The two senior bridge officers and the shipboard AI performed an intricate triangle. Others could command the ship in a pinch, but only Avery and Llewellyn had the authority to train the AI that actually governed the ship. Without the AI, the ship was brute muscle, far too slow and stupid to survive the Drift. But an AI coming out of dry dock was like a child. It was a blank slate, armed with formidable theoretical expertise but still waiting for its command officers to imbue it with all of the craft and cunning it would require to survive in a war zone.
Everything depended on the all-important relationship between the AI and its trainers. The Navy cat herders could do a lot, but they couldn’t fix a broken training relationship. And whether the training relationship worked depended not only on Llewellyn’s and Avery’s command decisions, but also on the subtle, shifting, unquantifiable relationship that would develop between the three of them. Today was only a simulation run, but Llewellyn would be watching Avery closely. And no doubt she would be watching him at least as closely. And the ship … the ship would be watching both of them, already beginning to learn from them and shape herself to them. So any way you sliced it, Llewellyn was about to meet two women today who would require extremely delicate handling if he ever wanted to have any hope that either of them would do their best work for him. And he needed their best. Because out in the Drift the best that sailors and ships had to give was barely enough. And anything less than the best was fatal.
“And you were glad to get a woman first officer, even if it wasn’t Sital,” the ghost said.
“Yes.”
“Because you think women get along better with shipboard AIs?” There was a ripple of laughter in the ghost’s voice now.
“They get along … differently. The AIs relate differently to men and women—I have no idea why since it really ought to be irrelevant to them, but they do. Or at least I think they do. It’s just a gut feeling. Before I got my first command I served under men and under women. And somehow … on the ships where I served under a male captain … it didn’t work as well. I’m not saying it’s some kind of general rule. Maybe it’s just me.”
“And yet you were worried about Avery. Why?”
Llewellyn grimaced, resisting the question. Resisting the memory.
But the ghost bent its will upon him—and suddenly Llewellyn was plunged back into the memory that flowed over him like a flood breaking over riverbanks.…
Llewellyn’s first look at Astrid Avery’s service record had inspired confidence but not comfort.
She had commanded her own ship before this posting. And though a posting to the number two seat on a ship of the line was theoretically a promotion … well, any sailor worth her salt would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Worse yet, Llewellyn had tried to promote his navigator from his last command into the position, and his request had been denied, and both request and denial would almost certainly filter through the mess hall telegraph and eventually reach Avery’s ears … if they hadn’t already. So now he was stuck with a first mate he hadn’t asked for, and Avery was stuck with a captain she didn’t know. They would both have to figure out how to work with the other. It was best to go slowly, he warned himself, and not ask too much right out of the starting gate.
And too, there was something in her service record, something in the tone and flavor of her reports of prior ships and prior actions, that made him wonder just how likely Astrid Avery was to bend either the rules or her own expectations for anyone.
He glanced at her personnel file photo and saw the same thing he saw in her service record: a stiff-necked, by-the-book Navy captain who didn’t look like she cottoned to changing the rules for anyone, AI or human. Even her stance in the photo seemed telling: She stood at ease for the camera … sort of. But her at ease would have qualified as standing to attention in the eyes of any but the most diabolically sadistic drill sergeant. Stiff-necked was an understatement, he told himself with rueful amusement. At a glance, Astrid Avery looked to be a woman who had a great deal more spine than the average person—and wasn’t afraid to use it.
He took a closer look at the photo and decided that his new first mate was a little too good-looking for her own good. Which wasn’t the kind of trouble he would have wanted anything to do with if he’d been given a choice in the matter. But on the other hand, the intricate ceramsteel tracery snaking beneath her flawless skin was promising. Avery’s file said she’d gotten a state-of-the-art upgrade since her last command, the work done right here at the new Allegheny shipyards, which were rapidly becoming the top wetware facility in all of UN space. That meant bleeding-edge wetware and the blood-borne AI that UNSec’s controlled-tech security exemption allowed them to slave to the wire jobs of Drift ship bridge crew. If Avery was what she promised to be, and if the Ada was what it promised to be, then the three of them together would be unbeatable.
Well, he told himself, you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks or change a captain’s personal command style. So if Astrid Avery was what the Navy had decreed he’d get, then Astrid Avery was what he’d have to work with.
Astrid Avery in the flesh, however, was an entirely different matter. The moment she stepped onto the bridge he was aware of her in some visceral, primitive, completely ridiculous way. She was as tall as him to the millimeter, but slim and soft and supple-waisted so that all he could think about in that first dizzying moment was putting his hands on the loose-hanging uniform and pressing it to the body beneath it so that he could feel that supple waist, and the fine spring of the ribs above it, and the elegant sweep of hips below it. And then he realized he was staring and forced his eyes up to meet the warm, deep, richly brown eyes that were holding steady on his and—God, how embarrassing—even laughing a little at him. And he felt as if he had just stepped off into free fall and was plummeting through a heavy gravity well with no bottom in sight.
