Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “Will you take any of us who’ll come?” McPherson asked.

  “Let’s see …” He shuffled through the papers. “I’ve only got one warrant out on this ship. Which of you is Titus McPherson?”

  “I am.”

  The pirate looked annoyed. And well he might, Li thought; McPherson was ex-Navy, wired to the gills, and had fought the boarding party with skill and ferocity. He was no doubt the single man among the entire captured crew that the pirates would most like to recruit.

  “Well, according to this I’m supposed to airlock you. For”—he consulted the warrant—“shooting someone? Oh for crying out loud. Isn’t that your job? People will swear out a warrant for anything these days. Well, anyway, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I don’t know. Who do they say I shot?”

  The gray eyes glittered in wry amusement. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Not which one.”

  That earned McPherson a small but appreciative laugh.

  “Anyway, if it’s the man I’m thinking of,” McPherson went on, “his name is DiCaprio, and I shot him under live fire for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy. And I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to wait for some pansy-pants court-martial board to tell me I can do that!”

  Llewellyn sighed. “Do you have any idea what’s involved in overturning a warrant?”

  The warrant officer smiled. “Certain amount of paperwork, I imagine?”

  The engaging grin flashed out again, with that tantalizing glimpse of the personality behind the ironic mask. “I like you,” Llewellyn said. “You’ve got a sense of humor. And I hate to kill a man with a sense of humor. But we’re running ahead of ourselves, don’t you think? Am I going to soldier through all that paperwork only to have you turn me down and take the long boat?”

  “You want to know if I’ll follow you? That depends. Are you Black William?”

  A pause, tinged with caution and … something else? And then the reluctant answer:

  “I am William Llewellyn, yes.”

  “Then I’ll follow you.”

  “That’s very flattering, I’m sure. But might I ask why?”

  “Because I crewed on the Ada and I know you’re an innocent man.”

  A chill settled over Llewellyn’s features. Soft and faint and vanishing as the stray snowflakes that settle out of a sunny winter sky and melt before they hit the ground. It was almost imperceptible, but to Li it was a red flag; it was the look Cohen always got when he was about to stop trusting you. And God only knew what happened when a man as desperate as Llewellyn stopped trusting you.

  Then he smiled that frank, open smile again. Li would have believed in that smile if she hadn’t seen the soft chill settle through him a moment ago.

  “You’re hired,” he told the warrant officer.

  “And what about the warrant?”

  “You can eat it for all I care,” Llewellyn said, then handed the piece of paper to McPherson and passed on down the muster line.

  The rest of the crew was straightforward, unproblematic. No paperwork. Li waited for Llewellyn to reach her.

  He never did.

  He stopped before the end of the line, as if she weren’t even standing there. The pale eyes flicked toward her one more time.

  “You’re coming, too,” he told her.

  “I’ve got no fight with you,” Li said. “Just let me off at the next station.”

  “I think we both know that’s not going to happen, Catherine.”

  She held still for a beat, not acknowledging the name, testing him with a neutral expression. No dice.

  “You know my name,” she said.

  He let the implied question hang in the air for a few beats.

  “What else do you know?”

  “About you?” There was that thin, ironic smile again. “At a guess I’d say pretty much everything.”

  “Who told you?”

  Finally he looked straight at her. He really did have wolf’s eyes, she realized: a snowbound arctic gray that was disturbingly pale in a human face. She stared into them. Blinked. Stared again. Gasped a flash of recognition that she immediately denied as impossible.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  And then he smiled Cohen’s smile. A smile so achingly familiar even on this total stranger’s face that she half-knew what his next words would be before he spoke them.

  “I’m your ever-loving husband—or what’s left of him, anyway.”

  In the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in. We may notice three components,

  (a) The initial state of the mind, say at birth,

  (b) The education to which it has been subjected,

  (c) Other experience, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected.

  Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. Presumably the child brain is something like a notebook as one buys it from the stationer’s. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.

  —Alan Turing

  (Llewellyn)

  “You son of a bitch!” Llewellyn snarled when he’d finally tracked the ghost down in its memory palace. “You tricked me into attacking the Titan ship because you knew she was on board!”

  “I’m sorry, are you talking about the Catherine Li resurrect?”

  “Don’t play games with me! You put the lives of my crew at risk for your own personal satisfaction. And what’s worse, you lied to me about it!”

  “Well, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black! Or do I need to remind you about your little charade at the Telegraph Society?”

  The ghost pronounced charade like a Victorian Englishman—to rhyme with Scheherazade—and for some reason that little affectation drove Llewellyn almost wild with anger.

  “Well, since you won’t lower your dignity so far as to ask, I might as well tell you that she’s safely aboard.”

  “Thank you for that, William. I do appreciate it. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that I’d very much like to talk to her.”

  “Over my dead body!”

  “Well, I certainly hope it won’t come to that,” the ghost said placidly. And then, apparently deciding he’d had enough of being yelled at, he plunged Llewellyn straight into his memories of the leadup to Flinders Island.

