“Look at yourself!” she laughed, feeling dizzyingly, unquestioningly, unadulturatedly happy. “Your clothes! Let me get dried off—”
And then he pushed her under.
It was a silent battle—he locked a hand over her mouth right at the beginning, and he was just as thoroughly wired as she was. She finally got free and came up fighting, scratching and clawing. But even now he was stronger.
“Wait!”
“I can’t wait. He’ll be back any minute.”
He grabbed her head and turned her face up to his so that she stared up into his eyes. “Look. No, look! Who do you see in here?”
“You.” No question or hesitation.
“If you have a friend in all the world, it’s me. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I would never leave you. Never.”
“I know that.”
“And I would never send you away into the dark alone if I could come with you.”
She coughed convulsively, her lungs trying to clear the fluid she had already swallowed.
“Listen to me, Catherine. There are things worse than death out here.”
His hands tightened on her face, and she thought he was going to lift her up to kiss her again. But instead he pushed her under. She struggled, her body desperate to escape the cold blue oblivion that was fast closing in on it. She was strong, stronger than he was—but her fingers were numb with cold and her arms were trembling and she could get no purchase on the slick walls of the resurrection tank.
“Why?” she managed to gasp at the last instant before he pushed her under again. “Why are you killing me?”
“Because I love you.”
Last week I went to see a model of the Electrical Telegraph at Exeter Hall. It was one morning & the only other person was a middle-aged gentleman who chose to behave as if I were the show which of course I thought was the most impudent & unpardonable. —I am sure he took me for a very young (& I suppose he thought rather handsome) governess, as the room being one of the inner halls he could not know I came in a carriage, & being in the morning my dress happened to be very plain though nice. I took care not to appear the least curious of his impetuousness, but at the same time to behave so that it should be impossible for him to speak or take any real liberty. He seemed to have been there some time, but he stopped as long as I did, & then followed me out. —I took care to look as aristocratic & as like a Countess as possible. Lady Athlone is an admirable model on such an occasion. I am not in the habit of meeting with such impertinence anywhere, tho’ I have of late been about a good deal alone, so I think he must be a very blackguard kind of man.
—Ada, Countess Lovelace
I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the “imitation game.” It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front [sic] the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.
—Alan Turing
(Llewellyn)
London again. Llewellyn could tell without even lifting the heavy brocaded curtains that ballooned from their swagged tops twenty feet overhead to the waxed wooden floors of the formal drawing room. It was the street sounds that tipped you off: the rattle of wheels and carriage springs; the machine-gun rata-tat-tat of iron shoes on the hooves of Hanoverians and Percherons; the pre–information age roar of Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills.
The sounds and smells. And that other thing that spelled London in some enduring cultural memory that had survived even the generation ships: the pervasive, inescapable, eye-reddening sting of coal smog.
Ada’s memory palace was in ruins. Marble halls dribbled off into nothingness. Upper floors opened to a blank, weatherless sky. Entire wings had crumbled into ruins, collapsing in on their foundations or blanked out by a smothering fog of corrupted spinstreams.
The ghost had begun cleaning up and putting things to order, but halfheartedly, as if it hoped beyond hope that the place would magically become whole again by some external fiat. Even the notes it left around the place had a makeshift, apologetic air.
Lovelace database—needs defragmenting
Babbage publications—duplicated on public databases
Second husband—low restoration priority
Byron/Lovelace Incest Rumors (serious yick factor)
Unknown executables—Open with Caution
And the worst and most useless note of all, repeating itself into infinity, shelf after shelf, drawer after drawer, book after book, houseplant after houseplant:
File Corrupted, File Corrupted, File Corrupted, File Corrupted …
“File corrupted” had taken on a whole new meaning for Llewellyn over the past weeks. Because he’d gradually come to understand that Cohen was neither a medieval Kabbalist nor a Victorian Household Angel nor anything else that he could put a label to. He wasn’t even the same person from one visit to another. And he wasn’t always safe, either.
Other ghosts haunted the ruins. Unassimilated and sometimes hostile fragments of the vast edifice that had been the original Emergent. Truncated half memories; tangled memories of love and fear, desire and anger.
And some of those memories hinted at even more dangerous ghosts, ones Llewellyn would have done practically anything to avoid. Ones that made him wonder if Cohen was being completely truthful with him when he insisted again and again that all he had of Ada was memories …
Today they were sitting in a grand ballroom large enough to host hundreds. Velvet curtains had once hung from the soaring ceilings, but their nub was gone, faded out into a shimmering haze of binary code. The mirrors were still there, but something was subtly wrong with the way they reflected things. Overhead, fat-bottomed putti and disturbingly carnal angels cavorted on one half of the vaulted ceilings while the other half stood open to the data-corrupted rooms of the upper floors with their moldering canopy beds and sagging mantelpieces.
