Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  The merc led her to a parked jeep where the guy apparently in charge had set up a makeshift desk on the front hood. Li looked him over, searching for insignia of rank and unit, but didn’t see any familiar patches. She wasn’t surprised, really; there were laws about mercs having to wear public identification of their corporate sponsors and government contract holders. But they still did everything they could to make it hard for the average civvy on the street to identify them. At last she spotted what must be the corporate logo: a small silver slug that could have been anything from a bullet to an electron surrounded by the arcing circles of a spin orientation diagram.

  “Check her,” the commander said without looking up.

  Li felt gloved fingers probe her neck and jawline, looking for swollen glands, and poke at the I/O port behind her left ear.

  Then the commander did look up—and took in her construct’s face and the faint silver tattoo of her Peacekeeper’s wire job.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  For one frozen, panicked moment Li thought he had recognized her. Visions of being hauled back on-station and dragged back to Alba to face General Nguyen danced through her head. But then she realized he wasn’t talking about her personally—just to someone whose combination of poor-girl genetics and bleeding-edge wire job marked her as an ex-Peacekeeper.

  “I like a fat bank account as much as the next girl,” she told him.

  He straightened up and gazed over the roof of the jeep toward the dark spiral of smoke rising about the administrative zone. “Yeah, well, take my advice and sit this one out. It’s a bitch.”

  “Thanks,” Li said. “I’ll think about it.”

  He looked like he was about to say something else to her, but then he just shrugged and reached for her travel papers. They were clean—or clean enough, anyway. And a few minutes later she was walking down the gauntlet to the taxicab. As she passed by the line of detainees one of them looked up and caught her eye.

  A young woman, maybe in her mid-twenties. Fair-skinned, with the greenish pallor and bird-fine bones that Li was already starting to recognize as the sign of a childhood in the smog-choked Pit. The lines of ceramsteel filament that were just a silver shadow under Li’s darker skin stood out like ink on the girl’s pale face. And her I/O port was surrounded by an angry red rash that stretched into her hair and threaded down the side of her neck into her upturned collar.

  That’s gotta itch, Router/​Decomposer said.

  Li swallowed down a sudden burst of nausea and turned away.

  They passed three more roadblocks before they got to the hotel. And at every one of them Li saw the same seated circles of saffron-robed Uploaders and the same waiting lines of Trannies, the silvery tattoo of the wires on their faces the only bright spot in a world Li was starting to wish she’d never set foot on.

  Well, one thing’s obvious, Router/​Decomposer told her. The Navy’s little wild AI problem has definitely jumped quarantine.

  Li checked in at the Caledonia, took her key card and her suitcase, and stashed them in the ladies’ room. Then she slipped into the service stairs, climbed to the fourth floor, and walked quietly down a long carpeted corridor to Room 420.

  To her surprise the door was on the latch. She nudged it open with one elbow and peered around the edge of the doorway just far enough to see the body. One mostly Asian, thirty-something male, wearing seriously unsubtle shoes and a suit too loud to be anything but English. There were no obvious signs of violence on the body, but one glance at his face was enough to tell her that Elvis had left the building.

  Li stepped inside, closed the door carefully behind her, and crouched over the body. The cause of death was almost certainly a hard download of virally protected data. She’d seen it before; it made the victim spike a lethally high fever that cooked off their brain tissue like acute meningitis. Hard to say whether it was murder or simple data theft. But whatever you called it, the thief had wanted something inside the man’s head badly enough to kill for it—and to choose a weapon that destroyed the very structures of the victim’s brain so that no memory or data file could ever be recovered from them.

  She tossed the apartment—carefully, wearing gloves and putting everything back where she’d found it. No sign of Cohen. No sign of any active files large enough to contain even a minuscule fragment of him. She looked down at the broken body on the floor and sighed in frustration.

  Then she slipped out into the hallway and back down the service stairs, retrieved her suitcase, washed her face and hands in the ladies’ room sink, and rode the elevator to her own room.

  The police found her so fast that she knew she must have screwed up somehow.

  There were two of them, both human-norm at first glance, just like most of the New Allegheny natives she’d met so far. They were a team, she decided. The big, easygoing fellow with the boxer’s muscles would play good cop while the little weasel with the nicotine-stained fingers scanned the hotel room for evidence they could use against her.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” she insisted even after it became clear that they’d somehow placed her in the dead man’s room. “I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  The big man raised his eyebrows at that but said nothing. Then he turned to the window, either admiring the spectacular view of the Crucible and Shadyside or making a tactical retreat until he figured out his next line of questioning.

  He was an unusually impressive example of your basic post-human mutt, NorAm rust belt flavor. The blood of Polish and Irish immigrants mingled with the blood of former African slaves mingled with who knew what else. He was better-looking than the personnel file photo that had flashed up on her internals when he flashed his badge at her. And he had a nice smile that he didn’t save for special occasions. And he was so muscle-bound, and so much bigger than unengineered UNnormal, that Li would have suspected illegal retrovirals if she’d met him doing high-rent corporate security instead of holding down a pension on a backwater Periphery planet. But other than that, he looked a lot like the shantytown Irish boys Li had grown up with. Li knew the type. She’d grown up around boys like him. She knew how to befriend and talk to them. She felt at home with them in a way she’d never felt at home with Cohen or anyone else from her UNSec years. Which meant, of course, that she’d have to be extra-careful around him.