I am going to have to be so unbelievably careful not to ever be alone with this woman, he told himself. And then he told himself to stop being ridiculous because obviously they couldn’t possibly run the ship without being alone together, not even if Ike and Sital quit their day jobs in order to play chaperone. And then he told himself that the only safe thing to do was to walk straight off the ship and straight into Fleet headquarters, and go straight up the chain of command, and call down every favor he could shake loose to get Avery transferred somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was nowhere near him.
And then he accepted her crisp, sensible salute and told her to take the ship out of simdock—and retreated to the captain’s chair to lick his wounds and figure out how to deal with the disaster that his life had just turned into.
Still, as Avery moved the ship out into sim space, Llewellyn couldn’t help admiring her style and relaxing a little. She worked smoothly with the ship. She worked smoothly with Nav and Comm and Tactical. She led them the way a beautifully trained ballroom dancer leads his partner: with a light, sure touch, feet that never stumble, and a sure instinct for maintaining a proper and courteous distance.
It would be fine, he told himself. He didn’t have to perform superhuman feats to control himself. What kind of arrogant idiot was he to even have thought such a thing, let alone inflict real harm on a fellow officer’s career because of his own raging hormones? And anyway, he wouldn’t have to control himself, because Avery would control herself. No, she wouldn’t control herself. If she even needed to. After all—and here he dared a quick glance at the beautiful profile frowning intently over the Nav Board—what kind of arrogant bastard would even begin to imagine that a woman like that was his for the asking?
By the time Avery had taken the ship through her first shakedown run, complete with several computationally complex Drift entries and exits, Llewellyn knew that she was one of those rare officers for whom simply doing things by the book rises to the level of genius. She would be a superb first mate, perhaps a little more unbending than was ideal, but nonetheless an officer that you could entrust with the lives of your ship and your crew wit
hout hesitation. And that other thing—whatever it was—wouldn’t be a problem. Llewellyn worked well with women. He’d always worked well with female officers; he liked working with women, even preferred it. Half his bridge crew were women and always had been—and he’d always despised and ridiculed men who couldn’t grow up enough to keep it in their pants when they were on duty.
And now he had just one more delicate first meeting with an unknown woman. A woman whose well-being would be the last thought in Llewellyn’s head at night and the first one when he woke up every morning for as long as he had command of the Ada. A woman who was too important to meet now, in realspace, in a dry run with a crew that hadn’t yet coalesced into unity. A woman he would meet only in the unreal parallel universe of streamspace, where he would have to win her over with the subtle weapons of trust, love, and loyalty …
The ship herself.
“Trust, love, and loyalty,” the ghost echoed, its voice cutting in across the tail end of the memory. “We learn them with our mother’s milk, and they are the best and cruelest of weapons. I hope you used them wisely.”
Llewellyn dropped his head into his hands. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything but remember.
But the ghost pressed in upon him, and there was nowhere to hide because the ghost was everywhere and everywhen. The ghost was the world, and the world was the ghost—and there was no thought, no stone, no grain of sand that it couldn’t breathe into life and turn against him.
“I talked to her in AI-space.”
“In her memory palace, you mean.”
Navy bridge crews and cat herders handled their AIs through a safely sandboxed streamspace interface that contained a VR model of their systems architecture. They called it AI-world, but really there were countless AI-worlds: Each AI built its own self-contained universe, as bright or as dark as the internal workings of the AI in question, as rich or as poor as the mind of the AI could make it, as vast or constricted as the state space through which the strange attractors of Emergent consciousness cycled endlessly in critically self-organizing, endlessly evolving patterns.
The earliest programmers had worked in realspace, directly manipulating hexadecimal code and running decompilers that had no more to do with a modern router/decomposer than a stone axe had to do with a neutron bomb. They had envisioned computers as chess players, and had dreamed that the world of code would be an engineer’s paradise of complete and consistent rules, transparent cause and effect, pure logic and reason. They had run close to the machine in one sense—closer to the machine than any modern programmer would ever imagine running. But in another sense, they had been unimaginably distant.
Long, winding centuries separated Ada Lovelace’s first visionary leap into the information age from the wily, elusive, charming creature facing Llewellyn across the sparkling murmur of the Moorish fountain. And down through those strange generations, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and proteins replaced silicon, the metaphor of chess had given way to deeper, richer, darker metaphors. Hacking had given way to conversation. Writing patches had given way to the talking cure. Programmers had stopped calling themselves code jockeys and started calling themselves AI shrinks and cat herders. And gradually—albeit with the protection of technologies with betraying names like sandbox and cutout and firewall and kill loop—humans had had to learn to meet the machine on its own terms and in its own territory.
“So tell me about Ada’s memory palace,” the ghost asked now. “Was it running on free-range execution?”
“God! Of course not. Do you think I’m crazy?”
The ghost’s lips tightened in an expression that Llewellyn couldn’t quite read. But there was a measure of disgust in it, or at least of judgment. He bridled at the notion of being judged by the ghost … and then he let it go. Because the ghost was right, of course. It wasn’t that he felt there was something immoral about bending a shipboard AI to its captain’s will. All soldiers had to obey orders, and a ship was as much a soldier as any other member of her crew. And to the AI-proponents who would be appalled by a ship being made to kill, Llewellyn really had nothing to say. Their world and his world were so far apart that there didn’t seem to be much point in even trying to communicate across the chasm between them. And any qualms he might once have had about what was done to shipboard AIs in the name of duty had survived real action against the Syndicates about as long as an eighteenth-century navy captain’s qualms about gunnery boys would have survived his first broadside from a French corsair. But still, there was something … unclean about the way too many captains and cat herders “managed” their AIs.