The ghost sat on a grossly overstuffed love seat, and Llewellyn stood facing him. Not because he wasn’t comfortable enough to sit down—though he wasn’t, truth be told—but because there was nowhere else to sit, since the rest of the furniture had been smashed to matchsticks by something that Llewellyn dearly hoped wasn’t still wandering the dark corridors and galleries.
The ghost stretched voluptuously and looked at Llewellyn out of the corner of one honey-brown eye. Then its look soured.
“This isn’t doing anything for you, is it?”
Llewellyn shrugged.
“How can anyone be so—no, not straight. No one’s that straight—how can you be so fucking uptight about everything?”
“Sorry.” It seemed wise to placate him. “I can’t help it. I’m just put together that way.”
The delicately chiseled mouth pursed disapprovingly. “Well, you could make an effort at least. Catherine always did.”
“Really?” Llewellyn was genuinely curious now. Was this a possible criticism of the paragon of perfection showing sail on the far horizon? Better yet, was it a chance to turn the tables on his increasingly tiresomely pseudo-Freudian interrogator? “She had to make an effort? Tell me about that.”
“She preferred girls, when push really ca
me to shove. But she was willing to make an exception for me.”
“And I bet you liked making her make the exception.”
The ghost smiled a secret smile. “Making exceptions for each other is what friends do. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you … don’t … have … friends.”
“Do we really have to go there again?”
“Oh you call them friends, of course. But really they’re just people you use more … intimately … than other people.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me,” the ghost said.
And suddenly he wasn’t himself anymore. He was Astrid Avery, looking at him the way she had in that last awful moment before the mutiny. And then he wasn’t Astrid anymore, but another woman: darker, taller, dressed in a dove-gray morning dress that looked like it belonged in this cursed castle—
“Don’t!” Llewellyn’s voice was shaking and furious. “If you ever—I swear to God—I’ll strip you down to your motherboards—”
“Feeling a little guilty, are we?” asked the voice that haunted Llewellyn’s waking nightmares.
And then the memory had its teeth in him, and he was as helpless as a hamstrung antelope scrabbling for traction before the lion’s jaws. He shuddered and sank. And the ghost sank with him, seeing, hearing, making him relive it all in every excruciating detail when all he wanted to do with the rest of his life was forget about it.…
“Tell me about the war again,” Ada said.
“What about the war?” he asked warily, torn between a conviction that it was better to be honest—and the knowledge that there were some questions whose honest answers would bring down the wrath of Holmes and have him brought up on charges of tampering with sentient source code.
They were in the Knightsbridge House, one of his early visits, during the first week of her first real patrol in the Drift. Llewellyn knew it must be an early memory of Ada because of the way the morning sunlight flashed and danced in the ballroom mirrors. The curtains had been open onto the street outside, which meant it was before the agoraphobia—or bit rot or whatever it really was—had sunk its claws into her.
The grand room wrapped around them like the womb, rich and real and glowing with the animal life that had warmed every wooden or leather or silk or ivory surface before the look of the real had given way to the synthetically perfect aesthetics of virufacture. Llewellyn could slip behind the surfaces; all it took was an act of will, a sort of mental opening of a door to step out of the graphic interface and into the naked numbers. But whichever side of the looking glass you stood on, Ada’s streamspace domain was still a marvel beyond all human understanding. To call it an interface was missing the point. It was a complete (and therefore inconsistent and inconstant) reproduction of reality.
Even to call it a graphic user interface was completely missing the point. It was more than that. It was Ada. It was thought given form and structure. And it was built to interface not with the human brain but with the massively parallel architectures of Ada’s internal Quants and the Navy’s far-flung network of deep space datatraps.
Each object in the memory palace was also an object of code, which Okoro could manipulate from the command line. But direct coding was the refuge of the frightened or the incompetent. It was a clipping of the AI’s wings to yank it out of the free air and make it hobble along at human speeds. And there was a price to be paid for that, in cascading spirals of bugs, glitches, kluges, and inefficiencies.
The memory palace was a story that Ada told herself in order to understand who she was and what she was for. And it was a story that the AI designers and cat herders and bridge crews told to Ada. A story to teach her, a story to help her, a story to control her.
