Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “So you’re a cop,” he said in a flat, impersonal voice.

  “Yes.”

  “You out on official business?”

  Li started to answer but Dolniak cut her off.

  “No.”

  “So you just figure your detective’s badge gives you a get-out-of-curfew free card? Is that it?”

  Dolniak didn’t answer. And when Li glanced in his direction she saw him standing with his hands at his sides and his eyes fixed politely somewhere around the squad leader’s left elbow.

  “Are you gonna answer me?”

  “I’m sorry. I misunderstood the curfew law. We were told departmentally that it didn’t apply to us.”

  “In the performance of official duties.”

  “I understand now,” Dolniak said quietly, his eyes still fixed on the man’s elbow. “I’ll make sure to remember that in future.”

  Li expected the squad leader to back off then, but instead he stepped toe to toe with Dolniak and started talking right into the larger man’s face. “I’d really fucking like to bring you in. I wonder what I’d find out if I did. I would have cashed out the entire local police force the day we arrived. But no, that was too confrontational. We didn’t want to create a Dead Ender Syndrome. And now you guys are always out late and up early. And the last five guys I’ve sent home in body bags took the trip courtesy of official police-issue thirty-eights.”

  Li stirred restlessly beside Dolniak. The squad leader’s eyes flashed toward her, white-rimmed with anger and fear. In that instant she knew that Dolniak had read the situation right. Nothing she did could help. And any move at all from either of them would merely add fuel to an already explosive situation.

  For the next several minutes, she watched Dolniak stand, head bowed, patiently enduring one intrusive question after another. He reminded her of a draft horse standing for the farrier. But she saw the anger in the set of his broad shoulders—something different than she’d seen before. It was the dangerous anger of a quiet man. And there was something else, simmering beneath the anger, that had nothing at all to do with the careful, controlled, cautious cop she knew him to be. She’d seen that look before. And seeing it in Dolniak’s calm, steady face started a slow burn of foreboding in her belly that told her things on New Allegheny were going to get as ugly as they possibly could get.

  He was still keyed up when they got back to her hotel room—enough so that she invited him in for coffee. She had planned to see him politely off in the lobby, for many reasons, personal as well as professional. But there was a dangerous, simmering look about him, and she didn’t like the idea of sending a man that angry back onto the streets to run into more trouble.

  Dolniak had barely spared a glance at her hotel room the last time he’d been there, but this time he gave it a narrow-eyed inspection. Watching his glance tick from the plush carpets and furniture to the high ceilings and the glistening windows, she felt suddenly guilty at the sheer off-world luxury of the place. He made no comment, however. Just walked to the door and stepped out onto the balcony to look at the nighttime view of the Crucible.

  “Those fires never go out, you know.”

  She stepped out onto the narrow balcony with him, peering through the haze at the orange glow of the blast furnaces.

  “They can’t go out. They heat the furnaces to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. If you let the fires go out, the walls crack. No steel. No mill. Nothing. There was one strike, when I was a kid, where the mill owners threatened to shut down the furnaces and move operations off-planet. The steelmen broke into the mill, took it over, and kept the furnaces running in the face of hired guns, police.”

  Dolniak laughed softly. It was an odd laugh, nothing she’d heard out of him before. She looked sideways at him and saw his usually placid face lit by the glow of the blast furnaces—and by some emotion that ran deeper and fiercer even than his anger at the mercenaries.

  “The owners couldn’t understand it,” he told her. “They thought they were fighting about money. So what were these guys doing, risking their lives in order to do a dangerous, shitty job that no sane person would want and with no hope of a paycheck anywhere in sight? But it’s never really about money for steelmen. It’s never about anything but the steel.”

  What was that about? Router/​Decomposer asked when Dolniak was gone.

  “Oh, nothing. We got stopped by a patrol in the street. He was angry about it. Who wouldn’t be?”

  That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.

