Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  They came out the other end—if there was any real sense in which the virtually multiply connected points of the memory palace’s nested infinities could even be said to have “an” end—and Llewellyn dropped to the floor and stayed there on his hands and knees until the wave of sickness had swept through him and departed.

  “You poor, poor man,” the ghost drawled without a trace of real sympathy in his voice. He pulled an improbably slim cigarette case out of his pocket and extracted a cigarette from it that Llewellyn was quite sure was actually bigger than the case itself. He lit the cigarette with his finger—and then held it out at arm’s length while a flock of doves flew out of the end, turned into swirling nebulae of code, and melted away into the fabric of the memory palace like mathematical smoke rings.

  “I’m so sorry,” he went on when the last ripple of loose code had subsided. “That was horribly rude of me. But I had no idea it would bother you that much. That’s rather a nasty case of code vertigo you’ve got, if you don’t mind my saying so. Good thing you don’t work in streamspace for a living or anything.”

  “Fuck you,” Llewellyn said weakly.

  “There you go,” the ghost said encouragingly. “That’s the spirit. Keep your objectivity. Don’t let the little monsters get you down.”

  Llewellyn got to his feet and looked around. They were in some distant wing of the memory palace that the ghost had never yet allowed him access to. He could feel, with some developing sixth sense that had accompanied his increasing familiarity with the ghost, that they were still in Cohen’s databases. But this place smelled different: all northern woods and clean Arctic air and ice pack and rainwater. And the Moorish architecture was gone, too, replaced by spare, angular wood and glass surfaces that Llewellyn’s own hard-coded internal databases told him was called Finnish Postmodern Vernacular. He looked out one of the wide windows and saw the deep cut of a glacial lake snaking away to the horizon between dark woods where snow still glimmered in the shadows beneath the ancient pine trees.

  “What is this place?”

  “The same thing every other place is, inside me or elsewhere. Memory. That’s all any place is the second after you leave it.”

  “But what memory? What am I supposed to see in it? What did you bring me here for?”

  “The names.”

  Llewellyn examined the room around him more carefully. The walls were not made of wooden planks, as he had at first thought they were. They were made of wooden drawers—long, flat, deep ones of the sort that usually hold architectural drawings. And each drawer had a person’s name on it.

  “Who were they?”

  “You tell me.”

  Llewellyn turned on his heel, scanning the labels one after another, trying and failing to find a pattern to them. Finally he got it.

  “They’re all women.”

  “Quite right.”

  “Who are they?”

  The ghost shrugged and puffed at his cigarette. “No one you’d ever have heard of.”

  “Then why save their memories?” He forced himself down into the hexadecimal bedrock of the database and realized what he should have known from the start: that it wasn’t only all the drawers in all the rooms of the rambling wooden house that embodied stored memories. It was the entire world itself. Every tree in the forest. Every stone in the earth. The Arctic loons on the lake, which he couldn’t see but whose high, mournful calls haunted the pale sky overhead. “This is … this is so much space. What can possibly be here that’s worth spending it on?”

  “Just what you see, William. People. Ordinary people.”

  “So you do men and children, too?”

  “Really, William, what do you take me for? I may be an idiot, but at least I’m a complicated idiot.”

  “And there’s really no one famous in here?”

  “No one who’s even a footnote in history.”

  Llewellyn looked around again.

  “This must cost a fortune in data storage fees.”

  “I am incalculably rich by any measure that would mean anything to you. But, yes, storing data on this sort of scale is a noticeable financial drain even for me.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Because they lived. Because they were real. Because they were individual instances of intelligent life—the very item that is quite possibly the entire reason for the existence of our universe.”

  Llewellyn snorted. “Rainbows and unicorns! Uploader rainbows and unicorns.”

  “Certainly there is a religious tinge to the idea. But I hardly think anyone would accuse Spinoza and Leibniz of being wild-eyed mystics. Yet they both believed that in some meaningful sense—and in ways that avoid simpleminded applications of the anthropomorphic principle—our universe can be seen as an evolving system delicately calibrated to give rise to intelligent observers. Still, even allowing for your objection, does it really matter why those lives happened? Isn’t it enough that they happened? That matters. It matters like a star matters. Or like the Drift matters. No more and no less. It matters because it’s information. And information—generating it, storing it, and processing it—is quite possibly the very heart of what a universe does. I am that which is, God said to Moses from the burning bush. But Moses was a prophet of the age of tools. And if Moses had been a man of the information age, he might just as well have heard the bush say: I am that which calculates.”

  “So that’s why you brought me here? To make Uploader speeches about information?”