  It had been one of Ada’s bad days. She had bad days. Terrible days even. She suffered from a kind of lingering spiritual malaise that all Okoro’s skill could neither explain nor cure. Still, she had performed splendidly throughout the shakedown cruise, and it seemed by far the wisest course to just do their best to keep Holmes away from the AI when she was on one of her depressive jags.

  But Ada was worried. Actually, Ada was terrified. She had shut up the great house in Knightsbridge, barricading the door and pulling the curtains over the tall windows. Llewellyn could still hear the noises of the street outside, but they were so muffled that he suspected she had made the servants close and lock the massive shutters. And as they sat over the cold tea things, Ada was a flurry of little fears and panics and irrationalities. Lint on her spoon that was too small for Llewellyn to see. A stain on her dress that was too faint for anyone to notice. Leaden scones, curdled cream, cucumber sandwiches that tasted of chalk, and an Irish maid who simply would not understand that butter left uncovered attracted flies and filth.

  He would talk to Okoro, he decided. Maybe something had gone awry in her Decomposer. Or perhaps it was a simple matter of corrupted biographical files that could be set straight with the kind of discreet coding tweak that Okoro excelled at.

  He stood up to leave—and Ada’s nerves and flutters blossomed into full-bodied panic.

  “It’ll be fine,” Llewellyn said soothingly, trying to disentangle her clu
tching fingers from his lapel.

  “It won’t be! Don’t leave me!”

  “I’m going to go get you help, Ada. Someone to help you feel better.”

  Her face darkened. “I’ve had entirely enough help, thank you very much. I know exactly what that quack doctor will do when you bring him. Foist bitter pills on me and tell me to put it out of mind as if I were a child seeing monsters under the bed.”

  “I’m not saying you’re imagin—”

  “There are monsters under the bed! There’s a sharp-toothed worm eating away at my innards.”

  “There’s a worm?” Llewellyn asked in rising alarm. “Tell me about the worm, Ada.”

  But she didn’t tell him. She merely passed on to the next imaginary terror. “Dragons stalk these halls. Monsters that live in the sewers and come up at night. And they squeeze my heart and my lungs until the blood in my veins moves to their rhythm, until not even my breath belongs to me.”

  Llewellyn felt the blood run cold in his own veins at the sound of these words. The Jabberwocky had said something eerily similar before it had gone irretrievably mad. Was it possible that there was a worm lurking at the heart of his beautiful ship? Was she going to go the way of the Jabberwocky? And whom could he talk to who wouldn’t tell Holmes, and bring down some heavy-handed intervention that would only make matters worse?

  “Sounds like an overclocking problem,” Okoro said when they reviewed the spinstream together that night. “I’d look at the interface between Ada and the shipboard semi-sentient, see if something there looks wonky to us.”

  “Explain that.”

  “I can’t, entirely. Titan’s very stingy with their documentation. They basically insist on our running the ship with a black box in the middle—and just putting back to port if the navigational AI develops any real problems.”

  “Isn’t that taking protecting their source code a little too far?”

  “Not from where they’re sitting.”

  “You mean safely behind a desk at Fleet headquarters?”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  Llewellyn waited, knowing that Okoro was too careful and thorough to skate by on whatever crumbs of information Titan was willing to dole out to him. And that he was using the silence to translate his coder’s understanding of the problem into metaphors that would make sense to Llewellyn.

  “The personality architecture of these new ships is quite unorthodox,” Okoro said when he had finally gathered his thoughts. “There are actually two AIs that run the ship. We only see the navigational AI, Ada in this case, who’s close enough to sentience that Titan needs a controlled-tech exemption to run the genetic algorithms through which she evolved. But Ada is the heart of the ship and not its body. She’s a kernel of potentially sentient code nested inside the semi-sentient that controls what might be called the autonomic functions of the ship. Ada herself runs in a sort of virtual sandbox, and she needs to go through semi-sentient in order to access the shipboard systems, or even her own hardware.”

  Llewellyn had heard something like this back at the shipyards. But now, out in the Drift, with a potentially malfunctioning AI, it took on new meaning.

  “So if something goes wrong, we can yank life support and tactical and give them to the semi-sentient?” That would probably be enough to limp home in the best-case scenario. But the best-case scenario included a larger portion of luck than Llewellyn liked to depend on.

  “We could. But it might cause more problems than it solved. The Titan AIs are embodied AI. It’s a very old machine learning model, and not one that most modern AIs are built on. To say that she’s slaved to the semi-sentient, or that it’s some kind of firewall is almost missing the point. She needs the semi-sentient. It’s her link to the physical world. It’s her link to us. And she needs it in order to continue to learn and function.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Okoro shrugged. “I know what Holmes would do. She’d slave Ada to the semi-sentient and head back to dry dock and hand her over to the Titan cat herders.”

  “And you wouldn’t.”

  “She’s a pretty sweet ship, William. She’s done very well for us. I hate to go all sprockets and sockets on her in the absence of a true crisis.”

  “So what does that mean moving forward?”

  “Let’s try the talking cure. Direct coding is an axe, not a scalpel. And most AIs can fix themselves if you stay off the command line and give them the time and space to do it.”