  Li muted her internals, walked into the bathroom, and started getting ready for bed.

  “Go ahead and ignore me,” the AI said, his voice shifting seamlessly to the bathroom’s livewall.

  “Can you not talk to me in here, please? Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t need company in the crapper.”

  “Then don’t run into the bathroom when I try to ask you a personal question.”

  “Personal? What’s personal?”

  “That cop, that’s what. And don’t try to tell me there’s nothing going on there. He wasn’t just here for the view. If I can see it, a brain-damaged mynah bird could see it.”

  “I don’t even know what a mynah bird is. Where the hell do you come up with these things?”

  “From my boundless store of biophilic trivia. And don’t change the subject. Are you getting involved?”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Well, he’s not!”

  Li set her jaw and stared at the floor between her toes. “That’s not my problem.”

  Router/​Decomposer sounded more disgusted than she would have thought an AI talking through a low-grade hotel bathroom intercom could sound. “That’s the most disingenuous thing I’ve ever heard you say. I’m disappointed in you!”

  “That’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard you say. And, at the moment, I’m bored by you.”

  Both of them paused to regroup, caught in the intricate web of memory that tied them to the years when they had both been part of Cohen’s larger personality architecture. Li had never been fully immersed in the Emergent’s complex and shifting web of associations; even a wire job as thorough as hers was wouldn’t allow a human that deep into AI territory. But she had gone deep enough. She knew things about Router/​Decomposer that no other human would ever know—that no human would understand even if they did know about them. And he knew things about her that … well, best not to think about that.

  She thumbed open the toothpaste, spread it on the brush, began brushing her teeth with savage energy.

  You can tell me about it, Caitlyn. I understand. I understand more than you think I do …

  Why? Because you’ve been spying on me again?

  Once, long ago, she’d caught him following her. He’d told her that she was worth keeping an eye on—that he was interested in what she was turning into. It had sounded like a compliment at the time, albeit an unnerving one. But now she wondered.

  Are you just playing him along?

  Would it be better if I was?

  He didn’t answer.

  She washed out her mouth and slammed the toothbrush back onto the counter. “Yeah, well, I guess neither of us is living up to our Best Selves at the moment, are we?”

  (Catherine)

  THE DRIFT

  Within an hour of jumping into Point Boomerang, Li knew that the news coming in over the comm was bad. That much she could see just in the faces of the officers coming off bridge duty. But she didn’t realize quite how bad it was until she overheard Okoro telling a midshipman that they weren’t going to be putting in at Boomerang because fucking Avery had gotten there before them.

  Unfortunately, how close fucking Avery was to catching them was turning into a serious personal safety issue for Li in a way that went well beyond the overall risks of the game for the rest of the crew. By the time she had been on board for a week, she was starting to notice the simmering resentment, the whispered conversations that ground to an awkward halt when s
he appeared, the eyes that were quickly turned elsewhere when she turned around and caught their owners staring at her. At first she thought it had to do with Cohen. But then she realized that it wasn’t Cohen that people were connecting her to at all, but Avery. And that every time Avery hit an entry point ahead of them or jumped into a Drift node too close behind them, the whispers got louder.

  Still, when she managed to ignore the unspoken threat that her crew mates might decide to airlock her if they couldn’t shake Avery any other way, it was amazing how much being on the Christina felt like being on a perfectly normal Navy ship. There was the same endless round of mind-numbing, body-depleting labor—even more than usual, since the pirates were running the Christina with what amounted to a skeleton crew by Navy standards. There was the same buttoned-down, no-nonsense discipline. The same familiar Navy routines. The same familiar Navy jargon. The same self-satisfied Navy attitude. The same familiar infantryman’s feeling of being at best a fifth wheel and at worst a prisoner.

