The extradition team struck just before she crossed into the AI enclave on her way home. They piled out of an unmarked van in full SWAT gear and had her surrounded before she could even wonder why she hadn’t heard them coming.
“Catherine Li?” one of the plainclothes operatives asked, flashing his ID so quickly that even her wired systems had to resort to coarse graining to make any sense of the badge.
“Yes?”
“I have a warrant for your arrest under clause 23(c) of the Maris Accord.”
At first the word Maris meant nothing to her, except that it was the name of one of the simmering Trusteeships she’d policed during her tours of duty in the Syndicate Wars. Then she realized he was talking about the new peace treaty—the one with the extradition clause.
“You guys sure don’t waste time,” she joked. “You must have been knocking on the judge’s door before the pooh-bahs put their pens down.”
She might as well joke after all; there was nothing else she could do. She’d realized that when her internal systems hung, stopped in their tracks by a government security loop. Those security loops were scandalous—such a violation of civil rights that normal cops wouldn’t dream of using them. Even UNSec operatives feared to tread there. Only the International War Crimes Tribunal could wield such a hammer.
“Do you mind telling me where we’re going?” she asked mildly.
“That’s for the politicians to decide. Our job is just to take you into preventive custody for now.”
“Oh. I see. What do they call that? A flight risk?”
He bristled a little. “You have money. And friends. Of course you’re a flight risk.”
“Well, money at least. My friends are getting a little thin on the ground.”
He cleared his throat. “I have to ask you to wear these,” he said, and held up the handcuffs.
Li put out her wrists obediently and stood while he fastened them to her good wrist. He was a little flustered about the prosthetic, but he finally settled for cuffing her one hand to his own wrist and they began walking back to the waiting van like that.
When he broke stride with her she thought at first he’d only stumbled. But then he slumped to the ground—and so did his entire SWAT team, in the same instant, as perfectly coordinated as a well-drilled ballet troupe.
“What the—” Li began.
But then she saw the telltale trickle of blood seeping from his nose and ears. And a moment later her internals unhung themselves and roared back into motion. She was free. But God, at what a price!
“No, Cohen,” she whispered. “Don’t start killing for me. Not you. Not innocent people who are just doing their jobs.”
But it wasn’t Cohen who had just killed for her, even if there was some part of Cohen still ghosting in the empty places of the noosphere. She knew even as she spoke the words that it wasn’t Cohen who had done it. That wasn’t Cohen she felt skirling across the grid. It was something colder and larger and far less human. And why it had saved her was as much a mystery as what it had planned for her.
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality). Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.
—Ada, Countess Lovelace
(Llewellyn)
NEW ALLEGHENY: MONONGAHELA PIT ORBITAL STATION
There were pirates hanging in the docking bays when the Christina made port at Monongahela High.
It was hard to know exactly how they’d died—especially since Llewellyn didn’t want to look too closely at them in front of his bridge crew. Airlocked into hard vac, most likely. And the hemp ropes noosed around their necks were just for show. After all it was a relatively simple matter to hang a man at the bottom of a gravity well, but doing the deed on an orbital station was an entirely different proposition.
Where did you even find the g’s on-station to hold a proper hanging? You’d have had to drag the poor buggers kicking and cursing to the top of the spindle. Or figure out some way to use the rotational gravity of a docked ship’s hab ring.
Or—awful thought—someone had jumped on their shoulders like hangmen used to do to real pirates in the days when the British Crown had displayed their corpses all along the shipping lanes to dissuade young sailors from choosing the merrie life of a rogue and sea dog.
The very thought was grotesque even by Periphery standards. And it bespoke a degree of vindictiveness that didn’t bode well in a port where Llewellyn had always counted on people to welcome easy money and ask no questions.
He wasn’t worried about station control recognizing the Christina. They’d repainted her, changed the cut of her jib, and swapped out transponder boxes with a captured freighter in a dark eddy of the Drift forty days ago. And just now they’d successfully spoofed the station’s NavComp to get their berth assignment. It would take hard and purposeful looking for anyone to see that they weren’t the harmless tramp freighter they claimed to be. But still … something was afoot. Something that had to do with the UN troop buildup everyone was whispering about. Something to do with the rumors that UNSec was going to shut down the FTL relay to everything except military traffic and cut New Allegheny adrift from the rest of the human planets.
Finally Llewellyn saw what it was that troubled him about the bodies. Their necks were too long. Of course, there could be reasons for that. The Drift was full of oddly shaped humanoids. When the FTL rush started prospectors had flocked here from every stretch of the Periphery. Few of them were human, strictly speaking, and Hox cluster expression was one of the easiest tweaks in the genome. Still, this looked like something else. Something that put Llewellyn in mind of moonless nights in the Monongahela Uplands, and his father slipping home across the biopreserve with his long-striding countryman’s walk—one step ahead of the game wardens with a fat brace of tweaked-for-terraforming pheasants hanging from his belt. Later, when Llewellyn was old enough to go poaching with him, he’d learned the quick flick of the wrist that wrung their fragile necks.
