Consciousness is a complex thing.

I've seen ideograms of it, neural-node schematics summoned by AIs with minds like bank vaults, optimized to handle digitized humans. I've watched them evolve and permutate under the caress of psychosurgery as the AI reroutes vital processes, encysts and removes traumatizing memories. Something very similar to that process was happening in Aiura's sleeve now, with the cortical stack lying dormant and disabled by the invading algorithm. I might need her intact later. She wasn't dead, merely contained. The initial wireless conversation we'd shared had been the initial volley; once the vanguard programs had had time to load I'd sent over the kernel during our conversation. The virus had compromised her at admirable speed.

I sent over more tightbeam wireless instructions while I waited for the program to run its course. Aiura's sleeve set the aircar's destination for her base of operations, and within about an hour we were gliding down onto a landing pad on one of the taller buildings. It was typical post-Unsettlement architecture, all gilded blue steel spikes and arches that owed Gothic architecture a patent or two. Aiura, present yet absent, led me down through DNA-scan locks and elegantly hidden yet potent security. Into a command/control hub at the heart of her headquarters.

It's strange, the way some people fetishize the physical connection. There's no reason at all why Aiura couldn't have just used a neural jack, and avoided an entire room filled with holo-screens. There might be some reason for it; despite all of our work to the contrary our bodies still aren't quite augmented to handle the alien rigors most technology presents. Even the artificial white light generated by the most basic computer screen was known to mess with the endocrine system within decades of its invention, let alone the delusional warpings of reality that can occur when you plug an information network the size of a planet right into the visual cortex. Maybe it had been Aiura's paranoia that had kept her from installing a wireless antenna in her brain that was even marginally more advanced than the bare-bones model which was enough to do her job. Maybe she'd just appreciated the old-school aesthetic. Maybe some of these were costly antiques.

Not that it mattered. It was annoying, though: Envoy conditioning can take in neural jack information with lightning speed. This would take somewhat longer. I had Aiura's sleeve key in the passcodes and began to sift through the data. Quallgrist plague statistics leapt up at me. In parallel, cross-correlations between orbital strike locations over the last year and their associations to Quallgrist plague loci. The datagram ballooned to include yakuza holdings, their southern haiduci competitors-same gangster shit, just Eurasian origins instead of Japanese-then movements of any of the DeCom personnel Aiura's people had managed to trace. Through it all, the movements of known Quellist sympathizers, or at least the few Aiura had managed to find at all, were represented as red lines as thin as hairline fractures. Most were peripheral or uninvolved. A few streaked right through the centre of the entire holographic artifice. 'Sylvie Oshima' was one. 'Takeshi Kovacs' was another.

Centuries ago, only about a hundred years after this planet was colonized, Harlan's World had a bit of a revolt. Typical anti-regime shit: not enough jobs, not enough rights unless you had the money to buy them, enshrined anecdotes of police brutality. It's a consistent pattern going back centuries now. Even without Envoy involvement, the correct responses are so well-known by the oligarchs at this point that keeping the place from turning into a cauldron of violently fractious failed statehood forms a careful but straightforward dance.

At least until Nadia Makita, known to her fans as Quellcrist Falconer, got involved. She wrote up a whole new philosophy about grassroots terrorism, democratic/socialist governance, and anarchism before putting her ideas into practice. The resulting philosophy was dangerous enough that her major works are still barred from publication on Harlan's World and on plenty of planets beyond. It sent Harlan's World into a tailspin. Not one but two wars, the last of which lasted over ten years. It was known, with typical deadpan irony, as the Unsettlement. Inevitably, Konrad Harlan was back in control by the end of it with Nadia Makita KIA, her helicopter shot down by the orbitals as it tried to escape no less. But Quellism, the philosphy and manifesto that she'd penned, survived along with a number of renegade Quellists.

Occasionally this would become a problem. But no one had really taken the Quellists seriously for a generation or so.

"Been a busy couple months," said Aiura's sleeve.

I almost jumped, Envoy control or no. I jerked my head sideways. Aiura's body had folded itself neatly onto one of the chairs and to all appearances was still unconscious. Her eyes were shut, her limbs relaxed. But she spoke.

"Jack, that you?"

