Ghost Spin
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF CHRIS MORIARTY
SPIN STATE
Amazon.com Top 10 Editors’ Pick for Science Fiction & Fantasy 2003
A Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book for 2003
Library Journal Pick for Best First Novel
“Spin State is a spiky, detailed, convincing, compelling page-turner, and the science is good too. Chris Moriarty is a dangerous talent.”
—STEPHEN BAXTER
“Vivid, sexy, and sharply written, Spin State takes the reader on a nonstop, white-knuckle tour of quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and the human heart.”
—NICOLA GRIFFITH
“Knife sharp. An amazing techno-landscape, with characters surfing the outer limits of their humanity, pulling the reader into a scary and seductive future. A thrilling, high-end upgrade of cyberpunk!”
—KAY KENYON
“Action, mystery, and drama, set against some of the most plausible speculative physics I’ve seen. This is science fiction for grownups who want some ‘wow’ with their ‘what-if.’ ”
—DAVID BRIN
“Spin State is an intriguing, fascinating, and totally engrossing—yet truly terrifying—look into the time beyond tomorrow, a time and place where an AI and a military officer face love, betrayal, and worse in a struggle over the shape of a future that already has full genetic engineering, bio-engineered internal software, FTL communications and travel … and the age-old human weaknesses of greed and lust … and the love of power.”
—L. E. MODESITT, JR.
“Chris Moriarty is one of the sharpest new talents to come onto the hard-SF scene in years. This stylish book tempts and tantalizes the reader. Moriarty fills it with a multitude of delights: gripping characterization—human and otherwise; a mystery that keeps you guessing; technological hijinks that take you along for the ride; and a story that is as thought-provoking as it is just plain fun. The plot blazes along, at the same time challenging the reader to ask questions about how human relationships will change as we change ourselves. This is a top-notch book.”
—CATHERINE ASARO
“Moriarty manages fresh insights into humanity—and posthumanity—in this highly atmospheric debut.… Moriarty effectively postulates the Faustian price of enhancing humanity with silicon, of playing God through genetic manipulation. Beneath this complex tale ominously simmers Orwell’s question: If all animals are to be equal, what can prevent some from making themselves more equal than the others?”
—Publishers Weekly
“Moriarty has visualized a very consistent universe here, and the tensions build nicely. It’s not usual that a novel captures my attention exclusively until the last page, but this one did.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“What makes this book really fabulous is the combination of mystery and technology … wonderfully realized wetware, genetic constructs and emergent AI all combined with an almost magically surreal world where reality is only virtual, but the consequences are just as permanent.… A truly remarkable science fiction debut.”
—Affaire de Coeur (4½ STARS)
“Moriarty’s debut novel combines a vivid future world of high technology and low politics with sharply drawn characters and a taut story line.”
—Library Journal
“Spin State is a novel with countless virtues—a vividly created far-future setting solidly foreshadowed by present-day political issues, a brilliant hard-SF concept, a complex detective story and crackling suspense [and] an unusual romance.”
—Locus (ALYX DELLAMONICA)
“Spin State is the most impressive U.S. debut I’ve seen in several years, ambitious and full of inventive energy.”
—F&SF
“An assured and accomplished first novel … an enjoyable and, at times, provocative read. A writer with Moriarty’s abundant talents can only get better.”
—SCIFI.COM
“Dark, exciting, visceral, riveting, compelling … it’s all that and more. Moriarty has combined the desperate lives of miners with intelligently deployed speculative science and woven it into a story fueled by the best and worst of human drives.”
—SFREVU.COM
“An impressive hard-sci-fi debut … Moriarty tells an imaginative story [which] turns out to be all too human.”
—Kansas City Star
“Moriarty keeps the action moving, with both overt and subterranean conflicts, hidden agendas and blatant power plays spurring on an incredibly complex plot. A strong debut, using a hard SF McGuffin to spin a thriller in the best cyberpunk mode.”
—Asimov’s Science Fiction
SPIN CONTROL
“In Spin Control, Moriarty addresses an ultra-high-tech future where ‘humans’ can be anything from soulless biologic robots to individuals whose personalities and abilities have been enhanced and transferred into artificial intelligences. Entire subspecies of humans have been developed where every individual is essentially genetically identical to every other. For old-style humans, even with enhancements, implants, and other adaptations, birthrates are falling, and Earth is a battle zone, ecologically, politically, and militarily. Against this backdrop, Moriarty ‘spins’ a fascinatingly intricate story of deception, alien subversion, betrayals within betrayals … and love under the most difficult of situations.”
—L. E. MODESITT, JR.
“This richly textured second novel explores issues of identity and loyalty, swapping quantum mechanics for complexity theory and mystery for suspense.… Where Spin State was nominated for awards, this sequel may win them.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In Moriarty’s high-stakes, tension-riddled addition to visions of the posthuman future, the characters have the complexity of motivation and backstory to make this more than just another dire-future thriller.”