  No access to shipboard security or operational systems. No access to realtime news about the unfolding and potentially hostile situation beyond the tin-can-thin walls of the hab ring. Nothing but low-level civvy access—and the knowledge that while you were twiddling your thumbs, your fate was being decided by a bunch of space jockeys who thought war was something you did from nine to five and before you cleaned up and put on your whites to report to the officers’ mess.

  Li hated it.

  And she didn’t just hate it theoretically. She hated it as a career soldier who’d spent endless months chewing her nails on board Navy transports while invasion fleets assembled with glacial slowness and then idled their engines in the dark reaches of space while the admirals and generals knifed one another in the back in order to be first in line for a promotion if things went right, and out of the line of fire if they didn’t.

  But this time was worse. Because this time it wasn’t some hapless Periphery merchant marine lying in wait for them out in the dark beyond the ship’s hull. It was Astrid Avery, manning the bridge of a state-of-the-art ship of the line and backed by the full firepower of the UN Navy.

  Another wrangle between Llewellyn and Doyle took place, with Sital serving in her habitual role as tiebreaker. The Christina retreated to a Drift entry point well beyond Boomerang’s sensor range and hung fire, eavesdropping on comm traffic and waiting for victims. There were no safe ports left for them now that Avery had made it to Boomerang, and they were slipping into the downward spiral of having to attack every time they needed air and food and water. The veterans in the crew knew what all pirates know: that this was the beginning of the end. A pirate ship without a safe home port is like a shark: If it stops swimming it suffocates. Without a safe home port they could never relax, never retrench or refit. They couldn’t even retreat, because their very survival hung on a string of one attack after another after another.

  The next weeks were ones Li would gladly have deleted from the span of her natural life—if this still was her natural life. With alarming speed they devolved into a cat-and-mouse game with Astrid Avery.

  The Christina would attack—usually some defenseless merchant marine ship. They’d strip their prey of air, water, and equipment. And then they’d tuck their tail between their legs and run like hell. With every attack their very survival hung on a knife’s edge. With every attack Avery got there faster and the margin of safety got slimmer. And every time Avery took a chunk out of their hide, the mood on Llewellyn’s ship darkened and the rumors about spies and mutiny ran quicker around the lower decks.

  Meanwhile, though Li remained more prisoner on the ship than crew member, Llewellyn seemed compelled to keep talking to her. Their conversations were cagy, uncomfortable, and often unsatisfying. And they were dangerous, too. Sital was more tightly wound than ever now that Avery was breathing down the backs of their necks, and every minute that Llewellyn spent with Li was a slap in Sital’s face.

  But Llewellyn either didn’t see it—or didn’t want to see it.

  “How much longer do you think she’s going to put up with this?” Li asked one night after Sital wordlessly delivered her to Llewellyn’s door for a late dinner.

  “Who? Sital? Don’t worry about her. She’s just protective. She thinks you’re going to hurt me.”

  “Oh? And what do you think?”

  “I think she’s probably right.”

  He smiled at that—sort of. He had two smiles, she was coming to realize. One was the sweet, gap-toothed little boy’s smile. The other one was a sort of automatic gesture of politeness: a cool, polite curve of the lips, carefully calibrated to satisfy social requirements while giving out as little real human warmth as possible. She thought of the two expressions as his real smile and his nominal smile. Or at least she hoped the first one was the real one. Who could tell? He probably didn’t even know anymore.

  The man’s emotional remove was infuriating. You wanted to poke him with a stick sometimes just to see if he’d bite.

  And yet there was someone in there. The man oozed charisma despite all his attempts to scrub away any trace of individuality. You could see people orienting to him whenever he walked into a room, like iron filings lining up with a magnetic field—often without even knowing it. And in his unguarded moments, Li caught tantalizing glimpses of the private man … the one in whom Cohen’s meme pods had found such fertile ground.

  “You know she’s in love with you, don’t you?”

  He just rolled his eyes. “Sital’s already been married and divorced once. Trust me, she knows better.”

  Li raised an eyebrow. “You ever been married?”

