”
    As soon as she spoke, she wished she hadn’t. Router/​Decomposer’s face clouded over, and she knew he must be thinking about his own disassociation with Cohen—you might as well call it a divorce though most AIs would scoff at the word. Cohen had treated Router/​Decomposer badly before he left. Li had stayed out of the fight, figuring it was one of those internecine AI spats that no mere human could even begin to comprehend. But she’d always wondered how the two of them really felt about each other underneath the surface politeness that AIs were so good at using to paper over harsh memories and bad feelings.
    AI emotions were slippery things. You could never tell from the outside whether they were real feelings or just interface protocols designedto bridge the chasm between artificial and organic consciousness. And sometimes they were both—in ways that even the AIs themselves couldn’t untangle. But the guilt and anger playing across Router/​Decomposer’s face right now were real—and they mirrored her own feelings far too closely for comfort.
    “Listen,” he told her, sounding far more human than she’d ever known him to sound. “Just promise me you won’t go off half-cocked. Don’t commit to anything in anger. You’ve got this ghost arriving in the mail—”
    Li shuddered. “Don’t call it that.”
    “All right. Fragment, then. Wait until the fragment arrives. He must have sent it to you on purpose. We’ll know a lot more once we hear what it has to tell us. And in the meantime … 
think
.”
    “About what?”
    “About whether you should actually do anything at all. If he really did kill himself—”
    Li made a sharp gesture of denial, but he overrode it.
    “If he really did kill himself there’s nothing you can do that will change that. And if Nguyen killed him … well, she can kill you just as easily, can’t she?”
    Li shrugged.
    “Are you saying I’m wrong?”
    “No. You’re right. On both counts.”
    “So why don’t you drop it? He’s dead. Just as dead as if he were human. He’s not coming back. Nothing you do, nothing you discover,
nothing
is going to bring him back.”
    “But there was a yard sale—” She caught herself and stopped.
    “Ah, so now we come to it.”
    “Don’t make it sound like that. I’m not that naïve. I know better than to believe in fairy tales. But haven’t some AIs been rebooted after …?”
    “Not in any form that a human would recognize as the same person.”
    Li wiggled the ends of her spork back and forth until it snapped in two. “Not in any form that a human would recognize,” she repeated bitterly.“Do you
really
think I know him that little? Do you really think I’ve lived among AIs for two decades without getting past
that
?”
    “I didn’t mean to say that.” The strange attractor was spooling faster and faster, a writhing halo of light and shadow twisting in upon itself. “But Catherine. You can collect all the ghosts—sorry, fragments—that you want, and run free-range simulations on them from here to eternity, and you would be astronomically unlikely to ever produce anything that even I recognize as
Cohen
.”
    “I know that,” Li said, ignoring the part of her that didn’t know that, that insisted on not knowing it, that stubbornly clung to hope because it couldn’t face the alternative.
    “So why are you doing this?”
    “Because I owe him.”
    “Because you owe him.” Router/​Decomposer’s flat, neutral voice was more challenging than the most pointed question.
    “I owe him everything.” She felt her face twisting, and she knew even before she spoke that the next words were going to come out all wrong—an accusation, when she was the last person who had a right to accuse anyone of anything. “And so do you.”
    He still wasn’t happy about the plan, but little by little he started helping her think it through instead of trying to talk