A bright, clean, healthy kind of death—learned from a gentle farmer for whom death, even his own death, was just the ebb tide of evolution’s life-giving ocean.
Which was one hell of a long way from what his son had turned into.
Llewellyn glanced at the bodies out of the corner of one eye one last time, just to confirm what he already knew. They’d been hanged first and then airlocked. And you didn’t even have to be a pirate to get a cold feeling in your belly at the sight of it.
He could see the crew sliding sideways looks at him out of the corners of their eyes. And if it’d been anything but a new NavComp he was needing he would have turned around right then and there—and let the quartermaster shove his persnickety procedural objections where the sun didn’t shine. But they’d been caught out on a lonely stretch of the Wall by a UN ship of the line, and barely escaped the encounter with their hull intact. Worse, they’d lost their navigational AI.
The soul of the Christina had died. Not a clean and simple human death, but an AI death: a descent into a fugue state from which nothing could rouse her, and then a slow falling away as her constituent semi-autonomous agents went spinning off into the nonsentient regions of her internal state space.
Okoro and Sital and Llewellyn had all tried to save her. They’d near killed themselves with synth, running deep in the numbers, as close to the machine as skin on skin. They’d tried to stitch up the tattered remnants of the Christina’s psyche, working under constant fear that one of her fragments would turn on them—always a risk with weaponized AI. Still, you had to risk it, even for a small and modest shipboard AI like the Christina’s. She hadn’t run deep, the Christina. She’d sometimes seemed like little more than an idiosyncratic amalgam of quirks and quotes and mathematical puzzles. But still,
she could feel and she could suffer. And there was something so childlike and affecting about even the littlest Emergent that you hated to see them suffer.
And after all, they owed her their lives. Out in the Drift your NavComp saved your life every hour you were under sail. That had been on Llewellyn’s mind through the whole desperate salvage attempt. And he’d seen the same thoughts in Sital’s and Okoro’s eyes. And the same knowledge that they were flogging the poor little Christina on when she was beyond all hope of salvage in order to make up for another ship that they hadn’t tried hard enough to save.
But finally they’d had to give up and shut her down, except for the critical systems that were either air-gapped for human control or slaved to the ship’s lumbering semi-sentients. Llewellyn had stayed awake for four days straight, dead-reckoning them into port. He was still enough of a sailor at heart to take pride in the feat. It would have earned him a medal back when he’d been a real Navy captain. Now it only earned him a new chance at being airlocked—or hanged, if those poor fools on the docking gantry were anything to go by.
He shot another glance around the bridge, gauging the state of people’s nerves. They were tough, he told himself; hard-bitten veterans. They’d handle it. Besides, they all knew as well as he did that there was no way out. They’d lost too much momentum to break away from the station now, even if they could spread their sails without calling down the wrath of Station Control upon their heads. No choice left but to bluff it out.
When they docked, he would dress the most trusted and senior members of the crew in rankers’ fags and let them do enough drinking and whoring on-station to avoid raising unnecessary suspicion. And he’d keep everyone else on board, where they couldn’t run their mouths. And first thing in the morning he’d walk over to the chop shop and lie down on the operating table and let the good doctor put him to sleep.
He’d either wake up dead or with a new NavComp. And sitting here amid the wreckage of his life—twenty-eight years old, a wanted man, and unlikely as all hell to ever see thirty—he couldn’t really muster a lot of enthusiasm for either outcome.
He didn’t feel any more enthusiastic when his alarm went off in the morning. But no one was giving him a choice last time he’d checked, so he told himself he might as well get on with it.
He showered, shaved, and took a hard look in the mirror, trying to assess the face that stared back at him as if it belonged to a stranger. It was a quiet face, albeit a determined one. The face of a career Navy man who ran his ship by the book and kept his head down and his nose to the grindstone. The face of a man who believed in discipline and professionalism and doing the right thing. Not in flamboyant acts of heroism. Hell, not in flamboyant acts of anything. And yet somehow that man had backed into being an outlaw—a pirate, for God’s sake—one step at a time, making the only choices that would save his neck and his freedom.
Not that it was really that simple, of course. Nothing was. And he’d learned some things about himself during the breakneck slide from licensed pirate hunter to wanted pirate. They weren’t pleasant things, or things that made it easier to look in the mirror every morning. But they were true things. And one of those true things was that he was not the reasonable man he’d always thought himself to be.
He pulled his coat on, pocketed the grimy stack of bills that would pay the chop shop fee, loaded his Colt Police Special with rubber slugs, and tucked it into the back of his belt. He looked longingly toward the best London bespoke shotgun from Hollister & Hollister, with its elegant, dangerous curves and its filigreed spaniels eternally straining toward the pheasant they would never catch. His best gun stayed shipboard, though—even if he had gotten to the point where walking out of the airlock without it made him feel naked.
You are not a reasonable man, he told himself for the second time that morning. A reasonable man wouldn’t imagine shooting his way off-station with a nineteenth-century shotgun in the waning days of the twenty-fifth century. But then a reasonable man would have given up long ago. A reasonable man would have accepted the old saying that pirates either retired young or died young. A reasonable man would have sold the Christina for scrap long ago, found some quiet corner of the Periphery to hole up in, kept his nose clean, and hoped for the best.