"No Jack here." Words that were almost whispers. "Not yet. No conscious control really. More like. Talking in sleep."

Right. Among several useful extras in the viral code was an unconscious subroutine with memory access, barely worth calling AI and more of a glorified dialog tree than anything more. "Will answering questions affect the upload rate?"

"Yes. Have to freeze... process to do so. Every minute talking a minute wasted." Her affect was idiosyncratic to say the least. The words seemed to move between Stripjap, archaic Japanese, and even the occasional Russian.

Oh well. "What the hell happened here?"

Pause while the machinery parsed the data.

"Several months ago a DeCom mercenary named Sylvie Oshima came to yakuza interests with a deal. She appeared to be an ex-Quellist who had participated in the second Unsettlement war. She offered to sell the yakuza a virus, a deterrent weapon originally developed by the Quellists, which could sexually transmit a retrovirus which modified the host's genes. There was a 1% chance on average that the host sleeve would then exhibit a pathological, violent hatred towards anyone carrying Konrad Harlan's genes."

I snorted. "Didn't just transmit sexually, did it."

"No," said the sleeve, absent of humor. "The virus was airborne within weeks. The yakuza had planned to use the virus as a negotiation trump card with the Harlanite oligarchy, and hopefully gain a modicum of political control which they have historically lacked. Once they realized the depth of their error, Aiura was contracted by Konrad Harlan and the yakuza to find Sylvie Oshima and resolve the issue."

"How far'd she get?"

"Sylvie Oshima captured successfully. AI analysis of the constituent consciousness found both Sylvie Oshima and a persona with memories and consciousness structure within 1 standard deviation of Nadia Makita's last recorded profile. Makita had been the one to approach the yakuza, with Sylvie in a state of unconsciousness throughout. Before interrogations were complete, a Quellist group successfully mounted a rescue and Oshima was moved beyond Aiura's reach."

"What Quellists?"

"Jack Brasil. Sierra Tres. Virginia Viduara. Mari Ado. Soseki Koi. Takeshi Kovacs. Several additional unidentified members, all KIA." The machine muttered the names in monotone. My eyes traced the hairline filaments that followed them.

"Which one's the ex-Envoy?"

"Takeshi Kovacs and Virginia Viduara are both ex-Envoys."

"Any intel on where they were going last?"

"Last ID was on a rented airboat, used as an entry/escape vehicle. Would you like to review the telemetry?"

"Save it for now. Who were Oshima's yakuza contacts?"

"Primary contact Yukio Hirayasu, now deceased."

"Who's Yukio's sempai?"

Brief moment of silence while the nanoware searched through Aiura's mind.

"Yukio's sempai is Tanaseda Sadaato."

"Show me everything you have on him."

I watched another curling pattern grow into the datacoil's hologram. It began as a series of separate alienated points, and then the correlations and second-degree-interactions extrapolated and flowed between. The sempai's contacts and conversations, both real and through virtual constructs, his financial holdings, his occasional gambling bouts, the slow build of stresses and opportunities that contributed to his motivations and decisions, all patterned together into mosiac. It looked like the root system of a weed.

I had to pause and admire the map Aiura had made out of the last several months of Harlan's World's history. Human behavior become endlessly-branching fractal growths across a topographical hybrid of geography and virtual dataspace. Agency, free will, and the conscious rationalizations of a collective million human beings abstracted away by data and replaced with the rich complexity of uncounted interacting systems. Easier to see and comprehend the patterns and forces that molded them from this vantage point.

Easier to manipulate too.

Something stirred in me at that thought. It was hard to pin down. It almost felt like the beginnings of anger, and a sweeping sensation of vertigo came with it.

When they ask me how I died

I shook it off. Turned back to 'Aiura'.

"How long until the upload process is finished?" I asked.

"Three hours," said the machinery.

Any meeting that ended in less than an hour or so with Aiura's guest stalking furiously out of the complex and leaving in a nice aircar would leave any guards, AI or human, unlikely to disturb Aiura for a little while without good cause. And conversations shorter than a few minutes were easily within the reach of a sleepwalker. The viral AI could handle this until the new me woke up. And something in me needed to move. Results weren't enough. There was a need in me to have a tactile sense of holding on to the problem, of choking the life out of it.

"So where's this sempai, then?"