  “An innocent bystander would have called the police,” he said without turning back to face her. “Don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Now he did turn around. She met his eyes squarely. They were green, much lighter than she would have expected given his skin color, and they gazed back at her with the unwavering calm of a cop who’s seen everything and is long past being surprised by anything.

  “I’m not your problem,” she told him. “And I’m not going to become your problem. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  He smiled and tilted his head to one side, waiting. And meanwhile his partner strolled around the suite without so much as a by-your-leave, poking and frowning at things. There was a rash running up the back of his neck that looked vaguely familiar to Li. But the hotel grid was acting glitchy and it didn’t seem worth the time or trouble to check on it.

  She got tired of watching the weasel and turned back to the cop she’d privately dubbed the Big Dog. “I just have some friends who don’t want police attention.”

  “Some friends,” the Big Dog repeated. And then he waited. Echo and silence. An old interrogator’s trick. But no backwater homicide dick was going to get a jump on her.

  “And what if I decided I needed to talk to these friends of yours?” he asked when he finally got tired of waiting.

  Li smiled.

  “You’re a damned cop!” he said in obvious disgust. She kept smiling.

  “What agency?”

  Smile.

  “So you’ve gone private, then.”

  The corners of her mouth were starting to feel brittle.

  He cursed under h
is breath. But even in exasperation his eyes were amused and his expression mild. He might be a man of strong emotions—in fact she suspected he was—but he kept them on a leash. And when he let them loose it was only provisionally, like a man with a big, dangerous dog who only lets it run in well-fenced areas.

  “Are you trying to ruin my day?” he asked, still with the same air of mild exasperation. “Or does it just come naturally to you?”

  The look on his face was too much for her. She laughed. “I’m not trying to ruin your day, Detective. I just can’t answer your questions. You know that. Do we really have to go through the Mutt-and-Jeff routine?”

  He sighed and rubbed a big hand over his face. “No. But I will have to talk to you again. Planning to go anywhere?”

  “I’m checked in here for a week.”

  “Peachy.” He stood up and pulled a dog-eared business card out of his pocket. Joseph A. Dolniak, Detective Sergeant. Li looked from the card to his face, trying to estimate his age. He might be younger than he looked, but she didn’t think so. She did the math, and it agreed with her gut instincts. The man should have made lieutenant before, especially given his obvious competence—or, depending on the police department in question, in spite of it. Apparently Joseph A. Dolniak, Detective Sergeant, wasn’t too good at office politics. “My office eight o’clock Monday morning work for you?”

  “Sure,” Li said bemusedly. As if she had a choice.

  “I like people who show up with doughnuts,” he went on in his placid, friendly voice. “I’m not so fond of people who show up with lawyers.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Li asked incredulously. A little of her amusement must have seeped through her voice, because Dolniak grinned right back at her.

  “Just laying the groundwork for a frank and friendly conversation. Plus, you’re better off saving your money in my experience. None of the hacks on New Allegheny is good enough to be worth hiring in the first place.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Though I can’t say I was holding out much hope for them.”

  “Okay, well, you know what to do now I guess.”

  She looked down and saw that he was proffering a handheld bioassaying device.

  She took it, pressed her palm to the screen, let it sample her DNA, and read her implanted data chip. The cop barely looked at the results, though; he was too busy looking at the telltale blue tracery of the ceramsteel filaments that were clearly visible just under the thin skin of her wrist.

  “You military?”

  “Just an interested citizen.”

  “Not with that wire job. And anyway I still say you’re some kind of cop.”

  “I get that a lot,” Li drawled, slipping into Caitlyn’s voice and shocked at how easily the shantytown accent rolled off her tongue. “Must be my charming Irish brogue.”

  He gave her a slow, placid, farmboy’s smile. “I love it when people make me find out the hard way. Keeps the day job interesting.”

  “Well, that was different,” Router/​Decomposer said as soon as the cops left.

  Li started at the unfamiliar voice, and then realized that he was talking to her through the room’s livewall.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “No integrated streamspace support.”

  “That’s the boonies for you.”

  “Even the boonies have full-surround streaming these days.”

  Li tried to go online, failed, leafed through the hotel’s promotional literature on the desktop. “Yeah, actually it does say here there’s supposed to be full-surround. It must be—”

  “Down for maintenance. Like everything else on New Allegheny. And did you see the rash on that cop’s neck? No one’s saying the magic words yet, but I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before the whole planet is officially under quarantine.”