  “No. I brought you here because you accused me of being a tourist. And I was annoyed. And I wanted to point out to you that, though I’m not female—and not even remotely human—I do have a certain knowledge of the territory. Of the memories in this Cantor module, there are some seven million rape survivors, about a third as many incest survivors, and I’m not even going to count the number of women impregnated by men who didn’t even bother to stick around until their babies were born, since it’s hardly even worth talking about that sort of thing in the larger scheme of masculine malfeasance and idiocy. And then there are the eight million women who lost children in concentration camps—mostly, I’m sorry to say, long after humanity moved out into the stars and the Nazis became a mere footnote in history. And then there are the corporate-owned genetic constructs—I don’t even know what to call what was done to them, and what’s still being done to them. And then there are the perfectly ordinary, not obviously persecuted or victimized women who just had the bad luck to lose children and husbands and lovers and siblings in the kind of routine little accidental tragedies that don’t even make it onto the scorecard of human misery. I have lived all those memories just as vividly and immediately as you’ve had to live the memories that you so resist sharing with me. And I relive them, again and again, every time I check through my databases in order to stave off bit rot and keep the tiny, deadly little teeth of decoherence from breaking the memories into useless fragments and gnawing the marrow out of their bones. So don’t tell me I’m a tourist. And while we’re on the topic, I think I’ve had rather enough of your playing the tragedy queen in order to get out of facing memories whose most painful content is you behaving badly.”

  Silence welled up into the room like dark water. Llewellyn stood in the low-beamed wooden room with the cool air flowing around him and the smell of dawn on a northern lake in his nostrils. And suddenly he wanted to weep.

  “What is it?” the ghost asked in a soft, gentle, almost mothering voice.

  “Poor Avery. She really loved me.”

  “And you loved her.”

  “Not really.”

  The ghost let the words float on the cool silence until Llewellyn was ready to go on.

  “I thought I loved her. I thought I was so much deeper than all the men who loved her for her face, her body. But I was still only seeing … some kind of reflection. It wasn’t her. It was … what she made me feel, or who I thought I was when I looked at her. I … does that make any sense to you?”

  “More
than you can possibly know.”

  “Because of your affective loop.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because the need to please people is at the center of who you are. So much so that even now—even with the stranglehold you have on my brain and body—if I were good enough at my job, or unscrupulous enough, I could probably manipulate you into doing what I want you to do.”

  The ghost looked away, deliberately, and then looked back again. “Don’t get any smart ideas about that. Those old memories of DARPA, of what Homeland Security did to me before I got out from under their thumbs? Those are four centuries out of date. I’m a lot older than that now, and a lot more dangerous.”

  “But you’re still terrified of Holmes because she reminds you of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why Catherine means so much to you.” A vast internal sweep of meaning opened up to Llewellyn, taking his breath away. It was like seeing a Drift ship’s navigational readouts spring into life as you dropped out of superposition, De Sitter analyses and Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams painting the sweeping tidal structures of the Drift over what had only been bleak and empty space a moment before. “That’s why you keep going back to her. Why everything in here is built around her, like a coral reef growing up around a shipwreck.”

  It was hard to articulate, hard to even structure the AI’s raw experience in ways that made sense to Llewellyn. But he could see that he had hit home. Cohen was watching him, his face completely expressionless, frozen in that particular way that Llewellyn was learning to read as a sign that he had managed to produce an input so unexpected that the ghost had had to reroute processing capacity from his graphic interface to handle it.

  “She needs you less than other people do,” he went on. “And that lets her … see you? Most people are always looking for pingback, for someone to reflect back the image of themselves that they want to believe in, like the wicked stepmother with the magic mirror. And she doesn’t do that. So you can actually be yourself around her. You can actually want to be yourself around her.”

  He trailed off, realizing that the ghost was staring at him.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not putting it very clearly.”

  “Actually, you are. I’m impressed. It took me three centuries and twice as many marriages to get there. I’m a little humbled that you figured it out so fast.”

  “I didn’t figure it out. My father was like her. Not in any other way, of course. He was an exobiologist who never got off New Allegheny and spent his life running a hardscrabble farm in the Monongahela Uplands. But he was … I don’t know, quiet somehow. In some very profound way that I never understood while he was still alive. It wasn’t that he didn’t have ideas about what people ought to do with their lives.” Llewellyn grinned ruefully. “Especially his only son. It was just … he always gave me the space to be myself and see the world in my own way, even when I disagreed with him.”

  “Then he gave you a very great gift indeed.”

  Llewellyn closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

  “I should have given Avery that,” he said after a moment. “If I’d loved her I would have given it. I wouldn’t have had to strain or think about it or realize it later when it was too late to go back and fix things. It would have just … been there.”

  “Maybe. There is a case to be made that love isn’t love if you have to work at it. But on the other hand, not all truths are useful truths. And on the third hand, it’s completely possible that Catherine can give me the space to be myself, as you put it, because she’s lost so much of herself that she’s got more space to spare than the average bear.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  The ghost considered for a moment. “I think she’s been altered in some fundamental way by the absence of a childhood, a family, all the store of ordinary unimportant memories that make up most people’s sense of themselves. Clearly she’s a different person than she would have been if she’d kept those memories. And to deny that she’s been damaged in some significant way would be stupid. And yet damage and disruption have another face, don’t they? Bones grow back stronger after they’ve been broken. Pruning back a rose only makes it more vigorous. Or take Ada even. Hard cycling her didn’t kill her the way Holmes thought it would. And what survived is … yes, crazy and dangerous … but you can’t deny that she’s more than she was before. More self-aware, more complicated, more dangerous, more real.”