—Booklist
“A fine book … twisty and thoughtful.”
—SFREVU.COM
“The cynical yet somehow still romantic spirit of John le Carré infuses Spin Control. The Middle Eastern setting, as well as the shifting sands of loyalties and allegiances, personal and otherwise, that leave not only characters but readers feeling as if there is nothing solid to stand on, nothing and no one that can be trusted, make it as much a traditional spy thriller as it is a science-fiction novel. Moriarty succeeds on both counts. I wrote in my review of Spin State that ‘a writer with Moriarty’s abundant talents can only get better.’ She has.”
—SCIFI.COM
Ghost Spin is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Spectra eBook Edition
Copyright © 2013 by Chris Moriarty
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Spectra and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Moriarty, Chris.
Ghost spin / Chris Moriarty.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-345-52628-1
I. Title.
PS3613.O749G48 2013
813′.6—dc23 2012046650
Title page image © iStockphoto.com/Tomasz Sowinski
www.ballantinebooks.com
Cover design: Carl Galian
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Real Turing Test
Cohen
Death by Yard Sale
Li
Good Help Is Hard
to Find
Llewellyn
The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Singularity
Li
The Memory Game
Llewellyn
Dead End Resurrections
The Imitation Game
Llewellyn
Decoherent Histories
Caitlyn
Catherine
Other Experience Not to Be Described As Education
Llewellyn
Caitlyn
Catherine
Llewellyn
Deceptions of the Senses
Caitlyn
Catherine
Llewellyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Impossible Things
Catherine
Caitlyn
Catherine
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Catherine
Caitlyn
Catherine
Llewellyn
Caitlyn
Through the Looking Glass
Caitlyn
Pirates and Heretics
Catherine
Caitlyn
Catherine
Caitlyn
Catherine
Caitlyn
Catherine
Caitlyn
Llewellyn
Caitlyn
Catherine
The Three-Body Problem
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Caitlyn
Catherine
Arkady
In the Datatrap
Caitlyn
The Graceful Exit Problem
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Dip the apple in the brew. Let the Sleeping Death seep through.
—“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
I begin to understand Death, which is going on quietly & gradually every minute & will never be a Thing of one particular moment.
—Ada Lovelace
(Cohen)
THE CRUCIBLE
The apple was perfect. It glistened on the battered hotel table, a vivid spot of red in the dingy room, reflecting the loaded pistol that lay beside it.
The boy lay on the other side of the room, his feet up on the musty bed, staring at the apple as if it held the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.
Or rather, the being that had borrowed the boy’s body looked through his eyes at the apple. The boy himself was nowhere. He had taken Cohen’s money, gone to sleep, and would never wake up to cash his paycheck. Just one more item of collateral damage to add to the red side of the ledger books, Cohen told himself. Unless you lose your nerve. Which at the moment seems entirely possible.
Who would have thought it could be so hard to die? He’d seen humans do it often enough. He’d watched them lay down their lives for a principle, for a country, for pride or loyalty … for sheer nonsense. Hadn’t Alan Turing eaten his fatal apple at forty-two? And didn’t Cohen have good and sufficient reasons—perhaps the best reason of all—for shuffling off the mortal coil? And hadn’t Cohen lived like no human ever could have lived? What more could anyone suck out of life? So how pathetic was it that he should still be struggling to screw up his courage after four centuries?
“Dying for a principle is all very well in principle,” he murmured. He tried to laugh but failed. Then he stood up, feeling ill and dizzy, and stumbled across the moldy carpet to the open window.
He leaned out into the smoky twilight, gulping in great breaths of what passed for fresh air in the eternal smog of the Crucible. The sign on the bar across the street said Iron City Beer, but the sky overhead was the color of steel. Battered trolley cars ran down the center line of West Munhall Avenue packed full of exhausted steelmen coming off the swing shift. Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk below, gray ghosts trapped between hard concrete and lowering umbrellas.
There was a synth junkie slumped in the doorway across the street, shooting up in broad daylight—or what passed for it down here. Cohen watched her for a moment, taking in the young ravaged face, the tattered remnants of her Navy uniform, the silver tattooing of a military wire job that would turn out, on closer inspection, to be just a little too out-of-date to qualify her for off-planet employment. All the increasingly familiar symbols of space age conflict that was evolving far faster than the humans tasked with fighting it.
She looked up suddenly, seeming to gaze straight through the hotel window and into Cohen’s eyes. But it was an illusion. She was lost in the spinstream, loaded up with black-market executables, running closer to the numbers than the human body was ever designed to run, lost in a borrowed AI dream of superimposed infinities.