  “No. I’ve only ever been close twice. And that was by accident.”

  She laughed. “Sounds like there’s a story there.”

  “Not really. Just socially incompetent. The last woman I almost accidentally married accused me of having borderline Asperger’s syndrome.”

  Li raised an eyebrow. “And was she right?”

  “I hide it well. But under hard interrogation I suppose I’d have to admit to having alarmingly neat closets. And according to some critics, also a compulsion toward excessive ironing.”

  “Oh? I assumed that was just your upright captain’s demeanor.” She stretched idly. “So why did you enlist? Just to get off a shitcan colonial planet like me? Or was there some nobler reason?”

  He smiled a bitter, cynical, wounded smile. “What is it they always say in beauty pageants? I wanted to make a difference.”

  “Oh,” Li said. “You’re one of those.”

  “Not anymore!”

  They drank to that, then nursed their beers for a moment in silence.

  “I take it you never were?” Llewellyn asked eventually. “There never was a save-the-world version of Catherine Li? Not even in the prehistory before the joint memories with Cohen start?”

  Li snorted.

  “Well, I confess I feel very inferior. But what can one do? It’s probably a result of my sheltered rural upbringing. In my defense, however, it only took a decade in the Navy to get over it.”

  They sat over their beers in silence for a few moments. It should have been an uncomfortable silence, but it wasn’t. Llewellyn might not trust her—indeed, he’d made it quite clear all along that he didn’t—but he had Cohen’s memories. Some vital part of him was Cohen. And that meant that he was the closest thing to a friend Li had left in the universe. And, in spite of all his attempts to deny it, she was the same thing to him.

  “Cohen on the other hand,” Llewellyn said, picking up where the conversation had left off a few moments ago, “was a hopeless world saver.”

  Li didn’t like the was but she forced herself to ignore it. “Is that what he was doing when he got killed?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  They looked at each other for a moment, each realizing that the other was after exactly the same information.

  Llewellyn laughed uncomfortably. “I really thought you knew. I don’t
remember anything after he shipped out to New Allegheny.”

  “Nothing about ALEF even?”

  Llewellyn looked blank for a few heartbeats, as if he was searching for a memory and not finding it where he expected it to be. Then he shook his head. “No. I know there was something going on with ALEF. And then I keep getting all these snippets that read like a math book … Cantor and Leibniz … Infinities upon infinities …” A curious look came over Llewellyn’s face and his voice took on a singsong quality. “A tree made of numbers that grows down out of infinity and back up again.”

  He shook his head, snapping out of the mild fugue state he’d slipped into. “I don’t know. I can’t make any sense of those memories. And I asked Ike about it, too, and he didn’t have a clue, either.”

  “Because it’s raw feed,” Li explained, recognizing a feeling she’d long been familiar with. “You’re remembering stuff that happened when he was interfacing with other Emergents, at his native clocking speeds. Or more likely internal traffic between different autonomous agents within Cohen himself. You’ve got the data, but you don’t have the bandwidth to process it. Your mind can’t grasp that, so you internalize it as memory loss.”

  “Is that what that is?” he asked curiously. “That tip-of-the-tongue feeling?”

  She nodded.

  “And what about the fevers? Did you get those, too?”

  Li’s breath caught in her chest. “Are you running fevers?”

  Llewellyn didn’t answer.

  “You’re playing with fire. You could die. Do you understand that?”

  Silence.

  “Come on, William! I’m not going to settle for the silent treatment. This is too important.”

  “I know what you want,” Llewellyn said finally. His voice was tight, with anxiety or anger, she couldn’t tell which. “Don’t think I don’t know. And don’t think I don’t feel for you. I do. I can even see that you have a … a sort of moral claim on your side.” He gestured impatiently. “Why skate around the reality? I have no claim at all. I don’t have a leg to stand on here. But I have this ship, and this crew. And the only thing keeping them—and me—alive is Cohen.”