A reasonable man knows when it’s time to strike the colors and stop fighting. A reasonable man knows that some battles are unwinnable and some seas are uncrossable. A reasonable man knows that real life has no reset button, and the Deep doesn’t give up its dead, and there is no resurrection.
The funny thing was that that kind of stubbornness was something he’d always admired, going all the way back to his childhood. Back on his parents’ frontier farm in the Uplands, huddled under his blankets with a flashlight, poring over every book about sailors he could get his hands on, he’d already known that he was going to run away to enlist as soon as he grew into his gangly height enough to pass for sixteen. And he’d wondered if he had the thing that drove all great ship’s captains, whether their ships sailed Earth’s oceans or the darker, vaster sea of space: that unshakable, unconquerable forward drive that never faltered, not even when things were hopeless and there seemed no point in going forward. All those years ago, before he’d ever set foot off-planet, Llewellyn had already been asking himself if he had it, how he would perform, what kind of man he would be in the face of the ultimate, fatal, hopeless, unsalvageable disaster.
Well, now he knew. He had it. And it looked like a fatal case.
He came face-to-face with his own stubbornness again when he was lying on the chop shop table, fighting off the sedative. He hated that moment of surrender, of knowing that he was giving himself over into another’s power, of trusting that they wouldn’t screw things up when the only thing he’d learned to trust in the world so far was the inevitable fact that people, given half a chance, would always screw things up.
At the last moment, the tech pulled out a syringe—practically a horse needle—that wasn’t just a sedative.
He grabbed at it and missed, his coordination already shot to hell by the sedative. “What the hell is that?”
“Nothing. Brain juice. Synthetic myelin enhancer.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, and the payload, of course. And a standard immunosuppressant.”
“For what?” The tech’s face was blurring out on him. He felt like he was underwater.
“So your T-cells don’t kill the AI.”
“The—what? You’re giving me AI?”
“I’m giving you synth,” the tech said impatiently. “The same stuff the Navy’s been using to juice your wire job for your whole career.”
“Yeah, well, I trusted them to do that.”
The tech grinned, showing dirtsider teeth that had never seen a dentist. “And look where that got you.”
“But you could be shooting me up with wild AI for all I know.”
The tech laughed outright at that. “Wild AI,” he scoffed. “You know what wild AI is? It’s a weed. And you know what a weed is? It’s a perfectly nice plant that happens to be growing where humans don’t want it to grow.”
Llewellyn stared at the man, noticing his unusually extensive wire job and the close-shaved hair that showed off the blue shadows of his subdermal I/O sockets like tribal tattoos.
“We are all avatars of chaos in the Clockless Nowever,” the man told him, speaking the words as if they were brandishing some kind of primitive talisman.
“Holy Christ! Are you Uploaders?”
He tried to get off the table but his legs weren’t working properly, and he only managed to slide sideways and end up in an awkward tangle.
The tech leaned over him, close enough for Llewellyn to look through his pupils and see the glint of the virally implanted ceramsteel filaments that spooled through his optic nerve.
“You got a problem with Trannies?” he asked in a soft and mocking tone. “I’d think that’d be a liability in your line of work. You talked to the psychtechs abo
ut it?”
“I never called you that, and I’ve got nothing against you,” Llewellyn said. “I just don’t want Uploader code in my bloodstream.”
“Our code is good. It’s a hell of a lot better than the crap you let the Navy shoot you up with.”
“Does it have a kill switch?”
“Good code doesn’t need a kill switch.”
“How do I know your code is good?” Llewellyn snapped. “For all I know you’re injecting a ghost into me! A ghost without a kill switch!”
“Our tech is good,” the Uploader repeated, his face set in hard and hostile lines. “Take it or leave it.”
“I still want to know what the payload is and where it came from,” Llewellyn said stubbornly.
“Don’t be a hypocrite. You’re getting a sentient NavComp for the price of a glorified calculator. You know exactly where it came from.”
“So it is a ghost,” Llewellyn whispered. “God help me. How did you sandbox it? And how do I know it’ll stay sandboxed?”
“Sorry. Proprietary formula.” The tech started packing up his kit. At first Llewellyn thought it was a bluff, but his certainty took a hit when the man gestured to his op team and they started packing up their stuff. The “chop shop” was actually just a rented room in a cheap dockside flophouse where the front desk didn’t make too much of a point of asking for travel papers, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to pack up in the first place.
“No! Wait!”
The tech made an impatient gesture. “Do you want it or not?”
“I want it,” Llewellyn said.
But his eyes said something different—and he could see the tech reading the message loud and clear: I need it. It’s a matter of life or death, and I’m out of safe choices—out of any choices at all.
And that was that. Because whatever their wild AI did to him, it couldn’t kill him any faster than Astrid Avery. He went under a first time. Then he surfaced briefly, in a panic, fighting the doctor, the nurses, the table’s restraints. Then he felt the stab of a needle and blessed blankness.
Ghost Spin Page 5