Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  She switched her optical feed to the ship’s forward sensor array. It felt like being stripped naked and strapped to the ship’s bow. The Drift pulsed and flowed around her in the psychedelic hues of the false-color imaging that was more real to most Drift runners—because they spent more time looking at it—than the invisible reality outside the windows. Within and behind the Drift the sky was shredded by streaking pin-wheels of blue- and red-shifted light: the stars of the deep field, spun into a carnival light show by a NavComp that was too focused on the fleeing ship in its sights to run the deep field imaging calculations that would have adjusted for their chaotic tumble through space.

  Their prey was two thousand kilometers ahead of them—or five human heartbeats away from them, given the blistering speed at which both ships were hurtling through the system. Li had only the vaguest amateur’s grasp of naval tactics, but even she could see that the fleeing captain had realized his rescuers were anything but—and was doing everything to escape from their clutches that the cold, hard laws of gravity and fuel consumption would allow.

  The system’s star was a tired-looking brown dwarf with a string of planets flung out along its ecliptic plane. It was a scant two million kilometers away, and the freighter was steering a course that would take it deep into the clutches of the sun’s gravity well. His line of approach would slingshot him around the star, with the pirate ship close on his heels. And when they came around on the backside—in the brief window of time when the raging magnetic storm of the sun obscured both ships’ sensors—he would fling his ship off the ecliptic in a brutal change of course.

  At that delta-V, even a slight deviation in heading would send the two ships hurtling apart so quickly that it could take hours or even days for the pirates to get back into attack position again. Time for help to arrive, or for the freighter captain to limp to the closest entry point.

  The faces of the boarding party around her reflected the same realization she had just reached: If the freighter made it to the star before they caught him, the game was off and they were going to have to keep running on empty until another ship drifted into their kill zone.

  Li thought of Llewellyn and Sital up on the bridge. And Cohen locked in the nebulous mazes of the NavComp like a genie in a Klein bottle. Obviously they must all be pushing the ship and themselves to the breaking point. But still the gap between them and the freighter was closing with agonizing slowness. They would close the gap, eventually, with mathematical certainty; the Christina’s flaring ram-scoops could boost her through accelerations that no tramp freighter could even contemplate. The only question was whether they would run out of turf before they won the race.

  The curve of the star’s mantle was now a looming monstrosity.

  Intercept in four hundred seconds, the ship murmured.

  On the externals Li could see the mooring lines freeing themselves from the hull. They groped toward the fleeing freighter like the tentacles of some silver-carapaced sea monster, their bulbous ends pulsing with an obscene sucking motion. It was hard to imagine them as machine rather than organism. It was also hard to imagine that they could actually be strong enough to hold an entire ship captive.

  “How do the grapples work?” Li asked the pirate next to her.

  “Monkey shit. Standard salvage nano.”

  Mooring lines out, the ship murmured. Li switched her optic feed to externals and saw them closing in on the hapless freighter, chasing it along the slow curve of the star’s vast gravity well. Sixty-eight meters off docking position. Five … four … three …

  And clang. The two ships came together, ricocheted off each other, and bounced back, held by the nano-grapples.

  “Heave to!” came the call, and the umbilical snaked between the two ships to grip the outer airlock door of their prey with biomorphic fingers. This was a thing Li had never seen before—Syndicate tech, stolen on some earlier raid—and she watched in disgusted fascination as the froglike digits suckered onto the other ship, insinuated themselves into its vulnerable crevices, and forced it open.

  The fighting was hard and merciless. The cargo spindle’s crew had decided to fight, God only knew why. And for the AIs it was always a battle to the death, with no quarter given. So they fought down clanging galleyways and maintenance tunnels, inch by bloody inch. At first they fought for the things they’d started the fight over—air, water, a sheltering hull between soft bodies and hard vacuum. And then they fought to win, never mind what. And then they fought not to die.

  Li could tell when the tide of the battle turned, because she could see her fellow pirates fall around her. There was something particularly appalling about the way an AI killed. You could reason until you were blue in the face that it was a death in battle just like getting hit point blank with a shotgun blast. But then you actually saw it happen. You saw the blank look come over a friend’s face. You saw the body go slack and slump to the floor. You watched them flatline on your head-up display, without getting off a shot, without any warning, without a chance even to defend or avenge themselves.

  And suddenly, no matter what you told yourself, it didn’t feel like seeing someone die in battle. It felt like watching an execution. And you stopped thinking of your own shipboard AI as a soldier—and started hearing the voice of an executioner every time it spoke to you.

  Despite all their training and discipline, the pirates lapsed into confusion when the tide of the battle turned on them. There was a moment of collective paralysis, long enough for two more men to die in. And then the sudden flash of comprehension.

  Avery.

  The word whispered along the head-up channel, and then quickened to a panicked drumbeat. A moment later someone locked onto the feed of the ship’s external sensors and threw that up on the channel, and they could all see the vicious silver needle of the Ada slicing out of the asteroid belt of the system’s second planet, where she’d been holding at cold iron, all systems powered down, to trick them into dismissing her as just another lump of steel-rich rock.

