Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “Anyway,” the ghost said, passing over that odd internal moment of reckoning as lightly as a child scampering through a graveyard, “back to Lewis and Alice and the Rose E’er Blooming. Imagine the multiverse as a rose, a rose with an uncountable infinity of petals. When Alice and Lewis run their Schrödinger’s cat experiment, they create multiple branchings, each of which can be envisioned as a single petal. Until a classical message passes between Alice and Lewis—until someone does something that forces the wave to collapse—they both continue to exist in a single universe in which the cat is both alive and dead. But the box is opened, and the cat is found alive or dead, and the message travels along the stretch of spacetime that separates the two of them, their superimposed universes delaminate from each other to create new membranes in the multiverse, each of which is its own universe with its own infinite quantum branchings. So, one universe has given birth to two—or, more realistically, an infinity—which continue to delaminate from each other until they achieve total separation throughout Lewis and Alice’s future light cones.”

  Llewellyn followed this as far as it went. But he was having trouble seeing how it applied to naval tactics, and his face must have shown it.

  “You’re looking at it the wrong way around,” the ghost told him. “You’re thinking of quantum branchings of the multiverse as something that happens to us. You need to start thinking of them as something we do to the universe. All of us. Every person, every mind, every body, every stone and leaf of grass and dust mote in the universe. We are all making new worlds at every moment, worlds upon worlds, universes upon universes, infinities upon infinities. Do you think in all those infinities I can’t find one where we win and our enemies lose?”

  “But how? You can’t possibly run those calculations.”

  “Can you run the calculations for a game of chess?”

  “No.”

  “But you can still play it. And you’re better than most players. And a few players are better than you. And a very few players are a lot better than you. Even though none of them can crunch the numbers any better than you can.”

  “So what then? What is it you do? How do you know when to jump and where to jump to?”

  “You just do. For one thing you only count the universes that count.”

  “How can you tell which ones count?”

  “Well, not that they don’t all count, but … some of them are just irrelevant. We don’t care about them. They have nothing interesting to say to us.”

  “You make it sound as if it’s some kind of subjective aesthetic judgment.”

  “Well, it is … isn’t it? Elegant ideas, elegant equations, is there really that much difference between the two? Look at it this way. In my favorite Evelyn Waugh novel one of the characters is held hostage in the Amazonian jungle and forced to read the entire collected works of Charles Dickens aloud to his captor. In some innumerable infinity of parallel universes I myself am being held hostage on, let’s say a remote space station by a demented fellow AI. Now if he’s making me read Dashiell Hammett to him, so what? That situation is entirely lacking in aesthetic interest. But if he’s making me read Evelyn Waugh? Ah! Now that, I think we can both agree, is a universe in which my worldline would possess a certain level of poignant irony. Or, put another way, it would be relevant to me—and not merely contiguous. And that’s just what I’m looking for, in a mathematical sense, when I’m playing at being NavComp. Connections. Structures. Frameworks. Echoes and counterpoints. Slices of spacetime where our worldline brushes against parallel worldlines in ways that strike me as useful or interesting. And, yes, it is a subjective judgment. And, yes, what’s interesting to me might not be interesting to another AI. And, yes, it’s a kind of mathematical thinking that’s as much art as science. But when you’re good enough at it, all math is art as well as science. Of course it is. It’s the art of reducing the world to numbers in a Universal Turing Machine—just the way the programmer of a Jacquard loom reduces paintings to numbers on punch cards.”

  Llewellyn’s head jerked up, and he drew in a sharp breath. “That’s exactly how Ada explained it.”

  “Of course it is.” The ghost’s head cocked sideways in a theatrical, slightly precious gesture of bemusement. “Who do you think I learned it from?”

  “You talked to her? And you didn’t tell me? What the hell do you think you’re playing a—”

  “Not that Ada, you idiot. The real one. Ada Lovelace. The woman whose name she took. The woman who wrote what amounted to the first mathematical description of computer programming. Don’t you see that’s what we’re talking about? Information. Information is what our memories are made of. Information is what our minds are made of. Information is what our genes and our immortality are made of. That’s what the cosmos is, William. And that’s all it is. The multiverse is just a creative exercise in mathematics: the manipulation of symbols, the enumeration of the Names of God, the art of wrestling meaning from ciphers.”

  “You make it sound so heroic it’s hard to imagine you being involved in it.”

  The ghost relinquished his wineglass, which popped like a soap bubble the moment he let go of it, and clapped mockingly. “Nice to see you developing a sense of humor. It’s good for the complexion. And you’re looking a little peaked lately, if you don’t mind my mentioning it.”

  “I’m serious. Are you dragging me off on some religious crusade?”

  “Jacob wrestled angels. I wrestle infinitudes.” The wineglass reappeared. “Just call us Chosen, Incorporated.”

  “Better than Titan, Incorporated.”

  The lingering smile on the ghost’s face shut off like a neutron star spinning into its final collapse. “Yes, I believe we were just talking about the lovely Miss Holmes when my minds began to wander? Go on. It was so amusing I can barely wait to hear more.”