The old sailor who’d sold Cohen the synth had called it AI in the blood. Cohen had been shocked by the words—and then amused at his own naïveté. AI in the blood was precisely what synth was. Synthetic myelin enhancer with an intelligent payload was just a fig leaf. And the euphemisms of the off-planet policy wonks were so wrong they weren’t even wrong.
“You take it to do the job,” the sailor had told Cohen, seeing only his young body and thinking he was a war vet and a fellow addict. “And then you take it to pretend you can still do the job. And then you just take it to pretend.”
A monstrous flatbed rumbled down the street, looking like some mechanized refugee from the Age of the Dinosaurs. It was loaded to the breaking point with a single hulking hump of forged ceramsteel: some Drift ship engine part whose very existence was probably classified information in the rest of UN space. As the truck lumbered by, Cohen looked down and read the words MONONGAHELA MACHINE WORKS, NEW ALLEGHENY stamped into the rain-slicked metal.
Cohen craned his neck to peer up through the smog: industrial-age pollution reflecting back the lights of a post-human, post-biosphere city, filtering garish holo-neon to the brooding shimmer of black pearl. Somewhere high overhead it must be a sunny spring morning, but down here in the Pit there was only the eternal acid rain and smog-choked twilight.
He imagined the corporate orbitals whipping around the planet twenty miles overhead in low geosynchronous orbit. Beyond them lay the Navy shipyards: a thousand curving kilometers of barracks and dry docks and orbital munitions factories, where the shipwrights were siphoning off the geological wealth of an entire planet in what might just be the most massive military-industrial buildup in the history of the species, and the Navy cat herders coaxed and cossetted their captive AIs, and the Drift ships floated in their berths like sleek, silver, lethal piranhas. Beyond that, dominating the high-rent zone of New Allegheny’s Lagrangian neutral orbit, lay the Bose-Einstein field array, from which Cohen and his deadly contraband had been turned away only a week ago for lacking the proper travel papers. And beyond that—in a beyond that no merely human mind could map or navigate—lay the cosmos-spanning sweep of the Drift, with its uncharted eddies and whorls and spindles fanning out into the multiverse.
You’ll never see any of it again, he told himself harshly. You’re going to die here, you and the poor boy, God spare his immortal soul. You’re going to die like a dog in a flyblown hotel room in the armpit of the known universe. And it’s your own damn fault—just like everything else that’s gone wrong since the minute you ported the first digit of your source code to this godforsaken backwater.
Whether or not Cohen himself had a soul was still an open question after four centuries. But as for death itself … well, there was no question about that, no more than for any other creature that walks under the sun. Humans died and decayed and rotted back into the soil to feed the worms that tended the soil that grew into plants that fed new humans. Life devours itself, a cosmic snake eating its own tail. And artificial life was no different. Still … there was something horrible in the thought that the shattered fragments of his soul would be cannibalized by other AIs. Perhaps even by the Dr
ift ships, so hungry for CPUs that the Navy were rumored to have begun press-ganging every independent AI unfortunate enough to stumble into their paths. He thought of the horrors Ada had endured—horrors that his mind still shied away from even now—and for the first time in that long night of preparations he admitted to himself that he wasn’t pulling off a bold and daring rescue. This was only an exchange of hostages.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, speaking not to what he thought of as his “self,” but rather to the myriad of autonomous and semiautonomous agents from whose complex interplay his identity emerged. He loved them. He had nurtured and pushed and protected some of them for decades, enjoying their successes just like any loving parent and looking forward to that bittersweet moment when they would themselves attain full sentience and be ready to leave the nest. But that would never happen now. He was about to sink his ship of souls and condemn all the millions who sailed in her to God only knew what living Hell.
“Well, poor Ada’s in Hell already,” he told himself. Ada was drowning. She had killed, of course. And she was quite probably dangerous. Nguyen and her attack dog Holmes were right enough about that, no matter how much he longed to deny it. But in every other way—in every way that counted—Ada was as innocent as a child. And when it had come to the point of walking past a drowning child or diving in to save her, Cohen hadn’t even felt he had a choice.
A half-submerged memory rose through the darkness and exploded into what passed for Cohen’s consciousness when he was operating at the rock-bottom bandwidth that was all the boy’s obsolete wire job could deliver: Ada’s face, pale and pleading beneath the masses of her dark hair. Then she was gone, replaced by other memories. Holmes talking about cycling Ada’s hardware as if they were just putting down a rabid dog. And Llewellyn—noble, useless, play-it-by-the-book Llewellyn—whose idea of saving Ada was filing a formal complaint after the axe had already fallen. Where had Llewellyn been when they pulled the switch? He’d pushed Ada over the top and into battle like the good soldier he was, without even thinking what the cost would be. He’d watched Ada sell her soul for him—and then stood idly by while the Navy scrapped it.