  And then it wasn’t even a fight anymore—let alone the easy victory it should have been. Then it was just a bunch of frightened people running for their lives.

  Li was almost at the boarding umbilical when the Ada finally got to her.

  One minute she was in realspace, laying down covering fire for a leapfrogging retreat and hoping the newer recruits’ nerves would hold long enough to complete the maneuver. The next moment she was sandboxed in some streamspace blackout zone, dangling in midair, hanging from the jaws of something that her rational mind knew must be the cargo spindle’s semi-sentient but that had her primate backbrain screaming about saber-toothed tigers.

  The spindle’s semi-sentient was old, out of date, badly in need of software upgrades. Li held it off, standing her ground and praying that rescue would get there before she ran through her limited bag of tricks. She had almost made it, too, when the other semi-sentient showed up.

  This one was an entirely different creature. Where it came from, she had no idea. But what it was, she knew instantly: a Navy AI, barely conscious by human standards but honed and specialized for combat and endowed with enough processing capacity to peel enemy systems open like sardine cans.

  Serial? she queried.

  C521-009.

  Whois?

  UNSS Ada, Countess Lovelace.

  “Oh shit,” Li gasped. A vision flickered across her optic nerve and thrummed along her backbrain: a vast, limbless, sightless something cutting through the Deep like a shark scenting blood in the water. Her vision flared and guttered as the semi-sentient throttled her bandwidth and wiped away the vestigial sense that was the last thing tying her to her sanity in the vast nothingness of inner space. She sank screaming into the strangling darkness.

  And then there was light, and more darkness. And just as suddenly as it had arrived, C521-009 was gone.

  Li drifted in some primordial inner sea, sightless, helpless, without the will or strength to help herself. She could have b
een floating in the viral gel of a rehab tank. But this wasn’t the cool, familiar processing darkness that she knew from a lifetime of upgrades, buffering pauses, and lagging uploads. This was a fleshly darkness, suffused with life, like the blood red of looking through your closed eyelids at the bright sunlight. And there was something close and claustrophobic about it, a living, breathing presence to it that made the hair on the back of her neck rise and all of her primate instincts scream out that there was a predator behind her.

  The danger, when it came, was subtler than that. It wasn’t a predator at all, but a friend and lover. A friend and lover that wore one of Cohen’s favorite faces. He couldn’t be real, she told herself. There was no piece of Cohen on Avery’s ship. There was nothing and no one on the Ada that wasn’t a deadly enemy. But no matter what she told herself, she couldn’t deny the vision that filled her eyes, the voice speaking in her ear, the touch that sparked a thousand memories. This was Cohen himself—so real, so present, so undeniable that she began to wonder if it was Llewellyn’s ship that was speaking to her, rather than Avery’s.

  “Who are you?” she asked the living silence that surrounded her.

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  But what she really wanted to say was, Be who I want you to be.

  But then if he really was Cohen—or any meaningful part of Cohen—that was exactly what he would do anyway. He would be who she wanted him to be. Or, failing that, he would be whoever he had to be to make her care about him, make her connect with him, make her come back to him. And there was no way to know if the centuries-old game of the affective loop that Hy Cohen had programmed into his most primitive and essential systems was being played by a friend or an enemy.

  The darkness pressed around her like flesh, warm and rich and at once claustrophobic and comforting. Then her optic nerve began firing, slaved into whatever alternate reality that AI was feeding it. Light washed over her: the clear golden light of Earth, flickering through moving greenery and shimmering over running water.

  And just like that, she was in Cohen’s memory palace—a database that no semi-sentient slaved into a Navy ship could possibly have summoned.

  She stood in a long courtyard whose enclosing colonnades echoed the tumbling slope of the rocky mountaintop beyond the encircling battlements. The walls of the courtyard itself were more art than engineering: a masterpiece of the mosaicist’s craft, a self-contained universe of fingernail-sized terra-cotta zellige arranged in stars and circles, sunbursts and octagons.

  Cohen had loved the mosaics, not just the images but their history and the symbolism. He had known the names of all the patterns, keeping them in active memory the way AIs did for things they cared about or thought about or worried over. And indeed, they were names worth remembering, rich names that mingled the high art of the geometrician with the earthy lexicon of the tile mason to form a cryptic kind of poetry: Fifty from Eight; Empty and Full; Four Clasped Hands; the Spider’s House.

  The tiles shimmered and shifted under the human eye, half mirage, half optical illusion. Lines led to other lines, circles overlapped with stars made of triangles that dissolved into smaller triangles. All dividing, all echoing, all repeating themselves in infinite recursion. A millennium ago, North African geometricians had painstakingly devised those starlike patterns to symbolize the infinite mysteries of a god whose true name was beyond human knowing. But here they mapped a different universe: the disembodied patterns of networks and data caches. Each tile and tree and fountain—every object in the memory palace—was a Cantor module, a virtual power set containing uncountable infinities of infinities.