  “What do you want to know about her?” Llewellyn asked, feeling an appalling tide of exhaustion and despair sweep over him.

  “No, actually,” the ghost said, changing tack as if he realized he was in danger of pushing Llewellyn too far. “Let’s talk a little more about Ada’s memory palace.”

  “Why? I mean, why are you so interested in it?”

  “I’m trying to make sense of it, to put it together in my own mind so … so that Ada has a place to go to make sense of herself.” The ghost laughed softly. “If that makes any sense to you at all, which I very much doubt it does. It barely even makes sense to me.”

  It was funny, Llewellyn thought, how the ghost said Ada. As if she were a person and not a ship. And it didn’t even know yet. Though Llewellyn supposed he had no way of knowing what the ghost knew and didn’t know. Maybe it had already ravaged his memories, picking through his most intimate secrets. Maybe it didn’t need him to unlock that door. Maybe this was just another of the manipulative games it so doted on.

  “Her memory palace was smaller than this. More self-contained. More … predictable.”

  “Naturally.” The ghost smiled a smile that Llewellyn could only call feline. “Because in this memory, at least, Ada hadn’t yet realized that she was one of a kind and no mere device.”

  After the death of the Romola, Holmes went completely ballistic.

  “What did she want to do?” the ghost asked. “Did she say specifically?”

  “Not as such.”

  “But the lines of battle were pretty well drawn, weren’t they? You, Sital, and Okoro for the talking cure. Holmes for a quick sail back to dry dock where Titan would either cycle the hardware or slave Ada to a semi-sentient. And what about Avery? Did she side with you or with Holmes?”

  “It still wasn’t that black-and-white,” Llewellyn protested. “Everything was in flux. No one was saying any of the things you’re talking about out loud yet. Hell, I didn’t even know you could slave a shipboard AI to a semi-sentient. And leaving any moral qualms aside, I still think you’d be risking the life of every man on board to even try navigating the Drift on a kluged-up system like that.
I just didn’t see what you’re seeing when you look at the memories. And I’m not sure I had reason to see it. I … I thought we’d pull out of the tailspin, find some accommodation we could all live with. I didn’t think it was really going to come down to a fight between me and Holmes for control of the ship.”

  But if the final confrontation with Holmes was still a distant thunderhead, the fights with Avery were daily and immediate. And they had been terrible. They had been the kind of fights where you said things you could never take back and made accusations you would never be forgiven for.

  Avery couldn’t seem to let it go. And Llewellyn … Llewellyn could feel himself wanting to leap to Ada’s defense, wanting to protect her, wanting to stop what he saw was coming. The need was all raw emotion with him, the human instinct to leap to a drowning child’s rescue, to pull a blind person out from in front of a bus, to rescue a bird with a broken wing. He said the word, but he hadn’t thought about what actually helping Ada might cost him. He hadn’t even really attached a specific meaning to the word.

  “We can’t help her,” Avery said, low and fast and fierce as if the very walls were listening. “That’s Holmes’s job.”

  “You know what Holmes’s idea of help would be!”

  “And so what? She’s the professional. You think you know better than her?”

  “I think I have a heart. And morals.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? That I don’t? You think I’m some kind of monster?”

  “I didn’t say that, Astrid.”

  “You didn’t have to. I can see it in your eyes. You’re already despising me. And you have no right. You have no fucking right to look at me that way. Not when you’re playing footsie with Ada while the fucking ship burns down around you!”

  Llewellyn actually stepped back at the expression on her face. He felt as shocked as if she’d reached out and slapped him.

  “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You’re jealous of her.”

  Avery’s beautiful face twisted into something halfway between disgust and fury. “Don’t go there, William. Just don’t. I’m doing my job. And part of my job is making sure this ship doesn’t turn into the next Jabberwocky.”

  “Ada’s not the Jabberwocky and you know it!”

  “Do I? Do I really? Holmes gets to sit behind the screen and run your training sessions, but I don’t have the clearance, do I? I have to take your word for it. I know all about what happens when you’re in there with her.”

  “When I am in there with her? Listen to yourself! You can barely even say her name anymore!”

  Avery straightened her spine and hardened her jaw. Llewellyn watched the hot anger drain out of her eyes, along with any last trace of life or light or forgiveness.

  “I’m going to talk to Sital and Okoro about this, William. That’s my job, and I intend to do it. And now I’m going to tell you something that I’m only going to say once, so you really need to listen to it: If you go there—if you make this about you—anything there ever was between us is over.”

  As it turned out, they could have skipped that fight. Holmes stepped in before Avery even had a chance to talk to Sital and Okoro and took the ship back to dry dock. And Holmes was there when the maintenance reports were filed and the Titan cat herders arrived and Okoro read them the passwords—with a blank look on his face that wasn’t just about accessing the high security content on his AI doc’s firewalled Cantor modules—and handed them the keys to the kingdom.

  By then the only option Llewellyn had left was asking for his orders in writing. Which he duly did. And which duly led to his being cut out of the loop from that moment forward—and getting to twiddle his thumbs uselessly while his first officer and his bridge crew and his AI officer decided the fate of his ship without him.