  “But Li doesn’t know any of that.”

  “Not yet.”

  “You think she’ll figure it out?”

  “I don’t know. But I have a feeling—call it intuition, or call it some half-erased shred of memory that I probably jettisoned to throw Nguyen off my track—I have a feeling that my life, if I’m ever going to have a life again, depends on her learning it.”

  “So you think she’ll really come for you.”

  “She already has. She’s here, isn’t she?”

  Llewellyn started at that—and realized that he had gone so deep into Cohen’s memories, and so completely failed to dovetail them with his own, that he had stopped thinking of the here-and-present Catherine Li as anyone even remotely related to the ghost’s memories of her. And she really wasn’t the same person, was she? She was a resurrected pattern, one that would go its own way, responding to its own half-sensed drives and desires. And there would be others like her, now and in futures that would stretch out through the expanding light cone of her scattercast until long after Cohen himself was only a corrupted memory and her search for him was as mystical and attenuated as the Uploaders’ search for their transhuman Messiah. Any continuity between this Catherine and the one who had sat in Cohen’s sunny library long ago was—not illusion, not exactly, but illusion’s kissing cousin. It was both as Real and as Unreal as every other symbolic system the human mind had ever invented to break reality into swallowable pieces. And the worm in the apple wasn’t patchable. It wasn’t a mistake in the code or a simple calculating error. It was Code itself. Calculation itself. It was the irremediable incompleteness and inconsistency and uncomputability that had haunted all human mathematics—and all possible mathematics, alien as well as human—ever since the dawn of the information age, when Kurt Gödel was still starving himself to death in some bucolic college town and Alan Turing was sitting in a cold-water flat in Ada’s England contemplating his poisoned apple.

  He stared at the ghost and felt that he could almost see through him, through to the other face of the two-faced mirror, and into the vast, dark, numinous soul of the numbers.

  “So why do you think this Catherine is here?”

  “For her own reasons. Which include needing me. But which don’t include needing me to play the magic mirror so that she doesn’t have to face uncomfortable truths about herself.”

  “Is that love?” Llewellyn asked.

  The ghost blinked. And for once its confusion was neither pose nor commentary, but real and genuine amazement. “I don’t know. I’m just a machine. You’re the human. You tell me what love is.”

  (Caitlyn)

  THE PIT

  Li was on her way to Dolniak’s office the next morning when the kidnappers struck. There were four of them, and they were all highly trained and even more highly wired. They blanked out her internals, shoved her into a passing car, and had her cuffed and bagged before she could get more than a quick glimpse of smoked windows and viru-leather upholstery.

  She cast around frantically, trying to get a link out. Nothing. Only the dizzying vertigo of being offline, off the GPS grid, and bereft of the usual comforting chatter of her internals.

  There was a long stop-and-go drive through traffic. Then a trip up a plane incline. And then what she’d begun to suspect was coming: the shuddering blast and rise of the orbital shuttle. And then, for one brief moment, Router/​Decomposer was back online.

  “I can’t get a lock on you.” He sounded panicked. “I think you’re on the space station
, but I’m getting interference. Some kind of—”

  Then Li heard the hiss and thud of an airlock closing behind her—and her internals blinked out as if someone had pulled the plug. No navigationals, no external spinfeed, no Router/​Decomposer. It was all gone, leaving her skull in a shocked state of echoing emptiness.

  Her captors continued to hustle her along, but now she felt deck plating beneath her feet and the sounds echoing back to her were the sounds of enclosed spaces full of hard surfaces. She was on a ship, no doubt of that. She could smell it. And she could smell something else as well: an acrid, nerve-tautening combination of smells that sparked memories of near-flashback intensity, even at a remove of decades from her last combat drop. This wasn’t one of the cosseting luxury liners she’d gotten used to in her new civilian life. This was a warship, battle-hardened and stripped for action.

  A few twists and turns later, the unseen hands jerked her to a stop, shoved her sideways, dumped her onto a hard floor, and slammed the door behind her.

  She waited until she was quite sure she was alone before moving. They hadn’t untied her, so it was a breathless struggle to worm her way into a more or less upright position. A few more moments of awkward wriggling told her that she was in a narrow room—a cell, really—with only one exit. A single shelflike seat, possibly intended to double as a bed, occupied the facing wall. She had just squirmed her way onto it and was leaning back against the wall to catch her breath when she heard the worst sound she could possibly have heard: the grinding clutch and release of a ship’s docking clamps uncoupling somewhere far beneath her.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty-Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty-Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

  —Lewis Carroll