  Cohen had once made her stand against this very wall, her arms outspread like wings, in order to tell her that the imaginary square circumscribed by her outstretched fingertips contained some eight thousand precisely cut and painted tiles. She tried to calculate the number of tiles in the entire courtyard, and her mind rebelled against the astronomical, impersonal vastness of the number.

  And every one of those tiles was a memory, and every one of those memories had been as real and immediate and alive to Cohen as any moment in Li’s own brief and imperfectly remembered life was to her.

  She tried to think through her limited knowledge of the system, looking for some crumb of useful information. But Cohen had always talked about the mathematics of his internal databases in a way that made their internal organization sound more aesthetic than logical. It was set theory taken to overwhelming extremes: Let it into your brain and you were down the rabbit hole, lost in Cantor’s lush paradise of infinities.

  He had said something else about the tiles as well, something strange and suggestive and riddling. And when Cohen spoke in riddles, it was a good bet that he was saying something that mattered to him.

  Li searched her memory, wishing vainly that it was as solid and reliable as the shimmering screen of mosaics.

  And the walls became the world all around, Cohen had told her. She could see him now, leaning against a blue-and-white-tiled pilaster, giving her a long, sideways look out of the hazel eyes of a body he’d favored in the first summer of their marriage. And that night the trees grew and grew in Max’s room, and the ceiling hung with vines, and the walls became the world all around.

  Between the shimmering fractals of the courtyard’s walls ran a long, slender, geometrically precise line of water. The watercourse flowed from a burbling fountain just at Li’s feet, down the long slope of the courtyard, and into an identical fountain and a matching arcade. The water sparkled as it flowed from shadow to sunlight and back into shadow again. Its movement was hypnotic, mesmerizing; and as Li gazed into the crystal blue she saw that every ripple, every eddy, every molecule was a memory. Everything in and around and above and below the courtyard was a memory. The tiles were memories. The trees were memories that branched into the limbs and twigs, leaves and flowers. Memories haunted the shadowed rooms that stood still and empty around the courtyard, ranked like loyal family retainers in a fairy-tale castle cursed to eternal sleep. Even the sky was a memory, lifetimes upon lifetimes shading away into blue infinity.

  She read the memories with the instinctive speed of the sensory interface. But when she dropped beneath that, slipping into the numbers, she could see that her eyes had not been fooling her. No other AI could fake this place. Not even ALEF, with all its power, could have done it. And certainly no lone Navy ship on the outskirts of UN space could manage it.

  This was home—as much as any physical place in her co-penetrating real and virtual lives was home. This was Cohen. Or at least it was the part of him that could be contained in the virtually infinite, folded databases that contained his four centuries and many lifetimes of accumulated memories.

  It took everything she had to remind herself that, real or not, Cohen’s memories belonged to others now. And those others could use the memories for their own purposes, and in ways that might be completely antithetical to everything Cohen had ever stood for. For the first time, facing the otherworldly beauty of Cohen’s memory palace, Li understood what it meant to be unable to die. And for the first time, facing the unearthly beauty of Cohen’s past, and knowing that Cohen himself was nowhere inside it, Li understood the real curse of immortality.

  Cohen might not inhabit his memories anymore, but someone still lived here. And that someone might be the very person who had murdered him.

  Li walked cautiously down the length of the courtyard, her feet slipping on the wet tiles where the watercourse had overlapped its boundaries. There was no sound, no movement, no sign of life anywhere. But she could feel in every cell of her being that the palace was not empty. And whoever now inhabited it was no unfamiliar and easy enemy. The new soul of the database was both Cohen and not Cohen, both lover and stranger, both friend and enemy.

  Under the far arcade, she found the first sign of life: a silk shawl, six feet on each side, as soft as cashmere, and woven into a dense, rich, intricate paisley. It was an
item of unimaginable luxury, something that had no place here and would have been a museum piece worth the price of entire planets if it were real rather than virtual. It was the kind of thing Cohen would have admired but never worn. To Li’s bemused eyes it seemed unimaginably far from the living, breathing AIs of her world, and more like the sort of detritus an elegant Victorian lady might have left in her wake … along with tastefully arranged flowers, painted fans, and discreetly engraved calling cards.

  Li should never have picked it up. She should have left it where she found it, safely untouched. Everything was code in a memory palace. Even the most innocent object could contain hidden programs, executables, viruses. And something like this practically screamed danger at her. But it was cold, and growing late, and the sky was dark with an oncoming storm. And some half-conscious premonition told her that she might be stuck here overnight—and that the heating might not be up to its usual standard.

  She wrapped the shawl around herself and stepped into the shadows.

  She found bits and pieces of the ghost before she found the ghost itself. An empty glass. A half-read copy of Jane Eyre with page 247 folded down into a precise triangle. A lady’s purse—a sort of arts and crafts project, also abandoned midway through—made of what Li was pretty sure the nineteenth-century society women in Cohen’s old novels had called netting.

  And then, abruptly, she turned a corner and came face-to-face with the person to whom—she had no doubt about this whatsoever—the shawl and the book and the purse belonged.