  “That part of ALEF’s story still doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, where did this supposed wild AI outbreak come from? Who would import DNA-based AI to a Periphery planet with no AI police? And even if they did, there’s gotta be a kill switch. What kind of maniac wouldn’t have a kill switch?”

  “Maybe a maniac who thought DNA-based AI was going to help them navigate the Drift and didn’t know enough to look for a kill switch? Or maybe a maniac who thought that unkillable AI was going to help them win the war against the Syndicates?”

  Li rolled her eyes. “Skip the conspiracy theories, okay? I’ve already had my full daily dose of ridiculous.”

  “Well, it did come from the Navy shipyard, after all.”

  But Li just made a rude noise at that. Everyone knew that UNSec issued exemptions from the banned technology list to security-critical industries. But that was a matter of bigger bombs or nastier bioagents or enhanced chemical interrogation techniques. Infectious DNA-platformed AI was the ultimate in banned tech, not merely a matter of morals but a matter of holding the line in the human-AI balance of power throughout UN space. People like Helen Nguyen tolerated limited citizenship rights for Emergent AIs because they had to. They needed the best technology they could get to fight the Syndicates, and the big Emergents shed bleeding-edge tech like humans shed skin cells. So they tolerated them—ALEF, the Consortium, the Continuum, all the other ever-shifting Freetown factions. They tolerated them until they pushed the boundaries a little too far. Then they paraded the Inter-faithers and the anti-AI activists and the other assorted crazies on the news spins just to remind them that the universe outside their golden cage was big and dangerous and full of people who didn’t like them one little bit and were willing to do something about it. Then they gave them back to their toys—because even the toys that flirted with the banned-tech list were hugely valuable to the war effort against the Syndicates. In fact, those ones usually turned out, in the long run, to be especially valuable.

  But letting DNA-based AI get out into the general population without a kill switch? That was the ultimate nightmare scenario, one that raised the specter of AIs seizing control of the human genome. That kind of technology would need a sign-off at the highest levels, perhaps even a unanimous vote of the Security Council itself. And even then … no, it was too crazy. No one would sign off on that, she decided.

  But on the other hand …

  “I still don’t understand why ALEF got involved. Why wouldn’t the Navy clean up their own mess?”

  “Well, they probably tried before they came to ALEF.”

  “But that’s what I’m asking you. Why go to ALEF at all?”

  His GUI shifted—Li could have sworn uncomfortably.

  “Well, ALEF and UNSec … you know …”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Is this some AI thing that you’re not allowed to tell me about?”

  “What was that story Cohen always used to tell? You know, the one about the motorcycle and the Swiss policeman?”

  Li knew immediately what he was talking about. The story went all the way back to his long-dead creator, Hy Cohen. It was a long, involved, shaggy-dog joke about trying to get a broken-down motorcycle from Germany to Italy in the trunk of his car. The German police had issued terse statements about verboten this and verboten that. The French had required a complicated but purely formal set of approvals, memorialized by one of their ever-beloved official stamps. And the Swiss … the Swiss police had stopped him on some cow-infested and revoltingly bucolic mountain road and, after a long, involved, frowning multiparty consultation, delivered their final verdict and the story’s punch line: “Well, it’s allowed, I suppose … but you have to admit it’s not pretty!”

  The joke had always escaped Li, who only had the faintest notion of what sorts of countries Switzerland and Italy had been. Mostly it symbolized for her the long expanse of Cohen’s life, memories, and adventures that stretched out for centuries before her birth—and that she’d always assumed would stretch out for centuries after her death as well.

  But now she absorbed the chain of emotionally charged connectio
ns—Hy Cohen, Germany, UNSec, stamps and regulations and travel permits—and she realized that, in his roundabout, associative, AI manner, Router/​Decomposer was trying to tell her something.

  “Are you saying ALEF was working with the AI police?”

  “Well …” Even now, he didn’t want to commit. “I hear.”

  “You hear what?”

  “Okay, more than hear. Cohen told me once. I guess it’s ALEF’s dirty little secret.”

  Li made a disbelieving face. “I can’t see Cohen going along with that.”

  “Well, he did tell me, didn’t he?”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “Meaning that he wasn’t happy about it. Even if he did it for them.”

  Li didn’t know what to say to that, or how to think about the new light into which it cast Cohen’s habitual—and habitually unexplained—absences. So she changed the subject. “If the outbreak was hitting the civilian population, wouldn’t we be hearing about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Router/​Decomposer said. “Like I said, everyone’s being very tight-lipped. Why don’t you look for your next buyer, and I’ll go rattle some cages and see what I can find out.”

  Five minutes later, Caitlyn Perkins was leaving the Caledonia in search of the second buyer on the Loyal Opposition’s yard sale listing.

  She hoped she wasn’t being followed, but if she was, there wasn’t much she could do about it. And given the vagueness of her directions, she doubted that Dolniak would learn much even if he was following her. Personally she wasn’t holding out much hope of finding this particular buyer.

  The address she’d been given was in Shadyside. But when she had asked for directions at the hotel front desk, the clerk had looked askance at it.