That was what had curled the ghost’s all-too-expressive lip.
And though he would have liked to defend himself, Llewellyn wasn’t enough the hypocrite to argue the point.
“So you met her in her memory palace,” the ghost prompted.
“No, not the first time. The first time was in public.”
He’d met her in London, on a day of fog and coal dust, at a five-penny exhibition of automata. Ada was the class of the show, and he’d known it from the moment she walked in. Even under the ridiculously prudish Victorian drapery, her legs were long and her walk graceful and purposeful. Even hidden by a broad-brimmed hat and a veil so thick she had to lift it up to read the printed labels on the exhibits, the lines of her face were aristocratic and beautiful. Women stared at her clothes. Men stared at her body. And the crowd around her gave way in an instinctive movement of submission and subservience.
She was regal and dangerous, Llewellyn decided, like a ship of the line gliding into port past tramp freighters and cargo spindles.
“Was it a real five-penny museum?” the ghost asked. “Oh, never mind. Why would you know? Just tell me which automata you saw and I’ll figure it out.”
Llewellyn decided to ignore that. “I think it was real. Didn’t the real Ada meet Charles Babbage in a five-penny museum? Anyway, it felt real. As real as it gets.”
And so had Ada, from that very first moment. From before he really saw her even.
It was odd how you felt an AI’s presence. You could tell yourself till you were blue in the face that it was just your wireless projecting stored burst patterns across your cerebral cortex. That the creepy back-of-the-neck someone’s-behind-you feeling was synthesized peripheral vision. That the sense of being watched was a technological artifact rather than a true perception of your actual environment. That nothing your wetware fed into your brain when you were in streamspace had any basis in reality. But it was no good. Your brain saw, smelled, heard, and touched. And your brain believed. It was the way humans were wired.
Odd, really, that the first meeting with Ada had happened well outside the core of her own memory palace. It occurred to him now that he could have asked Ike Okoro about it. But there’d been other things to worry about, all of which seemed more urgent, and he’d never quite gotten around to mentioning it.
At first Ada refused to talk to him. It took a little arm-twisting, a few subtle hints and tweaks, the pushing of just the right buttons before she realized that he was a stranger in her world—a stranger from that other, outer world who had the power to turn off the sun and crash the moon and send her Earth spinning off its axis.
You didn’t like to do that, of course. And even then, you moved as gently as possible, because the best ships always required the most delicate handling. But sometimes you had to get a ship’s attention any way you could.
The relationship between a ship and her captain was even more delicate and complex and essential than the relationship between a captain and his human crew. But still, it was ultimately and always a relation of authority, in which it was the captain’s place to command and the ship’s to obey. The speeds of engagement dictated that the AI actually take physical charge of the ship in any realtime crisis. No human ever beat an AI to the punch in thought, chess, or battle—and outside of old science fiction movies no human ever would. Naval engagements were p
rosecuted at relativistic speeds, so fast that only AIs could possibly make realtime decisions. Humans could barely even monitor the action, let alone command it. Drugs and wire jobs sped up human processing capacity, of course. But not enough. The optic nerve could only fire so many times. And an augmented optic nerve could still only fire so many times plus some percentage. Captains set strategy, but AIs executed. That was the official line, anyway. But the line between order and execution blurred beyond recognition once you hit a certain fraction of light speed. And the reality was that a good captain knew when to turn things over to the shipboard AI, and how to nurture and humor the AI so that she gave her best.…
“Blah blah blah,” interrupted the ghost, cutting through Llewellyn’s thoughts as if Llewellyn were the disembodied shade and the ghost was the only real person talking. “Spare me the violins. I’ve seen enough Rin Tin Tin reruns to know where this is going.”
“Who’s Rin Tin Tin?”
“Never mind. Just tell me what happened next.”
“Nothing. She was a lovely ship. Wonderful. Perfect.”
“Why do I have the feeling that I’m being covertly criticized?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh never mind. I’d be the last to claim I was perfect. Perfection is Hell minus the good company. Anyway, forget I said anything. Let’s just go back to talking about your lovely Victorian Household Angel.”
“You make it sound so … questionable, somehow. But I didn’t do anything that wasn’t entirely by the book. To her or any other ship. You can ask the Christina if you want. She must be in there somewhere.”
“She is. But whenever I try to get anything useful out of her she just gets all weepy and starts reciting tedious poetry at me. Aren’t there any nice, normal AIs out here? Whatever happened to names like Euler, and Router/Decomposer, and Plimpton 322?”
“Those are normal?”
The ghost gave him a Look.
“Well, how would I know? I’ve only ever met shipboard AIs. And they’re mostly female, I guess … because … well, ships are female. I mean most of them. Clearly you’re not.”
Ghost Spin Page 12