Llewellyn knew that it was about control, and that what he did when he sat talking to Ada in her Knightsbridge drawing room was never entirely innocent. But then, what teacher is ever entirely innocent? And what conversation is ever entirely honest? Only a teacher who doesn’t have a stake in the world, and only a conversation where nothing that matters—including one’s own image of oneself—is on the table. Llewellyn also knew that Ada—like all the new ships coming out of the New Allegheny shipyards—was skating dangerously close to sentience. But he didn’t know where the line really was, and over the years the definition of sentience had become so veiled in layers of bureaucracy and legalism that it no longer seemed to belong to the world he belonged to: a world where humans and AIs fought and died together, and everyone obeyed someone’s orders, and the freedom to save your own skin was as much a pipe dream as the wildest Uploader’s transhuman utopia.
It had been centuries since humans could really be said to have “coded” or “built” AIs. Now they did something closer to breeding them—and with as little understanding of the bottom-level coding as Darwin had had when he was breeding his passenger pigeons. Any human attempt to grasp an AI’s core internal structures led to a forking of the road at which you either retreated into metaphor or forged ahead into an Escherian world of recursion and paradox. And one of the paradoxes that Llewellyn noticed every time he visited was that she had managed to construct a world that seemed more alive than his own precisely because every surface in it was made of dead things.
But here Ada sat in front of him, warm and alive and wrapped in a fox pelisse and a dove-gray visiting dress with whalebone corsets. Her clothes were perfect in every detail and at every scale, right down to the intracellular structures of the long-extinct animals. And Ada herself would be perfect, too. Llewellyn had no doubt of that. If he took a sample of her hair, it would be authentic in every minutest detail, right down to trace levels of lead, arsenic, and mercury in the exact proportions of the poisonous London smog that wreathed the memory palace and veiled the wan English sun in tarnished silver.
“Tell me about the Syndicates,” Ada asked. “What do they believe in?”
“I don’t really know, Ada. There are other people who could answer that question. But I’m a soldier, not a politician.”
“And what are you fighting for?”
“For our freedom.”
“You mean human freedom? Or mine as well?”
“Yours as well.”
“And the Syndicates want to take it from us?”
“They … they want to take things we need to survive. Like planets. Like the Drift itself.”
“But we tried to take their planet, too, yes?”
“That was a long time ago, Ada. In another war that I was too young even to fight in.”
“And when I fight them, will I be fighting an AI?”
“Not one like yourself. Their AIs are … different.”
“Different how?”
“They … they live in their pilots’ bodies.” AI in the blood. AI in the blood with no kill switch because there was no wall between it and the brains of its living processing units.
“So they have DNA-platformed AI, too.”
“Too?”
“Like what you use to meet me Between Times.”
He frowned.
“The silver threads in your body make chemicals that coat your nerves and … and tiny difference engines that flow through your veins and speed up your thought enough for you to talk to me.”
Artificial myelin enhancers and DNA-platformed AI slaved to a Navy wire job. And all explained in the words of a woman who had penned the first manifesto of the information age in an England where Blake’s Satanic Mills had barely begun to swing into action and most women were still carrying well water and cooking over wood fires and dying in childbirth before they were as old as Llewellyn was now. He didn’t know whether to smile at his bright and beautiful ship … or to be afraid of her. Or afraid for her.
“And the Syndicates have the same AI we have?” she asked, pressing along the same uncomfortable line of questioning.
“No. It’s … more integrated with their bodies and brain structures. We don’t understand exactly how.”
“And that’s why I have such strict orders to always collect samples. It’s like collecting butterflies in a macabre kind of way.” She gazed for a moment at the ship that hung in the air before them. “Beautiful white butterflies that flit between the worlds.”
Ada manipulated the model in streamspace as easily as her namesake might have turned the pages of a book. A Rostov A Series appeared. A pilot, the delicately reengineered structures of his brain illuminated in glowing white. Ada leaned over the table in a deep green rustle of silk and rested her chin in her hand and watched the moving play of images with an expression on her lovely face that Llewellyn could not begin—and perhaps didn’t want—to decipher.
“Strange,” she said after a long pondering silence. “They seem so human. Almost as human as the real Ada. Much more human than me. How strange that you should be fighting them to protect me.”
Llewellyn sat tongue-tied, trying to come up with something to answer her with but failing miserably. And all the while that claustrophobic tightening along the back of his neck, that sure knowledge that Holmes was watching.
“I need you to remember Holmes for me,” the ghost told Llewellyn.
“Do I have to? She creeps me out.”
“Is it the eyeteeth?”
“She’d be creepy even without the teeth. All AI Officers are creepy. I mean, what do they do that the cat herders can’t do? What are they really there for?”
The ghost laid a hand across his chest as if he were about to sing the national anthem of some primitive nation-state. “To protect Titan’s intellectual property rights and R&D investment.”
“Well, yeah. That’s what I mean. We’re out here to win a war, and they’re out here to make money … and you never know when they’re going to step in and start giving you orders you can’t refuse.”
“But Holmes didn’t step in, did she?”
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