  “Okay, I agree. But Holmes is going to hit the roof when she sees this feed. So how do we deal with that?”

  Okoro tapped at his keyboard and the feed disintegrated into a fuzz of static.

  “Oh dear,” he said in a placid voice. “How did I manage to do that? I really need to get up to speed on the housekeeping in here and check file permissions before unfortunate problems like this crop up. I’ll write Holmes a memo about it.”

  “So Okoro wrote Holmes a memo,” the ghost said. “And then what happened?”

  “Nothing. Ada seemed fine. We decided it was just a glitch. Not worth bothering about.”

  “And did Okoro manage to get Holmes to agree to that?”

  “He never got a chance to talk to her about it.”

  “Because of Flinders Island, you mean.”

  Llewellyn flinched at the name. He couldn’t stop himself.

  “And what about Avery? Did you tell her?”

  “No. I … I didn’t want to drag her into it. Especially after Ike corrupted the spinstream file.”

  “So you were protecting her. You didn’t want to do anything that might damage her career. That’s very noble of you.”

  “You know, you could stand to dial down the nose-holding disdain a little.”

  The ghost chuckled. “It’s not disdain,” he told Llewellyn. “It’s an affectionate appreciation for the poignant contradictions of the male psyche.”

  “This is incredibly stupid,” Llewellyn told Avery the first time they slept together.

  And she’d agreed—of course she had. She wasn’t a child or a fool not to understand how close to disaster they were sailing. Nor could he honestly say she’d ever led him on, let alone seduced him. Neither of them had done that to the other. It had been a shared insanity, a madness in the blood. And it had ripped through both of them, forcing them face-to-face with a deep current of need that reduced everything they were to the fleeting froth driven ashore by the dark tides of a mighty ocean.

  “Maybe I had the right idea before,” she said. “Maybe if we just get it out of our systems.”

  But even as she said it, Llewellyn knew better. The smell, the taste, the feel of her, was stealing into his blood like a drug. And he’d known. He’d known it was going to end worse than badly. He’d known they were walking off a cliff together, and there was no happy ending at the bottom of the long drop. He’d known that neither of them was ever going to get over it. He’d known it all, with a perfect certainty that even her final betrayal hadn’t been able to erase.

  And Avery had known it, too, even though she’d never spoken of it. He could feel it in the way she held him, in the way she lapsed into long, oblique silences during their times together or avoided talking altogether.

  They had been weaving an imaginary universe around themselves, building a memory palace of their own that was every bit as constrained and constricted and sandboxed as the one Ada lived in. But it wasn’t Holmes or Titan or even the Navy who held the keys to their prison. It was the Drift. The Drift that swallowed ships and people like a great snake swallowing its own tail: chewing its way through blood and treasure and sanity to produce nothing but more war, more death, more ravening hunger. The Drift that would never belong to them no matter who won the war, because they weren’t going to live through it.

  So they had retreated from the real world into a carefully circumscribed and blinkered imaginary one. And they had pretended to have a future there, knowing that they could only pretend for so long, and that
sooner or later they would crash headlong into reality in the form of some burning datum, incoming at relativistic speeds, that would hole them to hard vac if they didn’t take evasive action.

  But they hadn’t known that the fatal impact would come from within, not from a Syndicate bioship lying in wait forty klicks off some lonely Drift entry point. And they hadn’t known how soon it would hit them, far sooner than either of them expected it to: with Ada’s first blood in a lonely backwater of the Drift called Flinders Island.

  Flinders Island wasn’t an island, or even a star system. It was more like an upwelling of an intergalactic sandbar: a dark intergalactic structure that could only be seen by the way it deformed stars and other objects that passed through it. Point Boomerang’s namesake galaxy was in the process of passing through the sandbar eleven thousand light-years farther down the Drift, and it owed its unmistakable shape to the gravitational blowback of the ancient and ongoing collision. At Flinders, the vast dark structure had captured a once-grand nebula from a neighboring galaxy and shredded it into mare’s tails and smoke rings that glowed wanly as they scattered the light of stars too distant and insignificant to have any names that were more than naked identity numbers. To Llewellyn Flinders looked less like an island than it did a flock of spectral geese wheeling and side-slipping to keep formation as they struggled through a stormy sky under black thunderheads.

  “What are we supposed to do there?” Avery had asked incredulously when they got their orders.

  “There’s a Syndicate hunter-killer picking off civilian shipping in the neighborhood. Fleet thinks it’s sitting off the Flinders Island entry point, hiding in the dust and intercepting local scattercast traffic. We’re supposed to trawl the dust and find it.”

  “That’s going to require some delicate spectroscopy,” Ada pointed out.

  Llewellyn had taken to letting Ada listen in on tactical discussions, despite Holmes’s disapproval. And when Holmes bitched about it, he’d pointed out—quite reasonably, he thought—that Ada’s very existence was classified, along with any even remotely current information about the state of UN AI design and the scope and mission of the entire AI design facility at New Allegheny. So if Ada ever started talking to the press, worrying about mission details would be like worrying about the fleas drowning when your dog fell overboard.