  And that was it. Holmes swept out of the room without even looking at them. When Avery finally met Llewellyn’s stare, she looked almost as sick at heart as he felt.

  “I’m sorry. Whatever I said before I … I didn’t want this to happen.”

  “You didn’t want what to happen, Astrid? What comes next? And don’t hide behind Titan’s trade secrets. I think I have a right to know. Are they going to help her or are they just going to cycle the fucking hardware?”

  The look on Avery’s face was all the answer he needed.

  The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

  —Georg Cantor

  (Caitlyn)

  The Crucible’s boundary wasn’t marked on any map, but it was tangible nonetheless. She could feel the change in the air. The change in the noise and bustle and energy of the streets. The endless vistas of high gray walls and vast stock car yards and looming chimneys. The sudden and total absence of women. The choking smoke that seemed to roll off the very streets. And above all the noise and stench and red-hot glow of the blast furnaces that burned day and night because they were so hot that allowing them to cool would shatter them.

  If Carrick and Glen Hazel were the Pit’s heaven, and Shadyside its wasting purgatory, then the Crucible was the inner ring of Hell. The Crucible was poor, like Shadyside. But in every other possible way the two districts were dead opposites. The Crucible encompassed the great flat crescent of dry ground on the sunny side of Monongahela Pit. It boasted the most consistent year-round solar gain values, the most accessible bedrock, and the easiest access to the spaceport’s launchpads and mass boosters. And it was swept by brutal year-round winds that wafted industrial pollution out of the lowlands and up over Mount Monongahela’s barren summit.

  The Crucible was the engine that drove Monongahela Pit, both economically and politically. Here were the steel mills, and the miscellaneous heavy industry that fueled the local economy, and the preprocessing foundries that supplied the orbital ceramsteel factories with the components of the modern era’s zero-g-manufactured white gold. And here, too, were the steelworkers and stokers and linemen who epitomized New Allegheny. A blazing inferno, its flames stoked night and day by broad-shouldered giants—with politics to match. If New Allegheny was a powder keg, then the Crucible was its lit and smoldering fuse.

  The steel mills were built to the scale of the steel they rolled, not the people who worked in them. By the time Li found the front gate of Mercer, she had walked past miles of railroad sidings, blank gray foundry walls, and open storage sheds.

  We need to leave, Router/​Decomposer said, as categorically as if he were stating an unspoken law of the universe. That woman must have been wrong. Korchow can’t possibly be here.

  “Why not?”

  “Because. Just look around you.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Then listen.”

  “For what? I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s my point. I’m squeezed down to a single fiber optic, for God’s sake. I can barely think, let alone talk to you. I’d kill myself before I went to ground in this hellhole.”

  Li raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer him. Korchow couldn’t possibly be here. Not we shouldn’t be here. Let alone you shouldn’t be here. It was one of those AI comments that she had no answer for. A little shaft of light penetrating the darkness. A disturbing hint that somewhere in that unplumbed darkness of his teeming networks Router/​Decomposer thought of himself as evolutionarily closer to Korchow than to Li or the other poor lost souls of the Crucible.

  She wasn’t sure what bothered her more about that realization: the fact that Router/​Decomposer thought it, or the fact that his thinking it still bothered her.

  After the long walk along the sidings, the factory gate was almost an anticlimax: a narrow door surrounded by barbed wire and guard sheds and loitering out-of-work steelmen. Some entrepreneurial spirit had cobbled together a coffee shed across the street out of what looked like mostly old shipping crates,
and its open-grill kerosene heater was a splash of warmth and color in the landscape. But other than that, the whole scene was as hard and grim and gray as the racked steel in the freight yards.

  Li shouldered through the listless ranks of the day-work pickup line and made her way to the guardhouse. They let her in without comment when she flashed an out-of-date military ID, and a harried-looking clerk in the front office looked up the shift roster and sent her to Foundry Five.

  “Who you looking for?” the foreman asked when she got there. He didn’t imagine for a moment that she worked at the mill, or that she had any business there at all except finding someone who did.

  “Kusak.”

  “Oh, him,” he said in a flat, unfriendly voice. It could have been the same brute bigotry Li had heard from Korchow’s landlady, but somehow this felt different. And she didn’t think it was simply anti-construct sentiment, either. More likely it was that subtle discomfort that almost everyone displayed around Syndicate constructs even if they didn’t know what they were: an instinctive withdrawing from beings that, however subtle the external differences, were no longer even arguably human.

  He jerked his chin toward a second man, still bent over the blast furnace. He was smaller than most of the others—not short, but slight of build, and wiry in the way middle-aged men become when they’ve seen too many years of scant food and hard labor. His hair was a gray-speckled brown, and cut cheaply, like every other middle-aged steelman’s hair. His overalls were dirty, patched, nondescript. Li would have passed him by in the street without a second glance.

  “Korchow,” she said coming up behind him.

  He didn’t hear her. The din of the foundry would have drowned out any normal voice, and when she got closer she saw that he was wearing earplugs. She tapped him on the shoulder.